At
a conference on social science and work-life journalism I attended in May 2004, writers and researchers alike were bemoaning
the new trend in national press coverage of work-life issues—
which, everyone agreed, hit a low point in October 2003, when Lisa Belkin’s “Opt Out Revolution”
story made the cover of the New York Times magazine. (“Why
don’t women run the world?,” Belkin pondered. “Perhaps
it’s because they don’t want to.”) Why, we grumbled,
were reputedly liberal media outlets wasting ink on news and commentary
about the modest number of affluent professional women who swap
their careers for stay-at-home motherhood, when more in-depth
analysis of the myriad social and economic factors that disadvantage
average working families is desperately needed?
The problem, several
well-respected journalists suggested, has to do with what’s
considered newsworthy. Old news doesn't sell, and -- thanks to a powerful resurgence of hide-bound attitudes about appropriate
social roles for men and women -- the real news
about work and family in America (which, just for the record, includes
a profusion of cultural and structural barriers to women’s advancement in the
workplace, the continuing economic inequality of men and
women, the intersection of race, class and gender discrimination in just about any social problem you can name, and ongoing resistance to enacting adequate family policy in the U.S.) looks a lot like old news.
The deepest disenchantment
with the stagnation of women’s progress wells up from the
hearts of those of us who expected to be much farther along by now.
Between 1960 and 1980, women made unprecedented gains in equality
of rights and liberties as part of the larger human rights movement
that flourished in that era. Supporters of the women’s
movement believed that when enough feminist parents raised their
sons and daughters to move fearlessly into the egalitarian future,
our progress would simply roll over from generation to generation
until all that irksome ideology about men’s
and women’s relative capacities for love and work was ground
to dust. In this new, improved, woman-friendly world, families would
thrive because both mothers and fathers would devote equal time
and effort to paid work and caregiving, and everyone would be happier,
healthier and more financially secure. The patriarchy might not
be ripped out by its roots, but at least men would be doing their
full share of child care and housework, and women could enjoy the
independence and self-respect that come from having a paycheck of
one’s own.
Needless to say, things
didn’t exactly work out that way. Today, educated, middle-class
couples— who, by some popular accounts, are reduced to constant
squabbling over who works harder and how often they have
sex— are as likely to feel weighed down by the legacy of feminism
as they are to feel emancipated by it. Even when they have supportive
partners, many mothers still struggle with combining work and family—
on both an emotional and practical level— and wonder if maybe
the good old-fashioned arrangement of breadwinner dad/homemaker
mom might not have certain advantages for all concerned. Far too
often, the conviction that “women can do anything” works
against the interests of low-income women who lack access to the
education, resources and employment opportunities that lifted the
oppression of their well-to-do sisters. Little wonder the mainstream
media is having a love affair with the latest crop of smart, politically-savvy
women who proclaim that feminism is no longer necessary, inexcusably
elitist, hopelessly arcane, dangerously misguided, or just plain
dead.
Over the last decade
or so, a different group of writers and researchers— from both
pro- and anti-feminist camps— have attempted to tease out why,
as we settle into the twenty-first century, the high-speed train
to liberty, equality and justice for women is stalled on the tracks
at the half-way point. Conflicting theories abound, but most can
be distilled down to a fairly simple formula: Is it nature or culture
that continues to divide the fortunes of men and women— or
some of each, and if so, how much and what should we do about it?
Ozzie
and Harriet Are Dead?
In 1996, psychologist
Rosalind Barnett and media critic Caryl Rivers co-authored a book based
on their study of 300 dual-earner couples in the greater Boston
area. She Works/He Works was one of several books published
in the mid- to late-1990s— including Susan Chira’s A
Mothers Place (1998) and Joan K. Peters When Mothers Work (1997)— offering much-needed reassurance to employed
mothers that they would not destroy their health, marriages
or children’s happiness by working outside the home.
When Barnett and Rivers evaluated the mental and physical health
of the dual-earner couples in their study, they found that both
men and women in couples who shared responsibility
for the economic and domestic aspects of family life were doing
very well— even when there were young children in the home.
Even though Barnett and Rivers acknowledged that “from outmoded
ideas about men, women, work and family flow flawed and ineffective
corporate dictates and public policy debates that see balancing
work and family as merely a ‘woman’s issue’ and
peripheral to the workplace,” they predicted with great confidence
that sometime in the early 21st century, the overwhelming advantages
of the dual-earner/dual nurturer arrangement would overshadow traditional
gender-bound ideas about work and family, and “collaborative”
coupling would become the predominant ideological model for married
couples with or without children. In a chapter cheerfully titled
“Working Moms are Good Moms,” the authors cite a U.S.
