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City Journal |
When
Lawrence Summers suggested that biology might be partially responsible for the
relative rarity of female mathematics professors, he was provoking an academic
giant. Powerful as the president of Harvard may be, his influence is as nothing
compared with that of the behemoth that is the women’s studies movement. The
field of women’s studies originated in the heady sixties and grew exponentially
through the seventies and eighties. By the mid-nineties, when Daphne Patai and
Noretta Koertge published Professing Feminism, their searing critique of
the field, more than 600 undergraduate and several dozen graduate women’s
studies programs were up and running at colleges and universities across the
country.
The intellectual
cornerstone of women’s studies is “gender,” the notion that differences between
men and women are not rooted in biology, as Summers had hypothesized some might
be, but are cultural artifacts, inculcated by an oppressive patriarchal
society. Precisely because the gender idea builds a specific (radical)
political orientation into the field, Patai and Koertge point out, women’s
studies proved intellectually suspect from the start. You can read that radical
politics right in the National Women’s Studies Association constitution:
“Women’s Studies . . . is equipping women to transform the world to one that
will be free of all oppression . . . [and is] a force which furthers the
realization of feminist aims.” True justice for these radical feminists means
overcoming gender and establishing an androgynous society. So when Summers
asserted that something besides artificial cultural roles—something besides
“gender”—might account for the distinct positions of men and women in society,
he was undermining the intellectual and political foundation of the entire
women’s studies establishment.
The alternatives to
feminist orthodoxy don’t end with Summers-style invocations of biology as
destiny. Take psychiatrist Leonard Sax’s new book, Why Gender Matters: What
Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences,
for example. Sax begins by arguing that variations in how boys and girls learn
result from brain biology. But, unlike many believers in hardwired sex
differences, he goes on to argue that we can triumph over biology through
single-sex education. If we teach boys and girls separately and in sync with
their biologically based learning styles, he claims, they will perform equally
well in all academics, including math.
There’s also a fourth
possible view on the relations between sex and success—one that no one has
systematically articulated to date. If those who assert biological differences
between the sexes disagree about whether we can overcome them, the same might
apply to those who assert the power of cultural differences. Even if we do
provisionally hold that virtually all differences between men and women are
cultural, might it not also be true that those differences are impossible to
overcome? If so, it wouldn’t be “gender” but the feminist effort to eliminate
it that is truly oppressive. This fourth view suggests that the very same
cultural forces that make feminists desire androgyny may actually prevent us
from achieving it. The cultural sources of “gender” difference, properly
understood, would then inform us not that our gender identities are infinitely
malleable but that they’re effectively impossible to change.
Sociologists
have thought long and hard about the cultural “reproduction of society”—the
transmission of deeply held cultural attitudes across the generations. Some
social thinkers focus on the conscious transmission of cultural messages
through religion and custom, while others highlight the influence of deeper
social structures, such as economic organization or family forms. The most
sophisticated feminist theories of gender—those that offer the most plausible
alternatives to biological explanations—take the latter view. To explain the
reproduction of gender differences, they zero in on family structure,
especially during the first months and years of life, to a time when the way we
care for children is far more important than the words we speak.
A case in point is the work
of psychoanalytic sociologist Nancy Chodorow, a women’s studies pioneer who
gives flesh to a radically “cultural constructivist” idea of gender. Nearly
every feminist plan for engineering a new, androgynous society—from the
“egalitarian feminism” of political theorist Susan Okin to the “difference
feminism” of developmental psychologist Carol Gilligan—offers a variation on
Chodorow’s themes, so it’s worth considering them closely.
Chodorow hypothesizes that
the differences between the sexes simply derive from the contingent
circumstance that women happen to be the primary caretakers of children. The
special, “feminine” empathy required for rearing children, she suggests,
becomes indelibly associated in our minds with people who just physically
happen to be female. Identifying with their daughters, moreover, mothers tend
to stay tightly connected with them for years, drawing them into a circle of
mutual dependence and empathy that is the essence of femininity. So it’s not
television ads or Barbie dolls that turn little girls into caring women, who
themselves want to be mothers. It’s the emotional closeness of mothers and
daughters that perpetuates the conventional female sexual role for generation
after generation.
