32.

Race, Class and Gender in the US

Definitions:

Race: a local geographic or global human population distinguished as a more or less distinct group by
genetically transmitted physical characteristics
Racism:a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among thevarious human races determine cultural 
or individualachievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right t
o rule others
Class: a status hierarchy in which individuals and groups are classified on the basis of esteem and
prestige acquired mainly through economic success and accumulation of wealth  social class may
also refer to any particular level in such a hierarchy
Gender: sexual identity, especially in relation to society or culture
Sexism: discrimination based on gender, especially discrimination against women

Racism and sexism can be either conscious or unconscious, intentional or unintentional.

Women in American society – by William H. Chafe (summary)

“Women’s Place” in American Life

- colonial daughters were taught to be moral, pious, devoted, subservient and nurturing
- women’s primary role as citizens should be to influence men through their positions as
“housewives and mothers” as a latter-day manifestation of the same cultural worldview that
guided colonial America
- as the industrial revolution separated home and workplace, it became a symbol of success for
man to women now limited to domestic roles in the home, often aided by servant who were
black or recently from Europe  some historians viewed this development as an occasion for
women to carve out new sphere of power over family and home (domestic feminism)
- women’s club  moved to the public arena of concern over child labour, alcohol abuse, and
factory safety conditions

Suffrage and Other Changes

- woman suffrage had become a primary objective of such groups
- it was believed, suffrage would help transform society, even as it promoted women into a
larger role of responsibility and equality
- women received the right to vote in 1920
- Equal Rights Amendment (1923)  there should be no differences in the law between women
and men
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 - early 20th century  the number of women who held paying jobs continued to increase 
they were young, single and poor, their jobs were low paying, sex segregated, and offering
little opportunity for advancement
- Margaret Mead: young woman, who contemplating a career hat two choices  a woman,
therefore less an achieving individual, or an achieving individual, and therefore less a woman

World War II and Woman at Work

- between 1941 and 1945 over six million women took jobs for the first time, the majority of
them married and over thirty (soldier gone to the front)  women workforce increased by
57%
- they performed every kind of work imaginable, from maneuvering giant cranes in steel mills
to toppling huge redwoods in the Oregon forest
- none received equal pay with men
- after war, return home?  80% of women wanted to stay  they enjoyed being paid for their
work and receiving recognition (active role)
- men insisted that women must recapture their traditional role as homemakers
- after war  baby boom

Affluence and the Second Income

- from the late 1940s to the present, the most outstanding feature of labour force participation
rates has been the rapid women’s employment rate increased four times faster than that of men
- after post-war demobilization  women returned to the job market
- dominated: married and over thirty-five
- these women took the job to help the family  sex segregated jobs: clerical and sales work
- without that second income owing a home or providing college education for one’s children
would have been virtually impossible  in 1975 the average income of a one-earner family
was 12000 dollars, two-income family: 17,500 dollars
- in 1940 only 15 % of married women were employed  1970 more than 50 % of those with
children six to seventeen years old were in the work force and by the 1980 more than 50% of
those with children under six were also employed

Women’s Liberation in the 1960s

- 1964 Civil Rights Bill  black Americans and women demand equality  the bill outlawed
discriminatory treatment based on sex and race
- by the end of the 60s women’s movement had succeeded in the challenging nearly all of
America’s traditional cultural assumptions about women’s proper place
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 - NOW – National Organization of Woman challenged employment discrimination, bias
against women in politics, and anti-female prejudice so dominant in the country’s major
economic and social institutions
- changing attitudes towards women
- college educated women: career is as important as marriage  more and more women entered
in law and medical schools
- changing family  1950  70% -father breadwinner, mother is at home 1980  only 15% of
the families were like that
- after the baby boom birth rates declined (women at work)

Present situation – based on Wikipedia

- from 2003-2011 – American women served in Iraq War
- first same sex couple legally married – Del Martin and Phllyis Lyon
- Nancy Pelosi – the first Speaker of the House of Representatives
- 2008 – Hillary Clinton: first woman to win a presidential primary
- Sarah Palin, Alaska governor was nominated to be the Vice President of the Republicans 
she was not elected though
Some Famous American women: (ide lehet bőven keresni példákat:
http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/figures.htm )
Susan Brownell Anthony (1820 – 1906) - Napoleon of the women's suffrage movement, mother of the
19th Amendment, abolitionist
Carrie Chapman Catt (1859 – 1947) - Suffragette, founder of the League of Women Voters
Dorothy Fuldheim (1893-1989) - Jewish-American news journalist and television broadcaster;
developed format for television news programming
………
Homosexuals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_States

Class in the US (mixed sources)

- “This is the country where is no distinction of class, no distinction of social status.” –

Woodrow Wilson (1912)  according to modern sociologists’ questionnaires, American
attitude towards class have not changed much during the past two generations  this attitude
toward class is called American exceptionalism  but class lines and distinctions do exist!
- class  complex concept, it has multidimensional components: status, prestige and
subjectivity involved in ranking even such objective features as occupation and residence

