Femininity, Social Construction of

Social constructionism is based on the notion that human beings create the societies that they inhabit. William Isaac Thomas and the sociologists of the Chicago School and various phenomenological sociologists and philosophers have been credited with generating the term. However, the term only came into popular use in the 1960s with the publication of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality, which synthesized ideas developed previously by French sociologist Emile Durkheim and American philosopher George Herbert Mead. While Berger and Luckman focused most of their studies on religion, their work has also been used to explain the development of “femininity” as a concept.

Thus, according to the dictates of social constructionism, the concept of “femininity” was constructed by beliefs, attitudes, and reactions ...