Gender, Class and Education (Routledge Revivals)

Stephen Walker, Len Barton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136156052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

First published in 1983, Gender, Class and Education is a collection of papers that formed presentations at the Westhill Sociology of Education Conference in January 1982, and is the fifth such collection to emerge from the annual conference. The conference theme, 'Race, Class and Gender', was not only chosen because of its topicality, but also to provide a framework for debate between educational researchers and teachers. The papers focus on the reproduction of gender relations through education and provide important insights into how this process works, how it is resisted in schools and colleges, and the possibilities for radical intervention. This volume includes three teaching bibliographies on gender and education which were not presented at the conference, but were compiled specially for the book.

1. Gender, Class and Education: A Personal View

Stephen Walker, Newman College and Len Barton, Westhill College

You don’t have to be any one thing to be a feminist, there’s no signing on the dotted line … if the issue is choice then we also have to be free to choose our own ideas.

(McRobbie and McCabe, 1981)

In writing this introductory chapter to a volume concerned with the educational experience of women, we find ourselves in a somewhat peculiar position: we feel a need to explain, or even to justify, our own interest. To some extent such explanation would not be unusual. Inclusion of biographical information or of personal histories is now fairly common in prefaces to sociological discussion. But the relevance of this practice to the particular topics discussed in this book is more pressing, and arises from our awareness that some analysts may have doubts about the status of discussion of women’s experience by men. In part, this caution would seem to be based upon the following view. A major concern in the study of women’s educational experience is the ways in which schools operate so as to reproduce and sustain gender differentiated identities, perceptions and cultural visions which are legitimated through ideologies of male domination. It follows that analysis offered by men, whose own consciousness has been shaped through participation in this system, is, at best, distorted or, at worst, patronizing. The question arises, therefore, whether men can ever achieve non-sexist understanding of women’s experiences.

The significance of this question becomes acute in the light of the fact that although the extensive work in women’s studies which has been developed over the last ten years has produced considerable theoretical refinement and a growing body of empirical data for the sociology of education, it is still tempting to coin the phrase ‘invisible men’ to describe male involvement in this area. Why — we might ask — have so few men been interested in joining the debates and the research programmes in this crucial area? Is it a result of bias, of shortsightedness, of a failure to appreciate the work’s relevance of even, perhaps, of a forlorn attempt to preserve some supposed form of academic neutrality? Whatever the explanation, our own recent experiences as teachers have convinced us that a slavish and unreflective adherrance to a narrow perspective or to a fixed set of assumptions is always counter-productive. Our motive, then, for entering this field — and we do so with some trepidation — is not with a view to attempting chauvinistic correction or to assimilating feminist insights into our own male world-views, rather, we see such an effort as part of a process in which reciprocal challenge is a key and exciting feature.

However, it is not through reference to these ‘academic’ considerations that we would want to make the main reason for our interest in women’s studies, feminist analysis and gender differentiation in schools. Our motivation comes from our interpretation of the basic purpose for doing sociological work. In this respect we follow the direction and justification so clearly articulated by Wright Mills (1970) in his discussion of the politics of doing social science. He argues:

The interest of the social scientist in social structure is not due to any view that the future is structurally determined. We study the structural limits of human decision in an attempt to find points of effective intervention, in order to know what can and what must be structurally changed if the role of explicit decision making in history-making is to be enlarged… . We study history to discern the alternatives within which human reason and human freedom can now make history. We study historical social structures, in brief, in order to find within them the ways in which they are and can be controlled. For only in this way can we come to know the limits and the meaning of human freedom.

It follows that interest in both the public and private troubles of women (or men) is inextricably related to the broader aim of discovering particular forms of structural and interactional limitations on the possibilities of human freedom. In short, for us as men to ignore or to accept exclusion from a concern for the position women occupy and the experiences they encounter in our society would be tacitly to accept a status quo, to treat it as unproblematic and, by so doing, to limit the possibilities in the common struggle which inspires our intellectual and political endeavours.

Gender and Schooling

The development of mass education in England and Wales since the beginning of the nineteenth century has been marked by three crucial divisions: social class, ability and sex.

