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Good evening, this is the ten oâclock news and Mary Lyon reading it. First, the news headlines.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Right Honourable Frances Buss, has announced today that there will be a mini-budget on 19 June before the summer recess.
The results of the Democratic presidential primary in Georgia shows Bella Azbrug a clear winner over Shirley Chisholm.
The Derby was won today by Blakeneyâs Niece at 7 to 4, ridden by Emma Willard, trained by Annie Kenny and owned by Lady Hester Stanhope, the millionaire industrialist.
The Secretary of State for the Environment, Prudence Crandall, announced that the Royal Commission on the Road Haulage Industry is to be chaired by Dame Lucy Larcom, President of the Royal College of Surgeons.
The President of Yorkshire County Cricket Club, Phillippa Fawcett, has made it clear that the club is to discipline Geoff Burkett over the controversial incident at Hove last Sunday.
At Question Time the Prime Minister, Dorothea Beale, faced tough questions from Opposition Leader Rhoda Nunn over the new wages settlement for the airline pilots. Nunn claimed that the settlement was highly inflationary, but this has been denied tonight by Captain Catherine Beecher, leader of BALPA, the pilotsâ union.
Our Middle East correspondent, Lousia Lumsden, has reported further fighting from the Iraq/Iran border tonight.
The Archbishop of Canterburyâs visit to Dover today was disrupted by women demonstrating for the right to be ordained full priests of the Anglican Church.
Finally, good news for consumers. Julia Ward Howe, chief executive of the giant food manufacturers CapCorp, has promised to cut Sp in the kilo off coffee from next Monday.
Imagine those are the news headlines for Derby Day, 1984. While the world portrayed has little to do with Orwellâs nightmare vision of totalitarianism, it is not a world like ours today. There has obviously been some kind of revolution, which has changed the power relationships in the world in one fundamental way yet left most features of the political and social system untouched. The fundamental change I am suggesting (and if you have not noticed it, you should read the headlines again) probably seems more bizarre and improbable to you than the science fiction ideas of world governments and inter-planetary wars. Yet all I am imagining is that women might be occupying some of the many social positions for which they are at present eligible. I am not suggesting a role-reversal, for men are still fighting the wars and playing professional cricket. A woman could be President of the United States, Chancellor of the Exchequer of Britain or lead a large union today but on the whole women do not reach such exalted posts. This book examines the various spheres of social life outlined in those news headlines (finance, politics, sport, mass media, work and religion) where women conventionally do not figure in positions of power, and those spheres in which women do figure (education, medicine and the family).
I suggest that most people who read those news headlines will find the world portrayed disquieting and even unnatural. Yet the everyday world in which we live has a power balance between the sexes which is just as one-sided, because all the powerful jobs are held by men. It would be perfectly possible for a similar set of head.: lines to include only men and their occupations, and no one would even notice this or remark upon it. News readers, Chancellors of the Exchequer, foreign statesmen (sic), American presidential candidates, jockeys, trainers and owners, chairmen (sic) of Royal Commissions, presidents of the Royal College of Surgeons and of county cricket clubs, prime ministers and opposition leaders in the United Kingdom, trade union secretaries, foreign correspondents and leading industrialists are normally all men. This does not make us feel uneasy or uncomfortable. Yet there is no inherent reason why any of these posts cannot be held by women, and we can tolerate one or two of them being so held. At the time of writing the British Prime Minister is a woman, there are a few women news readers, a woman might own the Derby winner, and both Shirley Chisholm and Bella Azbrug might run for President of the USA. Women are no longer unthinkable in one or two top jobs, but a whole Cabinet, a whole trade union council, university senate or board of directors, is still unbelievable. Margaret Thatcher has no other women in her Cabinet, and the 1979 election saw nearly all the leading women politicians in Britain lose their seats. One Prime Minister makes no difference to the male-dominated power structure, unless she is a conscious feminist. One of the aims of this book is to examine why this is so, by discussing the imbalances between the sexes in all areas of endeavour in modern Britain, and analysing the ways in which they are developed and sustained.
This book can therefore be described as a sociological portrait of the women of Britain, but a portrait which sees the women always in the context of the wider society around them. It is, in fact, a sociological, biographically organised picture of women in modern Britain which draws on research findings and other evidence to present a feminist account of womenâs situation. All these terms -âsociologicalâ, âbiographically organisedâ, âmodernâ, âBritishâ and âfeministâ - need both explanation and justification and so this is provided first. Thus, the introduction explains the ways in which these terms are used to structure the book and then describes the range of contents of the other chapters. Explanations of what is meant by modern, biographically organised and British are offered first, with a description of the bookâs sociological perspective interwoven, followed by some idea of its feminism.
The book is about women in Britain today although it looks back to the last century for some material. The theoretical perspective is sociological, but as far as possible I have tried to avoid or explain technical terms so that the beginner or non-specialist can read it. The idea behind compiling such a sociological work on women today is a simple one. Most social science books, and most social scientists, ignore women unless they are discussing marriage and motherhood, when they tend to reverse the process and neglect men. This bias reflects the fact that all social sciences are male-dominated occupations and the bodies of theory and research they have accumulated systematically neglect women and their place in the world. This book therefore gathers what is known about women in Britain, highlights the lacunae in our knowledge, and reassesses many of the traditional fields of sociological endeavour in the light of their coverage of women.
The book is organised biographically. That is, after this introduction and a short chapter on sex and gender, the material on women is presented according to the age of the women concerned. So the book begins with early childhood and follows women as they grow up, age and die. The format is slightly different from most introductory texts in sociology or on modern Britain. Because this book centres on women, it introduces material from the different sociologies (of medicine, politics, and so on) as they become relevant. There is so little research on women that a chronic shortage of data is revealed whichever strategy is adopted, but the biographical structure makes more coherent reading. An entertaining introduction to sociology (Berger and Berger, 1976) has recently been produced using this formula, and in so far as this book has a model I have followed the Bergers.
