Sociology For Dummies by Jay Gabler

Author:Jay Gabler
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2010-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

Every society is diverse, and to assume there’s one way to “properly” be a member of that society is not fair to either longtime residents or to new arrivals.

Sex and Gender

Just as “race” and “ethnicity” are often used interchangeably but mean different things from a sociological standpoint, such is the case with the terms “sex” and “gender.” As used by sociologists, the word sex refers to a person’s biological sex; with a few exceptions, this is unambiguously male or female. Gender is a more complicated term that refers, like “ethnicity,” to a role that a person identifies with; it may or may not correspond to a person’s biological sex.

In this section, I describe the history of sex and gender from a sociological standpoint and explain how sociologists are trying to keep up with the rapid recent social changes in how sex, gender, and sexual orientation are viewed.

“You’ve come a long way, baby”?: The women’s movement and its discontents

Women can have babies. Men can’t. After the babies are born, women can nurse them. Men can’t. The basic biological differences between men and women have always led to them having different roles in societies. As societies grew and institutionalized — that is, created social institutions such as businesses and governments, with elaborate codes of law — these differences became formalized in specific rules about what men and women could do.

This played out differently in each society, but in most societies around the world, it was made difficult or impossible for women to take formal leadership roles. In many societies women were for a long time unable to own property or vote.

As with racial discrimination, sex discrimination came under increasing challenge as the principle of equality that fueled the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries (see Chapter 3) spread, and as science made increasingly clear that there were no significant differences between men and women in intellect or ability. An international suffrage movement around the turn of the 20th century earned women the right to vote in most countries around the world, and other legal barriers to women’s equality began quickly to drop away.

But even as formal distinctions between men and women fell away, many informal distinctions remained. In the postwar “Baby Boom,” women were still typically expected to stay at home and care for the children and the home while their husbands went off to bring home the bacon. This theoretical ideal was never actually as widespread as it seemed (see Chapter 15), but many women felt suffocated by the expectation that they would inevitably find a life of domesticity more rewarding than any alternative.

A wave of influential thinkers — Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and others — called for a complete rethinking of the roles of women in society, and millions of women around the world actively resisted being pigeonholed in the role of passive nurturer. In part because of this cultural shift and in part because of an economic recession, women entered the workforce in record numbers, and today it’s

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