Heather McLaughlin’s Reflections on “Women as a Minority Group”

Helen Hacker’s “Women as a Minority Group” (Social Forces, 1951) has been cited nearly 400 times by prominent scholars such as Joan Acker, Myra Marx Ferree, Arlie Hochschild, Roberta Simmons, and Candace West. In this seminal piece, Hacker is the first to apply the term “minority group” to women, offering new theoretical insights that shaped the discipline for decades to come. In “Women as a Minority Group,” Hacker suggests many avenues for future research. Here, I highlight three particular insights in order to demonstrate the relevancy of Hacker’s work for contemporary debates within the sociology of gender.

Hacker writes that “no empirical study of the frequency of minority group feelings among women has yet been made.” This basic question—to what extent do women collectively identify as a minority group—had yet to be explored in mainstream sociology journals. Feminist scholars have since identified various “waves” of feminism to reflect viewpoints and feminist movements in the 1960s-1980s (second wave) and beginning in the late 1980s (third wave). Today, some have used the term “post-feminism” in asking whether feminism is even relevant in today’s society. Studies on whether young women today identify as feminists have brought us full circle in this debate (Aronson 2003).

Second, Hacker asks what it would mean for men and women to be fully “assimilated.” For Hacker, this would mean “women’s pages would disappear from the newspaper and women’s organizations would pass into limbo. The sports page and racing news would be read indifferently by men and women. Interest in cooking and interior decoration would follow individual rather than sex lines. Women’s talk would be no different from men’s talk, and frank and full communication would obtain between the sexes.” A gender utopia remains the vision of most feminist scholars, though it remains highly contested how and to what degree this can be accomplished. Scholars such as Judith Lorber, for example, call for a feminist degendering movement, a rebellion against the division of people into categories of women and men and all that is built on that division (e.g., work organizations, families, and politics).

Lastly, a third question raised by Hacker is “What hypotheses of inter-group relations may be tested in regard to men and women? For example, is it true that as women approach the cultural standards of men, they are perceived as a threat and tensions increase?” Questions of power and inequality are at the core of sociological research, and this particular question has received considerable attention within the subfield of gender. Within sexual harassment research, for example, scholars put forth two distinct hypotheses: the vulnerable victims hypothesis and the power-threat model. While the former suggests that women with the least workplace power, those in temporary or other precarious positions, are most vulnerable to harassment, the latter suggests that women who hold more organizational or workplace power threaten men’s dominance in the workplace and are more frequent targets of harassment (Berdahl 2007; McLaughlin, Uggen, and Blackstone 2012). While this remains an important guiding question in sexual harassment and other research, recent studies (e.g., McLaughlin et al. 2012) find greater support for the power-threat hypothesis, as Hacker suggested nearly sixty years ago.

Hacker’s “Women as a Minority Group” offers many theoretical insights and raises a number of additional questions that have sparked their own lines of research and debates. Returning to this classic work, armed with contemporary scholarship on sex and gender, provides a fresh perspective many unanswered questions. As you read this piece and others throughout the volume, it is useful to reflect on how these questions have evolved over time, how society has both changed and remained the same, and what are the implications for both men and women.