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| Firstly an introduction MUSINGS OTHER PEOPLE'S ESSAYS |
Gender relations of power are maintained through a set of institutional and cultural practices: Discuss
The domination of men over women is a historical phenomenon. Whilst in recent decades, the feminist movement has sought to equalise the gender bias, there are still factors, both institutional and cultural, that serve to maintain this long standing imbalance. This essay's purpose is not only to identify these factors, but also to explain the impact that they have on each other. Cultural practices breed institutional barriers and vice-versa.
Briefly, it is necessary to make a distinction between sex and gender. In accordance with Oakley (1972), sex is a physical difference whereas gender operates on a psychological level. We are thus concerned with the factors in society that fuel people's attitude toward not just the physical difference but psychological differences between men and women. Furthermore, we are concerned with the knock-on effect this has for the institutional practices that cause gender-relations of power to remain so pervasive.
Issues that deal with neutralising gender bias can be classified as feminist. This corresponds with Dahlerup (1986), who defines feminism as the ideologies, activities and policies whose goal it is to remove discrimination against women and the male domination of society. Whilst we may consider this to be a good textbook definition, it runs into problems when confronted with the perceptions of everyday people. It has problems because women (and even men) who would be classified as feminists according to this description explicitly refuse to be labelled as feminists. This may be because the media have succeeded in caricaturing feminism as an extreme form of men hating by unlovable, unattractive, humourless women. This point about the media is an important one. It raises the issues of the cultural practices as mentioned in the title.
Cultural practices are very important for maintaining gender relations of power. In many cases, these practices begin when children are very young. This occurs in many different forms such as language, toys and general stereotypes. Children receive preverbal clues as to their gender identity before they actually understand the difference. Differences in hair, clothes and scent provide children with this distinction from an early age. These differences set children up to develop into their specific gender.
Empirical studies (Rootham, 1978), have documented instances where children born as one sex but brought up as the other (due to surgery at birth), tend to develop freely into the other role. Furthermore, once these labels have been allocated, they tend to prevail throughout a person's life in the form of social stereotypes. Practices such as dressing girls in pink and boys in blue condition people into making judgements. Will et al. (1976) studied this phenomenon. A group of adults were asked to play with a baby in 'girls' clothes' while the researches watched their behaviour. This was repeated with a different group of adults with the same baby wearing 'boy's clothes. The results found that the adults' behaviour patterns were as would be expected; the two groups treated the baby according to the appropriate gender stereotype.
A similar study by Zammuner (1987) asked groups of both parents and children from Holland and Italy to classify a range of children's toys according to whether they were for girls, boys or either. In each country, the parents and children agreed very strongly. This research shows very clearly that cultural stereotyping from an early age moulds children's attitudes toward gender. Interestingly however, the research showed that cultural stereotypes in Italy were far greater than Holland.
Whilst the above examples provide evidence that gender identities are largely cultural, it is important to consider how this allows for the emergence of power relationships. In terms of cultural practices, this can be attributed largely to the language we use in everyday life. Terms such as 'head master' and 'chairman', terms used to describe positions of power, are all biased in favour of men. Even the term 'mankind' has connotations of men being seen as the more important sex. When children are taught that it is acceptable to use this kind of language, they are conditioned into believing that gender relationships of power are natural.
The kind of conditioning mentioned above occurs widely in the education system. This is especially true in the books that schools use to teach. Books used for teaching subjects as varied as mathematics, English, domestic science and French can influence children through both the frequency of references to males and females, and also through the activities that characters do. Dymoke (1991) found that in books used for teaching in Primary schools in the UK, had almost three times as many references to boys as girls. Moreover, in 86% of references to girls, the panel (made up largely of middle-class women between the ages of 20 and 35) viewed the activities negatively. When the school children were asked for their thoughts, most thought the portrayal of the characters was appropriate. Similarly, the panel reported that 77% of the male characters were portrayed in a positive light.
The education system has been cited as the dominant ideological state apparatus for gender conditioning (Barett). This happens by way of some of the mechanisms mentioned above. Wolpe (1977) documents from empirical research the ways in which the curriculum, school organisation, the teachers as agents and state policy all contribute to the reproduction of the ideology of the woman's role.
