considered society to be like an organism, and distinguished structure and function. While he recognized that society was composed of individuals, for Durkheim, society was not just the sum of individual behaviours, actions, and thoughts. That is, society had an existence of its own, apart from the individuals in it. Further, societies influence individuals through norms, social facts, sentiments, and social currents. These emerge from human action, but stand apart from the individual and affect the individual. society as sui generis – that is, society as a thing in itself, something of its own kind, or a thing apart. Durkheim argued that Marxism is composed of "disputable and out-of-date hypotheses." (Ritzer, p. 73). The further we look into the past, the smaller becomes this difference between man and woman." However, Durkheim resolves this contradiction by arguing that social development changes the physical evolution of the sexes. In other words, Durkheim believed that the gendered division of sexual labour produced the biological changes associated with masculinity and femininity. Durkheim justified this by citing the contemporary phrenologist Lebon, who argued that male brains are larger than female, and this "inequality grows proportionally with civilization..." (p.58). Durkheim 's gender conservatism therefore …show more content…
Another functionalist share the same idea of Durkheim, George peter Murdock (1949) argues that a sexual divison of labour develops, in which men perform specific task such as hunting and heavy work while women do the gathering, cooking, mainly domestic task. However, with the emancipation of women, radical feminist believe that women are exploited andare subservient to men under the patriarchal or male dominated society. Men are the ruling class and women the subject