Jane Pilcher

School Sex Education: Policy and Practice in England 1870 to 2000.

This article draws on a range of primary and secondary sources to provide an account of the development in England of sex education in schools between 1870 and 2000. It pays particular attention to the decades prior to and just after the Second World War (1939–45) about which relatively little is known. Focusing on official guidance to schools provided by central government, and reports of the nature and extent of practices in school sex education at the local level, the article traces gradual shifts in policy on and practices of sex education. It is shown that, although some formal sex education took place in schools during the early part of the twentieth century, matters of sex did not become firmly established in central government guidance to schools until the 1950s. Thereafter, both central government guidance on sex education and local level practices in schools became more expansive. However, the 1980s and 1990s stand out as countervailing decades in the longer term progressive development of school sex education in England.

Domestic Divisions of Labour in the Twentieth Century: ‘Change Slow A-Coming’

Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers, She Works, He Works. How Two-Income Families Are Happy, Healthy and Thriving, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998, paper £9.95, xii+260 pp. Francine Deutsch, Halving It All. How Equally Shared Parenting Works, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999, paper £15.50, 327 pp. Richard Layte, Divided Time. Gender, Paid Employment and Domestic Labour, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999, xiv+190 pp. These three books each focus on the way heterosexual couples manage the household and caring work of family life along with paid work, and each were published in the last years of the twentieth century. The other millennium bug (the infectious tendency to reflect back over the century) inevitably means that here I locate their findings within the body of British evidence on the distribution of household and caring work between women and men during the twentieth century.

No logo? children's consumption of fashion

In this article data are presented on children’s appraisal of clothing retailers and brands, and how this interacts with their identity and social contexts. In exploration of some of the meanings and processes surrounding children’s consumption of branded or labelled clothing, two case studies of child consumers are profiled: one who actively consumed designer-label clothing, and another for whom it held limited significance. It is argued that children aged 12 and under knowingly and skilfully use their consumer knowledge in the reflexive presentation of their selves, or their own ‘me’, but that these practices are structured by their place in the social and generational order.

Names, Bodies and Identities

In this article, I argue that the emerging field of the sociology of naming should recognize the fundamental importance of bodies in the range of social practices through which individuals come to have, and to be identified by, names. I introduce the concept of ‘embodied named identity’ to describe the outcome of identificatory practices of naming fundamentally orientated around and rooted in the body. I argue that the concept addresses the neglect of the body within the sociology of names and the neglect of naming within both the sociology of identity and in the sociology of the body. In my elaboration of the value of the concept of embodied named identity for enhancing sociological understanding, I focus on evidence on naming practices in relation to sexed and gendered bodies, racialized and ethnic bodies, bodies, nicknames and characterization, ‘nameless’ bodies and ‘body-less’ names.

Gender Matters? Three Cohorts of Women Talking about Role Reversal

Cohort is an important predictor of gender-role attitudes, as a number of surveys have shown. In this article, I undertake a comparison between cohorts of women on the issue of role reversal, with a primary focus on the qualitative differences in what was said and by whom, rather than in how many said what. It is my argument that a qualitative analysis is revealing of the way in which cohort acts to influence the very language used to report ‘agreement’ or ‘disagreement’ on matters of gender. Via an analysis of responses to an interview question on role reversal, it is shown that historical location via cohort operates to make permissible and/or available, some ways of talking rather than others. Consequently, on the issue of role reversal, gender featured as a more relevant category in the talk of the oldest cohort than in the talk of the younger cohorts.

‘Small, but Very Determined’: A Novel Theorization of Children’s Consumption of Clothing:

Childhood and consumption are each firmly established as substantive topics in sociology, yet the relationship between them remains narrowly considered. In this paper I attempt to deepen sociological understanding of one aspect of children’s consumption (their clothing) through reimagining the structure and agency problematic via a novel theorization centred on the concept of determinativity. I do this by engaging in a critical evaluation and adaptive use of existing theories, and by using data from an empirical study to illustrate and strengthen the theoretical claims I make. Children are argued to be exceptional consumers, in that what they come to wear on their bodies is subject to a different set of social processes than is the case for adults. At the same time, the theorization offered in this paper suggests ways forward for rethinking how individuals at all stages of the life course interactively engage in consumer societies.

Women's Training Roadshows and the ‘Manipulation’ of Schoolgirls’ Career Choices

Abstract A mesh of social processes contribute to the predominance of women in a narrow range of low paid, low status and low skilled jobs. The views that women and girls themselves hold on the types of work for which they are best suited are one element of this mesh. Womens Training Roadshows are an example of strategies which aim to widen the options that are considered by schoolgirls as part of their transition from school to work. This paper locates Roadshows in the context of similar initiatives and goes on to consider some of the benefits of this approach.

Names and “Doing Gender”: How Forenames and Surnames Contribute to Gender Identities, Difference, and Inequalities

Names, as proper nouns, are clearly important for the identification of individuals in everyday life. In the present article, I argue that forenames and surnames need also to be recognized as “doing” words, important in the categorization of sex at birth and in the ongoing management of gender conduct appropriate to sex category. Using evidence on personal naming practices in the United States and United Kingdom, I examine what happens at crisis points of sexed and gendered naming in the life course (for example, at the birth of babies, at marriage, and during gender-identity transitions). I show how forenames and surnames help in the embodied doing of gender and, likewise, that bodies are key to gendered practices of forenaming and surnaming: we have “gendered embodied named identities.” Whether normative and compliant, pragmatic, or creative and resistant, forenaming and surnaming practices are revealed as core to the production and reproduction of binary sex categories and to gendered identities, difference, hierarchies, and inequalities.

Evaluating a women's careers convention: methods, results and implications

Abstract This paper reports an evaluation of a careers convention for women, designed to widen their occupational horizons. The convention was held in Wales in 1987, and evaluated the same year. Data are provided on how 500 schoolgirls reacted to the event and how they plan to spend their own futures. The findings are shown to be relevant to anyone attempting to improve careers education, challenge sex stereotyping in education, or run similar conventions. The young women are shown to have enjoyed the convention, and to have learnt about non‐traditional careers available to modern females, but the majority remain attached to traditionally female jobs for themselves.

The Politics of Children’s Clothing

Age-related altercations about clothing are a longstanding phenomenon; the fashion choices of ‘the young’ have not always been to the taste or enjoyed the wholehearted approval of the ‘not young’. Commonly recognisable flash points between young people and their parents, teachers or employers include the shape of shoes, the knot of a tie, the length of a hem, the cut of trousers or the depth of a neck line. Disagreements about clothes — and where, when and how they are worn, and by whom — can be understood as an expression of differences in values, identities and interests between younger and older age groups. Typically, age-related conflicts over clothing fashions have tended to be between teenagers and adults, and worked out in the context of familial rules, or the localised uniform policies or ‘dress codes’ of schools and workplaces. Public and media interest in the issue has been only sporadic, arising especially in relation to the more ‘spectacular’ fashions of youth cultures like Mods, Rockers or Punks (Hebdige 1979; Bennett 2001; Hall and Jefferson 2005; Cohen 2011).