Beyond Dichotomy: Drawing Distinctions and Embracing Differences

Beth B. Hess

Sociological Forum, Vol. 5, No. 1. (Mar., 1990), pp. 75-93.

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Sociological Forum, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1990

Beyond Dichotomy: Drawing Distinctions

and Embracing Differences
Beth B. Hess'

The recognition of gender as a constituent element of social structure poses

a profound challenge to received wisdom and practice in sociology. We review
selected aspects of the new scholarship and its fundamental critique of ob-
jectivism and dualistic models. Counterchallenges are acknowledged: from
institutional and collegial resistance, on the one hand, to an enhanced aware-
ness of the dilemmas posed by diversity and sameness within and between
gender categories, on the other hand. From their struggle with these issues,
feminist scholars are constructing a sociology that transcends dichotomies,
embraces diversity, and links the several levels of social analysis.
KEY WORDS: feminism; gender; women's studies; social theory.

INTRODUCTION

This paper examines recent developments in the emergent field of the

sociology of gender, which even its critics consider a broad-based challenge
to sociological orthodoxy, with the potential for radically revising both our
paradigms and our practices. Although it is generally recognized that the con-
temporary women's movement has had a palpable, albeit partial, impact on
our discipline-on the career trajectories of women scholars (Miller et al.,
1988) and the composition of our governing associations (Huber, 1988), and
in the content of our major journals (deWolf et al., 1986; Grant et al., 1987)
and textbooks (Hall, 1988)-there is also widespread agreement that the
feminist revolution in sociology remains largely unrealized (Stacey and
Thorne, 1985; Bernard, 1988; Komorovsky, 1988). Nonetheless, important

'Department of Sociology and Anthropology, County College of Morris, Randolph, New Jersey
07869.
75
08848971 90 0700-075%ffi0 0 b 1990 Plenum Puhhslung Corporation
changes are underway in conceptualizing gender, in the application of self-
reflection to our work, and in the development of a gender-inclusive so-
ciology.
We will argue that what is often called "feminist sociology" is not some
parochial undertaking, but a vision of what all sociology should be if we
are to continue to claim expertise in the analysis of social systems (Chafetz,
1988a). Although gender has been the primary focus of the new scholarship,
the same shift in perspective will allow us to grasp the lived reality of other
subordinate categories: racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, women and men
of the working class, and the poor of the Third World-a congeries that our
more conservative colleagues are wont to label "oppression studies," but that
many of us have found profoundly liberating. For in the process of revision-
ing, we also gain new insights on dominant elites and social structures we
once thought we understood, such as the newly appreciated complexity of
the links between family and work.
This paper begins with a critical review of the feminist challenge to con-
temporary sociological practice, especially the dominance of positivistic scien-
tism and the construction of invidious distinctions. The growing strength and
coherence of this challenge, in turn, has produced a not unexpected back-
lash from the discomfited. A far greater obstacle, however, arises from the
very nature of the feminist enterprise: gender unites and divides, and inter-
sects with other systems of stratification. How we deal with these dilemmas
will be the test of the emergent paradigms.

DIMENSIONS OF THE FEMINIST CHALLENGE

The feminist revolution in any academic field - not to mention society

at large- begins with the realization that existing paradigms are inadequate,
that there are biases to be addressed, that there are gaps in knowledge to
be filled, and that there is a power structure to be confronted. Feminist scho-
lars have raised such questions as the following: How is this discipline con-
stituted? What is encompassed and who sets the standards of achievement?
How are academic departments organized and research conducted? To what
extent have these structures been influenced by, and in turn have an effect
on, gender relations?
Much of the preliminary work was accomplished in the early 1970s,
with the formation of women's caucuses and committees within various dis-
ciplines, of which there are now over 160. These organizations fulfilled three
major functions: to provide a supportive network for women scholars at the
personal and professional level, to challenge the status hierarchy within the
discipline at the organizational level, and to legitimate gender-related studies
Beyond Dichotomy 77

at the institutional level. The task for sociologists was somewhat eased by
an existing corpus of research on women, although in traditional form, as
well as the sharp insights of such as Helen Meyer Hacker who wrote of "wom-
en as a minority group" in 1951.
The outcome has been an exponential explosion of studies that not only
counter the received wisdom within academic fields but question the very
foundation of post-Enlightenment science and social science: the "objectivist
illusion" (Keller, 1982) that observation can be separated from explanation,
the knower from the known, theory from practice, the public from the pri-
vate, culture from nature, and other dualisms that undergird systems of so-
cial stratification (Hekman, 1987). Although recent essays in this journal
(Holmes, 1986; Spencer, 1987) have directed our attention to the "imperfect
empiricism" of social science and the dilemmas of separating the seen from
the seer, the feminist critique is less abstract and more political, because these
distinctions have typically been used to elevate one side of the dualism and
to denigrate the other.
In attempting to dissolve such dichotomies, scholars have also crossed
the artificial barriers erected between bodies of thought largely to preserve
intellectual hunting grounds. Yet despite ritual incantations to the virtues
of cross- and multidisciplinary work, the academic reward system remains
rooted in narrow specialization. Nonetheless, feminist scholars continue to
raise potentially embarrassing questions about the structure of academe
itself.

