RETHINKING STRATIFICATION FROM A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE - GENDER, RACE,AND CLASS IN MAINSTREAM TEXTBOOKS

Economic stratification and social class occupy a central position in sociological discourse as the core organizing features of modern socie ties. Yet such economically centered models of stratification often di sregard factors like physical violence and the intra-household distrib ution of resources that shape power and autonomy for all groups. Using a sample of textbooks from 1983 through 1988, we examine ''mainstream '' sociology, that is, the sociology that teachers, students, and text book publishers have treated as nonproblematic. We show how stratifica tion analysis is applied to class, race, and gender in profoundly uneq ual ways. Rather than integrating macro, meso, and micro levels of soc ial structure as interactive and mutually determinative in their discu ssions of race, class, and gender, introductory sociology textbooks se gregate stratification processes. They discuss class at the societal ( or macro) level of analysis, gender at the individual (or micro) level , and race at a group (or meso) level. We analyze the quantitative and qualitative elements of the coverage of class, race, and gender in in dexes, texts, pictures, and captions, and suggest that attention to fe minist theories of gender would produce a more integrated, multilevel, and interactive view. of stratification.