Census report projecting that “nearly 80% of mothers with
infants and young children will be employed by 2005.”
In retrospect, Barnett
and Rivers’ gleeful refrain of “Ozzie and Harriet Are
Dead” was overly optimistic. While it’s
true that over 70 percent of mothers with children 18 and under
are employed in the U.S. (and most are employed full time), a minority
of married mothers— just 26 percent— earn nearly as
much or more than their spouses (compared to 54 percent of married
women without children under 18). In 2002, three out of four married
mothers with at least one child under six earned less than $25,000
a year, whereas 73 percent of fathers in similar households earned
over $25,000 a year (49 percent of such fathers earned more than
$40,000 a year, compared to 11 percent of mothers). Current data
from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that with the exception of one
two-year interval, the labor force participation of mothers with
infants hovered between 53 and 55 percent in the 12-year period
between 1990 and 2002; since 1998, the number of mothers with infants
in the paid labor force has been trending downward (workforce participation
of mothers with children under six also declined from a high of
65.3 percent in 2000 to 64.1 percent in 2002). Another recent Census
analysis found that the total number of children age 15 and under
with stay-at-home moms increased between 1994 and 2002.
The dimensions of the
“Opt Out Revolution” have been dramatically overstated by
the media, but obviously something’s afoot— something
possibly related to a couple of the less favorable findings of Barnett
and Rivers’ She Works/He Works study. When it came
to sharing housework in collaborative couples, men and women spent
about the same amount of time on household tasks each week, excluding
child care. But women were more likely to be responsible for the
low-control “female” tasks necessary to keep the family
clean and fed (such as cooking, shopping, laundry and cleaning),
while men were more likely to spend time in high-control “male”
tasks such as yard work, taking out the trash and looking after
the car. And according to Barnett and Rivers, nothing mitigates
the added stress of being responsible for “female” household
tasks: “Whether you have a good marriage or a bad marriage,
whether you are a parent or not …doing these tasks takes a
toll” on women’s well-being— “and it doesn’t
matter whether you have a liberal sex-role ideology or a traditional
one.” Barnett and Rivers also found that in the dual-earner
couples they studied, mothers with pre-school children spent 25
more hours a week than their husbands doing child care and put in
17 more hours of total work a week— including paid work, housework
and child care— than dads.
Why do things on the
work and family front seem to be getting worse, not better, for
idealistic moms and dads who imagined the whole shared work/shared
care model would be road-tested and ready for roll-out by now? In
their new book Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting
Our Relationships, Our Children and Our Jobs, Barnett and Rivers
suggest the ideological drift of the last twenty years is partly
to blame. “Incredibly, traditional ideas that we thought would
soon vanish were back in full force. In the past few years, ideas
of innate and rigid gender differences that were hurting the families
we studied [in She Works/He Works] have reemerged, this
time from new and unexpected places, dominating best-seller lists
and becoming part of the academic canon. …Surely it was no
coincidence that just as women successfully moved into the workforce
in enormous numbers and challenged traditional male-female stereotypes,
theories emerged that defined men and women on the basis of those
very stereotypes.”
Could it simply be, as
a number of minds great and small have proposed, that biology is
destiny after all? That the survival of the human race has depended
on men’s aggressive agency and women’s nurturing passivity
since way back when, so that men and women literally evolved—
almost like different species— to specialize in separate,
interdependent social functions? It would certainly explain why
more well-educated, middle-class mothers are bailing out of high-paying
professional jobs to become “full-time” moms and the
feminist ideal of even-steven co-parenting has been so difficult
to sustain for even the most dedicated couples. Maybe we should
forget about all that heady equality stuff and just give in.
Or maybe not. Barnett
and Rivers and other progressive social scientists insist it’s
not human nature, but human culture and the gendered structure of
our society that’s holding women back. In Same Difference,
Barnett and Rivers reviewed over 1,500 studies to determine if there
is indeed a surplus of reliable data to support what most people
accept as plain common sense: that men and women think differently,
speak differently, behave differently, work differently, have different
capacities for competition and caring, and want different things
from relationships and family life because that’s just
the way men and women are. Barnett and Rivers found that while
differences do exist, they are small— it’s not so much
that men and women are different, it’s that everybody is different. “Of course there are differences between the
sexes— how could it be otherwise?” they write. “But
more important is the size of the differences between men
and women compared to those among women and among men. In most areas of life, the latter are much larger. If you are
a woman named Sarah, you may be very different from Jessica, Elizabeth
or Susan in the way you tackle a math problem, deal with subordinates,
relate to your spouse, soothe your child, feel about yourself. In
fact, you are just as apt to be like Richard, Tom and Seth in these
areas as you are to be like other women.” According to Barnett
and Rivers, “it’s situation, not sex” that determines
men's and women's social behavior.
