ABSTRACT
In their recent book, Social Class in Modern Britain, Marshall, Newby et al. specify gender as the most controversial issue confronting present-day class analysts (1988: 98). 1 Accepting this as true, and being a feminist committed to research on women’s labour force participation and a feminist asked to present the supposed anti-feminist side of the controversy, I am sorely tempted to invoke W. C. Fields’s ‘All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia’, pack my bags and head for the nearest airport. Alas, as so often happens—both professionally and personally-second thoughts are allowed to prevail over initial impulses, and the proffered task is taken up. In this particular instance, however, hesitation soon turned into gentle irony as, in preparing to write a defence of Goldthorpe’s views on women and class analysis, I realized afresh the variety and quality of the contributions he has made, however reluctantly, to our understanding of the position of women in society. For example:
Goldthorpe (1983a, 1987a; Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1988b) has provided further documentation, in Britain and across five other industrial nations, of the continued existence of sex segregation in the labour market, to the marked disadvantage of women. In comparison with men, women of all class origins are significantly more likely to experience absolute downward occupational mobility, with, moreover, nearly half of all women (and men) required to change places in the present occupational structure in order for equality in occupational attainment between men and women to exist.
Goldthorpe (1987a; and Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1988b) demonstrates that in contrast to much popular—and some sociological 2 —thinking, marriage in Britain and across five other nations does not provide women with an easier route to the higher social classes than is available to men through employment. On the contrary and with only minor variations, the pattern of women’s ‘attainments’ through marriage mirrors the pattern of men’s attainments in the labour market, with women from service-class origins—in comparison to women from working-class origins—three times more likely to marry into the service class than into the working class. The class inequalities which separate men in the labour market, in other words, also separate women in the marriage ‘market’.
Goldthorpe (1987a; and Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1988b) illustrates the effects of class inequalities, in Britain and across five other industrial nations, on women’s employment chances in relation to other women in the labour market, demonstrating that like men, women from service-class families do significantly better in the labour market than women from working-class families. Far from ‘sisterhood’ cutting across class inequalities, women are instead divided from other women occupationally in much the same way and to much the same extent that men are divided from other men. Class inequalities, in other words, act in ways which are gender-blind.
Goldthorpe (1987a), through an analysis which allows for the dominance of wives’ occupational participation over husbands’ in appropriate cases, provides systematic evidence on the class mobility experiences of unmarried women, and of families in which wives exceed their husbands’ occupational attainments, together with evidence about the class mobility experiences of families linked to the class structure via the husband’s occupation. These data provide a valuable base line against which the implications of future changes in women’s labour force participation for class analysis may be measured.
