4.2.8 - Stratification - Feminist and Postmodernist Approaches
This lesson explores two major challenges to class-only views of inequality. Feminist approaches argue that gender and patriarchy are central to stratification, while postmodernists argue that identity has become more fluid and less tied to class. For the exam, the key task is not just to describe these views, but to compare them and judge whether class, gender, and ethnicity still shape life chances in contemporary society.
The feminist challenge to class-first theory
Traditional stratification theories often treated class as the main line of division in society. Feminists argue that this misses a major source of inequality: men's structural power over women. From this view, a society can be stratified not only by ownership, income, or occupation, but also by how far men control paid work, domestic life, culture, sexuality, and politics.
Patriarchy
A system of social organisation in which men hold more power than women and male interests are treated as dominant or normal.
Liberal feminists explain gender stratification mainly through unequal socialisation and outdated legal barriers. Girls are often steered towards caring, appearance, and dependence, while boys are encouraged towards competition, authority, and public achievement. On this view, inequality is reproduced because institutions such as schools, workplaces, and politics were built around male norms, but these institutions can be reformed through law, policy, and changing expectations.
Marxist feminists agree that women face inequality, but they place more emphasis on capitalism. Benston (1969) argued that women's unpaid domestic labour benefits capitalism because it helps reproduce the labour force at little or no cost to employers. Meals, cleaning, emotional support, and childcare all help workers return to paid employment. This means gender inequality is not just a private family issue; it is tied to the economic organisation of society.
| Perspective | Main explanation of stratification | What should change? | Main criticism |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liberal feminism | Unequal socialisation and institutional barriers keep women disadvantaged | Reform laws, opportunities, and expectations | Can understate deeper structural power |
| Marxist feminism | Capitalism relies on women's unpaid and underpaid labour | Transform capitalism as well as gender relations | Can reduce patriarchy to class exploitation |
| Radical feminism | Patriarchy is the deepest and oldest inequality | Transform male power at its roots | Can treat women's experiences as too similar |
The key difference is that liberal feminism sees reform as possible within the existing system, while Marxist feminism sees women's inequality as built into capitalism itself.
Imagine a woman in full-time paid work who is still expected to organise childcare, cooking, and cleaning after work. A Marxist feminist would say this shows the dual burden: capitalism gains her labour in the workplace while the family still relies on her unpaid labour at home.
Radical feminism, black feminism and intersectionality
Radical feminists push the argument further by claiming that patriarchy, not class, is the most fundamental form of stratification. Firestone (1970) argued that women's oppression is rooted in biological reproduction because pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare have historically tied women more closely to dependency and control. Even if people disagree with her biological emphasis, her wider point is that inequality is built into intimate relations as well as public institutions.
Walby (1990) combined class analysis with feminist theory in a structural account identifying six structures of patriarchy: paid work, household production, culture, sexuality, violence, and the state. This is useful because it shows that women's disadvantage is not located in just one sphere. Women may face lower pay in the labour market, a larger share of domestic labour at home, objectifying media images in culture, and gendered vulnerability to violence at the same time.
However, feminists also criticised feminism itself when it treated "women" as a single, undivided category. Crenshaw (1989) introduced intersectionality to show that social divisions overlap. A person's experience of inequality depends on how class, gender, ethnicity, and other identities combine rather than operate separately.
Intersectionality
The idea that different forms of inequality, such as class, gender, and ethnicity, overlap and create distinct experiences of advantage and disadvantage.
hooks (1981) and black feminists argued that mainstream feminism often centred white, middle-class women and ignored racism and class exploitation. This matters because a white professional woman and a Black working-class woman may both face sexism, but not in the same way or with the same consequences. Intersectional analysis therefore makes stratification theory more accurate by refusing one-size-fits-all explanations.
A senior female manager may face sexism in promotion, but a Black female worker in a low-paid job may face sexism, racism, and class disadvantage together. Intersectionality helps sociologists explain why their life chances cannot be understood by looking at gender alone.
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