Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

128 reframing latin america
was bolstered by a scientifi c doctrine of innate sex difference. Women’s exclusion
from universities, for instance, was justifi ed by the claim that the
feminine mind was too delicately poised to handle the rigors of academic
work. The resulting mental disturbance would be bad for their capacities
to be good wives and mothers. The fi rst generation of women who did get
into North American research universities not only violated this doctrine.
They also questioned its presuppositions, by researching the differences in
mental capacities between men and women. They found very few.
This scandalous result triggered an enormous volume of follow-up research,
which has fl owed from the 1890s to the 1990s. It has covered not
only mental abilities but also emotions, attitudes, personality traits, interests,
indeed everything that psychologists thought they could measure.
There is a remarkable amount of “sex difference” research. It is technically
fairly simple to do, and there is constant interest in its results.
That in itself is curious, for the results have not changed. Sex differences,
on almost every psychological trait measured, are either non-existent or
fairly small. Certainly they are much smaller than the differences in social
situations that are commonly justifi ed by the belief in psychological
differences—such as unequal incomes, unequal responsibilities in child care
and drastic differences in access to social power. When groups of studies are
aggregated by the statistical technique of meta-analysis, it is more likely
to be concluded that some sex differences in psychological characteristics
do exist. But their modest size would hardly register them as important
phenomena if we were not already culturally cured to exaggerate them [. . .].
Around the midcentury, sex difference research met up with a concept
that seemed to explain its subject-matter in an up-to-date way, the concept
of “social role.” The meeting gave birth to the term “sex role,” which in
time passed into everyday speech.
The idea of a sex role is now so common that it is worth emphasizing
its recent origin. The metaphor of human life as a drama is of course an
old one—it was used by Shakespeare. But the use of “role” as a technical
concept in the social sciences, as a serious way of explaining social behavior
generally, dates only from the 1930s. It provided a handy way of linking the
idea of a place in social structure with the idea of cultural norms. Through
the efforts of a galaxy of anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists the
concept, by the end of the 1950s, had joined the stock of conventional terms
in social science [. . .].
Most often, sex roles are seen as the cultural elaboration of biological
sex differences. But this is not necessary. The sophisticated statement of
sex role theory made in the mid-1950s by Talcott Parsons in Family, Socialization,
and Interaction Process takes another approach. Here the distinc-