ABSTRACT
Sociologists of education paid little attention to gender until the 1970s. During the growth in the sociological study of education from 1945 onward many studies were conducted on male-only samples, and the sexual division of labor in industrialized societies was taken for granted, not treated as a topic for investigation or for theoretically informed debate. This is demonstrated (with a content analysis of major journals) for the United Kingdom by Acker (1981, 1994), who reviewed educational research in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s. She found that gender issues were frequently ignored, and that female experiences and the outcomes of education for women were regularly left unresearched. Many highly respected studies were based on male-only samples. The 1972 social mobility study of England and Wales (Halsey et aI., 1980), for example, was based on a sample of 10,000 men. Lightfoot (1975) reached a similar conclusion about American research. The third edition of the textbook by Havighurst and Neugarten (1967) devoted more space to feral children (reared as or by wild animals) than to gender divisions in the United States. Cordasco (1970) gave more space to Inuit education than to gender.