Boys learn their gender
lessons early, too, Chodorow maintains. Since traditional mothers assume that
boys are different from girls, early on they tend to encourage their sons to be
independent. As mothers begin to push their sons out of the warm circle of
empathy, boys get the message that people with Daddy’s kind of body should act
differently from the way Mommy acts. If they want to be men, boys learn,
they’ve got to overcome the qualities of emotional empathy of people like Mom.
Masculinity thus finds its ground in a rejection of “feminine” qualities.
If we could just break the
association between gender and child care, thinks Chodorow—if men as well as
women could “mother” children—then we might vanquish gender. Men and women
would still have a few distinct body parts, of course, but “masculine” and
“feminine” personality differences would no longer have anything to do with
bodily equipment. No one would assume that only people with a certain kind of
body should be caring and empathic. The speed with which a child became
independent would no longer depend on whether it was male or female. A new era
would dawn.
Yet even
if this understanding of gender as learned behavior is right, androgyny
proponents quickly run into a problem. As Chodorow herself underscores,
mothering by women produces women who themselves want to be mothers. The
mechanism at work may be social and psychological, rather than biological, but
it’s no less real for that. How, then, do you get women to mother less and men
to mother more, especially when, according to Chodorow, everything in a typical
male’s early rearing makes him wrong for the job?
Plato faced this dilemma
when he drew up history’s first great plan for a perfectly just society in the
Republic—a society that required, among other things, androgyny. His solution:
send the members of the old, imperfect city into exile, so that the new, just
city could be built from scratch. Otherwise, their recalcitrant mental habits
would sabotage the creation of the new order. The fact is, attempts to force a
society out of its most deeply held cultural values can be every bit as
tyrannical as schemes to override our biological nature.
But what if a society
actually existed—not just a theoretical utopia—whose inhabitants yearned for
androgyny? What if a society existed whose citizens, motivated by a burning
passion for perfect justice, committed themselves to a total reorganization of
the traditional family system, with the express purpose of eliminating gender?
Such a society has existed, of course: the early Israeli kibbutz movement. The
movement wasn’t just a precursor to modern feminism, it’s important to add. The
kibbutzniks were utopian socialists who wanted to construct a society where the
ideal of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”
would govern the production and distribution of goods. It was as part of this
larger socialist vision that the kibbutzniks set out to wipe away gender.
Kibbutz parents agreed to
see their own children only two hours a day, and for the remaining 22 hours to
surrender them to the collective, which would raise them androgynously (trying
more to “masculinize” women than “feminize” men). Boys and girls would
henceforth do the same kind of work and wear the same kind of clothes. Girls
would learn to be soldiers, just like boys. Signs of “bourgeois” femininity—makeup,
say—would now be taboo. As if they had stepped out of Plato’s Republic,
the children would dress and undress together and even use the same showers.
The
experiment collapsed within a generation, and a traditional family and gender
system reasserted itself. Why? Those who believe in hardwired natural
differences obviously would say that cultural conditioning couldn’t remove the
sexes’ genetic programming. Indeed, in his now-infamous conference remarks,
Lawrence Summers invoked the history of the kibbutz movement to help make his
case that biology might partially explain sex roles.
Feminists, though, say that
the kibbutz experiment didn’t get a fair chance. However committed to gender
justice the kibbutzniks might have been, they were all traditional Europeans by
upbringing. Somehow they must have transmitted the old cultural messages about
gender to the children. Perhaps, too, those messages came from the larger
Israeli society, from which it was impossible to shelter the boys and girls
entirely. What’s more—and Chodorow would doubtless emphasize this fact—the
kibbutz child-care nurses were all women. A 50/50 male-female mix might have
done the trick.
Yet American androgyny
proponents rarely refer to the kibbutz experiment—for understandable reasons.
Its failure—even if you accept their own cultural explanation for it—puts a
serious damper on the idea of androgynizing America. In the U.S., after all,
there’s nothing remotely approaching the level of commitment to surmounting
gender found among the early kibbutzniks. If androgyny proved unattainable in a
small socialist society whose citizens self-selected for radical feminist
convictions, how could one bring it about in contemporary America, where most
people don’t want it? It would take a massive amount of coercion—unacceptable
in any democracy—to get us even to the point where the kibbutzniks were when
they failed to build a post-gender society.
