SOC 220 hw1

When Alexander the Great brought his armies across Asia Minor, he was reportedly shown the Gordian knot, an intricate, tightly bound tangle of cords tied by Gordius, king of Phrygia. It was said that only the future ruler of all Asia would be capable of untying the knot. The story recounts that a frustrated Alexander finally sliced the knot open with his sword.

There are many dimensions to inequality, and all of these dimensions are inter- related. Class, race, and gender are three of inequality's core dimensions. Asking which of them is most important may be like asking, Which matters more in the making of a box: height, length, or width? These dimensions are like the 9 to 11 dimensions that quantum physics imagines for our universe: tangled, intertwined, some hard to see, others hard to measure, but all affecting the makeup of the whole. We could note other dimensions as well. Age, for example, can provide both advan- tage and disadvantage, privileges and problems. We stereotype both ends of the age spectrum: "silly teenagers" who talk, dress, and act funny, and "silly old codgers" who talk, dress, and act funny. Age is unlike class, race, or gender, however, in that unless our lives are cut short, we all move through all age categories. Sexuality and sexual orientation also constitute a complex dimension. Debates over gay marriage and who qualifies as a partner for the purposes of health care, tax, and housing benefits highlight how sexuality can be a dimension of privilege or disadvantage. Stereotypes, discrimination, and vulnerability to violence are also bound up in the sexuality dimension. Some dimensions, such as race, ethnicity, and religion, are frequently so bound together that they are hard to disentangle. In this chapter, we explore some of the dimensions of inequality. We can't completely untangle this

knot in our social fabric, but we can at least slice into it.

Dimensions of an Unequal World

Inequality is at the core of sociology and its analysis of society. It is also at the core of your daily life experience, although you may not realize it. You may know you

are broke. You may wish you were rich. You may be angry about the time you felt rebuffed as a black female-or as a white male. You may have a sense that some

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4 PART I: ROOTS OF INEQUALITY

people's lives have been a lot easier than yours-or that some have had a much harder time. In the United States in particular, and in most of the world in general, we are continually affected by social inequalities, yet we are rarely encouraged to

think in those terms. We know that many people are poor, but why are they poor? Perhaps they are just

lazy. That's certainly possible-I have met some very lazy people. But, come to think of it, not all of them are poor! If you have ever worked for a "lazy" supervisor or dealt with a "lazy" professional (not among your professors, I hope!), you know that it's possible for some people to be less than diligent and still command positions of authority and high salaries. Perhaps the poor are just unlucky. It is certain that luck matters a great deal in our society. You may know of people who have had "bad luck": They've lost their jobs, or are in fear oflosing long-held positions, just because their companies are closing or moving. Yet, when we step back to look at the num- bers, we find there are a great many of these "unlucky" individuals out there, all with similar stories. Patterns that go beyond individual misfortune are clearly at work.

You may also know people who "have it made" and wonder how they got to where they are. If you ask them, most will decline to claim special talents or brilliance; instead, they're likely to say something about diligence and hard work. Hard work certainly can't hurt anyone seeking success. But then again, I know of a woman who works 12-hour days doing the backbreaking work of picking vegetables and then goes home to care for three tired and hungry children. She works hard, but she does not seem to be climbing the ladder of success. Having access to the right schools, financial resources, business and professional contacts, and particular opportunities seems to play a large role in turning hard work into hard cash. The sociological study of social inequality does not negate individual differences and efforts, but it seeks to examine patterns that go beyond individual cases, to explore differences in access and opportunity and the constraints that shape people's choices.

Sociologists are interested not only in the fact of inequality but also in how this inequality is structured. When geologists are trying to understand the structure of rock formations, they look for strata: layers with discernible borders between the levels. Sociologists look for social stratification-that is, how the inequalities in a society are sorted into identifiable layers of persons with common characteristics. Those layers are social classes. Although scholars have examined the structure of social classes since the mid-nineteenth century, most of us rarely think in class terms. Particularly in the United States (as well as in some other countries, such as Canada and Australia), the cultural emphasis has been on the equal standing of all members of society; Americans are generally reluctant to use the language of class beyond vague and all-encompassing allusions to being "middle-class:' The term middle class once referred quite specifically to that group that stood in the middle ground between the common working classes and the wealthy propertied classes. Today, a wide range of people willingly claim middle-class status, for it seems uppity to label oneself upper-class, and almost no one wants to admit to being lower-class, which sounds like an admission of personal failings.

Certainly a simple division of American society into distinct social classes is not easy, and the difficulty is compounded by inequalities that come with gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and age. Yet, if we look even casually at various neighborhoods,

Chapter 1: The Gordian Knot of Race, Class, and Gender 5

we can easily see that we are looking at clusters of very different lifestyles. We can see class distinctions in the houses and the cars, and also in the residents' attitudes and routines as well as in their preferences or tastes in everything from yard decor to Christmas lights. In many ways, members of different classes live in different, and divided, worlds.

We may be most resistant to the language of social inequality and social class when it comes to the area of our past accomplishments and future aspirations. Certainly we are where we are, in this place in life, in this university, with a par- ticular set of prospects, because of our own abilities and hard work. The message of sociologists that our life chances (what we can hope for from our lives) and our mobility (whether we move up or down in a stratified system) are both socially conditioned and socially constrained is not likely to be a popular one-at least not until we have to explain why we failed that entrance exam or didn't get that job! We may be sensitive to personal bias ("That person was against me because of my age [or race, or gender, or clothes, or whatever]"), but most of us overlook the way the entire structure of our social system shapes our opportunities.

Let me illustrate with an example from my own experience and background. I am a sociology professor at a midsize public university in the Midwest. I have an occupational title and educational credentials that place me near the upper end of job prestige rankings,.--at least I get called "Dr:' by my students and by telemarket- ers. I earn a salary that places me somewhat above the overall national average (although somewhat below the average for persons of my age, gender, and race). My social class background doesn't differ greatly from that of many of my students. My grandfather was the son of German immigrants who farmed a bit and ran a small "saloon:' He did various odd jobs before marriage, and then he helped run his wife's parents' struggling farm. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, he worked as a night watchman in Chicago until he was injured in a fall, and then he drove a cab before returning to central Wisconsin to work in a paper mill and do some minor truck farming. Asked about his life, he would talk about hard work, about good times and hard times, about luck and perseverance and getting by. He was right about all this, of course. Yet his life was shaped in innumerable ways by his social class, as well as by his ethnicity, and these were constantly interacting with broader social and economic changes. Had his own parents been wealthier, they could have bought richer farmland where they began in Indiana rather than moving on to marginal land in central Wisconsin, and their "luck" at farming might have proven much better. Had they been able to afford a better-capitalized business than their small saloon, they might have joined a growing circle of prosperous German American small business owners in Chicago or Milwaukee. And if my grandfather's parents had brought no money at all with them from Germany, they may never have been able to buy land or a business and so would have faced even more difficult times. Had they been African American or Hispanic American, they would

not have been accepted in rural central Wisconsin and would more likely have found a home in Gary, Indiana, or South Chicago. As it was, they were part of the great immigrant movement that reshaped this country early in the twentieth cen- tury, and also part of the great movement of people from agriculture into industrial

and service economies.