Sex,
gender and the stories we live by
Sex happens. From a
purely biological standpoint, sex— whether an organism is
genetically male or female— is determined in that magic moment
when gametes collide. Sex determines which bodies produce eggs and
sperm and (in mammals) which bodies get pregnant, give birth and
lactate. In some species, including humans, sex also produces secondary
physical characteristics like women’s breasts and men’s
facial hair, but there is significant variation in the expression
of these traits (which can also be intentionally modified or concealed).
So the business of being “male’ or “female”
is fairly straightforward; it’s the meaning we attach to it
that makes life so damn difficult.
As social psychologist
Carol Tavris notes in her 1992 book The Mismeasure of Woman:
Why Women Are Not the Better Sex, the Inferior Sex, or the Opposite
Sex, throughout human history both individuals and societies
have organized their experience and understanding of the world in
a series of interlocking stories. There are monolithic stories that
explain the creation of the universe, the origin of the species,
the properties of the invisible and miraculous, the possibility
of transcendence and the nature of good and evil, life and death. There are
other overarching stories we rely on to explain why things can be
counted on to work a certain way in the context of a specific social
order. For example, in 21st century America we have an active collection
of stories about democracy, liberals, conservatives, the free market,
rights and liberties, the nature of happiness, romantic love, the
objectivity of scientific inquiry, equal opportunity, personal responsibility,
crime and punishment, checks and balances, the deserving and undeserving
poor, the mind, the body, aging, race, class, work, family, adults,
children and teenagers, motherhood, fatherhood, and of course, men
and women— just to name a few. These stories don’t reflect
absolute truths, although more often than not they are represented
as if they do.
In world where everything— everything— is subject to change, the stories we
construct are like signposts that help us make sense of our daily
lives and string our personal and collective experiences into a
coherent history. It may be that as time goes on, some of our stories
get better— perhaps they become more just, more humane and
more inclusive. But they are still only stories, and they can be and
are revised in response to pressure. As Tavris writes, “In the
space of only a few years, social movements and economic upheavals
can alter the stories people are able to envision for themselves.
And in our private lives, we frequently change explanatory themes
as a result of love, tragedy, everyday experience, political conversion
or psychotherapy.” Because stories are so critical to our
sense of personal and social equilibrium, the groups and individuals
that have the means to reshape their content are exceptionally powerful.
Gender is one of our
biggest stories— a thick, invisible film that overlays the
biological inevitability of sex. Gender is not so much about who
we are as it is about how others expect us to be. But since many people accept at least some aspects of the culture’s
dominant gender norms as “the way things are and should be”—
and there are heavy social penalties for non-conformists, including
shaming, ostracism and persecution— most people, if not all,
incorporate some elements of gender into their identity from an
early age, or they learn how to perform gender. As sociologist Barbara
Risman writes, gender is so deeply encoded in norms of interpersonal
conduct in our public and private lives that “doing gender
is usually the easiest means to thrive, or even survive, in our
society.” Men— so our present day narrative of gender
difference informs us— are active and aggressive, hardwired
to compete. Their motives are objective and rational, as opposed
to those of women, which are often described as subjective and “relational.”
Women are more nurturing than men, more emotionally expressive and
less emotionally stable. Men attack problems head-on and work to
get results; women “feel” their way through problems
and work to build and strengthen social connections that serve
the common interest. Men are more proficient with hard logic, such
as math and science or describing the positions and relationships
of objects in space; women are more proficient with the soft logic
required for processing language and reading the emotions of others.
Men are all about detachment and autonomy, whereas women are all
about attachment and dependency. From this baseline understanding
of the “nature” of men and women, popular culture elaborates
stereotypes of masculinity and femininity by layering on characteristics
that range from the sublime to the absurd.
But the most critical
thing to recognize about our story of gender— and why developing
a sensitivity to the way gender operates is important for mothers
who yearn for social change— is that it divides the world very
neatly into two different parts and assigns men and women to the
segment where their supposedly innate qualities are most in demand.
