ABSTRACT
Perhaps a more apposite term would be ‘women’s lack of treatment’. The conventional sociological view of women’s social class position is that it is mediated through their relationship with men (Goldthorpe, 1980; 1983; Lockwood, 1986; Goldthorpe and Marshall, 1992), while men’s social class is deemed to be independent, unaffected by the women they live with. However, this theoretical position has been increasingly contested. Some feminist analysts have developed an ‘individualistic’ solution based on the class position of individuals, irrespective of that of other family members (Acker, 1973; Stanworth, 1984), while theorists such as Britten and Heath (1983) and Leiulfsrud and Woodward (1987; 1988) espouse a joint approach which draws on both partners’ positions in the labour market. Walby (1986; 1990) has developed a theory according to which women are viewed as having two social class locations, one as paid worker, the other as housewife. In spite of these theoretical developments, the prevailing view is still that of Goldthorpe, who argues that the focus for class theory is the inequalities arising out of the labour market. Because of women’s domestic responsibilities, combined with the parttime, intermittent nature of their employment, they are deemed to be peripheral to the labour market. In the conventional approach the family is adopted as the relevant unit of analysis, and its class position is seen to be determined by its male ‘Head’. As a result:
The characteristics of married, or even single women for that matter, are considered to be irrelevant to class formation, class fate and even the class action of family members. (Hayes and Jones, 1992:464)
This male focus has lead to the invisibility of women in other areas of research. The absence of women in theory translates into a practice of excluding women from empirical studies. Within the more specific sphere of the sociology of education, studies of social class and education over the past two decades have been overwhelmingly about men. The Coxon and Jones study (1978 and 1979), the Oxford mobility study (Halsey et al., 1980), the Cambridge study (Stewart et al., 1980), Hopper, 1981 and the Scottish mobility study (Payne, 1987) all have male-only samples. Women have no status in these surveys, either as respondents or as independent contributors to the social-class allocation of their sons. Their absence is all the more puzzling when set alongside two bodies of evidence. First, a number of studies over the past 25 years have stressed the importance of the role of mothers in educational attainment, and, concomitantly, social mobility (Jackson and Marsden, 1966; Baker and Stevenson, 1986; Stevenson and Baker, 1987; Walkerdine and Lucey, 1989). Secondly, more recent empirical research emphasizes the complex, and at times, contradictory ways in which gender, ‘race’ and class interact (Mirza, 1992; Edwards, 1993; Mac an Ghaill, 1994; Griffin, 1996). When women are made visible in classificatory systems such as Gold-thorpe’s, it becomes apparent that the relative stability of men’s social class status is being achieved at the cost of a hidden, female, social-class instability. With current rates of one divorce for every two marriages (HMSO, 1995), Stanworth’s assertion that the Goldthorpe model leads to ever-increasing rates of family mobility as ‘women assumed an independent class position on divorce and subsequently relinquished that position through remarriage’ (Stanworth, 1984: 165) seems justified. However, this is just one example of contemporary changes which conventional theory fails to account for. As well as single parent families, current high levels of unemployment and female involvement in the labour market are subjects not incorporated into Goldthorpe’s stratification system (Reid, 1986).