Pedagogical Concerns

Discussions of a gender-free pedagogy, for example, focus on minimiz-

ing authority relationships in the classroom that reflect the assumed division
between objective reality, vouchsafed to a select few, and the subjective ex-
periences of our students that must then be processed through existing
paradigms (Culley and Portuges, 1985; also special issues of Signs, 1987, and
Women's Studies Quarterly, 1987). The imaginative leap into the mind of
the other rarely cuts both ways in the classroom. These critics note that, to
the contrary, women and people of color - as instructors or students - are
asked to accept a reality already ordered and defined by members of a rather
narrow stratum of the society.
The classroom as a learning collective is a daunting prospect indeed.
How can we, as teachers, respect the authenticity of our students' varied ex-
periences, without running the risk of all meaning becoming lost in a Babel
of sounds? Yet we know that a single voice is too constricting. It is no acci-
dent that two landmark texts in gender studies are titled Another Voice
(Millman and Kanter, 1975) and In a Different Voice (Gilligan, 1982), or
that the concept of discourses has been so readily adopted from French
philosophy. To hear through a profusion of sounds is a first step toward
bridging worlds of meaning, toward that extension of Verstehen, the imagina-
tive leap into the mind of others, that is a cornerstone of our discipline. In
this view, the unencumbered interplay of ideas and feelings that leads to
shared understandings is the very stuff of creative teaching.
But even if the classroom as a hierarchy of power could be deconstruct-
ed, we pursue the goal of democratic social systems in a broader setting that
systematically reconstructs societal divisions. How curious, that when dis-
suading their largely female staff from unionizing, the presidents of both
Harvard and Yale have recently claimed that institutions of higher educa-
tion are "special places," presumably immune from such mundane obliga-
tions as providing adequate wages and benefits. In truth, as we well know,
our campuses replicate the wider society: stratified by race, class, and gender
(Wilkinson, 1989); sustained by an often meretricious ideology of meritocra-
cy; and devoted to the transmission of a cramped canon of "culture." In such
a setting, women might well be perceived as some alien "special-interest
group," and women's studies viewed as either subversive activity or intellec-
tual frivolity. In reality, today women are a majority of entering students
on many campuses, much to the chagrin of trustees at the University of North
Carolina and elsewhere, who openly lament the passing of institutional
greatness - and, presumably, alumni contributions - that follows from be-
ing known as a "girls' school." Our concern, rather, should be that many
of these women are entering a miniworld that offers its female participants
what Jessie Bernard (1988) can still call the "inferiority curriculum."

Methodological Concerns

Feminist scholars have taken a critical look at research designs, engag-

ing in a lively debate over the relative merits of experiential vs. more quan-
titative techniques of data gathering. Both sides of this argument begin with
the recognition that the relationship between investigator and subject is "so-
cially organized practice" (Andersen, 1988) rather than the epitome of scien-
tific impartiality (see also Reinharz, 1983). Research designs, however, vary
in the degree to which the researcher's role is acknowledged and taken into
account, or goes unrecognized and is mistaken for objectivity.
Rejecting the ideology of value-free science, however, has led many
researchers to repudiate quantitative methods as fundamentally flawed. Fol-
lowing the formulation provided by Cook and Fonow (1986)- that a feminist
methodology must be consciously partial, self-reflective, aware of and con-
Beyond Dichotomy 79

cerned with the ethical consequences of one's work, and committed to polit-
ical change-such scholars claim these goals can be achieved only through
experiential forms of inquiry. In their desire to restore empathy and pas-
sion to our craft by taking women seriously, these researchers are drawn to
techniques that bring them close to lived experience: to diaries and letters,
oral histories, participant observation, and conversational analysis-all of
which have an honorable if currently undervalued history in sociology.
It has also been argued that because it is extremely difficult to quantify
the tasks typically performed by women, such as raising children, preparing
food, maintaining living quarters, and providing services to employed mem-
bers of the household- none of which is typically perceived as "work" un-
less someone is paid to do it - qualitative methods will provide deeper insights.
And, indeed, we can learn a great deal from studies such as Kaufman's (1988)
analysis of women who have intentionally returned to Jewish Orthodoxy.
Only when these women speak with their own voices do we understand how,
within a patriarchal system, they have been able to construct a world of mean-
ing that is not defined by men. This type of analysis moves us beyond facile
invocations of "false consciousness" to the reality of how people define their
situations to allow for human agency.
Yet as valuable as these insights are, it is the focus-taking women
seriously-rather than the methodology per se that provides the new per-
spective (Eichler, 1988). Qualitative studies can be as one-dimensional as
quantitative work when the activities of only one sex define social reality.
Conversely, quantitative research has proven invaluable in tracing secular
trends and testing macrohypotheses regarding gender stratification.
To be sure, crunching numbers carries the risk of pulverizing research
subjects, but it is also difficult to claim that qualitative research fully es-
capes the dangers of power inequality and the potential for exploitation
(Sprague and Zimmerman, 1989). At the same time, the struggle with qualita-
tive methods has enhanced our understanding of the social production of
quantitative data and "the politics of numbers" (e.g., Bose, 1987; Ander-
son, 1988).