6 PART I: ROOTS OF INEQUALITY

My father grew up amid the difficult times and ethnic antagonisms of pre sion-era central Chicago. When his family moved back to central Wisconsin,

h helped on the farm and went to work in the paper mill. When he found he hated mill work, he tried bartending. Finally, he studied for a real estate license and sub- equently old new home for many years in north suburban Milwaukee, prosper-

ing lightly during the growth years of the 1950s and 1960s and facing lean times during the recession years and slow growth of much of the Midwest that followed in the 1970s. When asked about his life, he, too, spoke of work that he liked and hated, of good times and hard times, and of hard work and perseverance. He did n t peak of the real estate license as his precarious step into a growing middle cla , or of his being part of a generational movement from blue-collar industry into the white-collar service sector, or of social forces such as suburbanization and the flight of industry and jobs from the Midwest and Northeast, yet his opportunities and life chances were very much influenced by these events.

As for myself, truly dismal performances in door-to-door sales and in junior high chool "shop" classes convinced me early on that I was suited for neither sales nor

industry. I excelled at school, especially in courses involving writing or science. A move during my fourth-grade year from an increasingly troubled urban elementary school to a substantially more rigorous and well-equipped middle-class suburban school system helped me develop these interests. I worked odd jobs during high school to earn enough money to pay for three years at a small public university at a time when in-state tuition was quite reasonable. With very high SAT scores (I excel at the abstract and impractical), I had many offers from other colleges and universities, but I didn't believe I could afford any of them-I had neither the savings nor the savvy needed to pursue scholarships and financial aid. My father and my grandmother contributed a bit, and my flair for testing out of courses got me an undergraduate degree in the three years of college I could afford. The downside of this rush was that I graduated into an economic recession, and there was little new hiring going on. My penchant for academics suggested graduate school as a likely course. An early interest in law and politics had shifted to social science and social policy, and so, eventually, I landed at a large Ivy League university and emerged with a PhD in sociology.

Certainly my experience, neither especially privileged nor especially deprived, would seem to be the result of my individual motivations and abilities. The fact that I'm not rich is explained by my choice of profession. Both the fact that I was the first in my family to obtain a college degree and the fact that I have a secure white-collar position (although I actually wear far fewer white collars than my father did) are explained by my own individual set of abilities and hard work. My students who come from working-class origins strongly argue the same, and few would ever admit privilege. But note how my experience might have been different.

What if my family had been wealthy? What if my father's failed attempt to start his own business had succeeded and he had ridden a suburban building boom to great prosperity as a real estate developer? Others with a bit more investment capital and better timing had done just that. We would have lived in one of the wealthier suburbs across the river. I would still have attended a public high school, but it would have been one with exceptional facilities and programs. In place of the odd jobs I worked, I would have indulged my interest in tennis-I'm not very good, but with

Chapter 1: The Gordian Knot of Race, Class, and Gender 7

early private instruction I may well have been able to make my high school's tennis team. In a school where virtually every student was college bound, I would have received very good guidance counseling and would have carefully gone through the many brochures that I received for selective liberal arts colleges with beautiful build- ings and beautiful female students on the cover. With the assurance that I could afford to attend these schools (I had the test scores to get in), I might have welcomed my guidance counselor's advice in choosing the best. (I would have needed this advice, given that this scenario still assumes I did not have college-educated parents to help steer my decisions.) My parents, my peers, and my counselor would likely have strongly encouraged my interest in law. Only with a high-income profession could I hope to return to live in the same exclusive suburban area with my friends and classmates. A private law practice would still allow me to work with and consult for my father's business. Alternatively, I could indulge my interests in geography and urban studies as an undergraduate, then pursue a graduate business degree, and then combine these interests as I eventually took over that business. Certainly, ambling excursions into the social sciences would have been discouraged. Some of my indi- vidual tastes and abilities would still be there, although now honed and shaped in new directions by my social situation. I might still enjoy history and social science and writing, but I might be spending evenings in the study of my large suburban home writing something like The Seven Business Secrets of Benjamin Franklin.

On the other hand, what if my family had been poor? Our important move from the city to the suburbs when I was nine years old would never have taken place. I would instead have attended an urban high school in north-central Milwaukee that suffered through a decade of declining facilities and neighborhoods, mounting racial tension, and a growing drug problem. I probably still would have graduated and might still have aspired to college, but I would have had to work out attending occasional classes at the nearby university while attempting to work and contribute to the family income. Some early difficulties I had with math would likely have gone uncorrected, limiting my academic options. If I had managed to graduate from college, it would not have been in three years but in six or seven, and I don't know if I would have had the energy or enthusiasm to consider graduate school.

Consider an even thornier question: What if my family had been black? My father might well have still made his way to Milwaukee from Chicago, but he probably would never have left industrial work. He could not have left to tend bar in the late 1940s unless he was willing to work in an all-black club. He could not have gone into selling suburban new construction, as that was an all-white domain right through the 1970s. Black would-be homebuyers were systematically excluded by their limited financial resources, banks, and fearful white suburbanites, and there was no place for a black real estate agent in suburban Milwaukee. My father would likely have contin- ued to work at one or more of the factories on the west side of the city, many of which closed or laid off workers in the industrial downturn of the 1970s and 1980s. This would have occurred just as I was reaching crucial high school and college years. I would have faced all the hurdles of the "poor" scenario, plus the school counselors

of the time might not have strongly encouraged me to pursue college. Finally, what if I had been female? This may be the hardest scenario of all to unpack,

for gender assumptions and inequalities are so thoroughly built into our families, our

8 PART I: ROOTS OF INEQUALITY

peer interactions, the media, and institutions such as schools that they are nearly impos- sible to disentangle from personal characteristics. My difficulties in math-which stemmed from the move from an urban to a suburban school that was a full year ahead, so that I virtually skipped long division and fractions-would likely have been attrib- uted to my gender and not to the move. My high school counselors would not have pushed me to overcome the deficiencies, and although I still would have easily gradu- ated from high school, my SAT and GRE scores would have been much lower, dragged down by poor math performance. With lower scores, I would have had fewer choices regarding colleges and may not have gotten into a top graduate school. I may have ben- efited from being female in one area: the odd jobs I worked on and off during college. The temporary agencies I worked for automatically assigned female applicants to cleri- cal positions, which were cleaner and paid just a bit more than the "light industrial" work that males were assigned. Even though I type far faster than I pack boxes, I never got a clerical position until finally the federal student loan office needed an office worker who could lift heavy boxes full of loan applications and files, and so decided to hire a young man. Of course, in today's economy, I would have to market my computer

skills-searching those student loan databases-rather than just a strong back. But if I had been female, other challenges would have been waiting down the road.

Our first child was born while I was in graduate school, and my wife was able to take a short amount of maternity leave from work Had that been my husband instead, he could not have taken off for "paternity" leave, and I would have had to delay completion

of my graduate program, as I would have had to take on a greater portion of the child

care than I did. Career success following graduation (assuming I got there) is also a

complex question. Sociology is a field rapidly opening to women, and, depending on

where I went, I might have done quite well as a female sociologist. Had I chosen the legal

profession, I may also have done well, but as a woman, I would have expected to earn

less than 70% of what male law school graduates earn over the course of my career.

A key theme of sociology is that who we become is the result of a complex inter-

play between individual characteristics and our place in society, which determines

which of our characteristics are encouraged, rewarded, and constrained. The fact that

these rewards and constraints are so unequally distributed makes the topic of social

inequality at times very disturbing but also intensely interesting. In a now famous

turn of phrase, C. Wright Mills (1959) referred to our ability to connect our personal biographies to the broader sweep of history and society and to see the connections

between personal troubles and social conditions as the sociological imagination. I hope you won't read the chapters that follow passively, but instead try to engage and

develop your sociological imagination, actively making connections between per-

sonal experiences-your own as well as those of people you know-and the stratified

social structures that advance or hinder our hopes, plans, and possibilities.

