In the final analysis, categoricalism can recognize power but deletes from its analysis the element of practical politics: choice, doubt, strategy, planning, error and transformation. The ‘battle of the sexes’ comedy in traditional popular culture is a vision of sexual politics with just this kind of deletion. From one year to the next husbands err, […]

Accounts of gender that do give a major place to power and conflicts of interest have generally expressed this awareness through a particular form of theory. It has no familiar name, partly because its logic cuts across such familiar divides as the conflict between cultural feminism and socialist feminism. I will call the approach ‘categorical’. […]

The literature on ‘sex roles’ is very large. It is also more than a little confused, especially over the differences between ‘sex roles’, ‘sex differences’ and ‘sexual character’. An example is the well — known research on androgyny by Sandra Bern, which attempts to measure psychological traits of masculinity and femininity. Her questionnaire is entitled […]

Chapter 2 noted the divergence between feminist theories that saw direct power relations between men and women as the main determinant of women’s oppression, and those that looked else­ where. The most influential extrinsic theories (apart from biological determinism, which will be discussed in chapter 4 and is not a form of social theory) have […]

This chapter tests the major frameworks for the social analysis of gender that have emerged from the history just discussed. The focus is on the general logic of different kinds of theories rather than on particular applications or particular concepts. I take this rather formal approach as it seems the best way to get a […]

(pp. 24-6). On the origins of liberal feminism see Martin (1972) and Rosenberg (1982). The view of Sade as a sexual radical is debatable; justification can be found in Carter (1979) and Thomas (1976). On early socialist feminism see Taylor (1983). Sexology and Psychoanalysis (pp. 27-8). Weeks (1985) gives an excellent summary of the history […]

As radical theories of gender multiplied and divided, and strategies for change became more sophisticated and controversial, a counter — current of reaction also gained strength. Its highlights included the rise of the anti-abortion movement in the 1970s, the narrow defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States, the squeeze on the welfare […]

ses of rape, such as Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, and of pornography, such as Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women, have generally followed this model. A rather more complex line of argument treated the power of men and the subordination ot women~"aI’ldFects of imperatives outside the direct relationship bet^erTTltT>"twfv.~4-,-lic more general form of this […]

In the context of this history, the research and the theoretical work inspired by feminism and gay liberation in the 1970s was not as novel as many activists believed. A number of its concerns were already widely debated: the nature of femininity, the power relations between women and men, the socialization of children, the dynamics […]

The ebbing of the radical tide in the 1920s drained practical urgency from these debates about gender. In the next generation the main developments were academic. The ‘woman question’ in politics had already produced a response from the new sciences of psychology and sociology. One line of research asked what were the psychological differences between […]