Epistemological Concerns

Beyond the issues raised by the feminist critique of pedagogy and metho-
dology lies a more fundamental challenge: to reexamine the nature and limits
of knowledge based on the positivist model and its claim to impartial objec-
tivity. Many feminist scholars argue for an epistemological transformation
that provides new bases for judging truth claims and for identifying the so-
cial processes through which knowledge is generated and disseminated. Part
of the subtitle of this paper is "Making Distinctions," referring to the central
activity of modern social sciences as well as to the consequences of the du-
alistic mind-set, based on a model of knowledge that emerged in the early
seventeenth century.
Although the distinction between rationality and emotion, and the as-
sumption that these qualities are sex linked, has a long intellectual history,
the crucial figure for modern science is RenC Descartes. The great
philosopher's struggle with the central dilemma of the Enlightenment - the
relationship of inner life to outward reality -is mirrored in his own writ-
ings: the deeply personal Meditations filled with private anguish and separa-
tion anxieties, in contrast to the technical Philosophical Work, where
Descartes rejects the all-embracing organicism of the Pre-Enlightenment in favor
of an extreme objectivism. Bordo (1986) refers to the outcome of this strug-
gle as the "extreme masculinization of thought" reflecting his era's preoc-
cupation with themes of individuation and separation- a generalized "flight
from the feminine," a drama of parturition in which knowledge and the world
are reborn in the image of men of intellect. In separating the knower from
the known, knowledge becomes masculinized in the sense of being removed
from the feminized context of relationships and feelings.
Feminists have asked whether more recent acolytes at the altar of ob-
jectivity are any less possessed by inner demons or institutional imperatives.
Take, for example, Herman Witkin, who considered his work on field
independence- the cognitive ability to abstract a single item from a field of
stimuli-to be the very apotheosis of scientific objectivism. There is a won-
drous congruence between what Witkin studied-the separation of an ob-
ject from its context - and how he studied it - by the experimental method.
As analyzed by Haaken (1988), Witkin's need to see field independence as
a higher mental function, uniquely bestowed on men, was rooted in political
and philosophical concerns of the immediate postwar era that propelled him,
along with many social scientists of the 1950s, to extreme statements of sex
differences in cognitive capacities. Field-dependent subjects, primarily female,
were described by Witkin in such terms as "narcissistic. . . with sadistic tenden-
cies, especially toward men. . . fearful of surrendering power, and accepting of
punishment (Haaken, 1988, p. 326)." Contrast this rendering with Rose Coser's
(1986) analysis of the relationship between spatial skills and the use of space,
where she links cognitive development to differences in children's ability to ex-
plore their environments, typically greater for boys than for girls. Regardless
of the sources of field independence and dependence, however, there remains
an assumption of the superiority of being able to see the trees rather than the
forest-the distancing rather than the contextual approach to knowledge.
Among sociology's founding figures, William Fielding Ogburn was
perhaps the most powerful proponent of pure objectivity, unadulterated by
Beyond Dichotomy 81

emotion. Laslett (forthcoming) traces Ogburn's affective and intellectual jour-

ney to radical positivism that allowed him (not unlike Descartes and Wit-
kin) to separate feeling from intellect. Eager to establish sociology as a
scientifically respectable field during the interwar expansion of American
universities as research-oriented institutions, Ogburn sought passionately to
avoid association with either the fuzziness of social philosophy or the
feminized realm of social work (see Bannister, 1987, on the highly emotion-
al struggle for the ascendancy of scientism in the American Sociological So-
ciety and its journal).
It was during these years, also, that a group of notable women social
scientists, many of whom had been trained at the University of Chicago, were
actually conducting sophisticated quantitative studies of welfare, poverty,
and household composition while their male colleagues engaged in colorful
ethnographies of the urban underside. Yet these female scholars were ex-
cluded from the postwar reorganization of the liberal arts. Most eventually
took jobs in social work, home economics, and similar professions where
they could also engage in conscious social engineering (Deegan, 1968).
Now rediscovered, social scientists such as Jane Addams, Charlotte Per-
kins Gillman, Marion Talbott, Florence Kelley, Edith Abbott, Alice Paul,
Sophonisba Breckenridge, Leta Hollingworth, Jessie Taft, Alice Hamilton,
Emily Greene Balch, and - the original Parsons - Elsie Clews can serve as
role models for a sociology that unites theory and practice, that uses research
to improve the human condition, and that bridges the artificial barrier be-
tween the personal and the public.