Intersections of Race, Class, and Gender in the United States

Where you stand in Robeson County depends on who you are, who your family is, and to what group you belong. The county courthouse even lists veterans in a

Chapter 1: The Gordian Knot of Race, Class, and Gender 9

hierarchy: whites first, then Lumbee Indians, then African Americans. Where you stand at Smithfield Packing, the largest hog-butchering and pork production plant in the world, located nearby, also depends on who you are. White men hold super- visory roles:

It must have been 1 o'clock. That's when the white man usually comes out of his glass office and stands on the scaffolding above the factory floor. He stood with his palms on the rails, his elbows out. He looked like a tower guard up there or a border patrol agent. He stood with his head cocked. One o'clock means it is getting near the end of the workday. Quota has to be met and the workload doubles. The conveyor belt always overflows with meat around 1 o'clock. So the workers double their pace, hacking pork from shoulder bones with a driven single-mindedness. They stare blankly, like mules in wooden blinders, as the butchered slabs pass by. (LeDuff 2001 :97)

Most of the other white men at the plant are mechanics. A couple of white men and the Lumbee Indians make boxes. A few Indians are supervisors or have other ((clean" jobs. Given that most of the local businesses are owned by whites or Indians, members of these groups may have other job options. Almost all of the newly hired black women go to the "chitterlings" room to scrape feces and worms from the hogs' intestines. Hardly elegant, but it is ((sit-down work:' The black men and most of the Mexicans and Mexican Americans, both men and women, go to the butchering floor. There they stand for eight and a half hours at a stretch, slashing at hog car- casses with sharp knives, trying to get all the meat from the bone and to turn out the required 32,000 pork shoulders per shift at a rate of 17 seconds per hog per worker. At the end of a shift their backs ache, their wrists ache, their hands are numb. Some say this giant plant doesn't kill just pigs-it kills the hearts, minds, and bodies of the workers. But this is the only job for miles in any direction that pays "unskilled workers" as much as $8 an hour.

Profits at this plant have doubled in the past year while wages have remained stagnant. The management is vigorously antiunion and has been accused of assign- ing workers to their stations based on race and gender. Yet the plant remains able to get workers, although with difficulty: Some come on release from the local prison, some are recruited from New York's immigrant communities, and some come because they've heard by word of mouth, in Mexico and beyond, that jobs are

available. By far most of the newcomers are Mexicans and Mexican Americans- some in the United States legally, some with forged papers and huge debts owed to "coyotes" who slipped them across the border. The work on the plant floor is so hard that employee turnover is virtually 100%-5,000 leave in a year and 5,000

come. Increasingly, those who come are Hispanic. LeDuff (200 I) notes that African Americans in Robeson County had long hoped

that their position in the plant and in the community would improve, but they now

find it stagnating; they are as poor as ever. They tend not to blame the plant's man-

agement or the town leadership for this situation; rather, they blame ((the Mexicans"

for taking their jobs and lowering their wages. Even the anger that black workers

express toward abusive management is tinged with racial expectations. As one said

10 PART I: ROOTS OF INEQUALITY

about a manager, "Who that cracker think he is keep treating me like a Mexican and I'll beat him!" (p. 98). The strain and pain of this work revive bitter racial epithets that have otherwise disappeared from polite American speech, as weathered old white employees speak of "the tacos" and "the niggers:'

At the end of a day, the workers pop pain pills, swab cuts with antiseptics, and make the long drive to trailers, cinder block houses, and wooden shacks in segre- gated communities: whites to Lumberton, blacks to Fayetteville, Indians to Pembroke, Mexicans to Red Springs. There are four taverns along the way, one for each racial group. Sometimes the men stop at these; most of the women, black and Mexican, must hurry home to waiting children. The surrounding counties are all poor, offering few job options. The textile mills that used to hire many locals, espe- cially white and black women, are now gone-many to Mexico. Meanwhile, the hog-butchering business arrived, leaving union towns such as Chicago and Omaha, with their $18-an-hour wages, and finding a home here, the new "hog butcher for the world" (to borrow Carl Sandburg's famous but now out-of-date line about Chicago). What remains in Chicago is the board of trade, where pork belly futures are traded at electronic speeds.

Other food production has also come south. You don't need "big shoulders" (another Sandburg description of Chicago) to butcher chicken and filet catfish, and these jobs are heavily feminized as well as racially divided:

The catfish are trucked from the fish farms to the factory where they await the assembly line. The workers-also women, also black, also poor-are ready for them in their waders, looking like a female angler's society. But these women mean business. The fish come down the line, slippery and flopping. The saw- yer grabs the fish and lops off their heads with a band saw, tossing the bodies back onto the line while the heads drop into a bucket. Down the line, women with razor-sharp filet knives make several deft cuts to eviscerate the fish and turn them into filets to be frozen. Many of the longer-term workers have lost fingers, especially to the saws. The company says they fail to follow directions and that they get careless. The women say they are overworked. They say they get tired. They say they slip in the fish guts that fill the floor. But through it all, the assembly line, like Paul Robeson's 01' Man River, "just keeps rolling along:' The line that threads between these rows of black women is operated by a tall

white man who supervises from a raised control booth, adjusting the speed

of the line and noting the workers' efforts. One watches and wonders: is this

the face of the new South or the old South? And what of what Marx called the

"social relations of production''; is this the assembly line of the future or the

plantation of the past under a metal roof? (Sernau 2000:88)

These are stories about work and about food. They're also about the industrializa- tion of food production, and about immigration and globalization, as well as the decline of union power. But in the day-to-day exchanges and experiences of these workers, they

are also stories about race, class, ethnicity, and gender, and about how these dimensions

intersect in the world of work They are stories of poverty and inequality, but also stories

about the complex social relations that define the stratification system.

Chapter 1: The Gordian Knot of Race, Class, and Gender 11

Sociologists trying to make sense of the complexities of social inequality have turned to the increasingly popular analytic triad of race, class, and gender. Contributors to popular anthologies and new organizations try to untangle the complex ways in which these three dimensions define inequality in U.S. society and the world. Other dimensions could be added: religion, ethnicity, sexuality, and age. This is the "new" approach to social inequality, not in that any of these are new forms of inequality but in that early "classical" theorists gave much less attention to race and gender than to class. They occasionally considered religion and national- ity, but they paid scant attention to age or sexuality. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels contended that the first class division may have come along lines of gender and age as men began to treat women and children as their personal property (see McLellan 1977). Men became the first dominant group and women the first subordinate group. Following from this, Marx and Engels developed biting critiques of middle- class ("bourgeois") family structure that in many ways anticipated feminist cri- tiques. They were writing The Communist Manifesto just as the first American feminists were denouncing "domestic slavery" at a conference in Seneca Falls, New York. Marx also offered interesting observations on how capitalists could use racial divisions to keep members of the working class divided, especially in the United States. Yet both race and gender were clearly in the background in his analysis.

In describing the dimensions of stratification, Max Weber proposed a three-part division: class, status (prestige), and party (political power). He was interested in the organization of privilege and duty between men and women within the house- hold and was particularly interested in cultural and religious differences, but, as they were for Marx, race and gender were secondary to his analysis.