Men get gainful work and public authority; women get family work
and private authority. Each hemisphere has its own set of drawbacks
and rewards, and one complements the other to constitute a functional
whole. There is, of course, just one slight problem— this
arrangement gives men, as the leaders of public institutions, disproportionate
access to social and economic power. As Cynthia Fuchs Epstein writes
in Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender and the Social Order (1988), “Whether consciously or unconsciously, from the
time gender distinctions were made …the social order generated
a system of thought that legitimated gender inequality. Agents of
the social order, people with a stake in it and people persuaded
by them, are the insiders.”
In other words, not only
does our gender story substantiate a social order that continues
to marginalize and subordinate women— especially if they happen
to be mothers, or poor, or people of color— it also ensures
that women have limited access to the power they need to change
the story.
The
difference problem
Difference, in and of
itself, is neither a good nor bad thing. For example, most people
who haven’t suffered a catastrophic brain injury perceive
there is a difference between a dog and a daisy. That dogs and daisies
are dissimilar is not presumed to make one organism essentially better
or worse than the other (although in the scope of Western
thinking, the lives of animals do have a higher value than those
of plants). Most people are capable of encountering dogs and daisies
without automatically making positive or negative comparisons between the two.
There are obvious biological
differences between males and females, particularly in their reproductive
functions, but gender makes distinctions between men and women in
ways that are unrelated to reproductive biology— such as defining
the ways men and women normally think, feel and act in a vast array
of social situations— and attributes a relative value to each
set of characteristics. Unlike dogs and daisies, males and females
are considered “opposites,” which means that if gender
assigns certain characteristics to females, such as sensitivity
and selflessness, males must therefore be callous and self-absorbed
or the formula of opposites won't work. As a result, we
are primed to accept preposterous gender equations that defy all
observations of reality, such as “women only want committed
relationships but men just want to get laid.” Consequently,
if you are a woman who just wants to get laid, you might feel badly
about yourself or you might feel judged by others as being of low
moral character, and if you are a guy who only wants commitment,
some people might question your judgment or your masculinity and
women might mistrust your motives. Alternately, if you are a man
who just wants to get laid you might act like you want a committed
relationship because you’re convinced that’s what all
women desire, which increases the likelihood you will end up hurting
someone’s feelings and reduces your chances of hooking up
with women who just want to get laid. This is just one small example
of how the story of gender makes a mess of our lives.
On the macro level, gender
works to persuade us that most men (but few women) possess the unwavering
objectivity, decisiveness and inner drive to crush the competition
that is so highly valued in the fields of business, finance, law,
politics, academia, the military and the criminal underworld; and
that most women (but few men) have an exceptional capacity for developing
the emotional sensitivity, protective instincts and practical skills
required to run a household efficiently and raise happy, healthy
children. (By demanding equal opportunities for women in higher
education and the professional workplace, second wave feminists
managed to make some minor edits to the first half of this difference
story— women now enter male dominated fields as a matter of
course, but they still earn considerably less than comparable male
workers, and are rarely admitted to the highest ranks of their professions.)
Both men and women are credited with having some kind of essential
ability, but the presumed sex-linked capacities of men are far more
highly regarded and rewarded in terms of money, prestige and social
power than the presumed sex-linked capacities of women.
Since women are not,
in fact, inferior to men or less sensitive to injustice, their consignment
to the second-class sex throughout the course of human history was
bound to rankle. However, their lack of substantive social power
prior to the nineteenth century made it difficult to set the record straight.
One of the counter-strategies women developed, possibly to dull
the sting of their subordinate status, was cultivating an alternate
gender fable that subverts the assumption of male dominance. In Deceptive Distinctions, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein observes that
There has always been
a theme in women’s folklore, at least in the Western world,
that women know best what men need, that men are often childlike
and incompetent, that their egos need bolstering because they
are unsure of themselves and easily threatened at work, that they
are vulnerable weak reeds depending on a woman’s strength
in matters of emotion, and that they cannot cope with children,
the home, or other aspects of the female domain. This is expressed
visibly through the media most egregiously in articles in women’s
magazines and in television comedies, and experientially in the
jokes and conversations of women beyond the earshot of men. This
cynicism occurs worldwide. I have heard it expressed by colleagues
and journalists in the north of Europe, in the Mediterranean countries,
in India, and right at home.
The “men are clueless”
discourse seems as vigorous today as it did when I was
growing up in the 1960s; I have vivid memories of the countless times
my mother, with hands on hips, uttered -- in a low voice
brimming with contempt -- a single word: “men!”
