Whereas the right to vote for Members of Parliament is vested in the people (and women are people), therefore we, as
citizens of New South Wales, respectfully pray your Honourable House to pass a Bill enabling women citizens of New South Wales to vote for Members of the House of Parliament. And your Petitioners, as duty bound, will ever pray.
(Received by the N.S.W. Legislative Assembly, 17 September, 1895). Although Australian women were among the first of their sex to attain the vote,2 they are often still treated parenthetically (as in the disclaimer above: "and women are people"), as though they are somehow different from the rest of humanity. This "parenthetical" treatment of women is illustrated by the practice of viewing them as a minority or "disadvantaged" group.3 While there is no doubt that women share certain features in common with such groups (for a
discussion of this point see Hacker [1951:60-69], Myrdal [1962:1073- 1078], Rossi [1972:346-348]), the convention of treating women as a minority masks both the differences among women themselves, and the fact that women do, after all, represent half the population.4
However, whether to treat women as half of humanity or a special case [A. Day, 1976:220-226] has posed a dilemma for sociologists. In the first systematic study of women's position in Australia, Mackenzie
2 The 1902 Commonwealth Francise Act provided for both male and female voting rights. By 1908 all states in Australia permitted women the vote. This compares with 1919 when women received the vote in United States federal elections, and 1922 when all provinces in Canada except Quebec granted women the right to vote. In Quebec this right was granted to women only in 1940 [Milburn, 1976:9].
3 For example, in a seminar on "Leisure — A New Perspective", held in Canberra, 1974, discussion of women's leisure [Mercer, 1974:8.1- 8.1.33] was included in a special session along with papers on the poor and the physically handicapped. In another example, Ancich
et
dl.
[1969, April:48-76, October:129-152] in a bibliography of research and writing on social stratification in Australia, listed material about women under the heading "Special Groups", thus including them with Aborigines, migrants, and the elderly.4 American historian Lerner [1975:13] stresses this point when she observes that the tendency has been to perceive of women's history in terms of a "subgroup" or minority, and it is time for historians "to face once and for all and with all its complex consequences that women are the majority of mankind and have been essential to the making of history".
[1962:xi] refers to this as a basic paradox. He quotes Simone de Beauvoir [1953] as saying,
Women have never constituted a closed and independent society; they form an integral part of the group, which is governed by males and in which they have a subordinate place. Hence the paradox of their situation: they belong at one and the same time to the male world and to a sphere in which that world is
challenged.
So far as his own approach to the study of women in Australia was concerned MacKenzie [1962:xi] took this to mean that broad aspects of "women's place" must be considered, and not just (as was his initial brief) the role of a minority of women who are actively involved in professional and public life.
The paradox of women's situation (belonging at once to the same social system as men and yet being set apart in a special sphere of their own) underlies the fact that sociological analysis of the position of women is at heart the study of social differentiation. Moreover, as Myrdal observes [1962:1073], social differences based on sex are among the most universal and "inexorable"5 forms of social differentiation in human society. As such, they fall within the rubric of one of the oldest concerns of sociology as a discipline: the nature and origins of social inequality. Historically, Dahrendorf
[1969:17] has observed the first questions sociologists raised about the nature of human society concerned issues related to inequality:
Why is there inequality among men? Where do its causes lie? Can it be reduced, or even abolished altogether? Or do we have to accept it as a necessary element in the structure of human society?
The study of social inequality is receiving new impetus today from the worldwide movement along subordinate groups to shed their
5 In an Appendix to An American Dilemma, comparing the situation of women with that of Negroes in the United States, Myrdal [1962:1073] comments that in the 1940s the barriers that kept Negroes from
competing on an equal basis with whites were still stronger than those that interfered with women's access to equal opportunity. However, he argues, "the function of procreation", which was chiefly responsible for keeping women in a subordinate position, was "more eternally
inexorable" than the doctrine of unassimilability that kept Negores in a lower status position.
inferior status. During the decades of the ’60s and '70s, racial groups, the poor, colonized peoples, "Third World" countries, youth, and women6 have all actively asserted their right to equal placement in the human community. Though social inequality remains firmly entrenched as an important source of human conflict, both nationally and internationally there has been a steady erosion in official toleration of all forms of invidious distinction between members of different social groupings [Beteille, 1969:366]. The same basic questions raised earlier about inequalities based on wealth, income, and race are now being raised about social differences based on sex: Can they be erased, or are they essential to the distribution of essential tasks?