The best account of the
experiment’s breakdown, offered by anthropologist Melford Spiro in his books Gender
and Culture and Children of the Kibbutz, points out an even bigger obstacle
to androgyny. Ultimately, Spiro argues, the kibbutzniks didn’t succeed because
the mothers wanted their kids back. They wanted to take care of their young
children in the old-fashioned way, themselves. Two hours a day with their kids
wasn’t enough. Even among the kibbutz founders, Spiro notes, women often
agonized over the sacrifice of maternal pleasure that their egalitarian
ideology demanded. He quotes from one mother’s autobiography: “Is it right to
make the child return for the night to the children’s home, to say goodnight to
it and send it back to sleep among the fifteen or twenty others? This parting
from the child before sleep is so unjust!” Such feelings persisted and intensified,
until collective pressure forced the kibbutz to let parents spend extra time
with their kids.
Spiro
holds that a pre-cultural form of maternal instinct subverted the kibbutz’s
child-rearing approach. But a plausible cultural explanation is even more
devastating to feminist hopes for a gender-free America. What really defeated
androgyny on the kibbutz, this interpretation posits, was the profound tension
built in to the very culture of modern democratic individualism that the
kibbutzniks embraced—the tension between liberty and equality. As part of their
insistence on their unique individuality, the kibbutzniks recognized the
unabridgeable unique individuality of everyone else. Hence, their insistence on
radical equality. Full equality meant that everyone had to treat everyone else
the same way. Even the differences between my children and the neighbors’ kids
would have to go. They pretended that their children belonged to the
collective—“child of the kibbutz,” they would say, not “my child.”
But the other side of
democratic individualism is the idea that each of us is uniquely
individual. And inseparable from this individualism are certain aspirations—to
express yourself personally, and to treat yourself, your possessions, and your
family differently from how you treat everyone else. Child rearing doesn’t
escape these aspirations. In fact, in modern societies people pay far greater
attention to the unique characters of their children than people do in
traditional, group-oriented societies. Lavishing intense, personal attention on
their kids is a favorite way for modern individuals to exercise personal
liberty.
Kibbutz mothers who hoped
to treat everyone the same thus also wanted to express their individual
characters by molding their own kids. The two goals—reflecting the two sides of
modern democratic individualism—were finally incommensurable. Eventually, the
desire for personal expression trumped the quest for radical equality. The
parents decided to raise their own kids in their own way. No one ever got the
chance to find out if further tinkering might have eliminated their children’s
gender differences.
The
culture of democratic individualism characterizes contemporary America, too, of
course, and it still cuts two ways. Feminists insist on radical equality, and
androgyny is the logical outcome of that drive for equality. Yet at the same
time, especially since the baby boomers came on the scene, many American women
have treated the experience of motherhood as an exercise in
self-expression—indeed, they do so more fervently than the kibbutzniks.
A modern, self-expressive,
committed-to-full-equality American mother might know that her child is getting
quality care from a relative, a nanny, or a nursery, but she’ll often feel
dissatisfied, since the care isn’t hers. Part of the point of being a
parent, she’ll feel, is to express one’s unique personality through how one
cares for and shapes one’s children. In practical terms, she’ll be reluctant to
give up her kids long enough to break the cycle of “gender reproduction.”
True, the last 40 years
have seen tremendous changes in the social roles of men and women—changes that
could never have happened were there not significant flexibility in gender
roles. From the standpoint of feminism’s ideal of androgyny, though, the shift
is still very partial. Until the link between women and child rearing
completely breaks down, neither corporate boardrooms nor Harvard professorships
of mathematics will see numerical parity between men and women. In the
meantime, in disproportionate numbers, at critical points in their careers,
women will continue to choose mothering over professional work.
From either a biological or
cultural point of view, then, the feminist project of androgyny is ultimately
doomed. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t do harm in the meantime. In
America, many boys are slipping behind in school; their sisters are
significantly more likely to go on to college. Yet thanks largely to the
influence of academic feminists, legal and educational resources still flow
disproportionately to supposedly victimized girls. In the end, gender won’t
disappear, whatever the mavens of women’s studies hope, but the careers of some
bright young men probably will.