This book is a sociological portrait of women in Britain. This means that material from other social sciences, such as anthropology, psychology, economics, and so on, has been kept to a minimum, except where there are no British data. However, because it is a book about British women and not English ones, there is considerable discussion of Wales and Scotland, and of ethnic and cultural minorities.
The book is feminist in its overall perspective. Feminism is a term with multiple usage, both good and bad. Here I follow the definition offered by Kraditor (1968, p. 8) who argues that the distinguishing characteristic of all feminists is a desire that women be recognised âas individuals in their own rightâ. In other words, feminism is a desire for female self-determination. This desire for autonomy can be found among the aims of the pioneers in the nineteenth century, and can be traced through womenâs campaigns up to the present day, when women marching to defend the right to control their own fertility chant:
Women must decide their fate,
Not the church and not the state.
In academic terms a belief in feminism means several things: that more women should engage in research and teaching, that research should be conducted into all aspects of womenâs lives, and that all social science theory and research should be rigorously scrutinised for implicit or explicit assumptions about women. This last point is in effect a call for a more scientific attitude among social scientists: a call for them to ask searching questions about sex differences and similarities rather than taking them for granted as natural. Thus a sociology without sexism would be a better sociology.
This book has nine chapters apart from this introduction. Chapter 2 examines how a sociologist looks at sex and gender, drawing to some extent on anthropology and psychology. Cultures other than our own are considered briefly to show how arbitrary our notions of ânaturalâ and âunnaturalâ, âculturalâ and âsocialâ, ânormalâ and âabnormalâ are. Also in this chapter is a discussion of the controversy over the biological and social bases of sex and gender differences, and of the issues raised by the rise of the new feminism. This chapter, therefore, offers a theoretical overview of the issues which feature in the rest of the book.
The biographical format begins with the third chapter. Early childhood features in Chapter 3 and adolescence in Chapter 4. Womenâs lives at home and at school are considered, with emphases on subcultural differences within Britain. Even at these early stages in a womanâs life, central issues in all sociological analyses such as class, power and wealth are shown to be operating. In Chapter 4 especially differences in the womenâs lives are revealed. A similar contrast is equally clear in Chapter 5 where early adulthood is discussed.
Chapters 6 to 9 focus on different aspects of adult life: work, class, community, marriage, parenthood, power, politics, leisure, religion, health and deviance. Throughout these four chapters there are noticeable differences between the analyses presented here and those offered in conventional sociology texts. For example, the section on work deals with both paid and unpaid work - including not only housework but also voluntary work - because so much of womenâs work is not financially rewarded. Similarly, deviance and ill-health are analysed together in a novel way. The deviance of the non-working man is contrasted with the deviance of the working mother, while the relationships between illness and work or nonwork for the two sexes are seen in the context of the female complaints that are not illnesses, such as pregnancy and the menopause. The key sociological topics of stratification, class and mobility are discussed, emphasising the serious neglect of women in both theory and research and thus querying the truth and applicability of such writing. Womenâs lives in various kinds of âcommunityâ are examined, covering a range from rural areas to urban ghettos and sprawling suburbs. Families of all kinds are discussed, from rambling extended groups to single parents and conventional couples to communes. The lives of women outside work, community and family are not neglected. Material is presented on non-work activities: politics, sport, religion and mass media are all considered, with the emphasis on discovering overt and covert sources of woman power in modern Britain.
The ninth chapter focuses on parenthood, the sociology of the family, and covers the final stages of womenâs lives: retirement, widowhood and old age. The concluding chapter summarises the main points of the argument presented in the book and suggests the chief research and theoretical priorities for the future of sociological research on women.
Towards a Non-Sexist Sociology
The central and recurring theme of the analysis in this book is the importance of understanding how sex and class are interrelated to form one system of stratification throughout Britain, a system which is further complicated by ethnic and regional variations. This analysis differs from most conventional sociological approaches, which traditionally concentrate on class inequalities and neglect sex (e.g. Parkin, 1971). It also differs from several of the feminist analyses which stress sexual stratification and ignore or deny class relations (e.g. Firestone, 1972). Only a few authors have tried to come to terms with both inequalities and combine them into one system of stratification (e.g. Parkin, 1979).
The lives and experiences of women in modern Britain are only comprehensible when their place in this double stratification system is understood. Yet most sociologists have only managed to work with one-dimensional class-based stratification systems, because sociology has not taken sex and gender as important topics for study, but has treated them as normal, natural and unproblematic. In studying stratification, as in other ways, sociology is sexist, like the wider society in which it lives, and has been so since its beginnings in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is sexist because it has adopted uncritically the myths and prejudices of the surrounding society about women rather than behaving or thinking in a truly scholarly manner. The best way to demonstrate this is to contrast the sociological treatment of other topics with its treatment of women. If we take any cliche of our society, such as âtrade unions are too powerfulâ, no social scientist would dream of accepting them as true, as statements of fact, or as anything other than a starting point for research. She would want to know who said such things and who did not, why they said them and when, and what purpose such comments served in the culture of their utterance. That is what social science research is all about - scrutinising the beliefs, customs and organisations of a culture - not taking them for granted.
This detached, inquiring attitude is characteristic of all the various theoretical âschoolsâ of sociology. All sociologists would take a claim like âweâre all middle class nowâ as the inspiration for a research project. No sociologist would build such a claim into a theory of how society works without examining it thoroughly and researching it. Yet cliches and myths about women as insubstantial and unsubstantiated as those I have ment...