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 - “class consciousness” - what the class regards as the distinctive constellation of values shared
by the members  American workers (and other groups as well) seem no to share common
consciousness, because they are divided by race, ethnicity, religion, income and type and
prestige of occupation
- differentiating Americans by class: upper, middle and lower classes  with each three
categories subdivided into an upper and lower segment (Edward Pessen)
- class: intellectual construct, designed to promote better understanding of the actual, random
chaos in any social order. – Edward Pessen
Academic Class Model by William Thompson & Joseph Hickey (2005) – Wikipedia (de
gyakorlatilag hasonlóról beszélt Pessen is, de ezen kívül van még két másik model:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class_in_the_United_States#Academic_models)
Upper class (1%) Top-level executives, celebrities, heirs; income of $500,000+ common. Ivy
league education common
Upper middle class (15%) Highly-educated (often with graduate degrees) professionals &
managers with household incomes varying from the high 5-figure range to commonly above
$100,000 (itt érne valamit a diploma)
Lower middle class (32%) Semi-professionals and craftsmen with some work autonomy;
household incomes commonly range from $35,000 to $75,000. Typically, some college education
Working class (32%) Clerical, pink- and blue-collar workers with often low job security;
common household incomes range from $16,000 to $30,000. High school education
Lower class (14-20%) Those who occupy poorly-paid positions or rely on government transfers.
Some high school education

Another model – six social classes (hasonló a fentihez, érdemes belenézni)

(http://www.sparknotes.com/sociology/social-stratification-and-inequality/section6.rhtml)

- from the Revolutionary era to the present  class has powerful effects: it has controlled the
quality and the quantity of the food Americans eat, the clothes they wear, their household of
their homes and neighbourhoods, quality of their marriages, sexual behaviour etc…
- poor people: higher rates of emotional and psychological disfunctions
- class influences the kind of crimes people commit, the quality of legal defence they can
obtain, the severity of punishments they are likely to receive, how long people live
- class: significant part of contemporary American life!!

Poverty in the US. (több itt: http://www.sparknotes.com/sociology/social-stratification-and-

inequality/section7.rhtml)
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About 66 percent of poor people are white, reflecting the fact that white people outnumber people of
other races and ethnic groups in the United States. About 25 percent of the people living in poverty are
black. The term feminization of poverty refers to the increasing number of female-headed households
living at or below the poverty level. In the 1960s, approximately 25 percent of all female-headed
households were in poverty; that figure is about 50 percent today. An increasing number of children
are affected by this trend. As of 2005, about 16 percent of children under age 18 live in poverty; about
80 percent of them live in households headed by a single female.

The rural South has a high rate of poverty for several reasons:

- manufacturing concerns have preferred to operate in suburban areas, which are closer to
interstate highways, railroads, and airports that enable manufacturers to transport their
products
- educational levels in the South tend to be lower.  about 12 percent of the general U.S.
population drops out of high school; in the South the dropout rate is about 15 percent
- the increasing demands of technology require employees who are flexible, skilled, and able to
learn rapidly  a workforce composed of people with relatively low levels of education and
few job skills is simply not attractive to potential employers

Poverty Rate 2009-2010 (http://www.statehealthfacts.org/profileind.jsp?rgn=1&ind=14)

overty Rate by Race/Ethnicity, states (2009-2010), U.S. (2010)View 50-State Comparison

US US US US
 
# % # %

White 27,512,700 14% 27,512,700 14%

Black 13,378,600 36% 13,378,600 36%

Hispanic 17,555,000 35% 17,555,000 35%

Other 4,853,200 23% 4,853,200 23%

Total 63,299,500 21% 63,299,500 21%

Race in the US

History
- the United States of America is a racially diverse country

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- immigrant populations began to mix among themselves and with the indigenous inhabitants of
the continent. In the United States, for example, most people who self-identify as African
American have some European ancestors
- similarly, many people who identify as European American have some African or Native
American ancestors, either through openly interracial marriages or through the gradual
inclusion of people with mixed ancestry into the majority population. In a survey of college
students who self-identified as white in a northeastern U.S. university, ~30% were estimated
to have less than 90% European ancestry
- Native Americas, European Americans and African Americans  considered to be different
races since the US’ early history   For nearly three centuries, the criteria for membership in
these groups were similar, comprising a person’s appearance, his social circle (how he lived)
and his fraction of known non-White ancestry
- slavery: slavery in the United States was unique for several reasons. First, it had a fairly equal
male-to-female ratio. Slaves also lived longer than in other regions. They often reproduced,
and their children were born into slavery. In other countries, slavery was not permanent or
hereditary. Once slaves paid off their debts, they were set free. In the United States, slaves
were rarely freed before the Civil War.
- in the early 20th century, this notion of "invisible" blackness was made statutory in southern
states and many beyond the former Confederacy
- In the 20th century, efforts to sort the increasingly mixed population of the United States into
discrete categories generated many difficulties. By the standards used in past  censuses, many
millions of mixed-race children born in the United States have been classified as of a different
race than one of their biological parents. Efforts to track mixing between groups led to a
proliferation of categories (such as "mulatto" and "octoroon") and "blood quantum"
distinctions, which became increasingly untethered from self-reported ancestry. In addition, a
person's racial identity can change over time, and self-ascribed race can differ from assigned.
See more: 34. tétel 

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 Population of the United States by Race and Hispanic/Latino Origin, Census 2000 and 2010

Census 2010, Percent of  Census 2000,  Percent of 

Race and Hispanic/Latino origin population population population population
Total Population 308,745,538 100.0% 281,421,906 100.0%

Single race        

 White 196,817,552 63.7 211,460,626 75.1

 Black or African American 37,685,848 12.2 34,658,190 12.3

 American Indian and Alaska Native 2,247,098 .7 2,475,956 0.9

 Asian 14,465,124 4.7 10,242,998 3.6

 Native Hawaiian and other Pacific

481,576 0.15 398,835 0.1
Islander

Two or more races 5,966,481 1.9 6,826,228 2.4

Some other race 604,265 .2  15,359,073 5.5

Hispanic or Latino 50,477,594 16.3 35,305,818 12.5

Read more: Population of the United States by Race and Hispanic/Latino Origin, Census 2000 and July 1, 2005
— Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762156.html#ixzz1wLvRoZHd