Women and Class Analysis: A Reply to John Goldthorpe

In `Women and Class Analysis' ( Sociology , November 1983), John Goldthorpe defends the conventional practice of making general claims about class from research focused mainly or exclusively on male `heads' of households. The concern of this paper is to show that the submerging of women's class position with that of their husbands is not justified, and that it closes off some of the most intriguing issues in class analysis. Goldthorpe points to substantial similarity in the types of employment undertaken by husbands and their wives; a re-analysis of his argument and evidence shows that the same data can actually be used to demonstrate a remarkable dissimilarity in the types of employment in which spouses are engaged - even greater dissimilarity than theorists of `cross-class' marriages have claimed. It is argued that the conventional approach advocated by Goldthorpe both obscures the extent to which the class experience of wives differs from that of husbands, and ignores the extent to which the inequalities that divide women and men are themselves the outcome of the operation of the class system.