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.What is interesting for sociologists about Agnes is thatshe illustrates how gender is something that we learn to do and canrelearn, although this may not be easy:Agnes vehemently insisted that she was, and was to be treated as, anatural, normal female.While her claims to her natural femininitycould be advanced they could not be taken for granted.Many matters 36 LEARNING AND DOING GENDER IN EVERYDAY LIFE[such as initial problems with her constructed vagina] served asobstinate reminders that her femininity, though claimed, could beclaimed only at the cost of vigilance and work.(Garfinkel 1967: 134)The only real difference between Agnes and other women is thatAgnes had to learn how to do femininity rather late in life, and wasmore conscious of how she did things and more worried aboutgetting it wrong than most women.This process of learning todo gender has to take account of what kind of body you have, butis not determined by it.If sex refers to basic bodily differences (female/male) that inter-est biologists, gender refers to how people learn about how to befeminine or masculine and apply what they learn in living theireveryday lives.Socialization is the process by which we learn howto act appropriately as members of a particular society.What isthought appropriate for girls and women, as compared to boysand men, often differs.A major part of socialization is aboutlearning how to do gender.Social structure, the way society isorganized (for example, around classes), is crucial in shaping ouractions in gendered ways.Crucial in forming gender is the wayfamilies are established and who does what within them.Otherinstitutions, such as the education system and the mass media, arekey agents of socialization: they are central in how people learnto do gender.Also important is the way that a particular societyorganizes for the everyday work to be done that is needed to keepthings running.Who is most suited to different kinds of work isoften decided partly according to gender.Not only social structurebut ideas about femininity or masculinity shape people.It is notjust being born with a penis that makes you masculine, and infact we sometimes describe people with male bodies ( men ) as feminine.Sociologists argue that what is meant by feminine and masculine is not fixed, and depends on the way a particular soci-ety has of understanding gender at a particular time.In other LEARNING AND DOING GENDER IN EVERYDAY LIFE 37words, gender is socially constructed.It can be shown thatgender is socially constructed by using the sociological imagin-ation to explore how gender has meant different things and beendone differently in different times and places.A look at historyillustrates changing ways of learning and doing gender.Then thereis a comparison of different ways of doing gender within presenteveryday life.Here, rather than look at how different cultures havedifferent ways of doing gender, examples of varieties of styles ofmasculinity and femininity within contemporary Western cultureare examined.The rest of the chapter focuses on attempts withinsociology to critically understand gender, not as natural , but asdone within the everyday lives of individuals.If gender is learnedand done, it can be done differently, and perhaps in ways morelikely to promote equality.HISTORIES OF DOING GENDERWorking at genderWhat it means to be feminine or masculine has altered throughouthistory.This tends to be ignored in common-sense thinking,which imagines that there are long-standing traditional ways ofbeing a woman or a man that reflect what is natural and thereforeshould not be changed.In relation to femininity it is thought thatwomen s traditional or natural role is as mothers and that theyshould devote all or most of their attention to this and not work.However, this is based on the idea that work is something doneoutside the home and that what women do as housewives andmothers does not count as work.That women s natural rolemeans not doing paid work can be challenged by looking at whatwomen have done in the past.Prior to Europe s Industrial Revolu-tion in the eighteenth century, for example, the vast majority ofwomen were centrally engaged in the business of helping theirfamilies survive.The work this involved often took place in ornear the home.Most of the population lived in rural areas and 38 LEARNING AND DOING GENDER IN EVERYDAY LIFEwomen helped work the land, with even young children joining inwith whatever tasks they were able to do.Some families workedtogether in craft industries such as weaving.Usually the womendid the spinning, the men the weaving, and children assistedwith the carding of wool and housework.But there were somedivisions between work done at home and out in the wider publicworld, and even then women were involved.In the medievalperiod in Britain, for example, women worked in a wide rangeof occupations.However, women s relationship to work began tochange:In the guilds their situation was being progressively weakened.The oldprotections and privileges of widows disappeared, and as apprentice-ships became more formal the entrance of women to trades was closed.A sustained struggle developed from the sixteenth century over thedefinition of women s work.Some trades which had been reservedfor women were encroached upon and eventually taken over by men.Brewing was probably originally a women s trade but by the seventeenthcentury brewsters (female brewers) were prohibited.In York, despitewomen s resistance, men replaced them in candlemaking.(Rowbotham 1972: 26)This may be a picture of past women s lives that is slightlysurprising if we think that there has been steady and clear pro-gress from women being dependent on men and under theirthumbs, to some present situation of independence.It also con-tradicts common-sense ideas which sometimes assume thatwomen were previously stay-at-home housewives and have onlyrecently gone out to work.It is important to note that there arealways a variety of social expectations about and ways of doingfemininity and masculinity at a particular time, they are alwayschanging and are open to being interpreted and challenged byindividuals.The eighteenth century is a period which illustrates well thatthere were constantly changing and sometimes competing ways LEARNING AND DOING GENDER IN EVERYDAY LIFE 39of doing masculinity.During the 1700s in Britain there was ashift away from earlier characterizations of the ideal man as thehonourable head of the household in control of his dependents,towards an ideal of the polite gentleman
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