This ‘role’ is reflected in the labour market with women taking up those jobs that most closely resemble their family ‘caring task’ – such as nursing, social work, waitressing, midwifery etc. As teachers, also, women continue their ‘caring role’ and this is reinforced by their concentration in infant and junior schools (The Bristol Women’s Studies Group 1979) with some 92% of nursery teachers being women.
The same roles are seen to exist in other countries such as the Soviet Union where, in 1978, women made up 99% of nurses and 98% of day-care personnel (Hansson&Liden 1980) and it is believed that the statistics have not changed markedly since then.
In 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (Giddens 1998) proclaimed the full liberation of women and granted them equal political and civil rights but, from the Marxist perspective, female employment was emphasised as the condition of full equality, in society and within the home. The reality of this was, though, that employment was simply added to the women’s traditional family roles.
Around 1928 the Industrial Revolution gained momentum in the Soviet Union and more workers were needed for the expanding industry. So, it could be argued that the reasons that brought women back into the work force were as much economical as ideological Despite equal pay for equal work being established by law in Russia, the same roles exist with women performing the caring, routine low paid jobs while the majority of men are in management jobs. In 1978 the man’s salary was estimated as being 50% higher than the woman’s (Hansson&Liden 1980).
In England, also, figures for 1988 show that only 15% of management posts are occupied by women (Hammond 1988) and even these are believed to be due to the enormous expansion of the service sector, in areas such as retail, hotel and catering and care services, where the overall workforce is predominately female and has, therefore, allowed women to increase their foothold in management (Feminist Review No.31).
Despite the equal pay Act being introduced in 1970 (Dominelli&McLeod 1989), and the sex discrimination Act in 1975 (Beloff 1976), there is still evidence today of “inbuilt discrepancies between the salaries between men and women” (Guardian 1.11.00) and reports quote that “women receive one tenth of the world’s income and own less than one per cent of the world’s property”(Thompson 1993). A report, by the women’s group Change, in 1994 said that “women earn less than 79% of men’s pay” and concluded saying that “the labour market is rigorously segregated with women over represented in low paid and low status jobs” (Gender and Prejudice vol.18). In fact, 90% of casual, part-time and low paid jobs are occupied by women (Glendinning&Millar 1994).
An extract from the Department of Employment -‘Women and Work’ (1975)-reinforces the notion that much of the work done outside the home is very similar to that which women carry out inside the home as part of those ‘maternal responsibilities’:
….From 1931 to 1971 the number of women working increased from 953,000 to 5,800,000. But this vast increase in the number of women at work has not led to comparable changes in the range of work that they do. Over half of them are still concentrated in the distributive trades and in the service industries including nursing, teaching catering and laundries. Penetration by women of traditional male preserves is very slow indeed. Women’s share of more senior and skilled jobs in almost all sectors of employment including the professions is small.
The shadow Health and Social Security Secretary Patrick Jenkin (now Lord Jenkin) in 1977 famously pronounced on television: “If the good Lord had intended us all having equal rights to go out to work and to behave equally, you know he really wouldn’t have created man and woman” (Franks 1999). It must be pointed out that at the time of making this observation that, for two years, he had been serving the Conservative party’s first female leader!
Another prejudice based on myth is illustrated by American doctor, Edgar Berman, in 1970 saying that women were unfit for leadership because of their “raging hormonal imbalances”(The Bristol Women’s Studies Group 1979).
The ideological assumption that caring is primarily a female role is, some sociologists argue, a behaviour learnt by males and females within their society. Ann Oakley (Haralambos&Holborn 1995) believes that gender roles are culturally rather than biologically determined and that, apart from childbearing, no tasks are exclusively female. Oakley goes on to identify how gender roles are shaped from an early age by means of manipulation, canalisation i.e. through play, use of language and different activities i.e. household tasks.
Linda Birke argues that “women’s biology actually and materially affect their lives” (Haralambos&Holborn 1995). Birke did recognise, though, that human behaviour is influenced by the cultural interpretation placed on biological differences. The norms, values and roles that are culturally determined are then socially transmitted. As long, then, as the sexual division of labour is such that men and women do very different kinds of jobs, so little boys and girls will imitate those patterns of behaviour. Oscar Wilde puts it into his own words by saying: “All women become like their mothers; that’s their tragedy, No man ever does, that’s his!” (Wilde 1996).
