Social Class and Gender

Social class and gender, as well as race, are important concepts for analysis in the field of education. For example, when looking at success rates of students, or teacher education models, or content in curricula—as well as any demographic data about how students learn—it is critical to consider intersections across social class and gender. Historical and contemporary theoretical perspectives in education that draw on an intersectional analysis offer complex understandings of diversity.

Theories linking social class and gender are the result of women's liberation movement activism and feminist writing in the early 1970s, particularly by women of color. An analysis connecting social class and gender uses intersectional theory to complicate any discussion of either class or gender. Intersectional theory also links race in any thorough investigation. A seminal article from the field of critical race studies authored by Kimberlé Crenshaw and published in 1991, highlighted intersectional theory. Equally important, the Combahee River Collective, a feminist and activist African American women's group from Boston, wrote an essay in 1986 that brought forth a feminist gender and class analysis, inclusive of race, that helped to define intersectionality.

In the United States, social class has been defined in various ways. A Marxist analysis defines one's class based on ownership of the means of production. Current definitions focus more broadly on a person's relative social rank based on income, wealth, power, and social position. Gender also has various definitions, including how one distinguishes the differences between women and men, based on socially constructed views of femininity and masculinity. Today, gender also includes one's characteristics based on social roles, biological sex, and gender identity.

In the field of educational studies, linking social class and gender as well as race results in a richer and more complex discussion than when these variables are not linked. Linkages across feminist, multicultural, and socialist education theories were initially lacking in the field of education. Early feminist theories addressed White women's experience while making invisible the lives of women of [Page 1974]color. Early multicultural theorists often privileged the experiences of men of color, rather than acknowledging that women of color faced different barriers to success. Although socialist theorists addressed social class issues, they did not often speak to racial or gender differences.

In colleges and universities throughout the 1980s, curriculum transformation projects, often led by women of color academics, emerged. The foremost goal was the inclusion of women and people of color in curricula across all disciplines. Although class was not always directly addressed, social class analysis was embedded in these projects, particularly as working-class studies emerged. Similarly, K–12 curricula started to include perspectives by and about women, people of color, and working-class people. Simultaneously, theorists in colleges of education began to study the relationships across gender, social class, and race. Early work by Christine Sleeter and Carl Grant challenged researchers and teacher educators to be cognizant of how intersections across gender and social class (and race) shaped student learning. Previously, education researchers often focused exclusively on singular perspectives of either gender or social class (or race), but not at points of intersection.

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