These assumptions of naturalness were nevertheless challenged from several directions. One was evolutionary biology. Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man in 1874 offered a detailed account of ‘sexual selection’ as a mechanism of evolution alongside the ‘natural selection’ emphasized in the Origin of Species. In his unemphatic style Darwin took the issue of sex out of […]

Social-scientific theories of gender are a Western invention, as far as I know, and definitely a modern one. Other civilizations have had their own ways of dealing with human sexuality and the relations between the sexes. As Indian eroticism and Chinese family codes illustrate, these can be as sophisticated and elaborate as anything the West […]

There is no widely accepted framework for understanding the facts set out in chapter 1. There are several conflicting ways of looking at them. The aim of the next three chapters is to come to grips with these approaches and derive from them a systematic basis for understanding gender. The first step is to ask […]

(pp. 6-7). Statistics on Australian earnings and work-force from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (hereafter ABS) Catalogue 6101.0, Labour Statistics, (1978), p. 71; and from ABS Cat. 4101.0, Social Indicators, 4 (1984), pp. 171, 192, 213, 214. The adjustment for people with no income is based on 1981 census figures for women and men aged […]

The lack of alternative housing is one of the reasons women may stay in, or return to, a violent marriage. Domestic violence is a very large part of all violence. It is difficult to get reliable statistics, but a good many pointers exist. A study of four police stations in different suburbs of Sydney in […]

The division of labour in Delia’s household and the kinds of jobs her mother and father hold outside, have roots in the conventional images of man-as-breadwinner and woman-as-home-maker. They also have a hard material base. We do not have Fred and Rae Prince’s tax returns but the general position is known. In 1978, the year […]

Delia Prince (the name is a pseudonym) is one of the teenagers my colleagues and I interviewed in 1978, along with their parents and teachers, in the research project later published as Making the Difference. The research was an attempt to understand the circumstances, in school, family and workplace, that lay behind the massively greater […]

The radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s opened debates about a range of practical issues to do with sex and gender, ranging from sexual expression to economic inequality, police violence against gays, and rape. Naming these issues, the new feminist and gay politics also posed theoretical questions and began to grow a theoretical language: […]