Oakley’s efforts to get away from conventional thinking about women that focused on their bodies were important but she tended to see sexed bodies as a kind of blank slate on which social gender was written (Gatens, 1991).This distinction between sex as a clear ‘natural’ fact and gender as a shifting set of social meanings has since been subject to much criticism, (for example, Gatens, 1991; Stanley, 2001/1984), and Oakley (1985a: 5-7) herself later recognized some of the limitations of this early work.
One problem with the kind of constructionist approach exemplified by Oakley is that it often attributed a great deal of importance to early socialization within the family. In her chapter on ‘The learning of gender roles’, Oakley (1972) spends over 12 of 15 pages talking mostly about children under five. Oakley makes only very brief nods towards non-parental influences on children such as school textbooks and the mass media. In short there is little consideration of gender as something we continue to learn in a variety of ways.
If gender socialization was as powerful as the model sometimes implies then we would be much more similar. Social expectations are not always clear, and even if they are, not all women follow them in the same way. There are different ways of dressing, sitting and speaking amongst women and people think differently about what it means to be feminine. This does not simply mean that everyone is different. There are patterns of class and age (for example) to the variations above. However, socialization theories tend to imply that people who do not conform are in some sense failures. As Stanley and Wise (1983) note, it is assumed that such people are not properly socialized. This seems a rather impoverished way to account for human diversity and resistance to limiting gender stereotypes. Thus socialization theories are felt to be lacking because they overemphasize the power of social structures in shaping individuals’ gender. The extent to which individuals are able to exercize some agency, or play a part, in how they become gendered is often under-recognized.
Sue Sharpe (1976) produced an alternative account of gender socialization, in which she tries to recognize that children have some, albeit
limited, agency in the formation of gender identities. Her account of ‘how girls become women’, draws on questionnaires and interviews from 249 mostly working class schoolgirls in Britain, including Asian and West Indian girls. Like Oakley, Sharpe is outlining ‘the situation of girls growing up’ (Sharpe, 1976: 11) and how that situation is socially produced by a particular gendered history, by economic conditions, and by ideologies promoted by the media, the education system, and how work is organized. Sharpe seems even more eager than Oakley to bracket off bodies as not really important in becoming gendered, but she makes more use of girls’ own voices in making sense of socialization. Oakley drew on and gave credit to women’s experiences in her other work, but not in her general explication of gender socialization. Sharpe is therefore useful in giving empirical richness to statements about how social institutions perpetuate particular notions of femininity. However, although the girls’ own ways of thinking are reported, this does not necessarily always reinforce their agency. Often their ideas about gender appear very conventional, for example, one girl says:
I don’t agree with the wife going out to work and the husband staying at home and looking after the kids. I’d rather stay at home all day if it was that way really. I think there’s a certain bargain in the home and for the women, that’s her children and they need her more than the father. (Sharpe, 1976: 223)
Especially for the working class girls Sharpe talks to, their boredom with school and desire to rush out into marriage and/or the workforce are seen as ‘schooled’ into them and their ability to shape a less ‘narrow’ life seen as limited. The implication is that these are not their own ways of thinking; they have been ‘brainwashed’ by society. Dominant structures and meanings will gender their lives, and that will mean following gender conventions in fairly predictable ways likely to perpetuate class and gender inequalities. The strength of this analysis is in challenging common-sense thinking that suggests people can get ahead if they want to, if they work hard. Sociological evidence outlined in Chapter 1 and throughout the book illustrates that it is harder for some women to succeed because of already existing inequalities. Therefore working class girls are unlikely to be successful because they do not have the same advantages as middle class girls, let alone middle class men. Yet emphasizing how present inequalities shape people makes it hard to see how things change and how some working class women do succeed.
The picture of British school life in the 1970s for both boys (Willis, 1977) and girls (Sharpe, 1976) is one of a system reinforcing not just gender, but class inequalities (see Connell et al., 1982 for a similar view of education in Australia). Given Sharpe’s data, it seems that the ‘cissies’ whom Willis’s lads think school is for are not working class girls, but
middle class children. Whilst many gender inequalities at school appear to have been quite successfully addressed, the same may not be true of class inequalities. Yet as the quote at the beginning of this chapter illustrates, working class women (and by extension working class men) do not just passively submit to middle class definitions of gender (see Chapter 7) and may produce less dominant but important definitions of their own (Skeggs, 1997).
