In most societies, for example, husbands tend to have more power, reflecting the privileged position of men in general in patriarchal societies. Like all social systems, families have resources and rewards that are distributed among the people who participate in them. The most important of these are power, income, wealth, and prestige, but they could include a variety of other benefits as well, such as parental attention or access to material culture, such as cars. Whatever the resources and rewards are in a particular system, the basic structural questions remain: how unequal is the distribution, how is that accomplished, how is the pattern of inequality justified and maintained, and how does all this affect people and the system as a whole by producing various kinds of consequences?
In most patriarchal societies, male privilege is supported by a culture in which boys are seen as more important and valuable than girls. In many societies, the birth of a boy is celebrated, while the birth of a girl is seen as a disappointment if not a catastrophe. Even in the United States, when people are asked which gender they would rather have if they could have only one child, boys are still 43 percent more likely to be preferred than girls.9
Male privilege is most apparent in the unequal distribution of resources within the family. In China, for example, girl babies may be left to die after birth or survive into childhood only to be sold off into marriage or prostitution, a sex trade that is now global, including Europe and the United States. In nineteenth-century Ireland, the survival rate for girls was considerably below that of boys primarily because of how food and other resources were distributed in families.10
Both within and among societies today, patterns of social inequality are major features of how social systems work, whether based on class, gender, race, disability status, ethnicity, age, or sexual orientation. At the heart of these patterns is the distribution of power. Power is one of the most important concepts in sociological practice but also one of the most difficult to work with, because there are several ways to define it. The standard definition comes from the nineteenth-century German sociologist Max Weber, who is perhaps best known for his prophetic work on bureaucracy. According to Weber, bureaucracy is a way of organizing and applying a particular kind of power, and his work correctly predicted that it would become the dominant form of social organization in virtually every aspect of social life from school to religion to government.
Weber defines power as the ability to control events, resources, and people in spite of opposition—in other words, as a means of control, coercion, and domination. Although this form of power is certainly the one most valued in today’s societies, it is not the only possibility. There is, for example, the power to cooperate and share or to nurture and facilitate processes that we do not control. Midwives play a powerful role in the birth process, for example, but they do not control it or dominate the people involved in it. There is also the powerful experience of coming together with other people in religious and community rituals that affirm a sense of belonging and meaning in life. Related to this is spiritual power that often comes from deeply moving life experiences and forms of spiritual practice that people experience as extraordinarily powerful, but not in a coercive or controlling way.
In a patriarchal world, however, the human capacity to control has been elevated to such a lofty position that ‘power’ and ‘powerful’ invariably look more like Weber’s meaning than its alternatives. Given the fact that the world is largely organized around this form of power, and given the huge social consequences this produces—especially in the form of privilege and oppression—Weber’s definition is the one used most often in sociology.
Systems and Systems: Family and Economy
Nothing in social life can be understood without seeing its connections to other aspects of social life, a principle that applies within systems and among them. If we compare family life two centuries ago with family life today, for example, we find dramatic differences caused in part by equally dramatic changes in the organization of economic life.
Before the rise of industrial capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most goods in the United States were produced by families primarily for their own use. People grew and raised much of what they ate, made everything from clothes to candles, and bartered for whatever else they needed. The same patterns were found in most of what we think of today as ‘services.’ What people couldn’t do for themselves, they did cooperatively with neighbors—from raising barns to bringing in crops—or traded, service for service. Money played a small part, typically used to settle accounts at the end of the year when someone had done more for someone else than had been done for them.
The patriarchal family power structure was based primarily on male ownership of land, but what actually went on in families centered on women, because they were responsible for most productive work, including raising children. Men monopolized certain areas of production, such as the cultivation of fields, but most of the goods and services that family members used and consumed—clothing, food, candles, soap, and the like— were produced by women.
Women, then, occupied a contradictory position—subordinate in the power structure but indispensable in the role structure. To some degree, the interdependence between men and women may have dampened the effects of patriarchal domination, for most men needed women too much to take full advantage of their authority as head of the family.