One way to look at both race and gender, as well as the other dimensions of inequal- ity, is as special types of status. Although many people have tried to define and describe clear racial categories, such attempts have continually foundered on the complexity and diversity of human backgrounds. Race is better understood as a social status. A racial identity or category can confer special prestige or respect within a community and may confer particular stigma and disadvantage-apart from, or at least in addition to, class position-in hostile communities. Gender is likewise a particular form of social and legal status that may confer privileges or barriers in addition to those of class. A wealthy woman may experience expectations and opportunities that are dif- ferent from those experienced by a wealthy man, and a poor woman's experience of poverty and the prospects for upward mobility may be quite different from that of a poor man. Age may command respect or contempt, depending on the context, and ethnic heritage may be a source of pride or something to be hidden. Race and gender are also closely bound up in struggles for power. Those in power may use issues of race to attempt to divide groups that pose a threat to their power, or race may become a rallying cry for groups attempting to mobilize and challenge established power.

The difficulty in trying to analyze race, class, and gender lies in the fact that the three are in continual and complex interaction with one another and with other dimensions of inequality. There is more than just an additive effect; a poor black woman, for example, faces more than simply double or even triple disadvantage. Poor black women may be less likely than poor black men to be unemployed, with more starting-level positions available to them, but these women often also face the

12 PART I: ROOTS OF INEQUALITY

added burden of heavy family responsibilities. Compared with poor blacks or Latinos, poor whites, male or female, may face less discrimination in some areas (such as housing) as they seek to move out of poverty, but they may face added shame and stigma that they have somehow personally failed. It is interesting that just as some slurs for poor people of color have faded from polite usage, other slurs-such as the biting and hostile trailer trash-have emerged to stigmatize poor rural and suburban whites.

Race, ethnicity, and gender are social markers that confer identity and social boundaries that define a community and who may be included in or excluded from that community. They are often categories of oppression and privilege, and as such, they must concern us all. Gender is not a "woman's issue:' because men must also come to terms with the ways in which their gender may confer power or privilege and may also confer isolation and unrealistic expectations, especially as it interacts with social class. Race is not a "black issue'' or a "minority issue:' because the members of those disparate groups-now placed together as the "majority" -must also come to terms with identity, boundaries, and perception of "whiteness" and what it can mean in either privilege or stigma, again, as it interacts with social class. The stigmatization of one religion can soon begin to erode freedom of religious expression for others, and violence against gays and lesbians can quickly escalate into violence against any- one whose "differentness" violates someone else's established norms.

We can't hope to disentangle the Gordian knot of race, class, and gender com- pletely, any more than Weber could keep his three dimensions perfectly analytically separate. Instead, the challenge is to understand more fully the interactions among oppression and privilege, dominant and subordinate positions, and inclusion and exclusion that shape our social structure.

The Development of Inequality: Race, Class, and Gender Across Societies

How did the world get to this state? Was there ever a time when people related as equals? Was there ever a society in which men and women worked as equals and race and class divisions were unknown? Possibly. We must be careful about project- ing too many of our hopes onto a utopian past. Yet the glimpses we get of our past, both distant and recent, and of other social arrangements shed interesting light on the development of human societies and the accompanying development of inequality. Evidence suggests that very equal human societies have existed; in fact, such arrangements may once have been the norm. Relative equality, not massive inequality, may be part of our human origins. The story of how we got from such a place to the world we now know is not as long as you might think, and it provides a fascinating glimpse into a shared past.

Hunting and Gathering Societies

Until about 10,000 years ago, hunting and gathering societies contained every- one in the world. These societies were largely made up of seminomadic bands of

Chapter 1: The Gordian Knot of Race, Class, and Gender 13

about 50, although in lush environments some could have been larger and the bands must have interacted with one another. As a rule, hunter-gatherers have gender- divided societies: The men hunt and the women gather. With their longer legs, men have an advantage in sprinting after game, and their longer arms allow them to throw spears farther. Young women are also likely to have young children, and it's very difficult to chase down your dinner with a 2-year-old in one arm! The gender division is probably based in social needs as well as in biology, however. To provide food, these societies need both tasks-hunting and gathering-to be performed, and they don't collect resumes to fill their two-part division of labor. Because men have certain potential advantages in hunting, it makes sense to train boys to be hunters. Because gathering is also essential, it makes sense to train girls to gather.

The gender division is probably not as clear-cut as it might seem, however. Men who are out hunting often gather wild honey, birds' eggs, and probably a wide range of edible fruits and nuts. Women who are out gathering might dispatch any small animals they encounter and add them to the larder, and they may also help men stalk and flush game. When fishing is important, men and women probably work together as teams, because successfully gathering seafood often combines the skills of both hunting and gathering. More important, however, is that both tasks are essential to the economy of the band. Men's hunting provides important protein and nutrients for the band's diet, but the women's gathering provides the most reli- able and abundant food source, often between 60% and 80% of the total. As all hunters know, hunting can be unreliable business, so it's good to have more reliable staples on which to depend. Because the tasks that both men and women perform are essential to the vitality of the hunter-gatherer economy, both men and women have power bases within such societies.

Class divisions are also unheard of among hunter-gatherers. The skills and imple- ments of hunting and gathering are equally available to everyone. Except for a healer or a storyteller or a religious specialist, who might be either male or female, there are few specialized roles. Possessions are few and cannot be hoarded because bands must carry all they possess as they travel. The hunter-gatherer economy is based on reciprocity, the sharing of goods. One small group of hunters might be successful one day, whereas others come back empty-handed. As the successful hunters cannot eat the entire rhinoceros themselves, it makes sense for them to share their take, with the knowledge that the next time they might be on the receiving end.

In hunting and gathering societies, power resides primarily in the consensus of the group, although a few leaders might emerge based on their personal charisma or ability to command respect. Age can cut both ways: Elders may be accorded added respect for their acquired knowledge of plants, seasons, stories, or incanta- tions, but an older member's declining eyesight might require giving leadership of the hunt to someone younger. Prestige may go to the best hunter or the best story- teller, but this is not passed down from generation to generation, so there are no prestigious subgroups. Further, in a band in which all must work together for sur- vival, prestige brings few privileges. Hunter-gatherers have little choice but to share their common lot.

Whether hunter-gatherers share a life in which all are poor or all have plenty has been a matter of debate. Hobbes wrote that life before civilization was "nasty,

14 PART I: ROOTS OF INEQUALITY

brutish, and short:' This has often described our cartoon image of the "caveman; who is nasty, brutish, and short and lives just such a life. In fact, we have evidence that the men and women of hunting and gathering bands may live well. They work less than you or I do, maybe only about 20 hours per week (Sahlins 1972). In part, this is because there is only so much they can do. Their lives are tied to the rhythms of nature, and so they must wait for the returning herds or the ripening fruits. While they wait, they joke and tell stories, they mend their simple tools and tempo- rary dwellings, they play with their children, and, it seems, they often give some energy to flirting and lovemaking. Their diets are often healthier than those of most of the world's peasants; in fact, they are quite similar to the diverse, high-fiber, organic diets based on fresh fruits and vegetables supplemented with a little lean meat that nutritionists encourage for the rest of us.

If hunter-gatherers live so well, why are there now so few of them? The first hunter-gatherers to become cultivators may have done so out of necessity when they were faced with growing populations and declining environmental abundance, whether caused by natural climate change or their own predations. Many others have succumbed to larger, more aggressive societies that needed their land and resources. This is a process that continues through the present day, so the last true hunter-gatherers are close to their final hunt.

Horticultural and Herding Societies

Women in hunting and gathering societies know a great deal about the plants they harvest. Under pressure to provide for their bands, some may have begun to remove unwanted plants, to move and tend root crops, and eventually to place seeds in fertile ground intentionally. They became plant cultivators, or horticultur- alists. Horticultural societies differ from hunter-gatherer societies in several key ways. They often must shift their cultivation, but they may stay in one place when they do so, such as in a village in the middle of shifting gardens. They also can produce economic surpluses and store them, thus creating commodities. In addi- tion, a population that lives in one location grows. When a village reaches the size of several hundred inhabitants, simple reciprocity often gives way to redistribu- tion, with redistributors who may become "big men" by gathering and giving gifts.

