The most popular way of grasping diversity in sexual character is to think of people as being arrayed along a dimension that represents differences in some gender-related trait. This is the basis of most paper-and-pencil tests of masculinity/femininity (hereafter M/F). The problem is how to specify where, on the imaginary line representing the dimension, any […]

Unitary Models and Sex Difference Research The most common conception of the psychology of gender is that women and men as groups have, different traits: different temperam&nls,,rehar. ac. t£rs_. outlooks and opinions, abilities, even whole structures of personality, t here is no accepted term for this concept; I will call it (rexuaTcHaracter’J The analogy is […]

The ‘crisis of the family’ has not ushered in Armageddon, despite the confident predictions made a decade ago. Indeed with the current conservative ascendancy in Western politics it is easy to feel that the cultural and sexual radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s has gone for nothing. Yet rhetoric about threats to the family and […]

The early development of gender relations is a matter of deep interest, regardless of the origins debate. In fact it hardly matters whether we can define an origin or not. The history begins when the archaeological evidence becomes full enough to throw some real light on the structure of gender relations. There is no evidence […]

Historicity and ‘Origins’ In 1984 the British government’s program of coal-pit closures provoked a national strike by mine workers, one of the bitterest industrial confrontations in recent times. As the struggle got under way with miners’ leaders and National Goal Board shaping up in best macho style, the media ran stories about how the miners’ […]

In common-sense understanding gender is a property of individual people. When biological determinism is abandoned, gender is still usually seen in terms of socially produced individual character. It is a considerable leap to think of gender as being also a property of collectivities, institutions and historical processes. This view is nevertheless required by evidence and […]

At several points in this analysis of institutions the importance of context has become obvious, especially the context provided by other institutions. To compile a complete structural inventory it is therefore necessary to go beyond a collation of gender regimes to the relationships between them. In some cases this relationship is additive or complementary. The […]

The street is not often thought of as an institution. It is something we walk and drive along, or that chickens cross. Yet a famous sociological text is called, with only mild irony, Street Corner Society, and we speak of ‘street-wise’ kids. It is at least a definite social milieu, with particular social relations. A […]

Theoretical literature on the state is at the other pole from the family: almost no one has seen it as an institutionalization of gender. Even in feminist thought the state is only just coming into focus as a theoretical question. Yet reasons to address it are easy to find. The personnel of the state, as […]

Conservative ideology speaks of the family as the ‘foundation of society’ and traditional sociology has often seen it as the simplest of institutions, the building-block of more elaborate structures. Far from being the basis of society, the family is one of its most complex products. There is nothing simple about it. The interior of the […]