It should be recognised that women's places in power relationships have developed greatly over the last century. For example, women in the UK were granted full voting rights in the UK in 1928. Further more, Parliamentary statutes such as the Equal Opportunities Bill and Sex Discrimination act have been passed with the intention of redressing the unambiguous imbalance between men and women. These initiatives have followed the rise of the women's movement, which was set in motion by pioneers such as Emaline Pankhurst.
Whilst these developments have occurred, there are still great institutional biases against women. This is visible very clearly in the number of women Members of Parliament in the UK. On a mechanical level, this occurs through the electoral system. The first past the post method of electing members results in large numbers of 'safe' white middle-class men being elected. This is clearly an institutional factor but it has its roots firmly in the cultural. Men are seen as the 'safe' option because of society's attitudes towards gender relations of power.
There are further institutional biases against women. Despite the high proportion of women who have their own incomes, the assumption that married women are not (and should not be) financially independent of their husbands, continues to be a cornerstone of the welfare state. Land (1976) points out that this assumption has been used to justify different pension entitlements for married women. Wilson (1974) further argues that this leads to a vicious circle, in which women are forced to be dependent on their husbands.
Women are also disadvantaged in the workplace. This has occurred despite the parliamentary statutes mentioned above. This is simply because governments cannot legislate over what kind of job someone should get. For example, women perform 99.6% of secretarial work. Conversely, there are very few women directors of organisations in both the public and private sectors, and at present, there are no female chief constables in the British police force. Further bias comes in terms of the relative salaries and non-monetary benefits of female workers. According to the New Earnings Survey 1985, more than 35% of women in full-time work were paid less than 100 per week. For men, this was true for less than 8%. In addition, women tended to do more part-time work, had poorer prospects for training, greater insecurity and reduced fringe benefits.
There are disagreements as to whether the male oppression of women has been characteristic of all human societies, or whether, on the other hand, an egalitarian sexual division of labour characterised the simplest human societies, with male domination only emerging under certain conditions. It is however, widely accepted that particular material and political changes served to increase the power of men vis--vis women. These changes include alterations in subsistence production, often combined with the reorganisation of women's labour around the family rather than the community; and crucially the emergence of the state, which consolidated and sustained the power of male heads of households over 'their' women and children.
The subordination of women in advanced capitalist societies involves two sets of interrelated structures. The first is patriarchy; the term was first taken up by Weber to describe a particular form of household organisation in which the father dominated over the other members of an extended kinship and controlled the economic production of the household. Hartmann (1982) defined patriarchy as 'a set of hierarchical relations between men, which enable them to control women'. It is therefore the 'male oppression of women'. Although it is recognised that some men are in a position to exercise more decisive power than others are, the concept of patriarchy emphasises the benefits accruing directly to all men from the domestic, labouring, reproductive and sexual subordination of women. The second structure is the capitalist relations of production. Studies of economic, social and political change in areas as different as the Dominican Republic, Columbia and Nigeria (Reiter, 1987) show that male dominance becomes more pronounced with the development of capitalism. The actions of the capitalists have enhanced the competition within the ranks of labouring people, and reinforced patriarchal relations within the family by offering women and children lower wages. Furthermore, male workers use the trade union movement to secure advantages over women workers, in order to preserve patriarchal privilege
This links in, to a certain extent, the distinction between the public and private spheres, as proposed by Showstack-Sassoon. This distinction centres on the barrier between the individual family unit and the rest of the outside world such as the Government and the labour market. She argues that as cultural practices tend to exclude women from the public sphere, greater emphasis is placed on their role in the private. Working in the private sphere, women's work is largely un-rewarded by pay, but also fails to entitle them to benefits of the welfare state. We should expect that as society's values of the public sphere change (as they have been doing), women are likely to assert themselves in the private sphere, thus reversing the stereotypically images fed to their children.
In conclusion, there are indisputable imbalances in gender relationships. These probably arose centuries ago, when men's physical strength and ability to wrestle wild animals allowed for the domination of women, who were superior at rearing children. These imbalances have remained until the twentieth century, and, whilst they are being broken down, women are still oppressed by men. This is due to a combination of institutional factors, such as the welfare state and industrial infrastructure, and cultural practices such as the stereotypes children are fed form the moment they are born. Furthermore, the institutional factors will not disappear until the cultural practices have ceased. Similarly, it is society's cultural practices that provide the democratic mandate for governments maintain such institutions.