THE BONFIRES OF RESISTANCE

To challenge the norm of objectivity is to attack the special vantage

point from which the definers of reality have forged their long imperium.
An equally vehement backlash is to be expected. It is no accident that the-
ories of biological and psychological determinism, rooted as they are in reify-
ing distinctions, capture the imagination of intellectual elites, even though
each in turn has been discredited. For two millennia, "impartial experts7'have
given us such trenchant insights as the fact that women lack sufficient heat
to boil the blood and purify the soul, that their heads are too small, their
wombs too big, their hormones too debilitating, that they think with their
hearts or the wrong side of the brain. The list is never-ending (Reinharz, 1986;
also Hacker, 1953, for an early sighting of the phenomenon).
The emergence of sociobiology in the 1970s is no chance mutation, nor,
one assumes, are such staunch defenders of educational elitism as William
J. Bennett or Allan Bloom and their epigoni. The very idea of a "recognized
canon" of worthy items of culture that just happen to be produced by white
Western males should have activated alarm bells in the head of any social
scientist, including some leading exponents of the social construction of real-
ity. The counterattack, on all academic fronts, is aimed at the entire social
constructionist enterprise, against relativism and indeterminacy, and the
goals of openness and inclusion. Or, in the words of a keynoter at the open-
ing conference of the newly formed neoconservative National Association
of Scholars, put it: "The immediate threat to academic freedom comes from
antiharassment policies, racial awareness programs, and the enshrinement
of diversity as a value for the university" (Alan Kors, quoted in Wiener, 1988).
Little wonder, then, that specific opprobrium is reserved for academic
feminism. To Brigitte Berger (1988), for example, it is the "prime carrier of
leftism" in our universities - which we might have taken as a compliment,
had she not proceeded to refer to "imperial feminism" as an "intellectual
travesty" skirting the "wilder shores of madness," and vaguely redolent of
Nazi demands for "Germanic" sciences.
At a less flamboyant and perhaps less conscious level, resistance to the
feminist critique persists within our discipline. Why is it only women or peo-
ple of color or gays and lesbians who have "political" agendas in sociologi-
cal organizations (Collins et al., 1989), as if whites do not have "race" or
men are immunized from gender politics? Why, for example, is there such
stubborn opposition to gender integration of the curriculum? Is it, as some
critics (Keller, 1982; Aiken et al., 1987) suggest, that asking men to value
the female is to require that they deal directly with the very elements they
rejected in the process of defining themselves as male; that in learning to
know women, they will themselves become the known, with all the loss of
power that entails (Bezucha, 1986)?
Some social scientists continue to look for immutable sex differences
to explain social realities, even though it has been amply demonstrated that
once biases in theory and research design are controlled, very little remains
of the litany of sex differences that have been invoked to support differen-
tial treatment (Fausto-Sterling, 1985; Epstein, 1988). All of which says more
about the social construction of science than about gender distinctions.
Surely sociologists should be among the first to recognize how the mind
and body are subject to social and cultural forces. Because reproduction is
so central to all theories of sexual differences, we must be especially cons-
cious of the social and cultural realities that come between the capacity to
bear children and the fact of birth (Tabet, 1987). How else explain the fact
that as the reproductive life of women in industrial societies has been greatly
lengthened, through earlier menarche and later menopause, the actual span
of childbearing has been severely compressed? Indeed, what is culture ex-
cept the progressive transformation of the natural into the social? And it
Beyond Dichotomy 83

is precisely these transformation rules that we study as the structure of so-

cial action.
Furthermore, these rules are embedded in language. Who among us
would seriously dispute the assertion that meaning is created and maintained
through language? Or that the power to name is the power to differentiate,
to decide what is to be included and excluded from our discourse, and hence
our imaginations? Yet the feminist insistence on inclusive language is fre-
quently mocked and in some cases defiantly resisted; but surely the question
of language goes to the heart of the sociological perspective.
Resistance to integration of the curriculum is visible even in our in-
troductory textbooks. For example, Hall's (1988) content analysis of three
dozen introductory texts published between 1982 and 1987 reveals that in-
formation on women averages only 5% of the total number of pages, large-
ly concentrated in the chapters on gender and family. This study also reveals
the downside to an unthinking adoption of inclusive language; in places where
it is important to make the distinction between male and female experience,
the use of sex-neutral words such as people and persons actually conceals
important differences, as in models of social mobility that homogenize gender
and racial categories.
The tension between unnaming the named (i.e., using gender-neutral
language when appropriate) and the naming of the unnamed (as in the iden-
tification of previously acceptable behavior that can now be called "sexual
harassment") brings us to the critical question of when and where and how
distinctions ought to be recognized or not. How, in other words, do we deal
with the very real diversity between men and women and within each group?