(Taking this concept to new heights, David
and Goliath, a Clearwater, Florida based clothing manufacturer,
markets a popular line of t-shirts for teen girls bearing such inspirational
messages as “boys are dumb— throw rocks at them”
and “boys lie— poke them in the eye.” The tongue-in-cheek
inscriptions are not meant to be taken seriously, but still you’ve
got to wonder— what were they thinking?) Yet despite
the unflattering light this kind of talk shines on them, men have
done little to contest the assertion that they are— at least
in the areas of life and love where women are assumed to have cornered
the market— complete idiots. One recent advice-seeker writing
to Salon’s Since
You Asked column deliberated if and how to tell a platonic
friend he was romantically attracted to her. “I’ve tried
being more observant to see if I can get any sort of hint via her
body language that she may or may not feel the same way, but alas,
I’m a stupid male and can’t seem to read any signals
one way or the other.” When Barbara Risman interviewed egalitarian
couples for a study on how these co-parents shifted their attitudes
about gender, she found that a key area of negotiation involved
differing standards of cleanliness. As one father confessed, “I
know the thing men have the hardest time learning how to do is noticing
that there is dust. Men can’t see dust. Men don’t know
what dust is.”
Perhaps when all the
intricacies of the human genome are finally unraveled, we will discover
that the male chromosome does indeed lack the dust perception gene—
but until then it might be reasonable to theorize that men can’t
see dust because, at least for the last few hundred years and probably
for countless centuries beforehand, they’ve rarely been held
accountable for it. The matter of dust is, of course, just one small quirk in the ever-unspooling tale of gender difference. The overwhelming
issue with women’s blanket endorsement of men’s professed
stupidity in the domestic/relational sphere is not just that men
are willing to buy into it; it’s that if women cling to the
belief that mothers are better adapted— because of biology,
psychology, temperament, acculturation or whatever— for child-rearing
and the type of housework that invariably goes along with it, they
will never have enough confidence in men’s care-giving abilities
to relinquish half the load. According to Epstein:
Women participate
in the conspiracy; they protect men and help maintain the myths...
Women who ‘prop up’ men …also protect their
own sphere (the home) from male control by arguing that they have
special competence for their domain as men do for theirs—
asserting that women manage the home better and are more suited
to it. Women prevent men from becoming competent in the home,
holding that men’s personality traits are not suitable for
women’s roles and that men’s biological makeup impedes
their acquisition of the required attributes such as nurturance
or home management. Men also conspire to remain incompetent, as
women suspect, because such skills are poorly rewarded.
Whether it’s men’s
resistance to taking on work that will degrade their status and
power or women’s low estimation of men’s domestic ability
that buttresses the inequitable distribution of domestic labor in
our society, there can be no doubt that— with exception of
a tiny minority of stalwart feminist couples— we're still
“doing gender,” big time. For example, the results from
the first American Time Use Survey (Bureau of Labor Statistics,
September 2004) found that 84 percent of women, but only 63 percent
of men, devote some time to housework every day. 20 percent of men
reported doing cleaning, laundry or yard work— as opposed
to 55 percent of women— and 66 percent of women, compared
to 35 percent of men, prepared meals and washed dishes as part of
their daily routine. We can joke about cave-men and cave-women and
complain about the intransigence of human nature, but the bottom
line is that the amount and type of unpaid labor women contribute
to the economy is hazardous to both their short- and long-term well-being.
There is, in fact, plenty
of anecdotal and empirical evidence suggesting that men can learn
to do this work just as well as women— when they have to. “Can
only women be effective primary nurturers?” asks Risman in Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition (1998).
“The answer is crucial, for no one would want to abolish gender
structure at the cost of harming our children.” But Risman’s
study of 55 “reluctant” single fathers— those who
had absolute custody of their young children because they were widowed
or deserted by their wives— found these fathers were just
as competent at “mothering” as the mothers in her control
group. Risman also found that “responsibility for housework
is better explained by parental role than by sex. Primary parents,
whether men or women (housewives or single parents) reported doing
much more housework than other parents.” Because the caretaking
behavior of single fathers and fathers in dual-income couples was
significantly different from that of the breadwinner fathers she
studied, Risman concluded that men are perfectly capable of keeping
house and nurturing children— but they are less likely to take
on domestic/relational work when a women is available to assume
the caregiving role.
Gender,
new and improved
When Cathi Hanauer’s
anthology, The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About
Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood and Marriage, was first released
in 2002, it was pitched as a book about the anger that bubbles up
when real life fails to match women’s egalitarian expectations.
