sociology of gender Essay

Historical Perspectives on women’s work
• Family-based economy
o First period (seventeenth-to early eighteenth century)
o Farming, agriculture
o Labor depended on class and marital status
• Family-wage economy
o Second period (mid-eighteenth)
o Advanced capitalism
• Factory system
o Money
• Family-consumer economy
o Third period (present)
o Mass production
• Ideology and the history of women’s work
o Ideology-a belief system that seeks to explain and justify the status quo
o The cult of true womanhood
• Popularized in 19th century
• Glorified women’s ideal place at the home where women were seen as having a moral calling to serve their families
o Order, system and efficiency
What is work
• Social structure of work-how the social patterns of gender, class, and race shape work experiences
• Emotional labor-referring to the work people do in managing the emotions of others
o Ex: airline flight attendant
Economic restructuring, class, and gender stratification
• Gender stratification-hierarchical distribution of economic and social resources along the lines of gender
o Form of social stratification-process by which groups or individuals in a society ate arrayed in a hierarchy based on their differential access to the social and economic resources of a given society
• Economic restructuring
o a multidimensional process of change in the nation’s economy
• 1. The transition from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy
• 2. Increasing globalization
• 3. Technological change
• 4. Increasing concentration of capital (i.e. economic resources) in the hands of a few
o it fundamentally altering the work people do
o global assembly line/international division of labor-manufacturing jobs relocated averseas
• Contingent workers-include those who are temporary employees, contract workers and part time workers
o 1/3 labor force
the contemporary status of women
• labor force precipitation
o in 2005 60% of all women were in the...