Women, the Manual/Non-Manual Divide and the Working Class

Abstract

The conventional view of class, advocated by Goldthorpe (1983, 1984), considers the household as the appropriate unit of stratification. This means that insofar as members of the same family live together, they are assumed to occupy a single position in the class hierarchy. The massive entrance of women into paid employment during the last decades has stimulated challenge to this approach. In particular during the 1980s, a heated debate took place over the question of how to incorporate women to class analysis. Controversy became acute over the fact that it was common practice in stratification research to derive women’s class position simply from their husband’s or father’s employment, data on female work activities being irrelevant. Consequently, feminist critique has highlighted two aspects of the conventional view considered as problematic: firstly that women’s class position is independent of their own employment status, and secondly that the social position of the family is completely unaffected by women’s work career (Sørensen, 1994: 28). The main reproach focused on the occurrence of families in which husband and wife occupy basically different class positions and where the ‘family class’ cannot simply be derived from the man’s occupation (Heath and Britten, 1984).