Viola Klein
Viola Klein was a sociologist in Great Britain. Her work demonstrated that objective ideas about women's attributes are socially constructed. Although her early training was in psychology and philosophy, her most prolific research engagements concerned women's social roles and how these changed after the Industrial Revolution. She was one of the first scholars to bring quantitative evidence to bear on this socio-economic topic. Her research not only illuminated the changing roles of women in society, but she also wrote and lectured on concrete social and political changes that would help facilitate these new roles.
Early life
Viola Klein was born in Vienna in 1908 to a Jewish family. As a young student, she moved to Prague with her family owing to political circumstances after studying one year at the Sorbonne University in Paris and a short period at the University of Vienna. She continued her studies at the university in Prague and graduated in fields of psychology and philosophy. During her studies in Prague, she worked as an assistant editor. Besides psychology and philosophy, she was also interested in French literature. Her first doctoral thesis was about the linguistic style of the modernist French author Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Because of her interest in the woman question she visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Inspired by this visit she wrote several articles in British magazines about "double speak". It represented the new role of women in society, marriage and the family. In 1938, she and her brother migrated to England. Shortly after fleeing, their parents died in a Nazi concentration camp.As Jewish refugees, Klein and her brother had problems finding work in England. For a short period of time, she worked as a domestic servant until she finally received a scholarship from the Czech government operating in exile. This enabled her to enroll in the London School of Economics and to work on her second doctorate diploma. During her studies in London, she met the well-known sociologist Karl Mannheim, who became her supervisor. Because of their similar cultural background they were interested in similar social issues, literature and art. Both of them were collecting information and ideas relating to her thesis while traveling across the country between different universities. In 1946, Klein published her second thesis, one of her best known publications - The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology. This publication was criticized because of its ostensibly militant feminism which departed from the traditional views and values. Her encouragement of women to work if they so desired, was perceived by critics as a destructive social force, provoking destabilization and family problems.
Klein worked in relatively lower status positions as editor, translator and teacher. However, she continued her research working on female employment in Great Britain. Starting in 1951, she collaborated with the Swedish sociologist Alva Myrdal and together they eventually published the book Women's Two Roles: Home and Work. This publication helped her to increase her involvement in international research activities. In 1964, she was offered her first academic post as lecturer in the Sociology department at the University of Reading in Great Britain. After 3 years, she was promoted to senior lecturer and in 1971 to reader.
In 1973, shortly after her retirement, she died at the age of 65.
General overview
Klein's thoughts were constructed around the meaning of a femininity concept and the social creation of a feminine character. In her first important work: The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology, she claimed that attitudes in society considered as feminine are not factual observations but preconceptions and particular subjective interpretations. Providing a question about sources of the knowledge about womanhood and examining studies from the beginning of the 19th century, she wanted to prove that "what we think of specific perspectives are not guaranteed truths but the ideas subject to the influence of surrounding culture and personal bias". With her work Klein wanted to demonstrate that scientists, whose assumptions result from particular branches of knowledge, are not free from the social, cultural and historical climates of their time. She observed that scientific objective studies about femininity are full of stereotypes and repeat particular traits like "passivity, emotionally, lack of abstract interests, greater intensity of personal relationships and, an instinctive tenderness for babies". Therefore, she wanted to define a feminine nature, using notions of social and cultural expectations "Klein sought to isolate psychological influences on sex difference by excluding sex-related traits that could be attributed to social function, historic tradition and prevailing ideology".Gender, sex roles and role theory
For a long time before the concept of gender was used in scientific discourse, Klein considered Role Theory in her research on what is feminine. Pointing out that every individual in society occupies various social positions; Klein wrote that each position includes particular patterns of roles and behaviors. According to Klein, the process of becoming an adult is the action of learning appropriate role patterns like mother's role, teacher's role, school girl's role and within every particular society these patterns are understood differently. "Male and female roles are thought to be the new members of the social group in innumerable and subtle ways almost from birth. They are reinforced by experience, example, innuendos and the various others means by which social control is usually exercised". Starting from stereotypes about womanhood and sex-role prejudices, Klein explained that the framework in which individuals develop and which shapes the way individuals adapt is full of common belief, social opinion, and tradition.What Klein started in her research, supervised by Mannheim and known as an ideology of feminine character, came to be known as psychosocial orientation after 1975 and eventually subsumed into the nexus that we know today as gender.. As Shira Terrant claimed, Klein's research about femininity conceptualized within Mannheim methodology - underestimated by the second-wave of feminists - in fact gave roots to this concept. Contrary to Parsons' functionalistic understanding of Role Theory and sex-roles division, Klein understood the concept more broadly, that femininity and masculinity should include also personal traits that can be more or less assigned to the opposite sex's character, a concept later solidified in transgender and queer theory.
The Sociology of knowledge
Within Mannheim's sociology of knowledge framework and its standpoint to understand how "individuals give meaning to their ongoing reality within context structured by specific institutions social values structure our perception, give legitimacy to certain ways of seeing the world, and give moral credence to particular patterns of relationships" reality is understood by individuals within institutionally structured frameworks. Klein was the first who used Mannheim's theory and applied it to studies about a particular subject: femininity. Concerning the social world, "Mannheim’s perspective required the thinker to look for ways of interpreting the situation more clearly and productively". Within this exposure and conceptualization of social reality this way of examining reality can provide motivation for women's emancipation.Political thought of women
Klein considered the problem of social construction of the feminine more widely, women and men of one society being participants of two cultural systems and in regards to hegemonic norms, one is dominant to the other. In this context, Klein understood that women have a secondary status like particular discriminated groups in society, for example black Americans, Jews or immigrants. What she believed to be the most challenging for women was that they "internalized the sense of secondary status", thus many accepted their own suppression. Klein called this phenomenon "a collective inferiority complex" which she saw as analogous to other minority groups.