But the essays in Hanauer’s collection tend to reveal more
about women’s disappointment and disillusionment with the
new complexity feminism forces into the work/marriage/motherhood
mix than the searing rage and righteous indignation one would
expect to find. When these woman writers get angry, they get angry
at their men, not at the system; when they reach an impasse they resort
to envious daydreaming about the uncomplicated lives of June Cleaver
and Mrs. Brady of The Brady Bunch fame. Although the contributors
to The Bitch in the House are not representative of the
general population— all the authors are well-educated writers
and editors, which is a rarified kind of life and not one most people
can depend on to pay the rent— the book’s popularity
suggests that the uncomfortable sensation of being squeezed between
the ideal world that never was and the ideal world that could be
is an experience many women share.
Partly
in reaction to reviews of The Bitch in the House which called attention to the singular domestic/relational ineptitude
of some of the Bitches love interests, Hanauer’s
husband set to work editing a companion anthology from the male
point of view. Even the title of Daniel Jones’s book, The
Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings
About Love, Loss, Fatherhood and Freedom (2004), speaks volumes
about our knee-jerk acceptance of gender difference; bitches come
right out and “tell the truth,” but bastards must “try
really hard to explain their feelings.” The bitches delve
into themes of the personal— sex, solitude, work and marriage—
while the bastards tackle big universal subjects like love, loss
and freedom.
I actually enjoyed the essays in The Bastard on the Couch, although once
again they represent the lives and lifestyles of an elite group.
On the whole, the Bastards took more chances than the Bitches,
which made for more interesting and nuanced storytelling. But what
really surprised me was how easily these men made the connection
between doing housework and relinquishing both power and the male
prerogative of leisure. Calling on metaphors of Man the Hunter and
the iconography of Ward Cleaver and his TV Land ilk, the bastards
also find their lives painfully constrained by gender edicts about
masculinity, femininity and male norms of success. As Fred Leebron
writes in “I am Man, Hear Me Bleat”
I always wanted to
marry my equal or better— anyone less never occurred to me.
This is what our generation of men does; we marry our equals.
…But you know what men give up when they venture into this
kind of so-called equality? The give up equality. Why? Because
there is no such thing as equality. Because men have long recognized
that women are their domestic superiors, and perhaps that’s
why we’ve so staunchly and unjustly guarded our castles
of work. Because women haven’t had the so-called privileges
we men have had for the entire history of the world, they are
now knocking on the door of the patriarchal fortress, and as the
patriarchal door comes crashing down in my particular house, who
is there to be squashed underneath it but me.
It may be that acceptance
of women as men’s “domestic superiors” sensitizes
men to the true scope of what’s at stake if we strive for
sexual equality without seriously rethinking gender. On one hand, if
women become men’s true equals in the public sphere but retain
a larger share of authority in the home, men will end up without
a domain of influence— something that men, at least those in
the dominant class, are not accustomed to and might predictably
feel a little bitter about. On the other hand, if women relinquish
their primacy in matters of home and child-rearing to include men
as equal caregivers but fail to achieve full social, political and
economic equality, they stand to loose even the smattering of social
power that flows from their presumed mastery of the domestic/relational
realm. In other words, our current gender story ends in a stalemate,
and we will need a far more capacious imagination and collective
vision to move forward. As Cynthia Fuchs Epstein writes, “It
is no surprise that dichotomous models are an ideological weapon
and survive challenge because it is easier to propose a dichotomy
than to explicate the complexities that make it invalid.”
No wonder Ozzie and Harriet have come back to haunt us.
Meanwhile, an emerging
sub-culture of “rebel” mamas are reconstituting traditional
gender ideology as an act of dissent. In The Paradox of Natural
Mothering, sociologist Chris Bobel describes her study of mothers
who embrace a particularly intensive style of “full time”
motherhood she defines as natural mothering. “While
her contemporaries take advantage of daycare, babysitters, and bottle
feeding, the natural mother rejects almost everything that facilitates
mother-child separation. She believes that consumerism, technology,
and detachment from nature are social ills that mothers can and
should oppose.” One of Bobel’s interview subjects, who
describes herself as a “radical feminist,” explains:
“I would like to be considered an equal person in society.
But that doesn’t mean I have to do the exact same things that
somebody else does. …I feel that someone, and I feel that
it should be the woman, needs to be the focus of the family, to
keep the family running, organized, on track, spiritually, physically,
and emotionally.”