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER

Sociologists are uniquely conscious of those wonderful peculiarities of

our species- human volition, variety, and unpredictability. Clearly, people
do not always become what they "should" be, and it is precisely because mem-
bers of subordinate groups fail to fit the categories thrust upon them that
social movements emerge - and typically surprise those in power. Gender is
one such category, designed to bring order out of the natural, overlapping
diversity of humanity. Surely by now it is obvious that women and men are
more similar to one another than either is to anything else in nature (Rubin,
1975). Yet in all societies, layers of meaning have been wrapped around the
one distinguishing feature of biological sex to produce a palimpsest of gen-
dered reality - socially constructed systems of thought and action that organize
perception, identities, and the allocation of scarce resources. Thus, rather
than being a property of the individual, maleness and femaleness are products
of the operation of social systems on both the variability and similarities
provided by nature - an insight that is as distinctly sociological as it is feminist
Hess and Ferree, 1987). Gender is created by suppressing similarities, and
it is maintained by a deep ideological commitment to differences between
women and men.
The basic process is categorization, the establishment of a gender hier-
archy in which a superstructure of social, political, and economic differences
has been superimposed on the biological (Connell, 1985; Epstein, 1988). Com-
parable to the concept of social class, gender stratification refers to relation-
ships of superordination and subordination. The study of these hierarchies
is a major component of contemporary feminist sociology; its potential scope
covers the entire life course, from children's play (Thorne and Luria, 1986)
to the status of the elderly (Hess and Markson, 1985), and ranges across the
full spectrum of cultures (Blumberg, 1989; Chafetz, 1984; Huber, 1986).
A sex/gender hierarchy is maintained by defining the qualities of the
superior group, against which others can be differentiated as inferior and
less worthy of societal rewards (Reskin, 1988). Moreover, the definers can
always change the rules. Reskin's example, occupational segregation, is par-
ticularly illustrative, as she traces the deskilling and status loss that are both
cause and consequence of women's entry into previously all-male occupa-
tions. The occupation is redefined, its prestige is lessened, and the status/wage
gap remains as wide as ever.2 Perhaps we will see something of this process
in sociology where, according to Kulis (1988), recent increases in the num-
ber of women graduate students have coincided with a decline in male en-
rollments.
Intense research focus has also been directed to the processes whereby
gender hierarchies at the macrolevel are reproduced at the microlevel. Here
we can see how feminist sociology has developed in sophistication from its
beginning in the study of sex differences, then to a simplistic emphasis on
differential socialization to "sex roles" (itself an anomalous concept, con-
flating the biological with the cultural), and now to conceptualizing gender
as relationships of power and privilege. In contrast to the mechanistic as-
sumptions of socialization models, the current focus on structure and
process-Gidden's (1986) "structuration"-allows for human agency and
struggle, and the possibility of systemic change.
Gender, as defined by West and Zimmerman (1987: 126), is an "achieved
property of situated conduct. . . an emergent feature of social situations. . .

21n some cases, the status loss occurs without deskilling, as in veterinary medicine in the United
States today; once women were admitted to veterinary schools, the number of male applicants
dropped precipitously, and the occupation is defined more as an extension of nursing than
the practice of medicine, even as the level of required technical skills continues to rise (Faber,
1988).
Beyond Dichotomy 85

