Women and Stratification: A Review of Recent Literature

Abstract

Until six or seven years ago, women were invisible in work on social stratification, hidden in a conceptualization of female class or status derived from the class or status of men (Acker, 1973; Haug, 1973). Sex inequality was not part of the subject matter either of stratification studies focusing on individuals and their distribution in hierarchies of reward or of class studies focusing on aggregates similarly located in relationship to the system of production and the structure of economic and social power. In the ensuing years, there has been an avalanche of publications on sex inequality, much of it within the area of stratification and most in journal articles rather than books. In selectively reviewing this literature, I have been particularly interested in two questions fundamental to an assessment of progress toward stratification theory and research that illuminates the structural positions of women. First, can the disadvantaged and subordinate position of women be understood or explained within the confines of the available theories? Second, is our knowledge of class and stratification deepened, extended, or altered by the new attention to women? The answer to the first question must be no, unless we discard the assumption of derived status or class for women and investigate the possibilities of conceptualizing women as social beings with identities and existence of their own. It might then be possible to account for sex inequalities within stratification or class frameworks. Three different approaches to this problem are implicit, and sometimes explicit, in the literature: (1) that sex and class stratification are different phenomena and that sex inequality should not be examined at all or should be analyzed separately; (2) that women can be integrated into existing theories without substantial change in those theories; and (3) that reconceptualization is necessary if we are to understand sex inequality. That sex and class stratification are separate processes is implicit in much work on class. For example, a number of writers clearly think that an integration of the analysis of sex and class inequalities is not needed because women are still substantially outside the class system (Giddens, 1973) or because housewifes have the class positions of their husbands (Wright, 1978); the situation of women working for pay is no different than that of men and therefore, can be accounted for with a presumably sex-neutral class analysis. These authors do not discard the old assumptions that female class is determined by the class of male relations and do not deal with sexbased inequality; by implication that subject must be discussed outside the boundaries of class analysis. A similar implicit separation of class stratification and sex stratification appears in the proliferation of books and articles dealing with sex inequality as a separate phenomenon and geared toward the sex roles-women's studies market (e.g., Chafetz, 1974; Stoll, 1974; Deckard, 1979; Duberman, 1975; Walum, 1977; Nielsen, 1978). Class differences in the situations of women and men are described in some books (e.g., Deckard, 1979; Hacker, 1975), and the question of the relationship between sex stratification and class stratification is given brief treatment in others (Chafetz, 1974; Walum, 1977). However, the analyses do not proceed much past the declaration that women constitute a caste; the existence of these books as a separate body of literature attests to the implicit separation in the conceptual frameworks. Recent stratification textbooks illustrate a variety of approaches to bringing sex inequality into a stratification perspective,