However, the fact that men and women remain unequally placed in their access to opportunities and social rewards is perhaps the last major form of social inequality to be not only widely challenged but
subjected to systematic inquiry. This is true even though the distribution of power has long been a central concern of sociology, and even though power is, in all human societies, unequally
distributed by sex. Rosaldo and Lamphere [1974:3] note that, while some anthropologists claim to have located societies that appear
genuinely egalitarian and other societies in which women were accorded considerable esteem and a share in the responsibility for making
important decisions, "none has observed a society in which women have publicly recognized power and authority surpassing that of men".
The distribution of power by sex is only part of the issue. There is also the even more basic fact of the universal asymmetry between the sexes. Mead [1949:8] stresses the great variety of ways, often, as she says, "flatly contradictory to one another", in which differences between the sexes have been elaborated. But while the range of differences in sex role patterns has been extensive, and the assignment of different traits, tasks, rewards and powers to the two
6 In a study of adolescent American girls, Konopka [1976:2] writes that the world-wide phenomenon of active self-assertion on the part of previously suppressed groups was probably one of the most influential social trends of the 1960s-70s in terms of its impact on the attitudes and expectations for future roles of the 1,000 girls in her national sample.
been there.
In keeping with the tradition of sociological inquiry, the next question would seem to be: is the distinction between the sexes to be seen as simply the differentiation of positions essentially equal in rank, or are the different positions occupied by men and women
evaluated differently, and therefore associated with differential access to prestige and valued social rewards? In classic sociological inquiry, establishment of the fact of social differences or of a
marked division of labour between different tasks was followed by two lines of investigation. First, were the observed social differences attributable to natural differences among men, and second, were the differences equal in rank or expressed in terms of a rank order with different consequences for social status? Examining this distinction as it relates to equality between the sexes would seem a logical sequal to observation of the universality of the division of labour between the sexes. Yet as a possible determinant of social inequality,
differentiation based on sex has been largely ignored by sociologists. It has lagged behind analysis of inequalities perceived to be derived from the distribution of property, the division of labour, the
functional necessity of allocating different kinds of tasks, and inequalities derived from such ascribed qualities as race, religion, and ethnicity.7
A basic reason for the long delay in including sex differences in the study of inequality may have been the tenacious belief in the
7 Dahrendorf [1969:23-26] associated the discussion of property as a cause of inequality mainly with Rousseau, Millar, Stein and Marx; the division of tasks as a basis for differential ranking with Engels, Dürkheim and Schmoller, Dürkheim and Simmel, and functionalist theory with the American sociologists, Parsons, Davis and Moore, and later
Levy and Barber. The conclusion that seems to follow functionalist theory that inequality is indispensable because an unequal system of rewards is necessary to ensure that the necessary tasks are performed in society has led to lively debate among American sociologists, see Davis and Moore [1945:242-249], Tumin [1953:387-393], Wrong [1959:772-
782].
Myrdal's An American Dilemma [1944] analysed the relation between race and social position. Systematic sociological study of the Australian Aborigines is of quite recent origin [see Broom and Jones, 1973].
existence of a congruence between differences between men and women in nature, and differences between the positions men and women occupy in
o
society. This notion about the origin of social differences between the sexes persisted long after social theorists discarded the idea of a congruence between the natural and social ranks of men in unequal social standing. In fact, Dahrendorf [1969:22] writes that discarding the assumption that "men are by nature unequal in rank and that
therefore there is a natural rank order among men" was a necessary- precondition to the development of the sociological mode of inquiry, which he defines as "an explanation of inequality in terms of
specifically social factors expressed in propositions capable of being empirically tested".
By the same token, the challenge to the assumption that social differences between men and women are congruent with natural
differences between the sexes has opened the way to applying the sociological mode of analysis to the study of women. Rosaldo and Lamphere [1974:3] suggest that there is among social scientists a new tentativeness in the approach to male and female roles in society:
What once seemed necessary and natural has begun to look
arbitrary and unwarranted. What once could be assumed, ignored, or tacitly acknowledged now seems problematic and difficult to explain.
These changing perspectives on the origin of social differences among individuals and groups serve to emphasize the crucial importance of values in the study of social inequality. Beteille [1969:365] observes that social inequality may be viewed in two ways: first, as an observable aspect of social structure, and second, as a system of values and norms:
Thus, social inequality belongs not only to the domain of facts which can be represented on statistical tables; it belongs also
to the domain of values and norms.
8 Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex [1953] was one of the first books to present extensive biological, historical and sociological evidence in support of the theory that social factors are the key determinants of women's overall status. More recently, Hutt [1972:17] has resurrected the case for "the biological basis of psychological sex differences".
This observation applies equally to the special case of social differences between men and women. Both approaches will be used in the present study: namely, data will be presented on both statistical indicators of the position of women relative to men in the Australian social structure, and on the values and norms of a sample of
Australian adolescents concerning their present and future social roles.