Natural mothers actively
resist the deteriorating values of a culture they perceive as excessively
materialistic, over commercialized, and un-family-friendly through
the practice of mothering, and believe they have the power to transform
society by modeling an alternative, child-centric lifestyle. But
as Bobel notes, “Natural mothering, rooted in biologically
determinist understandings of gender, reifies a male-centered view
of role-bound women. The ‘natural’ in natural mothering
may liberate mothers from a mechanized and commodified experience
of their maternity, but it reproduces a gendered experience that
subordinates their needs to those of child and husband.”
“Natural”
mamas are just the most recent cohort of feminist-informed women
to claim that women have a special prowess when it comes to caring
for others and repairing the damage men— and “male”
values— have visited upon the world, and to argue that women's
“innate” capacities should be elevated in social stature
so they are honored as different from but equal to men. As
Cynthia Fuchs Epstein writes, “…Two feminist perspectives
compete today to explain the sex division in our society. One model— a
dichotomous one— holds that there are basic differences between
the sexes. Some of its proponents believe the differences are biologically
determined; others believe they are products of social conditioning…
or lodged in the differing psyches of the sexes by the [processes]
that create identity; still others believe the causes of the difference
are a mixture of both factors.” Difference or cultural feminists “believe that differences are deeply rooted and
result in different approaches to the world, in some cases creating
a distinctive ‘culture’ of women. Such differences,
they think, benefit society and ought to be recognized and rewarded.”
According to Epstein,
a second feminist model of gender contradicts this essentialist
perspective, suggesting that “most gender differences are
not as deeply rooted or as immutable as has been believed, that
they are relatively superficial, and that they are socially constructed
(and elaborated in the culture through myths, law and folkways)
and kept in place by the way each sex is positioned in the social
structure.” Barnett and Rivers, along with Epstein, Tavris
and other reputable scholars agree that most definitive research
from the fields of sociology, anthropology, physiology and psychology
supports the view that the actual differences between the sexes
are relatively insignificant and that it’s the social meaning
we attach to maleness and femaleness which generates and enforces
gender difference.
Nature,
nurture or structure?
Of course, there is
one irrefutable difference between men and women, which is that
women can get pregnant, gestate an embryo, give birth and produce breast milk and men
cannot. There are quasi-scientific theories— captured under
the heading of “sociobiology”— that propose the gendered
division of labor arose from women’s (so far) inalterable
biological condition and glorify Early Man as the mighty hunter/warrior
who fearlessly set out to stalk his prey and subdue the enemy, while
Early Woman, with her baby in a sling and her basket of roots and
berries, trailed meekly behind in his protective aura. Over time,
so the story goes, natural selection would favor men with aggressive
tendencies and women with nurturing instincts because their children
would be more likely to survive and reproduce. Then, voila!—
after a few hundred million years of human adaptation to a vast
array of cultural and environmental conditions, here we are in our
historically complex, technologically advanced society, freshly
minted versions of Man the Provider and Woman the Nurturer. We will
all be infinitely better off, these theorists assert, when we simply accept our true natures— which, on inspection, generally
means giving men all the money and leadership and sticking women
with the kids and housework.
There are quite a few
things that are troubling about this approach, not the least of
which, as Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers point out in Same
Difference, is that it’s impossible to know how our pre-historic
ancestors actually lived or how they functioned in social groups.
Most conclusions about the social behavior of early humans are merely
conjectures based on observations of primate behavior and/or anthropological
studies of modern non-literate cultures. The other problem with
sociobiological theories is that they are rarely used to challenge
traditional gender ideology. The notion that the social behavior
of men and women is predetermined from the get-go is most often
used to make sense of women’s subordination. (And, as Barnett
and Rivers note, it makes for great news copy: “The idea that
we humans were hardwired back in the Stone Age has become a favorite
theme in the media despite its speculative nature.”) Sociobiology
casts the saga of human evolution as a dramatic tableau—
just imagine all those virile hunter-types strutting around in their
loin-cloths!— but it shouldn’t be confused with real
science. As Epstein remarks, “Gender distinctions are basic
to the social order in all societies. Like age, gender orders society
and is ordered by it.”
Sociobiologists, like
social philosophers, churchmen and others before them, argue that
the division of labor by sex is a biological rather than a social
response. But if this were so, sex-role assignments would not
have to be coercive. Social groups do not depend on instincts
or physiology to enforce social arrangements because they cannot
reliably do so. Societies make it the responsibility of people
from certain groups to be responsible for such social needs as
food, shelter, child care and leadership. Nowhere do they depend
on “nature” to get the jobs done.