(Deem, 1978)

Although the tendency to treat educational practices and assumptions as unproblematic has met increasing resistance from sociologists of education during the last decade, a new trend has replaced it. This is the practice of identifying an educational issue as problematic and then treating the area within which the problematic pertains as being relatively unified, homogeneous or well-bounded. However, this criticism cannot be applied to sociological analyses of women and education. Indeed, one of the problems which has resulted from the rapid increase in research interest in women’s educational experience in the last few years is the development of a series of analytical forms and explanations which are diverse, heterogeneous and, sometimes, underrelated to a main theoretical platform. It is useful to examine these forms, not with a view to offering a detailed description or a synthesis, nor with the intention of suggesting orders of priority, but rather with a view to identifying what would appear to be some unifying concerns of this research — albeit concerns which themselves pose diverse problems in any programme aimed at change.

Issue 1: Ideology and Patriarchy

The education system is a key means of production and reproduction of the ideological structure — for this system not only in its very organisation and mode of functioning, embodies the dominant ideology of the society, but also functions to reproduce this ideology in its specific form.

(Wolpe, 1977)

A major focus in the study of women’s education and gender differentiation has been the impact of ideological formations which work outside and above education and, crucially, their influence upon the processes of schooling and upon the reactions girls and boys make to these processes. These ideological formations have been depicted as encompassing a variety of features. The crude depiction of educational practice and experience as strongly influenced by a set of ideologies and relations which permeate the whole social order and which are characteristically patriarchal in form has been refined by writers like Kuhn and Wolpe (1978), Deem (1978, 1980), Arnot (formerly MacDonald) (1980, 1981) and David (1981) who chart critical dimensions of this influence. These dimensions generally include the following observations of the impact of patriarchy upon schooling:

(a) At the level of the individual, the dominant ideology works to regulate cultural norms of appropriate gender behaviour with respect to personal identity, social roles, work and marriage roles; these are norms which are carried into the schools by the pupils and involve quite specific gender differentiation. Specific illustration of sex stereotyping and gender differentiation through exposure to the socializing influences of the family, the media and other cultural agencies abound in Delamont’s Sex-Roles and the School (1980). The important concern, however, is that not only do different cultures define sex roles and identities differently but also that the power to define the differences is itself in the hands of men. Patriarchy, then, operates a form of differentiation at both deep and surface levels of the structuring of reality.

(b) At the level of the social structure, the dominant ideology works so as to regulate appropriate forms of gender differentiation in terms of the practices made possible in the economic and political spheres. The way resources are distributed, the rights and obligations determined by law, the form of state intervention in personal life and welfare, can all be seen as preserving gender distinction, as reinforcing gender discrimination and, often, as sustaining the marginal position of women. Thus, girls and boys not only experience a process of acculturation at the individual level which is strongly patriarchal in form, but also the social structure works to legitimate this ideology at the collective level. Legislation which purports to concentrate on welfare provision, employment patterns or social services is never framed in a climate separate from a more pervasive social ideology and, hence, it is possible to identify reflections of patriarchy in most of the activities of state agencies. Commenting upon recent state economic policy, for example, Deem (1981) suggests that

Reductions in public expenditure during Labour’s period in office (in the 1970s) hit women’s education particularly hard, as if to further underline the inconsistencies between the existence of legislation against sex discrimination and specific policies of different state apparatuses upholding that discrimination. Teacher training received one of the largest cuts at a time when it was still one of the major avenues for women’s higher education…

(c) An important element in the kinds of analysis we are examining is the conceptualization of the dominant ideology, that is, patriarchy, as being realized inside a series of complex relations within and among different social settings or sites. Gender differentiation is produced and reproduced through the operation of patriarchal ideologies in places of work or production, in family life and in cultural forms and practices — all of which are themselves necessarily class specific and differentiated. Thus, the ways in which the reactions of girls and boys to schooling are ideologically shaped will take a variety of forms. These will depend upon the dialectic between the class norms of a child’s family and that family’s experience of work, community and sub-cultural practices. Clarricoates (1980), in her study of the construction and reinforcement of gender stereotypical behaviour in schools which drew pupils from class differentiated catchment areas, remarks that she was led to believe that the

models [of gender appropriate behaviour] presented to the children, with their demarcation between masculine and feminine, are based on ecological factors which pertain to that school, i.e., the value structure of the school in relation to community values.

But the question arises as to how the different influences of patriarchy should be seen as interrelated whilst being realized in different settings. Clarricoates (1980) herself expresses the fairly general view that ‘it is patriarchy — the male hierarchical ordering of society, preserved through marriage and family via the sexual division of labour — that is the core of women’s oppression’ (our emphasis). This view exposes some of the difficulties which emerge in analyses which propose an interrelation between patriarchy and class, a linkage between gender differentiation and the sexual division of labour. The following difficulties can be noted.

