Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- 1 Commonsense beliefs and psychological research strategies
- 2 Stereotypes, attitudes, and personal attributes
- 3 Origins
- 4 Developmental influences
- 5 Sexuality: psychophysiology, psychoanalysis, and social construction
- 6 Aggression, violence, and power
- 7 Fear, anxiety, and mental health
- 8 The domestic sphere
- 9 Work, education, and occupational achievement
- 10 Looking back and looking ahead
- References
- Index
1 - Commonsense beliefs and psychological research strategies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- 1 Commonsense beliefs and psychological research strategies
- 2 Stereotypes, attitudes, and personal attributes
- 3 Origins
- 4 Developmental influences
- 5 Sexuality: psychophysiology, psychoanalysis, and social construction
- 6 Aggression, violence, and power
- 7 Fear, anxiety, and mental health
- 8 The domestic sphere
- 9 Work, education, and occupational achievement
- 10 Looking back and looking ahead
- References
- Index
Summary
Commonsense beliefs
Everyone has ideas about the nature of men and women and knows in a commonsense way what they are like. For most people throughout most of human history that was the whole story. Beliefs handed down through the generations provided a way of understanding first-hand experience so that the nature of men and women, and their place in wider society, became matters that were taken for granted. Today, those of us who live in liberal Western nations have become used to traditional beliefs about the natures of men and women being contested. No longer is there an unquestioned consensus about what is the natural order regarding women and men.
Nevertheless, many of our current commonsense beliefs derive from a time before public consciousness was challenged by modern feminist thinking. Admittedly, obviously sexist statements are easier to locate before this time, when they were more or less taken for granted by everyone. Such statements reflect a limited number of general principles about men and women.
The first principle is that women and men are fundamentally different. Consider the following lines from A Hymn to Him in My Fair Lady (© 1962 A. J. Lerner and F. Loewe), the musical version of Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. The context is that Henry Higgins is puzzled because, after achieving a social triumph at the ball, Eliza Doolittle has disappeared.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Sex and Gender , pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002