These family role structures also held an important place for children. Since most people lived on farms, children began working at an early age. When public schooling was introduced on a wide scale in the mid- and late nineteenth century, the vacation calendar was organized around the family’s need for child labor during the growing and harvest seasons, which is why schooling stopped for the summer. Since children routinely worked alongside parents and other adults, there was plenty of chance for interaction across generations, especially with fathers and mothers. While raising children was still primarily a mother’s responsibility, with families living and working in the same place, fathers also had reason to take an active interest in their children’s development.11
The structures of work and family life changed with the rise of industrial capitalism, and the effects are still with us today. As people left farms to work in urban factories, living and working in the same place became increasingly a thing of the past. This created a dilemma for parents that had never existed before in human experience: they could not do economically productive work and take care of their children at the same time. Many lower- and working-class families could not survive without the earnings of both spouses, so children had to fend for themselves in many ways. But in the expanding middle of the class system, the dilemma was resolved by keeping wives at home while husbands went to work for wages.
As is so often the case, the patterns found in the middle and upper classes became general cultural ideals, and working-class husbands and fathers increasingly measured their success by the ability to support their families on their own and ‘keep’ their wives and children at home. This is one reason why male workers demanded and eventually won a family wage that allowed a man to support an entire family with his earnings alone. This was more than a concession to labor, for it also helped men maintain their dominant position in the family.12
The characteristics of the industrial capitalist system, then, radically split the typical family role structure. The productive work that women had done—from baking bread to making soap to weaving cloth—was rapidly taken over by industries that could do it faster and cheaper. This meant that for the first time, child care became a full-time job for middle-class women, along with certain kinds of domestic work, such as cleaning. Increasingly, children spent most of their time with mothers, and husbands and wives no longer worked side by side.
Shifting production from home to factory also affected children’s roles within the family and elsewhere. Putting children to work in factories provided extra family income, but it also put children in competition with adults. This, al
ong with concern for how easily children were exploited with long hours of work and poor wages under terrible conditions, resulted in legal bans on child labor, with compulsory schooling taking its place. As children lost their place in the adult work world, ‘adolescence’ emerged as a developmental stage between childhood and adulthood, along with dramatic changes in cultural views of young people. As children lost their economic value in families, for example, their emotional value to parents increased.13
But children’s dependent emotional attachment to parents was not— and still is not—enough to replace an active productive role in family life. Until industrial capitalism transformed the world, children in every society were productive members of their families. When children lost this position, they needed something to replace it to feel a sense of worth and belonging.
The answer was an expanding peer culture isolated from the surrounding adult culture and often at odds with it. Adolescence has become a growing source of deviant and often violent behavior as adolescents reject mainstream cultural values. Adolescent males, for example, account for more criminal behavior than any other age group. As Margaret Mead argues in her classic study of adolescence in Samoa, such patterns may reflect the broad historical shifts in the structure of family and economic life and how these shifts have deprived young people of a secure and meaningful place in their families and in society.14
In several ways, then, the industrial capitalist system has undermined the positions of women and children. It has also affected men, although in different ways and degrees.15 The shift of production out of the home and away from agriculture virtually destroyed the family as an economically productive system, at least as far as society and its rewards were concerned. What goes on in families is still critical to what goes on in the economy, since without families there would be no place for workers to be cared for and nurtured. There would also be no place for future workers to be raised into adulthood. But this contribution is rarely recognized as a form of productive work with economic value.
As a result of the capitalist Industrial Revolution, owning land and dominating the family no longer amounted to much as a basis for men’s patriarchal authority. In other words, men were now the ‘heads’ of something that had lost most of its importance as a source of prestige and power. The world was still patriarchal and organized in male-dominated, male identified, and male-centered ways, but the position of individual men within that world shifted dramatically. Most men no longer had any authority over production—as men once had as farmers or independent artisans— but now worked for wages under conditions controlled by employers. This shift meant that men had to find other ways to secure and exercise male privilege.
One answer was for men to control the wages they earned and what families purchased with them. Women, for example, were not allowed to own property, sign contracts, or spend money they earned. Men, however, enjoyed an independence they had not known before. A capitalist economy based on wages allowed people to survive as individuals by earning money outside the family. This broke the powerful economic interdependency that had previously bound women, men, and children together in a productive family system.
Because male privilege allowed men to avoid taking care of children, men could—and did—take advantage of this possibility for independence in ways that women could not. Many people today believe this arrangement in which men work outside as family providers and women stay home and do not ‘work’ is the natural way of organizing family life that has always been around in one form or another in every society. In fact, however, this social invention was extraordinarily recent and did not dominate for very long, as the massive entry of wives, mothers, and other women into the paid labor force during the second half of the twentieth century shows.
