1. Sydie argues that the ideas of Durkheim, Marx and Weber on gender issues and women's role in society are all based on their acceptance of "the idea of a sexual dichotomy and the assumption that women inhabited, ideally, a privatized domestic sphere and men the public world of action, decision, power and authority" (Sydie 9). The result of such a perspective, based on this "hierarchy of sex relations" is that women have been "defined out of the public spheres of action in a modern, industrial society" (Sydie 9-10). Sydie writes of Weber:
. . . One phenomenon that he took to be an unchangeable feature of social life was the "natural inequality" between the sexes. Weber saw power as essentially an arrangement among men. In addition, he regarded the access to power and domination by men as natural, inevitable or simply right (Sydie 54).
The place of women for Weber was in the home, a place determined from the beginning by nature: "The only 'natural' relationship is that of the mother and child 'because it is a biologically based household unit'" (Sydie 57). If nature dictates this hierarchy of gender relations with a man having freedom and power outside the home and women confined to the home, then to upset this relationship would be to defy nature, according to Weber. Women are not only defined by biology and confined to the home and child-rearing, according to Weber, they are also inferior by nature. Here Sydie paraphrases Weber: "The woman is dependent because of the normal superiority of the physical and intellectual energies of the male" and "within the patriarchal household the authority of the master is based on tradition" (Sydie 59). Men have "superior strength and practical knowledge and experience" (Sydie 58). Their physical strength was required in the earliest human history, but in modern society there is no reason that such strength should give men exclusive rights to social power. If men do have great knowledge a...