1. Firstly, the location of the crucial defining element in the sexual division of labour is problematic. Essentially, one can question the relative influence of the sexual division of labour in the family upon the sexual division of labour in production, or, vice versa, the relative influence of the sexual division of labour in production upon family life. At one level, it can be argued that these two manifestations are inseparable. A sexual division of labour in family life, irrespective of how it originated, provides several advantages for the operations of economic production organized under a capitalist mode. It serves to legitimate the division and segmentation of productive authorities; it provides for the cheap and efficient reproduction of labour power by hiving off domestic work from paid employment and by giving the former an identifiable group — female non-waged workers; and it results in effective maintenance of an industrial reserve army whose contribution to production can be exploited on a part-time and insecure basis. Nevertheless, the key question is whether or not the sexual division of labour in the family is an essential condition of the mode of production. This is an important question because the ways in which individuals such as teachers can find a point of intervention in these processes are dependent on the answer. Thus, if one maintains a relative autonomy between forms of gender differentiation in the family and the wage-labour process, intervention will be required on two fronts. Or, if one reduces the sexual division of labour in the family to a particular manifestation of the social relations which arise from the organization of the forces of production, then interventions which are aimed solely at changing attitudes to familial roles can only achieve limited reforms. But, in the final analysis, the answer has to be that the sexual division of labour in the family is not an essential condition of capitalism. Whilst its present form may contribute to the need of capital to establish effective control of labour processes, it is vital to recognize the full impact of MacDonald’s (1981) insight when she argues:
   New forms of control may develop under capitalism which do not rely so heavily on patriarchal relations…. It is perhaps the changing nature of the capitalist economy and its demands for certain types and quantities of labour that allows for the possibility of ‘progressive’ attempts to reduce the inequalities between men and women. The success of these attempts, however, are likely to be determined to a large extent by the resilience of patriarchy as a power structure that also maintains a relative independence from economic forces of production since it is also based ideologically and materially in the family and other social institutes such as religion, newspapers, broadcasting etc.
2. A second difficulty is that the form of patriarchical relations, as many feminists have insisted, assumes different characteristics at specific moments in history. The ‘male hierarchical ordering of society’ works through a variety of forms and modes. Any crude depiction of this ordering in terms of a simple sexual division of labour would result in analysis which seriously misrepresents a subtle and shifting reality and which would be blind to quite crucial ways in which male cultural and economic power is exerted. The implication is that descriptions of the specificities of patriarchal relations require not only precise and detailed ethnographic charting but also constant revision and re-assessment.
3. A third difficulty with class-patriarchy linked models is that gender differentiation works both within and across class formations. Theoretical generalizations about the form of patriarchal domination in specific settings must be received cautiously and inspected to determine at which level of class formation they apply. More importantly, interventionists will have to struggle with the problem of determining if they are directing their programmes at all women, at specific class groups and, crucially, if the possible unintended consequence of programmes of action aimed at one class groups is an exacerbation of the problems of gender differentiation being experienced by another, different class group.

Issue 2: Gender Stereotyping in Schools

Girls are taken to cricket matches and given toy trains if they ask for them, while boys are allowed to knit, play with dolls’ houses and cry. Yet, in school, institutional pressures, teachers and peers enforced stereo-typed sex roles, and are intolerant of idiosyncrasies.

(Delamont, 1980)

A second major focus of research into gender diff...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Gender, Class and Education: A Personal View
• 2. Intersections of Gender and Class: Accommodation and Resistance by Working-Class and Affluent Females to Contradictory Sex-Role Ideologies
• 3. Gender, Resistance and Power
• 4. Work, Class and Teaching
• 5. A Cloud over Co-Education: An Analysis of the Forms of Transmission of Class and Gender Relations
• 6. The Conservative School? Sex Roles at Home, at Work and at School
• 7. Gender, Patriarchy and Class in the Popular Education of Women
• 8. Women and Teaching: A Semi-Detached Sociology of a Semi-Profession
• 9. Sex, Education and Social Policy: A New Moral Economy?
• 10. Social Theory, Social Relations and Education
• 11. Gender, Class and Education: A Teaching Bibliography of European Studies
• 12. Gender, Class and Education: A Teaching Bibliography of Australian and New Zealand Studies
• 13. Gender, Class and Education: A Teaching Bibliography of American Studies
• Contributors
• Index