In many ways, women are completing a transformation of family role structures that men began more than a century ago. In this sense, working women do not represent a radical departure from traditional family life. Women have always worked in economically productive ways, and men were, in fact, the first to introduce the idea of parents working apart from their children. The pattern of wives and mothers working outside the home is part of a long-term adaptation by families to an industrial capitalist world that, like every society before it, requires most adults to work for families to survive.
Men leaving home for work during the capitalist Industrial Revolution created strains in family life, and women’s exit from a strictly domestic role is having similar effects, especially on child care. This situation is not simply a result of the women’s movement or because women now choose to work outside the home more than they did before. It results from an ongoing tension between economic and family structures, a tension that was first resolved—for a while and in certain social classes—by keeping wives and mothers at home and financially dependent on their husbands. As wives and mothers move into paid work outside the home, the old ways of resolving that tension will not work, which is why a child-care crisis exists in the United States (except for families wealthy enough to hire women to take care of their children for them).
The ability of large numbers of adults to earn a living without being tied to a family system of production was unheard of before the capitalist Industrial Revolution. When such independence became possible, it changed the shape of family life and the relationships of women, men, and children to one another. Today, the percentage of people who live alone and the percentages of men and women in their late twenties who have never married are increasing steadily, following rapid increases during the preceding decades. Nonfamily households are being created at a rate twice that of family households.16 At the same time, employers are beginning to feel pressure to do something to relieve the strain felt by family members who must work. How this situation plays out will depend in large part on a willingness to ask difficult questions about what families are, why they matter, and what an economic system is supposed to provide for the people who participate in it.
The Structure-Culture Connection
The concepts of culture and social structure are tools, devices for thinking about social life in ways that help reveal how things work. They are useful because they focus attention on different aspects of reality so that we can then reassemble them in our minds into a coherent whole. Because culture and structure have their own names and are typically discussed separately, they are often thought to be separate in reality as well—culture over here, structure over there.
However, as I pointed out at the end of Chapter 1, we never find one without the other, because everything in social life, from people to systems, exists only in relation to something else. Understanding what culture and structure are, then, is just the beginning, because we also must see how they shape social life in relation to each other and the people who participate in systems.
We can think of racial prejudice, for example, as a cultural attitude that combines stereotyped beliefs about different races and values that rank some as superior. People who don’t qualify as white are viewed as inferior to those who do, and lighter skin is preferred over darker.
Prejudice would not be such a problem if it were not connected to structural aspects of societies, especially role structures—who gets to do what— and the distribution of power, prestige, and other resources and rewards. Prejudice would cause little more than hurt feelings if it were not for systematic patterns of inequality in economic and legal systems, in political power, in how children are treated in school and pedestrians on the street, in access to health care and all kinds of social services that affect the quality of life. In this sense, racism is not just a way of thinking or feeling. Racism is an integral part of the structure of entire social systems that privilege and empower some groups at the expense of others.
We can look at cultural prejudice as both a consequence and a cause of structural inequality. Negative prejudice about black people in the United States, for example, makes it a path of least resistance for white people to treat them badly or allo
w such treatment to go on unchallenged. But the effect also works in the other direction: if white people treat black people badly as part of asserting white privilege, then white people can use negative views of black people to rationalize such behavior and make the privilege seem appropriate or not even privilege at all. This makes ending racism more than just a matter of changing habitual ways of thinking or feeling about race. It also involves a complex set of structural arrangements that shape the system of white privilege, and getting white people to give up this is a much larger and more difficult task.
If black people were not concentrated in the lower and working classes, for example, they would give middle-class white people much more competition over jobs and would not be available to capitalist businesses as a source of cheap labor. It is unlikely that white people or capitalist enterprise would welcome that kind of racial progress. This makes it easier to focus on cultural prejudice as the sole problem rather than on the structures of white privilege and capitalist economics that prejudice supports. No matter how much we succeed at changing racism’s cultural aspects, we still must find a way to deal with its structure.17
Cultural and structural aspects of racism are connected not only in how they work but also in their dynamics of change. Stereotyped beliefs about race, for example, are organized around real or imagined differences that are distorted and exaggerated to benefit one race at the expense of others. The beliefs are generalized to every member of the target group and are usually seen as inherent—people are the way they are simply because they belong to that racial group. Since the beliefs rarely describe actual people with any accuracy, the best way to undermine those beliefs is to give people a chance to experience people of different races and see what they are really like. But this cannot happen as long as people live and work in segregated communities. In the United States, for example, neighborhoods and schools are so segregated by race that a large portion of students would have to move for the percentage of each racial group in schools to match its percentage in the population as a whole.18
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