There appears to be ample
evidence that gender is not a fixed expression of biological sex,
but rather a set of rules that govern the status and mobility of
individuals based on the sex role assigned to them. And if human
nature plays any part in the expression of gender difference, it’s
probably a minor one: as Robert W. Connell writes in Gender
and Power (1987), “It is possible that there are some
innate differences in temperament or ability between men and women.
The hypothesis cannot be ruled out entirely. But if they exist,
we can say quite confidently that they are not the basis of major
social institutions."
Where
we go from here
Gender— including
the archetype of the heroic, self-sacrificing mother— is part
of the story we depend on to stabilize the dominant social order
and get the work of economic and social reproduction done. And even
though what we “know to be true” about men and women
seems to be time-tested and unalterable, our story of gender is
changing all the time. It changed in the late 1700s, when mothers
were first called upon to instill the values of democracy in the
sons of the new American republic. It changed in 1920, when
the U.S. finally ratified women’s right to vote. It changed
when women filled men’s stateside jobs during WWII, and again in 1963, when Betty Freidan deconstructed the feminine mystique.
Our common understanding of gender changed in 1964, when Title VII
of the Civil Rights Act established women’s right to equal
opportunities in the workplace, and once again when sexual harassment
at work was recognized as a form of illegal discrimination.
It changed in 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe
v. Wade, and again when mothers of young children flooded into
the paid labor force in the 1980s. It changed when Title IX was
enacted, requiring educational institutions to provide fair funding
for women’s athletic programs, and in 1993 when the FMLA was
passed, guaranteeing 12 weeks of unpaid leave to both mothers and
fathers when a baby is born or adopted. It changed in 2004,
when Pfc. Lyndie England was photographed abusing
Iraqi prisoners at Abu Graib. And these are just some of the major
benchmarks; men and women are constantly working and reworking the
story of gender in their public and private lives.
But no matter how far
we stretch the boundaries of gender in our movement toward equality,
there will always be stakeholders— generally those who stand
to lose power in the disruption of the status quo— who want
to push progress back into the box. As Cynthia Fuchs Epstein writes,
“The powerful are gatekeepers of ideas, the owners of intellectual
production, who can affix and have affixed values to distinctions
between men and women.” And they will continue to do so for
the foreseeable future in an attempt to protect their special interests.
Barnett and Rivers also note that gender has seductive pull for
average men and women who feel confused or conflicted about living
in a half-changed society: “The gender-difference narrative
is also appealing because it helps us rationalize the sex segregation
and discrimination that still pervade our society. It’s easier
to believe that men and women have different capacities and inclinations
because of their genes, their hormones, their motivation, or their
brain structures than it is to take the necessary step to expand
the opportunities of both sexes.”
If we have any hope of
one day living in a society where the work of caregiving is fully
acknowledged and accommodated as an essential public good, where mothers
have full rights and liberties to ensure their equal authority in
both the public and private domain— indeed, if we want to
reverse the arbitrary bifurcation of human activity into male and
female spheres— we will be forced to confront the vigorous
relationship between our stories of gender and the social, economic
and political marginalization of women who mother. And it may take both strength
and courage, but we will have to let go of the cherished idea that
women are— in all the ways that really count— the “better”
sex, that caregiving comes more easily to women than it does to
men, that childbearing imbues women with a special sensitivities that make them more suited to the care and protection of children—
not just their own children, but all children (and, by
extension, the entire world). We'll have to abandon the notion that women— due to some inborn
quality— are the more emotional, relational and empathic half
of the human species, and that men are boorish slobs who can’t
be trusted with housework and child-rearing. We must do this, even
if it means forgoing the accolades we receive for doing “the
most important job in the world.” We need to cultivate a heightened
awareness of the intrinsic connection between gender and social
power. And we can never lose sight of the fact that challenging
gender is a profound act of political resistance.
We'll have to do more
than slap a few revisions on our old tale of gender, or to sketch
a scenario where the problem of difference is resolved by encouraging
women to act more “manly” and men to be more “womanly.”
As Barbara Risman suggests, we may have already taken that strategy
as far as it can go. We must come up with a brand new story—
an original and innovative work that will expand the meaning of
motherhood and fatherhood, love and duty, work and play, and put
the sex differences that do exist into a realistic perspective.
We will probably end up with a more open-ended story than the one
we have now, one where the rules of social conduct are more fluid
but less transparent. The story that overwrites the mythology of
gender will be one that frees individual men and women to form a
sense of their own true natures from the inside-out rather than
the outside-in.
And that will make a
new world -- and a new kind of motherhood -- possible.
mmo : september 2004
< back |