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accepting male dominance—they complied; they had internalised their role of victims, often without realising that they were victims of a rule based on culture and not on nature. The male dominance was accepted, not voluntarily, in the sense of a choice, but as a kind of acceptance of a fate not to be avoided. But almost suddenly, women started to rebel—not only in individual cases, but in a mass movement. From compliance to rebellion—this was not the result of lightning from above, not the impact of a specific messiah. It was the result of changes in society—in the given case, the impact of modernisation and postmodernisation. The rise of new political issues like feminism has been the consequence of deep social changes—followed by the breakdown of an order based on prejudice (Inglehart 1997, 237–266).
Prejudices are the product of the society as it is. All societies create prejudices. But different societies produce different prejudices. In The Authoritarian Personality, the U.S.-American society of the mid-twentieth century was seen and analysed as the creator of prejudices (Adorno et al. 1982). It is the unequal structure of any society that points to the direction and the intensity of prejudices. In the industrialised and especially in the postindustrialised society, class may have become a less defining object of prejudices. But class produces prejudices directed against groups which—at least at first sight—seem to have nothing to do with class: women and Jews, African Americans and Asian Americans are seen very differently, according to the social (cultural and economic) status a specific person has. Ethnic, religious, and gender-related prejudices are correlated with social differences.
The specific character of social inequality is continuously changing. But there has always been and there always is inequality: in economic terms, in cultural terms, in social terms. Inequality produces the need to understand the social differences by taking shortcuts, by looking for a basic principle that promises an explanation. It can be “race”, it can be religion, it can be gender, it can be region, it can be generation—all these identity-shaping factors are prejudice-shaping as well. As long as you “know” that Protestants are the better entrepreneurs and women the better nurses, you make yourself believe you have the necessary knowledge