Summary Of The Cocktail Waitress By James Spradley

The Cocktail Waitress by James P. Spradley is a study on a woman’s role in society. The study takes place in the 1970s and focuses on the relationships between the males and females .The objective was to show the reality, perceptions, descriptions of the cocktail waitress’s culture, and compare to how the rest of society behaves. To achieve these objectives,the researchers James Spradley and Brenda Mann researched at a college bar in Oakland, California called Brady’s. Brenda Mann became a cocktail waitress to study the culture and interview many of the other cocktail waitresses. All of the cocktail waitresses were women and all of the bar tenders were men. James Spradley become the detached observer. He prevented Mann from going native, …show more content…
One of the cocktail waitress, Joyce, was retrieving a couple a beers behind the counter while the bartenders were in the back. The cocktail waitress open them and left the lids on the counter. When one of the bartenders came back and found the lids he threw a fit. He said they should have been thrown away in the trash. The bar is the bartenders territory, and the cocktail waitress had changed the landscape of it. This moment shows the role of the woman as less efficient and has the potential to be hazardous. The status of the cocktail waitresses is subservient and lower than the men. The hierarchy of Brady’s is shown by the bartenders scolding the cocktail waitresses. If the waitress had been equals or have a higher status than the men then the bartender wouldn’t have chewed the cocktail waitress out. Another example of the bar being the territory of men is how the women embrace the moments that they do spend behind the bar. Most of the time the cocktail waitress were denied access, but occasionally they were allowed. The limited access or denied access shows the hierarchy and unequal status between the men and …show more content…
The bartenders and the customers should have also been interviewed. One thing that I believe that the authors should have covered was the lack of data from the bartenders point of view. The book is supposed to show the cocktail waitress’s perception, but it is difficult to see a way that this data can’t be biased without taking in the bartenders perception of the culture. Without the bartenders perspective, the data paints the bartenders in an unfavorable light. The customers should have also been interviewed. The customers could have discussed how they treated the bartenders or the cocktail waitresses. It seems that there were several different viewpoints that were not told to show a true representation of the culture at Brady’s. Without all of the perceptions their can’t be a definitive description of the