Knowledgeable Women

Structuralism and the Reproduction of Elites

Sara Delamont

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032138848
• eBook ISBN: 9781000549379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Knowledgeable Women, originally published in 1989, Sara Delamont traces the history of women's education and the elites it produces. She examines class and gender divisions in the structure and contest of education in Britain and the USA from 1850 to 1989. Her empirical focus is of course elites – especially elite women – but the justification for this is the belief that sociologists should study the powerful as well as the poor and powerless. Above all, Delamont argues the case for the relevance to sociology of a serious study of women, their schooling and professional training, and their struggle to enter the professions.
She also encourages a broader focus to the sociology of education itself, viewing her subject from an anthropological structuralist perspective and encouraging the inclusion of anti-sexist ideas and material from other areas of sociology such as the study of science and stratification. She demonstrates for the first time the relevance to education of structuralist theorists such as Mary Douglas.
Knowledgeable Women is a structuralist and feminist challenge to the sociology of education by an author highly regarded in Britain and the USA. It offers a non-sexist, structuralist, fully sociological sociology of education.

Part I Introductory themes

1 Introduction: towards a structuralist sociology of education

There is a set of activities which are prohibited to members of each sex: men are forbidden to wash dishes or laundry, to sew, to sweep the floor; women are forbidden to climb trees and prune vines.... Males are more concerned with what the peasants call... products of the air, that is, the things that grow well above ground level.... Women are generally in charge of... things which grow in or near the soil.... The following adage... points to the difference between the sexes: ‘males look up, females look down’. This adage has three distinct meanings: it refers to the differences between male and female genitalia; it refers to the sexual division of labour; and, finally, it refers to a much wider utilization of the dimension opposition above/below as analogically related to oppositions such as heaven/hell, life/death, mind or spirit/body, purity/corruption, socially beneficial/antisocial.

(Pina-Cabral 1986: 83-4)

Pina-Cabral conducted anthropological research in a remote corner of northern Portugal. The peasants’ belief system about sex roles and pollution which he discovered, and which is quoted in summary here, may seem an odd place to start a book about the education of elite women in industrial societies. In fact, as this book will show, similar binary oppositions between male and female, purity and pollution, strength and weakness, underly much of the superficially rational thought and research on the education and training of elite women. We may feel that the peasants of the Alto Minho have quaint superstitions, such as a belief that women must not climb trees while we are free of such notions. Yet the arguments deployed in contemporary industrialized societies to explain the lack of women Nobel prize winners, judges, or headteachers turn out, when analysed, to be grounded in a similar kind of oppositional logic. Sociologists of education have not paid enough attention to the symbolic, underlying, unconscious, and inexpressible oppositional logic that determines our responses to a range of issues about the curriculum, educational structures, and careers. This book argues that studying educational beliefs from a structuralist perspective, akin to the one used by Pina-Cabral on the folklore of Portuguese peasants, will be both revealing in itself and will also revitalize the sociology of education.

This book focuses on the education and professional training of clever, mainly middle — and upper-class women. It does so partly just because they are a valid topic for a book, and any suggestion otherwise is purely made from inverted snobbery. Equally important, though, is the function that this group serves in the sociology of education. It crystallizes, highlights, illuminates, throws into relief, and magnifies flaws or lacunae in the existing theories and data collections. In particular the book argues that the literature on cultural reproduction, on professions and professionalization, on social mobility, and on the internal organization of schools and their curricula is flawed by neglecting the reproduction of elites in society, and especially failing to compare the male and female elite systems.