Feminists, who see the family as a microcosm of wider society, have identified the ‘gendered’ nature of family caring and the assumption about the role of women in society. Marxist-feminism sees the roots of sexism as being political (Thompson 1993) and capitalism as being supported by patriarchy. Patriarchy is also seen as being closely linked to material life with women representing the proletariat (exploited class) and men the bourgeoisie (the exploiters).
Women being cast in the role of carer was also recognised by Finch who comments:
In recent years, feminists have increasingly insisted on making explicit the true meaning of ‘community care’ as it applies to elderly or handicapped people, i.e. for community read family, and for family read women, and have rightly been suspicious of attempts to increase such ‘community’ provision, seeing them as part of the political agenda of getting women out of the labour market and back into the home, to provide unpaid health and welfare services for members of their own family (Finch&Groves 1983).
Women are often seen as the invisible social glue that hold communities and families together and therefore provide a workforce that is ‘serviced’ from within the family. An arrangement well suited to capitalism, the government have frequently intervened, since the 19th century, either to encourage or discourage women’s employment according to their perception of the priorities of the state. Priorities can be, for example, the need for more or healthier children, a shortage of labour at a time of economic growth or a special need for women to work outside the home because of wartime emergency (Franks 1999). Although ideology is not simply a function of the needs of the economy, it cannot be denied that women’s subordinate position in the labour market is legitimised by ideas that the woman’s role is in the home.
In the 19th century, in the belief that the woman’s place was in the home, social reformers limited the hours of work for women in the new factories, excluded women from certain types of employment and prevented them from working within a certain time before or after childbirth. There were, though, no reforms that gave women the means to live while not earning money.
Before the development of large-scale industry the work of the housewife was recognised as a contribution to family income. A husband seldom supported his wife as they were mutually dependent and together supported their children. With the progress of industrialisation the work of the housewife became less concerned with ‘production’ and had been whittled down to ‘reproduction’ -the physical reproduction of the population and the care of small children, as well as the care and comfort of the husband/father (Thompson 1993).
In the 1940’s psychologists, such as John Bowlby (Haralambos&Holborn 1995), stressed the importance of motherhood with great emphasis being placed upon the quality of mothering. The ‘ideology of motherhood’ has been especially powerful when there have been pressures to reduce the level of female employment. Since the Second World War, during which day nursery provision trebled in response to the nation’s need for women’s labour, the state has neither provided nor adapted any child care or education services specifically to meet the needs of employed mothers (The Bristol Women’s Studies Group 1979).
Moreover, Diana Baumrind (1972) states that:
….Those mothers who do work feel sufficiently guilty so that they are inclined to tell their children that they work out of necessity rather than pleasure, once again suggesting that to remain in the home is the right thing to do.
Through custom and media images women are exposed to stereotypical expectations of women and, psychologists such as Bowlby, can be influential to even the most liberal of thinkers. A little less than a hundred years ago, Freud had this to say in a letter to his fiancée:
It is really a stillborn thought to send women into the struggle for existence exactly as men…. It is possible that changes in upbringing may suppress all a woman’s tender attributes, needful of protection and yet so victorious, and that she can then earn a livelihood like men. It is also possible that in such an event one would not be justified in mourning the passing away of the most delightful thing the world can offer us – our ideal of womanhood. I believe that all reforming action in law and education would break down in front of the fact that, long before the age at which a man can earn a position in society, Nature has determined a woman’s destiny through charm, beauty and sweetness. Law and custom may have much to give women that has been withheld from them, but the position of women will surely be what it is; in youth an adorned darling and in mature years a loved wife.
As we have seen, roles that people are expected to play are often scripted but the individual does still retain considerable freedom in the way they act out their role. We have also seen evidence that both supports and refutes the argument that community care is by women and that the private world of home and care often overlaps into the public world of politics and production. It is often easy to discover explanations and to identify with regular social patterns and actions but not so easy to truly understand. Even though we don’t know where we’re going in the future it is, though, through regular research and recordings that we know where we’ve been and we know that by simply ‘de-constructing’ powerful social institutions we will not make them vanish.
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