and a means of legitimating one of the most fundamental divisions of socie-

ty." Because gender is produced and reproduced in concrete social acts be-
tween women and men and among members of each group, these relationships
are also arenas for change, as people negotiate their identities and role obli-
gations, yet with unequal power resources, and within settings already con-
strained by gender assumptions (Gerson and Peiss, 1985).
If gender is not so much a personal trait as it is a system for categoriz-
ing people, we become men and women through the accomplishment of
gender-specific tasks. And because the gender system is not a reflection of
natural differences, we can readily understand why many people might chafe
at such restraints - especially those whose lived experience does not accord
with what they believe they must do or feel or be attracted to sexually. Some
aspects of the process of engenderment are vividly illustrated at the bound-
aries of sexual identity - among transsexuals, transvestites, cross dressers,
berdaches, and other who defy easy categorical assignment (see papers in
Atr~ericanBehavioral Scientist, 1987). As fascinating as these studies are,
however, we must be careful not to reduce gender to sexuality (although the
role of sexuality in producing and sustaining gendered relationships cannot
be overlooked). Far more powerful and pervasive are the manifestations of
engenderment in definitions of job prestige, in wage scales, in work autono-
my, in the law, and in the relative bargaining power of wives and husbands.
The tension between learned systems of meaning and actual experience
is not easy to reconcile, and many people will reduce the dissonance by deny-
ing the validity of their own perceptions. Perhaps the most lasting effect of
the new feminist movement has been to enable women to generate an alter-
native definition of their capacities and proper place, and to share it with
others (Kasper, 1986). Many feminist scholars have gone on to claim that
it is precisely their standpoint of quasimarginality that allows women - indeed,
all "outsiders within," as Patricia Hill Collins (1986) has noted in the case
of African-American feminists - to see most clearly into the workings of the
taken-for-granted systems of superordination and subordination. How
strange that this classic sociological insight (Merton, 1972) has so rarely been
applied reflexively to our own discipline.
Although women are located similarly in the gender hierarchy, they are
variably positioned along other stratification dimensions - in our society, most
particularly those of race and ethnicity. For example, Fox-Genovese (1989)
describes how extreme differences in social status served to keep wives of
slaveowners and their domestic servants from recognizing their shared power-
lessness as women in the antebellum South, a pattern that still characterizes
the relationship between mistress and maid (Romero, 1988). A few years ago,
the women of the Portuguese-American community of New Bedford, Mas-
sachusetts, in a display of ethnic solidarity, banded together in support, not
of a female victim of a gang rape, but of her attackers (Chancer, 1987).
 For women of color, the struggle must often be waged against subor-
dination on the basis of race and class as well as gender (Dill, 1983). Here
again, the introductory sociology textbooks are not much help; women of
color appear briefly in the section on race and again in the margins of the
chapter on family, whereas the pages of the chapter on women are populat-
ed by whites (Hall and Ferree, 1989). Clearly, feminist scholarship itself could
be more self-reflexively critical (Spelman, 1989): if the women in the text-
books are white, and the African-Americans, Asians, and Hispanics are men,
where are the women of color? For now, the task of locating these women
has been assumed by the emergent field of black women's studies (Collins,
1986), but it should also be the task of us all.
Historian Nancy Cott (1987) has chronicled the fatal effects of the ina-
bility of American feminists to deal with the reality of women's diversity.
The 19th-century activists ignored the problem by embracing an essentially
white middle-class women's view of their proper sphere. In contrast, the wom-
en's movement in the early 20th century was more varied in membership and
goals, but ultimately failed to reconcile the division between those who saw
gender alone as the crucial issue (with the disenfranchisement of black women
a problem of racial politics, distinct from feminist concerns), in contrast to
those for whom gender was subordinate to the struggle for equality on the
basis of class and race. Unable to construct an ideological umbrella under
which the various factions could recognize gender as a significant but not
the only important locus of identity and cohesion, the movement failed to
encompass the diverse needs of its constituents and potential supporters.
Conversely, an exclusive emphasis on group unity carries enormous
risks - the very exclusiveness and forced conformity that fueled female pro-
test in the first instance. And who gets to define the "canon of authentic
feminism"? This tension between the need for unity and the recognition of
differences within the category of women as well as between women and men
has alternately energized and enervated the feminist movement, and remains
to be dealt with both politically and conceptually.
What I see, then, is no single "dilemma of diversity," but a web of
paradoxes built on the reciprocal themes of sameness and distinctiveness,
inclusion and exclusion. The very contradictions that beset the earlier wom-
en's movement in America still confront us as feminist scholars and activists:
singularity vs. similarity, special treatment vs. legal equality, individualism
vs. group unity. The challenge, then, is to deal with these dilemmas, not as
dichotomies but as dialectical tendencies - and to do so at the level of both
theory and action (Giele, 1989). Our enterprise, therefore, is not some blood-
less academic exercise but a means of achieving that most elusive of goals:
the blending of knowledge and practice. It is in this respect that attention
must now be paid to feminist theorizing.
Beyond Dichotomy 87

