Chapter 5: Reluctantly Learning to Appreciate the Importance of Gender

I did not go to graduate school to study gender. Far from it. I came of age in the 1950s, graduated from high school in the midst of the civil rights movement, and then arrived at graduate school at the end of the 1960s in the middle of the Vietnam War. I was interested in how jobs were being replaced by automation, how the caste system of race was being challenged by social movements and urban riots, and how global capitalism was causing upheaval all over the world. I wanted to do research on power and politics and stratification and inequality, in other words, serious issues, not on gender, which I perceived to be a pigeonhole that would constrain me.