Some of these societies have female traders and "big women:' but key positions of

political and economic power are often monopolized by men.

Still, the horticultural surplus produced by a small village is likely to be limited

and perishable, so there is little hoarding and little intergenerational accumulation.

The big man's power is based largely on his own charisma and influence; he has

little coercive power. His privileges are based on his ability to redistribute goods to

everyone's satisfaction and to his own advantage. And his prestige is based largely

on his ability to reward supporters generously.

Even if the top leaders are most often men, women often play a key role in the

social organization and governance of horticultural societies because they are the

gardeners. Men may do the "ax work" of clearing the land, but it is often the women

who do the "hoe work" of tending the gardens. Men may supplement the food sup-

ply by hunting and fishing, but it is the women's gardens that sustain the village. The

Chapter 1: The Gordian Knot of Race, Class, and Gender

rule that he or she who controls the economy also controls much of the governance again seems to apply. Economic power leads to social and political power- a lesson not lost on feminist activists in modern industrial societies as well. Among the Iroquois, an Eastern Woodland group of horticulturalists who lived in what is now the U.S. Northeast, the men were the tribal leaders who met in council, but the women were the electors who chose those leaders. Further, it was elder women who controlled the longhouses and the clan structure; when a man married, he went to live with his wife's relatives. Horticultural societies in the Pacific often trace descent and lineage through the women's rather than the men's ancestry, and behind every male leader there are well-connected and often influential women.

Age often brings respect in horticultural societies: The village elder, the wise "medicine woman:, the vision seeker, the canny clan leader-all had places of par- ticular prestige. These societies, attitudes toward sexuality were often what caught the attention of the first European traders in the Americas, the Pacific, and parts of Africa. Restrictions on female sexuality were sometimes less stringent than in European society, perhaps because inheritance did not necessarily follow a male line in which men had a prime concern in establishing the "legitimacy,, of their offspring. In this atmosphere, alternative sexual orientations were also more likely to be tolerated-in some cases, they were even highly regarded. The Native American berdache, a person who crossed traditional gender lines, taking on the attributes, and sometimes the marital options, of the opposite sex, is one example of this.

The domestication of plants is one way to cope with scarce food resources; the domestication of animals is another. Rather than just hunting animals, people began to control some animals, movements and eliminate the competition of predators, becoming herders, or pastoralists. Herding societies emerged alongside horticultural societies in arid and semiarid regions that were too dry for horticul- ture but had grasses on which large herd animals could graze.

Herding societies are often marked by distinct social inequalities. Individuals in such societies can accumulate wealth in the form of herds. Further, they must defend their property. It's not an easy task to swoop down and make off with a horticulturalist's sweet potatoes, but cattle and horses must be guarded. This is generally the job of armed men (women and children are more likely to be given herding responsibilities for smaller animals, such as poultry, sheep, and goats). Given that tending and guarding the herds are male responsibilities, men tend to dominate these societies. In fact, in some herding societies, wealthy men acquire harems of women just as they do herds of horses, cattle, or camels. Men without herds are left to serve as hired hands, often with little prospect for advancement. In some herding societies, this servanthood develops into hereditary slavery.

Age and gender work together as the route to privilege in herding societies: A senior male can become a patriarch, accumulating a vast herd along with the ser-

vants to help tend the animals and a large family lineage dependent on him. Still, in a society that produces few luxuries and is constantly on the move, even a patriarch has to be hardy and able to live with hardship and rigors-that is, unless he and his

followers take to raiding the luxuries of settled rulers. In a society with strict gender

divisions and great importance placed on inheritance of livestock, there also tend

to be stricter punishments for those who blur the clear lines of gender or sexuality.

16 PART I: ROOTS OF INEQUALITY

For the past 7,000 years, horticultural and herding societies have been disap. pearing, giving way, like hunting and gathering societies, to larger and more power- ful societal forms. This is a process that began in the Middle East with the rise of agrarian societies at what we have come to call the dawn of civilization.

Agrarian Societies

Agrarian societies, like horticultural societies, are based on cultivation, but they practice intense and continuous cultivation of the land rather than rely on shifting gardens. The term horticulture comes from the Latin word for garden; agriculture comes from the Latin word for field. The shift from horticulture to agriculture is largely one of scale. As people domesticated both plants and animals, and as they faced increasing demand to bring more land under cultivation, they realized that oxen could turn up more ground than they could. The keys to agriculture are irriga- tion and the plow, which allow much more intense cultivation of a given plot of ground. This shift first occurred in the Middle East, which had good candidates for domestication in the horse and the wild ox; good candidates for seed cultivation in the wild grasses, the oats and wheat that blew in the highland; and good opportuni- ties for irrigation in several major river systems. Agriculture provided enough food to support not just villag~s but whole cities filled with people who were not cultiva- tors themselves. The city, and that urban-based form of social control we call civi- lization, was born. Again, the order in which things occurred is not entirely clear. Some have suggested that growing food surpluses allowed for the establishment of cities of priests, artisans, rulers, and their soldiers. A darker view suggests that once ruling groups established themselves, perhaps at key trade and ritual centers, they demanded more supplies from the countryside and forced the intensification of work and production that became agriculture.

In either case, agrarian societies became vastly more stratified than their prede- cessors. As the cultivation process shifted from groups of women to men, or to families led by men who worked with the animals, women's prominence in society declined. Even more striking was the division of societal members into true and largely fixed classes. Land that was continually under cultivation could be owned, and private property now became very important. A food surplus could support metalworkers and artisans who fashioned lasting items of great value that could be accumulated. The surplus could also support standing armies that gave rulers great coercive power to enforce their demands. Continuously cultivated private property could be passed from father to son, and so inheritance became important in main· taining the class structure. As rulers expanded their domains, simple redistribution became difficult, and valuable metals were made into coins to support the first money-based market economies. Land was still the main source of wealth, however, and the way to increase one's privilege, prestige, and power was to bring ever more land under one's control. Rulers could do this with standing armies using metal· edged weapons, and great empires were built.

Increased centralization of power further increased the wealth and power of a few, relative to the bare subsistence-level existence of the many. Those who worked the fields, the new class of peasants, may have produced a surplus, but as the lords

p

Chapter 1: The Gordian Knot of Race, Class, and Gender 17

who owned or controlled the land laid claim to it, the peasantry were often left with only enough to survive so that they could produce more. The obligations of peas- ants to their lords were often as high as 50% of their total production. Local land- lords and petty rulers could use their command of a region to gain impressive privileges. The rulers of the great empires extracted enough surplus from both the land and subjugated cities to live in fabulous luxury. The kings and emperors of agrarian empires often commanded absolute power (although often fearing palace coups), ultimate prestige as god-men, and all the privileges that their societies could supply. The Egyptian pharaoh came to be considered a god- man who rightfully owned all the land and all who lived on it to serve him (or, in one case, her) as he pleased. In twelfth-century England, the average noble's income was 200 times that of a field hand, and the king's income was 24,000 times that of a field hand. The artisans who worked on the manors and in the cities were often no better off than the peasants, and many agrarian cities were crowded with beggars; these destitute "expendables" may have constituted one-tenth to one-third of their populations (Lenski 1966). Yet limited land and a high birthrate meant a steady supply of unskilled labor. When labor was in short supply, warfare could provide not only new land but also slaves or servants.