GENDER THEORIZING AND THEORIZING GENDER

Cynthia Enloe (1987) reminds us that theorizing is an activity that re-

quires a degree of leisure, of security, of legitimation, and above all, access
to the means of transmitting one's thought. That women's theorizing has so
rarely been recognized reflects both their delegitimation as deep thinkers and
their material positions in society - without the economic and physical secu-
rity that makes theorizing possible. The current flowering of feminist thought
is the logical outcome of increased access to the means of scholarly
production.
Much of this work, however, remains embedded in existing
paradigms - as a supplement or corrective to standard Marxist analysis, for
example, or interpretive sociology, or object-relations theory. In some fields,
it is tolerated as an adjunct, focusing on women, rather than as an essential
challenge to the dominant paradigms of a particular field, as in anthropolo-
gy today (Strathern, 1987, contra Stacey and Thorne, 1985).
A freestanding feminist theory, as Chafetz (1988b) argues, has four
defining characteristics: (a) the capacity to challenge or change a status quo
that devalues women, (b) a focus on gender and the engenderment of social
structures and processes, (c) a social problem approach to the study of gender,
and (d) a definition of gender relations as neither natural nor immutable.
Less an attempt to impose order on an unruly universe than an effort to ex-
pand and embrace multiple realities, feminist theory explicates the recipro-
cal relationships that link human lives and social structures.
Two distinct strands of such theorizing in sociology can be identified.
One strand, exemplified in the work of Blumberg (1989), Chafetz (1984),
and Huber (1986), employs comparative data to construct a general theory
of gender stratification, capable of explaining historical and cross-cultural
variations in power differentials between women and men. The emphasis is
on control over resources, on economic and cultural systems, and on varia-
bility in the social construction of "natural" sex differences. Using the language
and tools of conventional social science, these analyses are both compelling
and accessible to the broader sociological community.
The other point of departure for contemporary feminist theorizing has
its roots in the school of analysis variously described as "postmodern," "decon-
structionist," or even "constructivist," and involves a basic paradigm shift
from the scientific to the literary (Flax, 1987). According to Gitlin (1989),
the postmodern imagination can be traced to the disruptions of the 1960s
and "the erosion of that false and devastating universality embodied in the
rule of the trinity of Father, Science, and the Staten-precisely the targets
of the feminist critique reviewed earlier in this paper. In the postmodernist
view, concepts such as gender are reflections of transient existential realities
rather than objective verities. It is no accident, then, that the redefinition
of "gender" as a way of talking about social relationships and power should
emerge at this moment of "epistemological turmoil" (Scott, 1985).
Forsaking the imperialism of a theory of universal causation, gender
theorists today are engaged in the task of reconciling rather than exaggerat-
ing distinctions, including the apparent division within feminist ranks be-
tween those who take an essentialist/maximalist approach to sex differences
and those who espouse a radical egalitarian/minimalist position. The essen-
tialist position maximizes the differences between a masculine and feminine
mode of thought and action, while the egalitarian stance emphasizes the broad
areas of similarity between the sexes. As traced by Offen (1988) these posi-
tions reflect the two modes of historical discourse used on behalf of wom-
en's emancipation in Western societies: a relational model based on women's
connections with others and an individualist model lodged in abstract rights
inhering in the person. As an example of how poststructural analysis can
illuminate, Scott (1988) notes that it is not difference but inequality that is
the opposite of equality, and the antithesis of difference is sameness. Once
these terms are deconstructed, we can see that equality requires the recogni-
tion of both differences and similarities depending on relationships and cir-
cumstances. Indeed, equality may not be attainable without taking sex
differences into account, as in Molotch's (1988) earthy example of the pub-
lic restroom.
Must diversity lead to division? Can a nonobjectivist, nonseparative
view of social theory and society make meaningful distinctions without rein-
troducing systems of super- and subordination? Those who are grappling
with these questions have constructed a vocabulary designed precisely to ac-
commodate ambiguity. Haraway (1988), for example, speaks of "embodied
objectivity," "situated knowledge," and "partial perspectives" that do not
separate the self or split subject from object -a "passionate detachment" that
combines distance and feeling. Similarly, Harding (1986) celebrates the "in-
stability of analytic categories" in feminist theorizing, arguing that this kind
of "fruitful ambivalence" can embrace the range of existential realities that
dominant models have failed to capture. Although these are my choice of
words, the difference between "embrace" and "capture" is emblematic of the
difference between a pluralist and objectivist paradigm.
Such inclusiveness is not risk free, however, and the feminist enterprise
could founder in either direction: at one extreme, become so enamored of
women's essnetial distinctiveness and virtue as to recreate binary oppositions
(Klein, 1989), or at the other pole, to fall into the bottomless pit of infinite
deconstruction, a slough of solipsism in which all meaning becomes dissolved
(Alcoff, 1988; Hawkesworth, 1989). The debate, I believe, has already tran-
scended the question of whether the goal of feminist theory is to place wom-
en at the center or to deny the reality of privileging any one voice.
Beyond Dichotomy 89

It is in recognition of the explicit dualism of this question that feminist

theorists are working their way to a middle ground, appropriating from a
variety of traditions those arguments that will help us eliminate inequity on
the basis of gender, an eclecticism well displayed in the recent collection of
papers in Wallace (1989). I am more sanguine now than only a few years
ago that the dialectic of the debate will produce a theoretical synthesis by
means of which we will be able to identify the differences that are important
to heed, and distinguish them from the differences that lead to judgments
of superiority and inferiority. At the simplest level, there are occasions when
it is appropriate to refer to "people," and other times when it is necessary
to speak of "women" and "men." There is also a time when we can stop de-
bating the exact number of Puritans in the Royal Society and notice that
none was a woman (Schiebinger, 1987).
Between the broad macrolevel sweep of the gender stratification model
on the one hand, and the postmodern emphasis on the immediacy of mean-
ing on the other, there lies the distinctively sociological terrain of the situa-
tional or structural determination of behaviors that are so often interpreted
as "natural." Even mothering has its situational roots (Risman, 1987), while
"good mothering" is a concept that changes with each cohort's Dr. Spock.
And although both men and women may behave alike when in the same sit-
uation, they are rarely in similar circumstances.
In these many ways, then, feminist theory has generated an agenda for
sociology as a whole: to construct models that reflect multiple realities.
Spurred by developments in the sociology of gender, this work will cross all
the accepted boundaries of cultures and disciplines; it will be openly politi-
cal, with a clear agenda for change; the worlds of subordinate groups will
be fully represented; it will be cognizant of the experience of men and wom-
en as gendered beings; and within sociology, it will integrate and synthesize
a variety of models and methods (Kully, 1988). Surveying the current varie-
ties of feminist thought, Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley (1988) con-
clude that its contributions to sociology are the realization that the personal
is political, and vice versa; that the social world is constituted by dialectical
tension among macrostructures of domination on the one hand, and the
microinteractions of maintenance and resistance, and subjective acts of in-
terpretation leading to acquiescence or critique, on the other. In sum, the
study of gender is itself paradigmatic of the links among culture, social struc-
ture, face-to-face interaction, and subjective interpretation. Such a synthe-
sis has been long awaited; what more does sociology need?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is a greatly revised version of my Presidential Address to the