For Klein, the reason for women's conformity and acceptance of their secondary status, are social attitudes manifested in powerful institutions of sex-roles, power and dominance-submission relations, and group prejudices. The problem with the change of women's situations, according to her, was the strong character of stereotypes which are socially reproduced and carried from generation to generation enduring in people's minds.
Viola Klein and Karl Mannheim
During the period that Klein knew Karl Mannheim, he was a good friend and a mentor to her. His theory of the sociology of knowledge as well as his scientific modus operandi greatly influenced Klein. Both were refugees from the Nazi regime, they first encountered each other in the London School of Economics, where Mannheim helped and guided Klein in the process of earning her second doctorate, this time in sociology. At first naming her thesis "Feminism and Antifeminism: A Study in Ideologies and Social Attitudes", by the time of its completion in 1944 and its publication in 1946 the title and subject had changed to The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology.The Feminine Character - History of an Ideology
The book The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology is the second major thesis of Klein. This work is introduced with a foreword by Karl Mannheim where he explains that the question of the feminine character cannot be reached with only one field of study; for instance he said that we can find this topic in "biology, philosophy, psycho-analysis, experimental psychology, psychometrics, history, literary history, anthropology and sociology.". All these fields of knowledge have their own rules of research, with different results but complementarity of themes and utilities. According to Mannheim "All of the social sciences have a common method to - the understanding of human behavior; a common method the quantitative analysis of behavior records; and a common aspiration - to devise ways of experimenting upon behavior.". In this foreword, he argues in favor of Klein's intentions which had been criticized by other authors. To him, she took old research not to plagiarize, but to give rise to another outlook. He explains that she tried to create new questioning based on already completed research in different fields of studies.In the preface to the second edition, Klein responds to criticism from other authors, especially sociologists who reproach her for a lack of own research and sociological studies. The writer Rosa Macaulay, was one such critic who accused her of using "secondary sources" instead of doing "original research". Klein explains that the universal theme that is the feminine role deserves to be constantly re-examined and matched with old and new studies, because scholars' ways of thinking guide our understandings of society more subjectively than objectively, regardless of the empirical framework. Given the universal theme of women and femininity she argues looking at the historical background of the social status of women, to see and compare feminine traits according to politics, socio-economics, and epochs, is perennially useful to social scientists, if not lay thinkers in general.
"The feminine character" is her a psycho-sociological term to label "femininity" as a "psychosexual orientation". This idea of psychosexual orientation comes from biology where the feminine character is only defined by the physiological sex concept. From this point of view Klein wanted to show how Role Theory has been developed. This theory is not about "sex roles" but more about male and female behavior, "temperament" that the society assigns to them. Even though her book was criticized for the way she researched and wrote, it helped develop the psychometric method.
The aim of her book was the "clarification of the idea of "femininity"". Some main questions about the evolution of new women's roles and traits, structure Klein's thesis: What is the new ideal of femininity? What are the effects on women's personality and how are they represented and considered by other social groups? Trying to answer these issues, the book shows that as long as society's expectations are changing, the feminine character will change in shape. Comparing different research demonstrates that the scientific knowledge has directly or indirectly influenced the "general trend of intellectual and emotional development." This influence by sciences is called "the mental climate". She especially notes the difference between scientific and social knowledge. In regards to sociology for example it is difficult to determine the "truth" when constructing an analysis. Scholars are heavily influenced by their social and cultural backgrounds which add to the subjectivity found in sociology. Scientific knowledge relies on such pragmatic instruments for analysis like theorems and formulas. That's why she mentions that relativism is avoided as long as possible.
Some contexts are given to conform with research on: " the status of women in a given society; the prevailing ideologies concerning women in a certain historical period, and the author’s personal attitudes towards women.". The masculine standards influencing society situate women as an "outgroup". This term describes implicitly the unequal strata of society. The concept of "outgroup" is based on "physical characteristics, historical tradition, social role and different process of socialization.". Some turning points began the process of emancipation of women and their roles inside the social group that they are assigned to in societies. The first one was the Industrial Revolution; technological changes and surges in demand for labor implied that physical strength or traditional forms of labor no longer defined who could be productive. Then World War II led women to take on both male and female types of work, because only men were sent to fight and die, while women were left to maintain society and families. Moreover, the capitalist ideology, itself supported by the spreading of democracy during the second part of the twentieth century, celebrated women's emancipation as labor was the engine of production, and more laborers meant more profits. The democracy ideology extols the equality between all human beings. Thus this thought reevaluates the role of the woman in society. Democratic institutions inevitably lead to enfranchisement. Also to be noted is that development led to the size of families decreasing, meaning that women had less work to do in the family. All of these changes lead to a shift in how society views women.
"Owing, presumably, to the emotional character of philanthropic work and to the absence of pecuniary profit attaching to it, it did not seem "improper" for women of standing to engage in charitable activities, and soon we find ladies of rank and consequence running charity organizations, working for prison reform, collecting rent in the slums of the East End of London, embarking on propaganda for the abolition of slavery, against cruelty to children, against alcoholism and prostitution, and for the emancipation of women. The social history of the nineteenth century is full of women pioneers in all fields of social reform.".