The American Class System



The American Class System

Gender refers to a cultural understanding of what constitutes masculinity and femininity in any society. Gender roles are the social and cultural expectations that are associated with a person's sex and are learned during the socialization process. Gender is social differentiation based on sex. Masculinity, as a gender differentiation, refers to attributes traditionally considered appropriate for males such as aggression, athleticism, high levels of physical activity, logical thinking, dominance in interpersonal relationships; whereas femininity as a gender differentiation, refers to attributes traditionally associated with behavior appropriate for females such as passivity, docility, fragility, emotionality, and subordination in interpersonal relationships. Although many consider gender to be biological, it is not (Belkhir, 1994). Gender traits are socially determined, they are not innate. Margaret Mead's classic studies of sexual practices and gender roles among various ethnic groups in New Guinea demonstrated that among the Arapesh both sexes display what Americans would think of as feminine characteristics; among the Mundugumor both sexes display what Americans would think of as masculine characteristics, and among the Tchambuli Mead documented women engaging in gender roles that most Americans would consider masculine, while men engaged in gender roles that most Americans would consider feminine. As with racial and ethnic stereotypes there are also gender stereotypes: men are instrumental or goal oriented while women are expressive or emotional.

Long before the popularization of the Race, Gender & Class (RGC) perspective, I suspect that most Marxist sociologists teaching social stratification were already adept practitioners. For many years, for example, the Section on Marxist sociology of the American Sociological Association included in its annual program a session on Class, Gender and Race. I certainly called my students' attention, in twenty nine years of teaching social stratification and other subjects in which inequality matters, to the fact that everybody's lives are affected by class, gender and race/ethnic structures (in addition to age and other sources of inequality). We are, in Marx's terms, "an ensemble of social relations" (Marx, 1994: 100, emphasis added), and we live our lives at the core of the intersection of a number of unequal social relations based on hierarchically interrelated structures which, together, define the historical specificity of the capitalist modes of production and reproduction and underlay their observable manifestations. I also routinely called students' attention to the problems inherent in the widespread practice of assuming the existence of common interests, ideologies, politics, ...