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 formed within particular cultures over time. All societies were assumed to assign certain characteristics and behaviors to those that were born female, teaching both girls and boys that females were supposed to be timid, soft, delicate, beautiful, and nurturing and imbuing females with responsibility for perpetuating constructs of femininity [Page 529]that were consistent with the views of the particular society that they inhabited.

Likewise, the term masculinity was socially constructed to explain how those of the male sex should behave and how males were viewed by the world around them. According to feminist thought, the system of patriarchy dictated that masculinity has historically been privileged in most cultures, including modern western culture, which gave birth to the legal emancipation of women. French writer and existentialist Simone de Beauvoir argues that in this way, males were defined as they norm, and females, by definition, become the “other.”

Since females were viewed as extensions of males rather than as individuals in their own rights, the social constructionist argument contended that females were expected to fit into idealized representations promoted within popular culture that called on them to be “feminine,” denoting particular body types, which were usually thin, youthful, well proportioned, alluring, and free of body hair. Sexuality became imbued with paradoxical constraints, suggesting that women should simultaneously be sexually attractive, alluring, and available, yet behave in an appropriately “lady-like” fashion.

Heterosexuality was generally presumed, and femininity was expressed as submissive, passive, and responsive to men's advances. Expressions of femininity that deviated from the social prescriptions of normalized behavior were viewed as deviant. Over time, definitions of femininity evolved to embrace the changing roles of women that resulted from women's movements in individual countries. Essentialists and constructivists originally took up polarized locations on the issue of the relation between the social and the natural. Essentialists held that the natural was repressed by the social, whereas constructivists posited that the natural was constructed by the social. This thought was epitomized in Simone de Beauvoir's famous axiom: woman is made, not born.

For women, the long-held belief about their proper roles evolved out of the conviction that in large part because of their reproduction capabilities, they were best suited to the private realm. Males, who were assigned the role of protecting and providing for their families, were assumed to be more at home in the public world. Today, the lines between the two schools of thought have become less distinct, with biological determinists contending that evolution rather than biology may be responsible for behaviors associated with gender roles.

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