This chapter explains the reasons for offering a structuralist perspective on the sociology of education, then outlines its feminism, and sets out the structure of the remainder of the book. The central argument which underlies the volume is that the sociology of education is desperately in need of a new look. The subject matter and the theories advanced have become stale and familiar, like the recurrent ‘crises’ in the educational system itself. Familiarity is the biggest hurdle the educational researcher faces, and this book offers a way of challenging the familiarity. Sociology of education has become, to quote Chesterton: ‘full of tangled things, and texts, and aching eyes; and gone is all the innocence of anger and surprise’. This volume, attempting to practise what I preached in a controversial attack on my own specialism of school and classroom ethnography (Delamont 1981, 1983d), sets out to make the familiar strange. The analysis offered here, following M.F.D. Young’s (1971) injunction that we should ‘make’ our problems, not ‘take’ them as presented to us, uses structuralism, gender, and the literature from areas of sociology other than education, to make new problems out of the ‘tangled things’ which are giving us ‘aching eyes’. The use of a structuralist perspective, and the focus upon gender divisions in society, are equally important features of the book; both are employed to challenge our taken-for-granted assumptions and as ideas that are good to think with.

Why structuralism?

The theoretical perspective of the book is unusual. Structuralism has had little impact on British sociology, compared to anthropology, linguistics and literary studies. It is particularly rare in the sociology of education, as Atkinson (1981a, 1985) has argued. The reason for using it here is simple — it is the theoretical perspective which I find most powerful at the macro-level. For me, there is no other theoretical approach which carries such explanatory power and makes sense of so much. The approach is set out in chapter 2, and the central concepts from structuralism used in the book are explained and exemplified there. There are however other aspects of the use of anthropological structuralism which deserve attention in their introduction.

A great deal of the sociology of education, especially as it is summarized in text books, is dull. The leading introductions to the field do not make it seem exciting or even thought-provoking. Taking a structuralist perspective is intended to revitalize the area by several deliberate tactics. The perspective is intended to lift our ‘aching eyes’ from the ‘tangled things’ to enable a fresh insight.

First, structuralism is concerned to ‘decentre the subject’ — that is to focus our attention upon underlying structures in which the individual person is only one element. Doing this is a useful form of shock treatment: it jolts us into seeing educational phenomena in a new light.

Second, using anthropological theories forces us to think about different aspects of education (myths, rituals, pollution beliefs) and other cultures which are one excellent strategy for making the too, too familiar nature of education strange. This is an argument outlined in Delamont (1981) and developed further during this book.

Third, structuralism offers some ways in which sexual inequalities in previous educational writing can be both exposed and understood.

Fourth, there are some important women theorists whose ideas can be used — something badly lacking in conventional sociology of education and the theoretical knowledge traditionally drawn upon. There is an urgent need for role models who are theorizing women. Mary Douglas and Shirley Ardener deserve a central place in the sociology of education for their ideas, but once enthroned at the new centre of the discourse they will be role models for women students in the sociology of education.

Chapter 2 outlines the version of structuralism used in this book, where anomalous and ambiguous abominations stalk our cosmologies. This introduction now turns to the reasons for focusing on gender in education.

Why gender divisions or ‘Why would a man want to read this book’? Shirley Ardener (1985) reports that one of her male colleagues confessed that he wanted to read the collection of papers she edited called Perceiving Women but ‘couldn’t bring himself to’. Men interested in education may wonder why they should steel themselves to read this book, given that its subject matter is women’s education. The flippant reply to such doubts must be to appear less of a wimp than that male colleague of Shirley Ardener’s! More seriously, the structuralist perspective is novel, and together with a focus on elite women, makes many aspects of education strange.

An important caveat must be made here. Although the empirical focus of this book is elite women (and what I mean by elite is defined below), the women are used to illustrate general themes. The book is not primarily ‘about’ women as women: it is about how looking at society through women’s position makes the familiar strange (Delamont 1981, 1987a). Elite women are a lens for focusing on society in a particular way. Believers in feminist methodology, or in any other separatism in social science, are unlikely to be sympathetic to this way of using women to illuminate the sociology of education.

Evelyn Fox Keller (1985:3) reports how a former professor of hers heard she had been doing research on women and science. He asked what she had learnt about women. She replied ‘It’s not women I am learning about so much as men. Even more, it is science.’ She continued: ‘The widespread assumption that a study of gender and science could only be a study of women still amazes me.’ For Keller ‘science’ is socially constructed just as ‘male’ and ‘female’ are — and all three social constructs should be subjected to scrutiny. The perspective is the same in this book — though about women and education it tells us more about education than women. Fox Keller hoped that men interested in science would find her analysis illuminating. The purpose of this text is to encourage men and women to think about both structuralism and gender in a novel way.

