Class, Race, and Gender
Structured Inequalities
Class, race, and gender organize society as a whole and create a variety of contexts for family living
through their unequal distribution of social opportunities.
• They are forms of stratification that foster group-based inequalities.
• They distribute social resources and opportunities differently.
• Life chances
• They are relational systems of power and subordination.
• They are interconnected systems of inequality.
• Matrix of domination
• Families can be a place to resist inequality
• Social stratification: structured (socially patterned) inequality
• Groups are socially defined & treated unequally
Class
• Persons occupying the same relative economic rank form a social class.
• Striking differences in income; growing gap between top 1/5 & bottom 1/5
• Occupation is the most frequently used indicator of class.
• Determines income, opportunity, lifestyle
• Cultural explanations of class
• Each class is viewed as having a distinctive culture.
• Comparisons between the classes usually turn out to be “deficit” accounts of lower-status families.
• Culture of poverty, underclass
• Cultural explanations obscure or ignore the social and material realities of class.
• Rodman: “lower class family traits” are actually solutions to problems faced by lower class people
• Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID): families experience short-term spells of poverty as result of
dramatic changes (divorce, sudden unemployment, serious illness)
• Structural Explanations of Class
• Examine the ways in which social class shapes the networks of relationships between families,
individuals, and institutions.
• Focus on relationships of power between class groups
• The key to social class is not occupation, but the control one has in one’s work, the work of others,
decision making, & investments.
• Different connections with society’s opportunity structure produce & require unique family adaptations
• Class privileges (advantages, prerogatives, options available to middle & upper classes) shape
family relationships
• Class structure organizes families differently
• Poverty, wage earning, affluent salaries, & inherited wealth create different material advantages,
differences in the amount of control over others, and class differences in how families are shaped &
how they operate
• Gender cuts across class & race racial divisions
Class-Based Family Differences
• Families in Poverty (Lower Class)
• Lack of opportunities make nuclear family difficult to sustain: poor are more likely to expand family
boundaries, use larger network of kin than nonpoor
• Poverty reduces the likelihood of marriage: undermines the availability of economically secure partners
• Blue-Collar Families (Working Class)
• Largest single group of families
• Economic changes, increased vulnerability move these families farther from idealized nuclear family
model: pioneers of contemporary family patterns
• Interact more with kin than middle class families do
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