Page 194 - DSOC202_SOCIAL_STRATIFICATION_ENGLISH

Unit 9: Gender and Stratification

Similarly, children beyond infancy also require constant care and supervision and this work Notes
becomes the extension of her natural bond with the children. Hence she is confined to family and
home. This gives rise to the opposition between two domains— domestic and public. The domestic
unit is the family and home. The public unit is the society and its network of relationships. The
public unit is considered as more important and a part of culture.
Thirdly, it is also believed that woman has a different psychic structure. Nancy Chodorow shows
that women are seen to be more practical and this worldly than men. They get involved with
concrete feelings, things and people rather than with abstract entities. Men are more objective and
inclined to relate in terms of abstract categories. Women are more subjective and inclined to relate
in terms of concrete phenomena.
Sherry Ortner remarks that the so-called distinction between nature and culture is itself a product
of culture. She goes on to argue that this postulate can be viewed simply as a middle position on
a scale from culture down to nature and in that case it accounts for the lower status of woman. If
it may be read as a mediating element in culture-nature relationship then it may account for
cultural tendency to devalue woman and restrict her function. If it is read as an ambiguous status
between the two, it can help to account for woman’s specific alignment with culture. In reality
woman is not any closer to nature than man. Hence the revision of various institutions and
customs and traditions is necessary.
In order to show that nature-culture distinction is a product of culture, it is necessary to show that
men and women are social and cultural beings. This has not been argued out by Ortner. Similarly
the dichotomy of nature/culture does not prove the universality of the fact of subordination in
universal terms.
Another attempt to explain the dichotomy of nature/culture is made by S. Firestone. She reduces
the history of the relation between nature/culture to the opposition between female and male. She
argues that it is biology—procreation and the basic natural inequality that is the basis for woman’s
subordination and man’s power. Women are confined to home and men create and control culture.
Irrespective of many good suggestions in The Dialectics of Sex, Firestone does not show as to how
a biological phenomenon is appropriated by either the scientific community or by cultural
conditions.

Freud’s Theory of Psychoanalysis
Of Freud’s ’Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, his essay on ‘Female Sexuality’ is widely
known for his views regarding the psychological development of woman. He has tried to
understand how a human animal becomes a human being. According to him this transformation
does not take place all of a sudden but it is a long process in which a child has to pass through
various successive phases which do not resemble one another. The psychological development of
a child is thus several times repeated like that of caterpillar into a butterfly. These phases through
which a child passes are oral stage, anal stage, genital stage, latency stage, puberty and adolescence.
In the beginning Freud thought that the development of a boy and a girl takes place along the
parallel lines and there is not much difference. However, later on Freud arrived at the conclusion
that even though the phases are the same the way a boy or a girl experiences these phases is
essentially different.
According to Freud during the early infantile period the child is autocratic, it derives erotic or
sexual satisfaction from the stimulation of his body or from erogenous zones such as lips, cheeks,
nipples or genital organs stimulated by the mother during the activities of feeding, bathing or
otherwise. In the oral stage the stimulation of mouth gives rise to pleasurable sensation, in the
anal stage libidinal pleasure is derived from the activities of the bowl, and in the early genital
stage the erotic pleasure is derived chiefly from the manipulation of the sexual organs. Freud
argues that at the oral stage and the anal stage the experiences of a boy and a girl are the same. But

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