Feminism and Materialism (RLE Feminist Theory) by Annette Kuhn AnnMarie Wolpe

Author:Annette Kuhn, AnnMarie Wolpe [Annette Kuhn, AnnMarie Wolpe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415752237
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

II

There has emerged in postwar Britain a fairly coherent body of sociological studies which have been concerned with married women working, and with the implications of this for relationships within the family. The pioneer study, Myrdal and Klein's Women's Two Roles, first appeared in 1956. This has been followed by other similar studies (such as Klein's Britain's Married Women Workers (1965) and Yudkin and Holme's Working Mothers and Their Children (1969)), some of which – for example Fogarty, Rapoport and Rapoport's Sex, Career and Family (1971) –have restricted themselves to women engaged in professional occupations. Other studies have considered the impact of women working on the structure of the family (Rapoport and Rapoport's Dual Career Families (1971) and Young and Willmott's The Symmetrical Family (1975)). Most of these investigations have been policy oriented – written with the objectives of investigating barriers against women working, of influencing social policies which would make it easier for women to work (policies concerning nursery provision, maternity leave and so on) and advocating the reorganisation of working in order that women's labour can increasingly be drawn upon, (for example, by developing more flexible hours of work, part-time work). Recognising the shortage of labour which existed during the postwar period in Britain, the studies have shared the assumption that married women are an important source of labour at all levels of the occupational structure, and have investigated the social characteristics of women who work, when in their life cycles they work, what problems they face when they work and so on, amassing a considerable amount of evidence on these questions. I am not concerned with their particular empirical findings here, but rather with an examination of the theoretical framework within which these studies have been undertaken, and I shall attempt to show how their focus upon what economists call the ‘supply’ of labour has led them to ignore some important questions concerned with the structuring of women's employment.

These studies have accepted elements of Parsons's functionalist framework, but in an ad hoc way, and since they are formulated as empirical studies their functionalist assumptions are not always explicit. Such assumptions become evident, however, in the central place occupied in these analyses by the concept of sex roles: the position of both men and women within the social structure is defined in terms of the social expectations of a person holding a particular role, social positions being defined in normative terms. While these studies share with Parsons a notion of sex roles understood in terms of normative expectations, they lack the macrosociological analysis which Parsons provides, in his early Essays, of the tensions between the demands of the occupational system and the kinship system in industrial societies. Thus, instead of providing an analysis of tensions whose roots are located at a societal level, the empirical studies locate tensions for the individual women as resulting from the existence of different sets of normative expectations. The basis of women's social position is therefore defined, as in the title of Myrdal

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