Ann Oakley (1972) was one of the first sociologists to extend ideas about socialization to try to understand how gender is learned and how femininity and masculinity are socially constructed. She and other soci­ologists were suggesting that perhaps women and men were only as different as a society made them. Oakley started using the term […]

Mead: the socially constructed self The basic message of Mead’s (1962) work is that we develop a sense of self, an understanding of who we are, by interacting with others (see Box 3.1 for a summary of the four stages in Mead’s model). Socialization refers to the processes by which we learn what it means […]

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 […]

Juliet Mitchell’s (1975) re-reading of how Freud was useful in under­standing sexual difference was very influential within feminist debates about psychoanalysis, but many of its assumptions are more accessibly outlined by Ros Coward (1978). Coward critically re-reads Freud as providing a fundamental critique of the notion of gender as an inbuilt part of identity. She […]

Nancy Chodorow (1978) later provided a more woman-centred alternative to the original Freudian understanding of the psychological differences between women and men. Chodorow shares the same framework as Freud but understands the development of femininity as a smooth process rather than as a kind of deviation from a male ‘normality’. Chodorow suggests that because women […]

Julia Kristeva argues that the symbolic realm is patriarchal, so the ‘femi­nine’ is an otherness that cannot be named. Femininity lies within what she calls the semiotic and is closely linked to the maternal (Kristeva, 1982). Most psychoanalysts follow Jacques Lacan in using the term ‘symbolic’ to refer to all forms of signification (Oliver, 1997: […]

Sigmund Freud thought that gender differences developed from the way in which individuals learned to give meaning to their anatomy and to ‘repress’ drives, especially the sex drive, in order to allow ‘civilized’ society to function. He was an Austrian who began developing what became known as psychoanalysis at the beginning of the twentieth century. […]

Psychoanalysis has made a huge impact on both common sense and academic arguments about how and why women and men might differ in the ways they come to make sense of themselves and of the world. Some sociologists (for example, Barrett, 1992) have found psychoanalytic explanations of gender differences useful in explaining how women and […]

What is most striking about so-called ‘sex-differences’ research within psychology is its failure to find any really significant differences between how women and men use their minds. Feminist sociologists in the past drew heavily on debates about the relationships between ‘sex and intellect’ within psychology (see Oakley, 1972: 79—98). Other disciplines have also drawn on […]

In proposing that differences between women and men are largely social, sociologists have challenged ideas such as those which suggest that men’s social dominance is justified because they are physically stronger. Ideas about what sort of physical tasks women and men are suited for differ from one culture to another, suggesting that it is not […]