Viola Klein

Viola Klein (1908–1973) 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.

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 (Lyon 2007, p. 831). 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" (Lyon 2007, p. 832). 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 (Lyon 2007, p. 832). 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 (Lyon, 2007, p. 834). 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.

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 (Klein, Correspondence, May 30, 1942, Klein papers). 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" (Terrant 2006, p. 134). 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 (Klein 1946, p. 30). 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" (Klein 1946, p. 164). Therefore, she wanted to define a feminine nature, using notions of social and cultural expectations (Klein 1946, p. 171) "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" (Klein, 1946, p. 129).

For a long time before the concept of gender was used in scientific discourse (e.g. Butler 1990; Bornstein 1995), Klein considered Role Theory in her research on what is feminine (Terrant 2006, p. 148; Klein 1946). Pointing out that every individual in society occupies various social positions; Klein wrote that each position includes particular patterns of roles and behaviors (Klein 1946, p. 136). 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 (Terrant 2006) and within every particular society these patterns are understood differently (Klein 1946, p. 136). "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" (Klein 1946, p. 136). 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 (Klein 1946, p. 1).

What Klein started in her research, supervised by Mannheim and known as an ideology of feminine character (Klein 1946), came to be known as psychosocial orientation after 1975 and eventually subsumed into the nexus that we know today as gender. (Butler 1990). 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 (Terrant 2006). 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 (Terrant 2006, p. 150), a concept later solidified in transgender and queer theory (e.g. Butler 1990; Bornstein 1995).