Critiques of Social Theories

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 n

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this condition" (Simmel On 178). This contradiction, or confusion, is inconsequential in Simmel's overall argument about class, namely, that class divisions and conflicts are positive forces: The energy inherent in life to create forms that transcend life is a force toward cultural diversity [i.e., class divisions], not unity. In radical contrast to . . . Marx, who envisioned the goal of evolution to be the production of a homogeneous culture for one humanity, Simmel saw the generation of increasingly specialized cultural products ordered in fundamentally discrete and incommensurable worlds [i.e., again, class divisions] (Simmel On xvii). The middle class and the noble class, to Simmel, are "intermediate structures" whose purpose it is to struggle against one another, a struggle which creates a situation in which the individual can achieve his greatest accomplishments. For example, with respect to the noble class, Simmel writes that it "smelt[s] individuals" into a "superpersonal structure" which finds its "goal and meaning . . . in the existence of individuals, in their might and significance, in the freedom and self-sufficiency of their lives" (Simmel On 199; 213). In contrast, Marx's sees class as utterly destructive to

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