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Gender and Work Using Figuration Theory: A Narrative Exercise to Unpack Gender Inequalities and Conceptions of “Work”

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Transformationen der Arbeitsgesellschaft

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Abstract

The author uses Figuration Theory’s components of long-term change over multiple generations and the concept of interdependencies to illustrate how the concept of work came to be associated only with paid work and how women’s activities became marginalized from not only the paid labor market but also from the concept of work itself. She uses a narrative method with a fictitious family from 1750 to 2020 and focuses on the maternal line within a specific historical and geographic context to highlight interdependencies and context. Industrialization processes and especially men’s political lobbying to protect their status and earnings by excluding women from paid work led to the gendered dichotomous “separate spheres” of visible (male) paid employment and invisible unpaid feminized unpaid domestic labor. This gendered role division is anything but “traditional”. It is an historically recent social development.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fachbereich Gesellschaftswissenschaften, Institut für Soziologie, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Heather Hofmeister

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  1. Heather Hofmeister
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Correspondence to Heather Hofmeister .

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  1. Institut für Soziologie, Universität Münster, Münster, Germany

    Stefanie Ernst

  2. Institut Arbeit und Wirtschaft, Universität Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Guido Becke

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Hofmeister, H. (2019). Gender and Work Using Figuration Theory: A Narrative Exercise to Unpack Gender Inequalities and Conceptions of “Work”. In: Ernst, S., Becke, G. (eds) Transformationen der Arbeitsgesellschaft. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22712-8_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-22712-8_4

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