Agrarian societies also provided opportunities for one other group that was usu- ally kept to the margins. Merchants could travel between cities, using coined money and expensive goods as the medium of exchange. The nobility generally looked down on the merchants, and yet there was always the possibility that merchants could amass so much wealth that the largely idle nobles would need them as credi- tors. As Marx realized, in this odd relationship was one of the contradictions that would destroy the old agrarian systems. Agrarian societies spread from the Middle East across Asia, Europe, and North Africa. For almost 5,000 years they were the dominant form of human organization: in ancient Babylon and Egypt, in ancient Greece and Rome, and in medieval Europe, as well as in the great Chinese empire and imperial Japan.

Agrarian empires were carried to the Americas by European colonizers. But ever larger trade routes and expanding monetary systems, fueled in part by American gold and silver, gave ever greater power to traders and merchants relative to the landowners. Capitalism began to replace feudalism as the economic core of agrar- ian societies. The early great agrarian rulers, such as the Egyptian pharaoh of the Old Testament who has Joseph gather surplus grain for times of famine, were

largely just very mighty redistributors. But with the expansion of a money economy, redistribution gave way, in part, to markets. Markets, where goods are bought and sold with common currency and prices are set by a balance of supply and demand,

were the domain of merchants. As markets grew in power, merchants grew in

wealth, amassing money that they could reinvest to create still greater profits.

Fueled by new interests in science, along with this new science of money, the

Industrial Revolution began to transform agrarian societies. Bolstered by the sci-

ence of war, expanding industrial societies began to displace the agrarian order. Still

today, many of the world's so-called developing nations in Asia and Latin America

are industrializing agrarian societies. These areas are also home to some of the

world's most economically unequal societies.

18 PART I: ROOTS OF INEQUALITY

Along with the dawn of civilization, the rise of cities, the invention of writing, and the widespread use of the wheel, the agricultural revolution brought the begin- nings of the world's great religions and philosophies: The period around 3000 BCE (somewhat later in the Americas) witnessed one of the greatest flourishings of human creativity ever. Agrarian societies brought other things as well: widespread slavery and serfdom, chronic warfare, forced taxation, devastating plagues and famines, and malnourished poor who labored in the shadow of luxury and indul- gence. These societies were based on hierarchies of power, seen clearly in both European and Asian feudalism, in which peasants served lords who served greater lords who served the king or emperor. They were "deference societies" (Stephens 1963), in which individuals at each level showed great respect for those on the level above them: Peasants groveled in the dust before lords, who fell on their knees before kings. This pattern of deference, or showing great respect, carried down to the local level and the household. A cautious peasant who controlled a bit of land through the favor of a lord bowed (literally and figuratively) to the lord's every wish. Yet, on returning home, this man would expect the same gestures of deference from his wife and children. Age and masculinity might bring control of land, and land was power and the source of prestige. In such a system, wives, daughters, and younger sons were often at the mercy of senior men, who in turn answered to "noblemen:' As in most patriarchal societies, controlled by senior men, any actions that bent the bounds of traditional gender roles or strict sexual norms were viewed as threats to the system of power and inheritance and were most often severely restricted (Skolnick 1996).

Agrarian empires brought under one rule many diverse peoples, typically giving prominence to the conquerors and subordinating other ethnic groups. Some ancient empires incorporated diversity without much regard to color or ethnicity. It appears that Alexander the Great, with whom we began this chapter, irked some of his followers not just by spreading Greek culture but by marrying and promoting Persians and adopting some of the ways of the diverse, multiethnic Persian Empire. For rulers such as Alexander, personal loyalty often mattered more than race or ethnicity. Within medieval Mediterranean empires, religion-Christianity or

Islam-was often the key divider and determiner of privilege. For their Asian coun-

terparts, such as the great Mongol Empire, religion seemed to matter little. Finally,

as European states colonized vast regions of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, they

formed empires in which privilege was often based on European-ness, or "white-

ness:' and racial divides of color became common. Even as the world industrializes, the patterns of 5,000 years of agrarian society remain built into many traditions and

social structures: male privilege, white privilege, class hierarchies. Some elements

have been undermined somewhat, such as respect for age, but others have remained

quite persistent, such as suspicion of gay and lesbian sexuality.

Life on the Edge: Frontiers and Ports

Before they succumbed to industrial pressures, agrarian societies dominated the

planet, but they also shared the world stage with several other societal types, each with its own patterns of inequality. Alongside agrarian societies were a handful of

Chapter 1: The Gordian Knot of Race, Class, and Gender 19

maritime societies in places like Phoenicia, Venice, and, ultimately, the Netherlands. These societies, which depended almost entirely on sea trade, tended to be mer- chant dominated. Many were republics rather than monarchies, with groups of wealthy and influential traders forming their governments.

In places where native populations were displaced by newcomers, there was also the possibility of forming frontier societies. Frontier societies survived through farming and herding, but they differed from agrarian societies in that they were populated by newcomers. In general, the landed elites stayed home, so frontier societies were more equal and often, like maritime societies, more republican- minded. Labor was often scarce in these societies, so laborers were able to com- mand higher wages and more influence. In time, as elites emerged or were transplanted from elsewhere, frontier societies came to look more like their agrar- ian counterparts-unless other events intervened. The colonial United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were essentially frontier societies. Although they were agrarian in their livelihood, they developed social patterns that differed from those in their home countries of France and Great Britain. Newcomers had to develop new forms of social organization to work the land they had taken from Native American horticulturalists (or Australian hunter-gatherers or Polynesian horticulturalists in New Zealand). By the mid-1800s, the American and Canadian frontiers had moved westward, creating a fleeting frontier herding society that lives on in the popular imagination, encouraged by Hollywood westerns. By this time, an economic pattern very similar to older agrarian societies had taken root in the U.S. South: plantation agriculture supported by African slave labor. The great divides that had separated medieval European landowners and their peasants or serfs (peasants tied to the land as virtual slaves) were replicated and supported by a racial divide and a racist ideology. In the northeastern United States, frontier soci- ety never had time to establish older agrarian patterns. New England first became a largely maritime society of traders and merchants and then was fully gripped by industrialization. These patterns of the past two centuries have left their mark on the social structure and stratification patterns of the United States, as we will see.

Industrial Societies

The first social change that accompanies industrialization is often increasingly obvious social inequality. The rich may not garner any larger share of a society's goods, but with industrialization there are more goods to amass. The industrial poor

may not be any poorer than the agrarian poor, but they now labor alongside the symbols of urban wealth and prosperity. The first country to industrialize was Great Britain in the mid-1700s. Industry made Britain the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the earth. It also led to the horrific conditions and gross inequalities that Charles Dickens made famous in his novels, such as Oliver Twist, with its begging and stealing orphans, and A Christmas Carol, with its greedy Ebenezer Scrooge and his struggling employee, Bob Cratchit. By the mid-1800s, France, Germany, and the

United States were rapidly industrializing in a race to catch up with Great Britain.

These nations faced the same experience: greater production, greater power, and

increasingly blatant inequalities. In the United States, this was the era of desperately

20 PART I: ROOTS OF INEQUALITY

poor immigrant slums in industrial cities and of the fabulously rich "robber barons" whose wealth surpassed anything previously imagined. In the latter portion of the 1800s, European workers revolted and battled with soldiers and police, U.S. workers staged sit-down strikes and fought with state militia, and Karl Marx strode to the British museum to work on books and pamphlets denouncing the evil of it all.

