Reconfigurations of Class and Gender (review)

In Reconfigurations of Class and Gender, Janeen Baxter and Mark Western bring together an important set of studies of contemporary social and economic inequality. The volume draws from the data resources, international collaborations, and theoretical insights generated through the Comparative Project on Class Structure and Class Consciousness. The project, driven primarily by Erik Olin Wright's vision of theory and method in "analytical Marxism," was a crucible of empirically informed, cross-nationally comparative class analysis during the 1980s and 1990s. The contributors all use data, concepts, or dialogues from the project to characterize change and continuity in class and gender as organizing principles of inequality.

The results are especially persuasive when applied to the daunting task of understanding what the editors in their introductory essay call the "basic shift in the institutional characteristics of the advanced societies" — the postindustrial transformations of the empirically interconnected social relations of class and gender. For example, Western and Baxter's chapter on paid and unpaid work in Australia and Sweden takes advantage of the project's cross-nationally comparable data to test hypotheses about the gender-specific dynamics of labor force participation and household work. They attend, as do others in this book, to the extent to which gender and class relations vary (or present relentlessly similar patterns, as the case often appears to be with the division of household labor) over time and between different economic and policy contexts. The chapter on the double entendre of "flexible employment" by the late Rachel Rosenfeld maps the complex ways class and gender shape both sides of the labor market. She surveys employee demands for more "flexible" work arrangements and career trajectories to mitigate work/family conflicts. She also assesses employer demands for more "flexible" deployments of labor power through contingent, contract, temporary, and part-time work. Rosenfeld's chapter illustrates the connections between class and gender that characterize the changing organization of work.

Paula England's chapter addresses several contentious issues. Is the individual or the household the appropriate unit of class analysis? What dimensions of jobs are relevant to gendered class analysis? What gender and class dynamics explain patterns in the "gendering of class" and the "feminization of poverty"? Her answers (rooted empirically in the U.S. case) reinforce the notion that measurement and conceptualization both matter. Concrete differences in the lives of women and men (especially in terms of childrearing and household work) create the modern paradox of gender and poverty: "Women have gained access to money through increased employment, which improves their marital power, but their ability to use this power to get men to share in traditionally female responsibilities is limited." When women with more independent means form households separately from men, they lose their access to men's earnings. As women continue to bear responsibility for children's welfare, the price of independence seems to be poverty, at least for older women and mothers. Because gendered patterns of labor force participation and earnings are entwined with patterns of marriage and household formation, understanding poverty requires gendered class analysis. As do the other chapter authors, England shows the benefits of feminists' and class analysts' grappling with the empirical and theoretical implications of the conceptual issues Wright frames in the first two chapters.

The implications of the big picture Western and Baxter present in the introduction may trouble some readers. The contributors to Reconfigurations of Class and Gender cast their assumptions about and assessments of the interconnectedness of class and gender in terms of the transition to postindustrial social organization. They thus implicitly write those connections — and by implication the importance of gender to class analytic accounts of social inequality — out of history. It is as though the past twenty-five years of research on gendered aspects of class relations, class consciousness, class formation, and class struggle (by scholars such as Alice Kessler-Harris, Ruth Milkman, Eileen Boris, Eva Baron, and other feminist labor...