Page 276 - DSOC202_SOCIAL_STRATIFICATION_ENGLISH

Unit 13: Changing Dimensions of Social Stratification

Gender and Stratification Notes
To begin with, males assert the biological inferiority of women even today. Female disorderliness
is brought under control by education, producing modesty and humility, by honest work and the
subordination of the wife to her husband. Married women are deprived of certain forms of
independence, even regarding their dowries and possessions. They are confined to the domestic
sphere. These are the views even today held and practised considerably in most societies. One
hardly finds any description, for example, in a work like The Making of the English Working Class by
E.P. Thompson. His class analysis refers more or less exclusively to men. Even in the recent work
of Eric Hobsbawn one finds reference to experiences of middle-class women. Only very recently,
the idea of “home”/”home making” has come up in a positive sense recognizing contribution of
women. The notice of “housewife” has also emerged that she looks home and children, performing
a very important task, and her husband goes out to earn money, as his duty towards his wife and
children.
Domestic patriarchy has come with the concept of home and home making. Women’s right to
proper recognition of her work at home has been recognized to a great extent all over the world.
Now women go out for work, have their savings, and a control over what they earn. Most men are
not hostile towards women’s work. Despite these very notable changes, the man’s work determines
where the couple lives, and how much of their lives are organized. R.W. Connell calls such a
situation “gender regimes”, and Harriet Bradley gives it the name “gendered work cultures”.
Some types of work are believed to be “appropriate” for women; and women are debarred from
various types of occupations by informal barriers and restrictions.
Marriage is a gendered and unequal division of labour. In Indian society, husband starts controlling
his wife’s activities, and also starts imposing upon her some of his own activities. Helping the
wife by the husband is considered an inferior task. The modern technology has certainly reduced
the manual load on women, but even then gendered division of work persists. Women, despite
part-time or full-time work, are not able to get equal footing with men because men do not
participate equally in parenthood and domestic labour.
Michael Mann emphatically states that gender divisions are considered as important, but not
really integrated into the core of stratification theory, namely, social class, status and political
power. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, individual, family and household, division of labour
between the sexes, social classes and the nation-states are mediated by each of them. No doubt,
patriarchy has taken a new form due to modern industry, interchangeability of men-women
occupations, equal democratic rights and adult suffrage, and even then “neo-patriarchy” has
emerged due to newly found control mechanisms by men over women in industry, politics and
civic life. Women have become “individuals” like men, but they are gendered individuals through
their connection with domesticity. Women are still in patriarchal family systems, they are also
members of social class and affected by such class (caste) stratification. Thus, they belong to
different, but to overlapping, stratification hierarchies. Their occupations cannot be meaningfully
combined into a single scale. However, gender and stratification can no longer be kept in separate
compartments. “Stratification is now gendered and gender is stratified.”
Gender and Stratification in Indian Society
“Gender regimes” refer to inequalities of gender in family, work and state related activities.
Gender is reproduced within such a complex of institutions through “male reason” and the
dichotomy of “maleness” and “femaleness”. Connell writes : “A gender regime is a cluster of
practices, ideological and material, which in a given social context, acts to construct various
images of masculinity and feminity and thereby to consolidate forms of gender inequality.” For
Indian women, N. Kabeer observes that gender hierarchies have implications for the production
of knowledge and the allocation of resources. Hence, a need for the “deconstruction” of conventional

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