Then an odd thing happened: Inequality declined. Middle classes filled some of the gap between rich and poor, sharing some of the privilege of the rich. Power was still largely class based, but united workers found they could win political conces- sions. Prestige came to be based on multiple criteria, with political leaders, business leaders, and even entertainers sharing the elite circles. The relation between economy and society is more complex than observers such as Marx could have initially realized. In a famous statement, Marx contended that history does repeat itself, the second time as a parody, or mockery, of the first. One reason we need to take the time to look at disappearing societies is that, in some remarkable ways, they resemble our own. In some aspects of social stratification, it seems, prehistory repeats itself.

Social inequality is at its lowest in hunting and gathering societies. It widens in horticultural and herding societies as noble or privileged family lines are established. It reaches its greatest extremes in agrarian societies, where a rigid class structure often divides the landowning nobility from the peasantry and poor artisans. Inequality is still extreme in early industrial societies, where handfuls of individuals amass great fortunes while workers confront long hours, miserable conditions, low wages, child labor, and cramped, wretched living conditions. As societies move into an advanced industrial stage, inequality again declines as a more complex class structure-With more middle positions emerges (see Exhibit 1.1).

This is also a general picture of gender inequality over time. Hunting and gather-

ing societies are marked by considerable gender equality, especially if gathering

provides a large portion of the food supply. Women's position remains strong in

Exhibit 1.1 Inequality by Societal Type

High

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Hunting & Horticultural/ Agrarian Industrial Postindustrial Gathering Pastoral

Chapter 1: The Gordian Knot of Race, Class, and Gender 21

many horticultural societies unless chronic fighting elevates the role of the male warrior. Women's position is considerably diminished in most pastoral and agrar- ian societies. Women still contribute greatly to daily survival, but they are more likely to be cloistered in domestic settings, veiled or otherwise hidden from view, and limited in their ability to own property. In some aspects, they may be treated as the property of fathers and husbands. Early industrial societies do little to elevate the role of women as poor women are brought into the lowest wage sectors of the new economy in textile mills and sweatshops, doing "piecework,, for factories in their homes, and doing domestic work in the homes of the wealthy. Advanced industrial societies, however, create new opportunities for women, allowing them to excel in education and industrial skills on par with men. Industrial societies also create new dangers and problems for women, which we will explore in more depth, but often industrialization is followed by women's demands for new roles and improved access to power and privilege. As Rosen ( 1982) notes:

Under the impact of industrialization ... The mystique of male dominance that had for generations kept the female in a subordinate position becomes tarnished, and women, supported by an ideology of sexual equality, challenge their hus- bands' omnipotence, often with success. The scepter of patriarchal authority does not exactly fall from nerveless male hands; sometimes the wife, emboldened by her new freedom of power, snatches it brusquely from her husband's grasp. (p. 3)

More flexible roles for women often mean gradually greater acceptance of variation in family forms and sexual orientation, although this is a slow process. Youth also tends to become less of a reason to exclude individuals completely from power and rights; for instance, voting is no longer restricted to landowning males. Yet, as young people once had to wait to inherit land to gain access to power and privilege, in industrial societies they often have to wait to acquire educational credentials or to inherit the family enter- prise. Life for the elderly can also be precarious in industrial societies, as they may lose their assurance of family support at the same time they often get little social support. Retirement can mean poverty. Only in advanced industrial societies does the idea of social support for the elderly become common. Even this can remain precarious, as the continued anxiety in the United States over the future of Social Security illustrates.

An optimistic interpretation of the trend illustrated in Exhibit 1.1 has come to be called the Kuznets curve, after economist Simon Kuznets (1955), who first called attention to this trend in national development. The inequality within a soci-

ety increases until the society reaches a certain point in industrialization at which it declines. Kuznets argued that this describes the experiences of Great Britain,

Germany, the United States, and many other advanced industrialized nations. He

was less sure it would apply to later-developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin

America. The optimistic view is that they will also follow this pattern and that

inequality within the poor nations of the world will decline as these nations further

their drive to industrialization. Other theorists maintain that poor nations will be

prevented from following this pattern because they will be relegated to a subservient

role in the world economy. At this point we can only note the strong influence of past patterns of economy and society on the world's nations.

22 PART I: ROOTS OF INEQUALITY

The wealthiest nations in the world are the advanced industrial-some Would now say postindustrial-societies of Western Europe, North America, and the Asian rim. The poorest nations of the world fit Lenski and Nolan's (1984) description of "industrializing horticultural societies:' These are nations in sub-Saharan Africa and isolated portions of South Asia, where disparate horticultural and herding societies were united under European colonial rule into single administrations and are now independent nations with populations too large and land too degraded for the inhabitants to continue as small-scale horticulturalists and pastoralists but with limited background in centralized government and national-scale economy. These are the poorest of the poor-Niger, Mali, Mozambique, Somalia, Nepal, Afghanistan-which some have started to refer to as the Fourth World.

The nations in the world with the highest levels of social equality have been the Eastern European remnants of the Soviet "Second World:' Hungary and the Czech Republic emerged from years of enforced socialization with inefficient industries and environmental degradation, but also with societies far more equal than those to the west. Their transformation has brought new freedoms, new business oppor- tunities, and prosperity for some but unemployment and hard times for others. Their economies are growing, but inequality is also growing. The leader in this divide is Russia. With a handful of entrepreneurs and speculators gaining control of most of the national wealth while the rest of the economy withers under the feet of workers with declining incomes, the first communist nation is now more unequal than the United States.

The nations of the world with the lowest levels of social equality are the "indus- trializing agrarian societies" (Lenski and Nolan 1984) of Latin America and, to a somewhat lesser extent, South Asia. Inequality at its most raw extremes is found in Brazil, with its old plantations and new industry; in Guatemala, with its years of struggle between wealthy landowners and desperate highland campesinos, or poor peasants; in El Salvador, where 14 elite families own most of the country; in Panama, where a small handful control the profits of the country's strategic loca- tion; and in Bolivia, where 6% of the population own 90% of the land. Pakistan and India also struggle as the inequalities of an ancient caste system are superimposed on the modern inequalities of unequal development.

Of the advanced industrial countries, the most unequal are no longer those with rigid class divides inherited from an agrarian past. Great Britain remains socially

class-conscious, but 250 years of industrialization have accustomed the British to a

society in which cash-strapped dukes and earls rent out their great manors while

upstart industrialists grow rich through investments in global manufacturing.

France is also still socially class-conscious and a bit more unequal than Great Britain,

but all across Western Europe in the twentieth century, inequalities were gradually

lessened both by demand for technical and skilled labor and by welfare state policies

that tax the rich to support small farmers, unemployed workers, the elderly, and

children. Decades of social welfare policies in Western European nations have

helped reduce the divide between rich and poor. Most equal are the Scandinavian

countries of Sweden and Norway. Another advanced industrial nation with a fairly small gap between rich and poor is Japan, where defeat in war destroyed old elites

and postwar policies have combined with social pressures to limit huge incomes.

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Chapter 1: The Gordian Knot of Race, Class, and Gender 23

The most unequal advanced industrial nations are the former frontier societies. These are often also the least class-conscious, with strong ethics concerning equal standing and equal opportunity, and general suspicion of social snobbery. Yet the frontier approach to limited federal government and largely unrestrained markets, coupled with extensive land and resources, has led to vigorous but very unequal income growth for these now industrialized societies. They include the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with the United States leading the list as the most unequal (see Exhibit 1.2).