The empirical focus: women’s education

This book is a contribution to the sociology and social history of education, as well as to women’s studies. It addresses central topics in the sociology of education — class, knowledge, power and cultural reproduction — via key problems in the education of women. It is written in the belief that good social science is non-sexist, but good feminist scholarship can only be built on solid theoretical foundations, sound empirical material, and analyses that male social scientists can see to be appropriate.

Essentially this book focuses on women in education both because they are an interesting topic on which much remains to be written and because, when gender divisions are highlighted, many hitherto taken-for-granted features of society are made anthropologically strange. Using the insights of that strangeness we can proceed to novel accounts of educational issues.

It might appear that everything which could be written about women and education has been produced, for since the rise of the new feminist movement in the late 1960s there has been a rapid growth in research on ‘women’s studies’. In educational research there is now an American bibliography with 1,134 items (Wilkins 1979) and ample material to fill a World Yearbook of Education (Acker et al. 1984). While the research activity captured in such yearbooks and bibliographies has been refreshing in the new perspectives it has opened up on all stages of education (from pre-school through to graduate school) and has raised interesting issues about schooling, there are also weaknesses in its product. Many topics have not been adequately investigated — including the education of elite women — and the new research on women has been poorly integrated with the rest of the subject. The fifteen years of research have produced a ghetto called ‘women’s studies’ rather than any change in mainstream educational research. Thus while Kay Wilkins’s (1979:x) introduction to her bibliography Women’s Education in the United States claims that ‘The impact of the women’s liberation movement on educational research has been very strong’ her evidence for this claim is minimal. Appendix 1 (p.269) shows the impact of the new feminist scholarship on textbook authors in the sociology of education, and on the field of adolescent cultures. The material in that appendix contradicts Wilkins’s statement. Both the introductory textbooks and the publications on adolescence show little sign of the impact of the women’s movement.

Banks (1976) in a review of thirty years research in the sociology of education highlights recent work on sex inequalities as one of the field’s achievements. It is, however, an achievement which is not yet fully realized. One of the ways in which the work on women has been limited is by its emphasis on working-class girls in education, a bias which this book attempts to redress. The next section explains why this volume focuses on elite women and outlines how the term elite is used in it.

Why elites? Some background to the argument

In so far as this book uses historical material on the education of clever elite women, it builds on my earlier work on the history of education for ladies (Delamont 1978a, 1978b). The contemporary analyses it contains build on my ethnographic work at St Luke’s — a public school for girls in a Scottish city — where I did my Ph.D fieldwork. The research, consisting of participant observation of fourteen — and fifteen-year olds, has been described elsewhere (Delamont 1973, 1976a, 1976b, 1983d, 1984a, 1984b, 1984c) and is not recapitulated here. However there is a lesson about the sociology of education in the reception of the findings. For a variety of reasons detailed elsewhere (Delamont 1984a) the thesis was neverpublished as a monograph such as Hargreaves (1967), Lacey (1970), Ball (1981) or Nash (1973). While it would be hubris to speculate that a monograph would have had a status in the sociology of education approaching that of Sharp and Green (1975) or Willis (1977), the data are interesting. In practice, commentators who do refer to the study frequently reject it as ‘abnormal’ and ‘irrelevant’ to mainstream...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Part I Introductory themes
• Part II The mountains of inertia and prejudice: A structuralist discussion of the period 1845-1944
• Part III Exploring structuralist sociology of education: A critique of sociological accounts for the period 1945-88
• Part IV Conclusions
• Appendix 1: The impact of feminism in the sociology of education
• Appendix 2: A note on the history of education
• Appendix 3: Direct-grant and independent schools aided by the IFASES 1955-63
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index