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This impressive and original study is one of the first books to combine mainstream sociology with feminism in exploring the subject of the professions and power.This is an important addition to the corpus of feminist scholarship... It provides fresh insights into the way in which male power has been used to limit the employment aspirations of women in the middle classes. - Rosemary Crompton, University of Kent

Current evaluations of Simmel's theoretical writings on men, women and modernity have read these too generously, relying on a curate's egg motif culling the good parts from the bad parts. The good parts are judged insightful and prescient, revealing the workings of a sociological imagination and even anticipating elements of contemporary feminist epistemology. The bad parts reveal the unfortunate incursion of ideological baggage or blinkered romanticism that periodically surface and impede the productive workings of the sociological imagination. A more astute reading is proposed here: one which recuperates the bad parts as symptomatic of the workings of Simmel's philosophical imagination where he crafts a deep ontology of gender, in the form of an a priori, absolute duality of incommensurate modes of male and female being. This deep ontology of gender fatefully consigns woman to the wastelands of his philosophical imagination, whilst releasing man, and man alone, into the more fertile and productive workings of his sociological imagination. Hence, Simmel constructs a masculine ontology of the social. This is induced by Simmel's ontological grounding of the objective in the male and by the 'radical dualism' he recommends as a more women-friendly alternative to 'relative dualism'.

This article proposes that the urgent task for feminist sociology is to recuperate those lost or residual `body matters' which lurk, unattended to, on the sidelines of the social. Feminist sociology must carefully negotiate the complex space between sociality and corporeality. The new feminist philosophies of the body tend sometimes to grate against this project by valorizing the body but de-valorizing gender. The new sociology of the body is recuperating the body within sociology, but pays insufficient attention to the ways in which gendered bodies have always enjoyed varying degrees of absence or presence in the sociological imaginary - in the guise of `female corporeality' and `male embodiment'. By revisiting the classical texts of sociology, such as those of Durkheim, Weber and particularly Simmel, I explore the textual strategies whereby `the body' and `the social' were dissociated in the first place and how, simultaneously, woman is saturated with, while man is divested of, corporeality and she is divested while he is invested with sociality. The absent women in sociology were the women in the body excluded from the social. It is male bodies which animate the social - they appear for a fleeting moment, only to disappear immediately, in the space between `corporeality' and `sociality'. Thus, it is not simply a case of recuperating bodies into the social, but of excavating the gendered subtexts whereby gendered bodies were differently inscribed into and out of the social in the first place. The crucial point here is not the more familiar story of her saturation with corporeality but the less familiar one of what happened to his body - how, that is, did male sociologists effect the disappearance of their own bodies in the textual strategies of sociology?

The relationship between gender and professionalisation is a neglected one, and female professional projects have been overlooked in the sociology of professions. The generic notion of profession is also a gendered notion as it takes what are in fact the successful professional projects of class-privileged male actors at a particular point in history and in particular societies to be the paradigmatic case of profession. Instead, it is necessary to speak of `professional projects', to gender the agents of these projects, and to locate these within the structural and historical parameters of patriarchal-capitalism. Professional projects are projects of occupational closure, and a model of occupational closure strategies is needed which captures both the variety of strategies that characterise these projects and the gendered dimensions of these strategies. Such a model is set out and distinguishes between exclusionary, demarcationary, inclusionary and dual strategies of closure. This model is substantiated with material drawn from the emerging medical division of labour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The concept of the 'material' was the focus of much feminist work in the 1970s. It has always been a deeply contested one, even for feminists working within a broadly materialist paradigm of the social. Materialist feminists stretched the concept of the material beyond the narrowly economic in their attempts to develop a social ontology of gender and sexuality.Nonetheless, the quality of the social asserted by an expanded sense of thematerial – its 'materiality' – remains ambiguous. New terminologies of materiality and materialization have been developed within post-structuralist feminist thought and the literature on embodiment. The quality of 'materiality' is no longer asserted – as inmaterialist feminisms – but is problematized through an implicit deferral of ontology in these more contemporary usages, forcing us to interrogate the limits of both materialist and post-structuralist forms of constructionism. What really matters is how these newer terminologies of 'materiality' and 'materialization' induce us to develop a fuller social ontology of gender and sexuality; one that weaves together social, cultural, experiential and embodied practices.

Critically interrogates sociological theory from a feminist perspective and embarks on a politics of reconstruction, working at the interface of feminist and sociological theory to induce an adequate conceptualisation of the social. This text is useful for undergraduate and postgraduate students in sociology and feminist theory.

This paper argues for the need to revisit classical sociological texts with a view to excavating the masculinity that inheres in these texts and saturates the concept of the social. Primarily through an examination of Durkheim and Simmel, it explores the strategies whereby masculine individuals could be released from corporeality and granted the sort of embodiment that allowed them to transcend their particularity and become social agents. It is argued that male embodiment is deeply sedimented in the sociological imaginary as the very condition of social action and the constituent of social agency. Thinking through the conceptual lenses of corporeality, embodiment and agency exposes some of the ways in which the analytical scaffolding of 'the social' rests on a deeply gendered ontological foundation. While the sociological tradition may indeed have continued salience for contemporary sociologies of the body, a relatively unreflexive recuperation of these texts is problematic. This paper challenges those who seek to rehabilitate the classics in the service of an embodied sociology to produce a much fuller accounting of the truncated corporeal terrain upon which classical sociology developed, and one which explicitly recognizes its gender.