Five: Your Assignment
Talcott Parsons, the eminent 1950s Harvard sociologist (who, incidentally, trained both Kingsley Davis and Wilfred Moore from the last reading), argued that the family was held together by gender norms, culturally and socially accepted ways of being men and women. The American family of the 1950s, comprised of husband, wife, and children, was organized around women’s caring for home, and attending to the care and moral development of children while men earn an income to support their families, and if necessary, protect family and country. This came to be called the nuclear family, because family is the “nucleus” or center of social life in societies, and this model of the family was being defined during the 1950s, the “nuclear age.”
In 1848, roughly a century before, almost two hundred women gathered at a church in Seneca Falls, the first Women’s Rights convention—the resulting document, the declaration of sentiments, defined first-wave feminism, defined by the quest for the political enfranchisement of women. Many first-wave feminists advocated for temperance, regulating or criminalizing the sale of intoxicating liquors, to curb infidelity, domestic violence, and dereliction of duty among husbands. Some joined in the cause of abolition, or demanding an end to slavery that still existed in the U.S. South. But they really organized around suffrage, or the right to vote, which happened nationwide in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, just over a century ago. Critics then, who have reemerged in recent years, argue that the right to vote should be attached to the ability to be drafted into military service; women do not vote because women do not have to serve in the military in wartime.
Just over two decades later, the United States entered the Second World War. Many working-age men were drafted into the armed forces to fight the war, and women stepped into many jobs traditionally held exclusively by men, supporting the war effort by working in factories and shipyards, building weapons and munitions. The classic image of “Rosie the Riveter” appeared throughout the United States, an iconic image used to recruit women into factory jobs and bolster morale. World War II came to a close a few years later, and the men who had fought returned home, expecting to return to work. Between the end of the Second World War and the end of the 1950s, the United States experienced a baby boom, a period marked by an unusually high birth rate.
The world Parsons was writing about was a moment in place and time. Something like the nuclear family structure, while not exactly uncommon, has not been the norm historically and cross-culturally. This became part of a bigger set of criticisms of functionalism, that by neutrally describing the social world as it appeared in one place and time, it defined that set of social constructs as the norm for all, across place and time, conflating what is and what ought to be. This is actually one of the reasons social scientists have, at least since Parsons, separated sex from gender. As late as the end of the twentieth century, a student of sociology would be taught that sex is biological—human beings are born either male or female—and that gender is a social construct, something our society teaches us how to do through the socialization process.
Parsons’ vision of the nuclear family was really challenged in 1963 with the now-famous book The Feminine Mystique, in which Betty Friedan described “the problem that has no name,” challenging prevailing notions of gender norms. She wanted less rigid norms for women, that allowed them to choose the workplace, along with an abandonment of traditional beauty standards reinforced by make-up and push-up bras—in short, her call for gender equality in both public and private life defines second wave feminism. As many first-wave feminists were active in other political causes, second-wave feminists took on some of the activist causes of the 1960s, including the anti-war and Civil Rights movements. Many joined conservative religious groups in opposing pornography, while they also advocated for legalizing abortion and access to contraceptives. Opposition to contraception and abortion was reinforced in the Catholic Church in 1968, and again in 1995, beginning with the Encyclical letter Humanae Vitae, whereas sociologist Melissa Wilde shows that many prominent U.S. religious groups remained supportive of abortion well into the 1970s.
Second-wave feminists have been lastingly drawn to issues of work, both inside and outside the home. Inside the home, sociologist Arlie Hochschild found evidence of a “stalled revolution” in her book The Second Shift, that as women went to work in record numbers in the final decades of the twentieth century, men often did not pick up the slack with home and child care. Outside the home, a stubborn gender pay gap, the difference between women’s and men’s yearly earnings, has persisted; and actually deepened during the pandemic, likely because women made more career sacrifices to care for family and home. The gender pay gap is ultimately one of those average differences—a disparity, or statistical suggestion of inequality in outcomes between groups. Disparities, like any other average difference, have to be studied, examined, explained.
Often, sociologists attempting to understand, or put into focus, ideas or concepts they find in the social world, must invent new words—neologisms—in their efforts to explain what it is they mean. In short, the concept of intersectionality became a tool for analyzing attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes in ways that went beyond a single group-level average difference. Take, for example, the gender pay gap in the U.S. As of about 2016, before the pandemic and the mass economic disruptions that followed, women made about 82 cents on every dollar a man makes, on average. White women make about 82 cents on every dollar a white man makes, but Asian men make about 1.17 for each dollar a white man makes. Asian women make 87 cents, while Black women make only 65 cents, and Hispanic women, a mere 58 cents. These are average differences, not absolute ones, but these disparities show that race as well as gender is significantly related to earnings. These are complicated issues that cannot be fully examined, let alone resolved, in a little essay like this one.