Socialization theories do not adequately account for contradictory messages about gender. We can illustrate this briefly by looking at Barbie dolls and GI Joe dolls and figures, to see if there may still be some validity in Oakley’s argument that children prefer certain toys because they are socialized into seeing certain behaviour as appropriate for girls as opposed to boys (Oakley, 1985a: 52,177—8). Barbie dolls do still appear to reinforce particular ideas about femininity: ideas of women as passive, pretty things, interested in how they look, not in doing things. Barbie is thin, has long blonde hair and the proportions of her body exaggerate her breasts. Mattel’s (2005) website, Barbie. com, lists five categories of Barbies: ‘Barbie Diaries, Fashion Fever, Fairytopia, Superstar Barbies and Princess Barbies’. None of these appear particularly active, and the accessories reinforce a rather passive picture of girls. You can buy a ‘pillow and playset assortment’ to go with your Barbie Diaries Barbie, in which ‘the pink pillow unfolds to reveal Barbie® doll’s bedroom from the movie, complete with a canopy bed!’Your ‘very own tiara’ can be purchased to match with the Princess Barbie, and there is a special hairstyling head for the Fairytopia Barbies. The most active accessories go with the superstar ‘American Idol’ Barbie who has her own recording studio and a Ford Mustang car. All of these suggest that girls are socialized into valuing beauty and encouraged to focus on fantasy lives in which their appearance is crucial. Where are the Working Woman Barbies and the Motorbike Barbies? And where are the GI Joe ‘doing the housework’ accessories? In contrast to Barbie, GI Joe dolls (Action Man in the British market) or the new ‘Sigma 6’ action figures are presented in ways that encourage boys to aspire to active, exciting, dangerous and perhaps even violent behaviour. This behaviour is what contemporary western societies associate with being masculine. Of the GI Joe Sigma 6 toys featured on the website, five are distinctly active sounding action figures called Duke, Snake Eyes, Heavy Duty, Spirit Iron-Knife and Storm Shadow. The other two toys are a ‘Ninja Hovercycle’ and a ‘Switchfire Blaster’.The characters do not have ‘accessories’, but weapons cases, and you can buy the enemies they fight (Hasbro, 2005). These toys appear to send messages to boys that masculinity is about attacking enemies, embracing danger, destroying things, and speeding around in fast vehicles. Or is it more complex than that?
More recent theories, usually identified as postmodernist, have suggested that there is more than one way to ‘read’ (or interpret) cultural
products like toys and what they might say about gender expectations. Although Barbie, for instance, can tell us a lot about the culture in which we live, different interpretations of Barbie exist (Rogers, 1999). For example, there are boyfriend dolls available to ‘go with’ Barbie, which you could argue are there to do what Barbie, or at least her owners, want them to do. Barbie/girls are in control. Barbie’s men certainly portray rather different ideas about masculinity than does GI Joe. The boyfriends tend to be clothed to escort Barbie to social occasions, or be dressed as Princes in the kind of outfit young GI Joe owners would probably consider ‘cissy’. One of the male dolls is simple called ‘the handsome groom’ (Mattel, 2005).These male dolls are made for girls, not boys, but they do suggest that wearing combat gear is not the only way to be a man. Young boys are probably more likely to prefer GI Joe to ‘Prince Aidan’, but that does not mean that all boys will grow up into camouflage-wearing, aggressive, militaristic speed freaks. By the same token, just because girls might show an early pining for all things pink and Barbie-like, it does not necessarily mean they will go through life following the stereotypes of traditional femininity. Children may sometimes employ alternative gender meanings when playing with toys, so girls might dress Barbie in their brother’s GI Joe uniforms, or create stories for their Barbies which are more like Charlie’s Angels or Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. Conventional meanings remain hard to resist, but children engage with dominant and alternative messages about gender that are transmitted through cultural products such as toys, although perhaps more importantly through social institutions.
Gender socialization continues, for example, when people enter the workforce. Oakley and Sharpe give no real account of this (see Sharpe, 1976: 159—81). Even Oakley pays little attention to work despite her book Sex, Gender and Society (1985a) having emerged out of her study of housework (Oakley, 1974). She found that she could not make sense of what she was finding out about how work was organized in society without ‘going back to the beginning; that is to the nature versus nurture debate’ (Oakley, 1985b: 218). Sociology has continued to be centrally interested in how social structures (the way society is organized), not just early socialization, determine gender.