All the time you’ve got to weigh everything up: is it too tarty? Will I look like a right slag in it, what will people think? It drives me mad that every time you go to put your clothes on you have to think ‘do I look dead common? Is it rough? Do I look like a dog?’ (Skeggs, 1997: 3)
This is a working class British woman talking about the difficulties she faces in trying to appear feminine, and it highlights how individuals make choices, but within the constraints of their society. Structure and agency are involved. Much sociology has reinforced a view of gender as something that we become; we are shaped into being feminine or masculine by powerful social structures. However, there are alternative arguments that focus more on the part that individuals play in making choices about how they behave. This individual ability to shape our own lives is referred to as agency. When sociologists use the term agency they are NOT saying that we can do whatever we want, or that it all depends on individual differences. They are saying that society is always organized in ways that constrain people, but that there are usually various possibilities within those constraints. To take the woman above, she could wear whatever she likes but she is afraid of being judged ‘tarty’ or ‘common’. For working class women in the North of England, respectability is particularly important in how they present themselves to the world (Skeggs, 1997). She talks about having to ‘weigh everything up’ to avoid negative reactions. This implies that individual women have to make decisions about how they do gender, but the choices they have about how to do gender are made in relation to the broad patterns of femininity within particular times and places. In this case Skeggs argues that, typically, working class women will express their femininity in different ways to middle class women, but will know that middle class styles of femininity are more highly valued within society than their own ways of talking, dressing and being. They have agency but the way society is
organized or structured has a major effect on the choices they can make and the results of those choices. Those structural constraints are something sociologists have suggested that individuals learn as they develop a sense of self. Gender socialization theories have extended the classic explanations of self development to focus on gender as determined by social structures. These theories were a shift away from thinking about biological sex as determining behaviour and towards the proposal that gender was learnt. However, they thought it was learnt early and, once established, was very entrenched. From the 1970s onwards more emphasis began to be put on agency and gender began to be understood as something that we do. This shift can be understood by looking back to the early twentieth century when George Herbert Mead developed ideas about the emergence of a socially constructed self.