As I mentioned earlier, from about the 1950s up until the end of the twentieth century, social scientists distinguished between sex—something that was biologically “given”—and your gender—what you learned to do, how we learn to be men and women in the context of our respective societies. As we learned more about human beings, the assumption that sex is biologically given came into question. Some people are not born either male or female—a small proportion of babies are born intersex, meaning that biologically, they are born with a configuration of sex organs, hormones, or other markers which is not clearly either male or female. When a baby is anatomically intersex, historically they have been assigned to one or the other sex, and the infant’s body was made, through surgery, to conform to this identity. But with hormones, chromosomes, or other biological elements, many do not find out they are intersex until later in life and may live and die as their assigned sex without ever knowing. So yes, sex is rooted in biology. But it’s another case of average differences with a bit of overlap, a space of uncertainty across one or more biological aspects.
How common is intersex in human beings? Statistics range from.018% at the low end to around 1.7% at the high end, depending on how intersex is defined. Radically different statistics result from differing definitions of what does or does not qualify as intersex, which may in turn reflect deeper commitments of the scholars doing the defining. Taking these estimates, if there are about 342.7 million people living in the United States, then there are between 62,000 and 5.8 million intersex persons in this country alone. It depends on how intersex is measured, because humans are a product of anatomy, genes, chromosomes, biochemistry, and much more, all interacting in different ways through the course of life. Should intersex individuals be assigned a sex at birth without their consent or even their knowledge? Or should children who are born intersex instead be allowed to choose their own gender identity when they are “old enough”? And what of those who do not have the sex organs to fully conform to male or female sexuality, or those whose hormonal and other differences do not appear until later in life?
Should people born intersex have to stick with the sex and gender identity assigned them at birth? And if they don’t have to, then why does anyone? Many individuals, some intersex and most not, reject the man-woman binary in their expression of gender, and are known as genderqueer. People who are genderqueer may identify as both male and female, or neither, regardless of the configuration of their sex organs, and may adopt pronouns other than he/him or she/her. People who are transgender, on the other hand, adopt a gender identity different from the one assigned at birth; they may or may not engage in other biological and anatomical modifications to bring their bodies and sex into conformity with their gender identity. A trans man has transitioned from being a woman to being a man; a trans woman was assigned male at birth but now lives as a woman. To simply a bit, like height and hair length, sex is largely (but not entirely) ascribed, and gender is largely (but not entirely) achieved. Again, human diversity reflects a complicated relationship between organism and environment; and what we get are a bunch of average differences with some degree of overlap, not either/or.
Though it is often assumed that being transgender is a new phenomenon, this is by no means the case. Historically, women have often dressed as men, and lived as men, in order to secure traditionally male careers and social standing in patriarchal, or male dominated, societies. Men have also dressed and lived as women. Again, gender is something we do, and though it correlates with sex, masculinity and femininity are expressed differently by people in different places and times, because gender norms vary. Advances in medical technology allowed Lili Elbe to receive the first sex reassignment surgery in Germany in 1930. Elbe was a painter born Einar Wegener, and had been married to his wife Greta for some time before making the transition form man to woman. A 2015 film, The Danish Girl, tells her story. Since Elbe’s transition, many others throughout the world have undergone sexual reassignment surgery, further challenging the notion that biology is destiny.
A view of sex as well as gender as socially constructed raises new concerns. Should a trans man compete in a men’s Olympic sport, or a boxing match? Should a trans woman play for the WNBA, or fight as a female mixed martial artist? And what of those who are genderqueer or intersex? Are they forbidden from participating in either women’s or men’s sports, or can they participate in both? But let me ask a radical question: why are sports organized by sex or gender at all? Couldn’t basketball be organized by height, or football, by weight class or other aspects? Public bathrooms in the U.S. are divided by a binary version of gender, but what bathroom should persons who are genderqueer, intersex, or trans use? In terms of equity, it would be easier to create individual stalls to safeguard privacy if these are authentically the concerns that motivate public concerns around these issues today. That would of course take time, cost money, and require government regulation and policy change, but it could be done. Perhaps it is a deeply held gender norm, arising out of that nuclear family vision, in which it is assumed men are charged with protecting women from other men, that animates these concerns. These findings all raise deep issues about how the social world is organized, and the power of social construction, in shaping sex and gender.
Image Credit: Rosie the Riveter, World War II Propaganda, Public Domain
Important Words
Abolition
Baby boom
Disparity
First-wave feminism
Gender
Gender norms
Gender pay gap
Intersectionality
Intersex
Nuclear family
Patriarchal
Second-wave feminism
Sex
Sex reassignment surgery
Suffrage
Temperance
Trans man
Trans woman
Transgender
Sit With It: Big Questions
It is possible we are currently living through a “gender revolution,” and that future historians may see this era in terms of unprecedented shifts in gender, as well as gender identity, throughout much of the world. Based on what you learned from this course, and your experience, do you think it’s possible to reorganize the social world in ways that do not include gender norms—a “post-gender” world? Defend your answer.
I have drawn a lot of attention to gender through the lens of feminism and social change here. Reflect on your experience, based on readings and lecture: are there ways in which existing gender norms, or even blind spots in feminism, that may disadvantage or harm men?