Eastern Sociological Society, March 1988. I am indebted to Margaret An-
dersen, Christine Bose, Jennifer Brown, Rose Laub Coser, Myra Marx Fer-
ree, Judith Gerson, Helen Meyer Hacker, Bettina Huber, Peter Stein, Ruth
Wallace, and Forum's anonymous reviewers for their thorough critiques of
earlier drafts. Remaining infelicities are my sole responsibility. The paper
is dedicated to my mentor, Matilda White Riley.

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The Instability of the Analytical Categories of Feminist Theory

Sandra Harding
Signs, Vol. 11, No. 4. (Summer, 1986), pp. 645-664.
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Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth

Mary E. Hawkesworth
Signs, Vol. 14, No. 3. (Spring, 1989), pp. 533-557.
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The Knower and the Known

Roger Holmes
Sociological Forum, Vol. 1, No. 4. (Autumn, 1986), pp. 610-631.
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Trends in Gender Stratification, 1970-1985

Joan Huber
Sociological Forum, Vol. 1, No. 3. (Summer, 1986), pp. 476-495.
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Feminism and Science

Evelyn Fox Keller
Signs, Vol. 7, No. 3, Feminist Theory. (Spring, 1982), pp. 589-602.
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Marxism, Psychoanalysis, and Mother Nature

Hilary Manette Klein
Feminist Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, The Problematics of Heterosexuality. (Summer, 1989), pp.
255-278.
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The New Feminist Scholarship: Some Precursors and Polemics

Mirra Komarovsky
Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 50, No. 3. (Aug., 1988), pp. 585-593.
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Unfeeling Knowledge: Emotion and Objectivity in the History of Sociology

Barbara Laslett
Sociological Forum, Vol. 5, No. 3. (Sep., 1990), pp. 413-433.
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Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge

Robert K. Merton
The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, No. 1, Varieties of Political Expression in Sociology.
(Jul., 1972), pp. 9-47.
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The Rest Room and Equal Opportunity

Harvey Molotch
Sociological Forum, Vol. 3, No. 1. (Winter, 1988), pp. 128-132.
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Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach

Karen Offen
Signs, Vol. 14, No. 1. (Autumn, 1988), pp. 119-157.
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Bringing the Men Back in: Sex Differentiation and the Devaluation of Women's Work
Barbara F. Reskin
Gender and Society, Vol. 2, No. 1. (Mar., 1988), pp. 58-81.
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Intimate Relationships from a Microstructural Perspective: Men Who Mother

Barbara J. Risman
Gender and Society, Vol. 1, No. 1. (Mar., 1987), pp. 6-32.
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The History and Philosophy of Women in Science: A Review Essay

Londa Schiebinger
Signs, Vol. 12, No. 2, Reconstructing the Academy. (Winter, 1987), pp. 305-332.
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Deconstructing Equality-versus-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for

Feminism
Joan W. Scott
Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1. (Spring, 1988), pp. 32-50.
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The Imperfect Empiricism of the Social Sciences

Martin E. Spencer
Sociological Forum, Vol. 2, No. 2. (Spring, 1987), pp. 331-372.
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The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology

Judith Stacey; Barrie Thorne
Social Problems, Vol. 32, No. 4. (Apr., 1985), pp. 301-316.
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An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism and Anthropology

Marilyn Strathern
Signs, Vol. 12, No. 2, Reconstructing the Academy. (Winter, 1987), pp. 276-292.
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Sexuality and Gender in Children's Daily Worlds

Barrie Thorne; Zella Luria
Social Problems, Vol. 33, No. 3. (Feb., 1986), pp. 176-190.
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Doing Gender
Candace West; Don H. Zimmerman
Gender and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2. (Jun., 1987), pp. 125-151.
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Revitalizing the American University: A Social Science Renaissance in Problem Solving

Doris Y. Wilkinson
Social Problems, Vol. 36, No. 1. (Feb., 1989), pp. 1-13.
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