When countries have a frontier heritage and are still in the midst of industrializing, the inequalities are often vast: Brazil and South Africa vie for the title of the most unequal large nation in the world. Former frontier societies also have another element in common: The most entrenched inequality is usually not along old class lines-there is no nobility-but along racial lines. The United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and, to a certain extent, Brazil all have native populations confined to reserves, reservations, homelands, or other isolated, set-aside areas. New Zealand, the country in this group with the largest indigenous population (about 20% of New Zealand's inhabitants are Maori), has done perhaps the most to integrate that population into the immigrant majority society. South Africa, Brazil, and the United States all have histories of turning to African laborers to sustain their economies, imported across the Atlantic in the case of the latter two. Race relations are very dif- ferent among these three societies, and the nature of race relations is changing rapidly in all of them, but the correlation between color and class remains strong in all three.

The Coming of Postindustrial Society

Have we already begun the shift to another social and economic form? If so, what will its consequences be? Beginning around the mid-1960s and well under way by the 1970s, there has been a shift within advanced industrial economies away from a manufacturing base and toward a service base, a shift we will examine in more detail in Chapter 4. In the early 1970s, Daniel Bell ( 1973) referred to this shift as "the com- ing of post-industrial society:' Bell was quite optimistic that this change would create new opportunities for many, as the possession of knowledge rather than the control of physical capital would become the key asset. The widening of the ranks of the middle and upper-middle classes would continue as it had with industrial society, as new managers, professional service providers, and skilled technicians would be needed. Because women could provide these skills as well as men, gender inequality would diminish. As skills would become more important than old social divides, racial inequality might also decrease. This optimism is countered by the pessimistic analysis of "deindustrialization" (Bluestone and Harrison 1982), which asserts that the loss of industrial work undermines the gains of labor unions and the working

class, creating unemployment and a "race to the bottom" as workers in advanced industrial economies must compete with poorly paid workers in newly industrial-

izing countries. Hardest hit are the least protected workers-older, female, and

nonwhite workers in particular. Inequalities could therefore increase along lines of

race, class, and gender. A few profit enormously while many others lose job security

and see falling wages, leading to a shrinking middle class.

24 PART I: ROOTS OF INEQUALITY

Exhibit 1.2 Inequality in Industrial and Industrializing Former Frontier Societies

35:1

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CJ Industrializing • Industrial

Source: Data from United Nations Development Programme (2004).

The American case has been cited as proof that the Kuznets curve can be inverted: The United States has seen two decades of rapid growth accompanied by widening inequality. The decline in inequality stalled in the 1970s, and by the Reagan years of the 1980s inequality was growing rapidly, with the United States ahead of Britain, then ahead of France, and far ahead of Scandinavian countries and Japan. Given that the 1980s and the 1990s were periods of strong growth in the U.S. economy, it was not so much that the poor got poorer but that they got nowhere. It took the entire unprecedented growth of the Clinton era for the poorest groups just to recover what they lost in income in the recession of 1990 to 1992. Even that small gain was lost entirely in the recession of 2000 to 2004. Meanwhile, the wealthiest one-fifth of Americans watched their incomes soar. The greatest gains went to those who owned a piece of the national wealth. Upper-middle-class Americans with significant hold- ings in popular mutual funds gained some, and those few who controlled the vast majority of the stocks and assets of the country saw amazing windfalls.

We will look more closely at the dimensions of inequality-class, race, gender, status, and power-in the chapters that follow. Although we cant completely

Chapter 1: The Gordian Knot of Race, Class, and Gender 25

untangle the Gordian knot, we should at least be able to see clearly that the knot was twisted, strand by strand, by human hands. The dimensions of inequality are social constructions; that is, they're not facts of nature but the results of societal forms and patterns of power. The demands of the economy and the desires of ruling groups have divided societies along various lines, and cultural constructions follow to justify and explain societal patterns. What the members of one type of society find "obvious" about the nature and place of women may sound absurd to the mem- bers of another. Differences of color, language, ethnicity, or geography may be crucial determinants of an individual's place in one society and completely irrele- vant in another. Yet, once these differences become intertwined with class, prestige, and power, it can take years of hard effort to untangle the knot.

A Social Network Understanding of Inequality

Here at the start of our exploration into the dimensions of inequality we have the begin- nings of a theory of the origins of social inequality. Social inequality was not prominent in the tens of thousands of years that humans lived in hunter-gatherer bands, even though the range of inequality in individual talents and abilities (how are you at hunting large aggressive beasts with a spear?) must have been very large. Survival meant a close- knit community that reliably shared. Established inequality emerged as societies grew too large for this sharing. They needed a new social order, and new leaders emerged to control this order. Using charisma, persuasion, communication with spirits, and occa- sionally coercion, a few "big men" moved into privileged positions in a growing social network. They could use those positions of centrality and power to favor their followers, their own clan and family, and, of course, themselves. As the society grew, so did its resource base and its trade network. The privileged leaders of horticultural villages grew into the nobles and kings of growing agrarian states and, eventually, into the fabulously wealthy emperors of great empires.

This review of the rise of inequality may seem mostly of interest to those with a par- ticular interest in anthropology or historical sociology. But it is also pertinent to our current debates about the nature and future of inequality. Social inequality is rooted not nearly so much in individual talent as it is in commanding a privileged position in a complex social network of economic and social exchange. As these social networks grew,

so did the benefits accruing to those in positions of commanding and control at the core

of the system. Likewise, the penalties of being consigned to the margins of the system increased. Access to privileged positions in social networks also became bounded: first

by gender, then by ethnicity, religion, and citizenship, and ultimately by race. This is not just a broad-brush way to make sense of our long history, for it has real

implications for how we think about inequality. If social inequality is rooted primarily in the natural order and the inherent differences in human talents and abilities, then it

may be both inevitable and justifiable. If, however, inequality is a social construct, rooted in the needs and manipulations of a particular social order at a particular time,

then it may be less inevitable. If it is rooted not just in skill, but in persuasion, power, prestigious positions, and politics, then we may question whether it is so clearly justifi-

able. We can begin to ask probing questions about the ethics as well as the origins of

26 PART I: ROOTS OF INEQUALITY

inequality. Is it a good thing? For whom? And how much is needed? These questions have stirred social and religious thought for at least 2,500 years of human struggle,

KEY POINTS

• Inequality occurs along various dimensions. Max Weber noted three: class, sta- tus, and party. Gerhard Lenski termed the same basic divisions privilege, pres- tige, and power, respectively.

• Sociologists have grown increasingly interested in the intersecting dimensions of class, race, and gender, along with other dimensions such as ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and age.

• Inequality grows as societies become larger and more powerful. Advanced in- dustrial societies have seen a decrease in inequality with the growth of a large middle class. The effects of global, postindustrial economies are still uncertain, but many postindustrial societies are again seeing rises in inequality.

• Different societies vary in the emphasis they place on their constructions of class, race, and gender. Each society creates its own explanations for inequality along these dimensions.

• Attitudes toward race, ethnicity, and gender have shifted in the United States, yet these dimensions still divide the workplace, as seen in the food industry.

FOR REVIEW AND DISCUSSION

1. How has social inequality varied over human experience and history? What has characterized the divides of different forms of societies?

2. Is inequality likely to grow or diminish in the future? What changes or trends support your contention?

3. What do you believe matters most for a persons life chances: race, class, or gen-

der? Is this changing? How are they intertwined in your own experience?

MAKING CONNECTIONS

United Nations

Several organizations based in the United Nations gather and disseminate reliable

information on race, class, and gender around the world. For example:

• The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNES- CO; see www.unesco.org) makes available very good information on racial, eth- nic, and gender issues around the world.

• The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF; see www.unicef.org) offers good information on the status of children, including separate data on boys and girls, reports on the Year of the Child, and other materials on children.

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