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CHAPTER ONE
Gender and Politics Redefined
The women's movement has changed the way we think about both gender
and politics in this country. In feminist theory, gender, unlike sex, is defined as a
socially constructed role, which means that it is the result of political
arrangements and is amenable to social and political analysis. To understand
this idea, we have to think about roles the way social scientists do--not as God
or nature determined, but as how and with what rationale a particular culture
distributes certain tasks, certain privileges, and certain responsibilities.
We owe the original formulation of this radical idea to anthropologist
Margaret Mead, who in a study of three primitive societies in New Guinea
noticed that, even though in every culture certain tasks, responsibilities, and
privileges were assigned by gender, those assignments were not identical. In
one, the military task of protecting the village was assigned to males, but in
another both sexes had to go to war if the village was threatened. In still another
tribe, food production by agriculture was assigned to women, and the men who
had to do hunting and gathering had much more free time. Hence, when the
males were not away, they were home unemployed and able--indeed,
expected--to sit around and indulge in what we Americans would call gossip.
In that society, gossiping was considered a male privilege, whereas in our
society such conversation is thought to be a frivolous female pleasure.(1)
Mead's analysis demonstrated that, although every society defined certain
activities as either male or female, the gender designation of those activities
varied from culture to culture. No universal role was either male or female. The
societies Mead studied were interesting and important to her analysis because
there was little contact among them; each had invented its own gender
arrangements independently. Nevertheless, there was always gender definition,
and one pattern everywhere held true: Whatever men did was more highly
valued by the village than
whatever women did. In modern terminology, males were assigned tasks that, by
themselves, conferred higher status.(2) Thus, as we move into a discussion of
sexual politics in America, we have to face the challenge of the universality of
gender differences and the fact that, despite myths about matriarchies, almost
everywhere males enjoy a socially constructed superiority over women.(3)
Why? That is the question ethnologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and
political scientists have been asking for the past several decades. Some analysts
believe it is because males are physically stronger. Can we infer that in all
societies males have threatened women physically to maintain a superior status?
Or is there something about the childbearing and childrearing functions that so
debilitates women that they are unwilling or unable to compete with men for
positions of leadership and power? Remember that in a world without
contraception, a healthy female will be pregnant constantly during her adult life.
The only natural contraceptive is mother's malnutrition.
Despite the difficulty of answering these questions definitively, the reason for
women's inferior status has to be addressed. If biology is not women's destiny,
then some other explanation of how women's destiny came to be defined this
way, in culture after culture, must be provided by feminists.
Just as gender has been reconceptualized, "politics," too, has been expanded
by feminists. In its narrowest definition, politics has to do with participation in
government, party politics, and elective or appointed office. More broadly,
however, politics has to do with power: getting people to do what you want them
to do. This definition is still being challenged by academics, but feminists have
refused to limit a political analysis to that of formal roles. Politics, feminists
believe, includes relations in the world of work: for example, who is hired, who is
fired, who is always boss, who is never boss. In Sexual Politics, Kate Millett's
definition of sexual politics goes even further: Sexual politics, she writes, is the
power relationship between men and women in formal groups and in the family.(4)
Thus, sexual politics must include the politics of motherhood. Although from
one perspective, contraception and abortion pertain only to a woman and her
pregnancy, the question of whether a woman is legally obligated to carry her
fetus to term is, in most countries today, determined by society. In some, it is
never appropriate to end a pregnancy, even if it is medically possible. In others, it
is the decision of the husband and father because the fetus is considered to be
his property. In the United States since 1973, the decision may be made only by
the person who is pregnant, in consultation with her medical adviser--not the
father of the child and not the state. But these are political issues, not issues
determined by nature.
To take another example based on this broader definition of politics, child
care today is considered a political issue, but in a different society or at another
time, it might have been considered a family or a private matter. Politics
impinges on the right to work, marriage and divorce, participation in the military,
pornography, and even advertising, which, as feminists see it, affects people's
view of women and women's view of themselves.
Feminists did not always define politics this way. In the nineteenth century at
the beginning of the women's rights movement, women activists concentrated
on bringing balance to the civil and political (in the narrow sense) rights of men
and women, and in time their work focused on a complex, protracted struggle for
the right to vote. To win this battle, our foremothers had to form strong
organizations that could work across the nation concurrently for a common goal.
This was hardly an accident of history, so we must ask ourselves, What led to
the mobilization of so many women activists in this concentrated, all-out suffrage
effort? Under what conditions, and through what small struggles, did the first
wave of feminism emerge?
It is by asking these sorts of questions about the women's movement--about
political expediency, the quirks of fate and circumstance, and individual
leadership as well as theory--that we gain a useful understanding of how these
fundamental changes in our thinking occurred. The new feminism (sometimes
called the second wave of feminism) burst upon the American scene somewhere
between 1967 and 1968 with, as far as the general newspaper-reading public was
aware, no antecedents. Suddenly, as if planted by an extraterrestrial being, the
words sexism, male chauvinism, and patriarchy were on everybody's tongue. In
fact, the movement drew on the civil rights struggle of African Americans and
was deeply embedded in our own 1960s counterculturalism. Nevertheless, the
theory of patriarchy, first sketched out in Millett's riveting book Sexual Politics,
is where the story of the new feminism has to begin.(5)
Patriarchy and Politics
Patriarchy has been defined as a state whose ethos reflects the characteristics of
masculine gender. As Kate Millett used the term, it was meant to characterize a
society dominated not just by masculinity but also by men whose primary
purpose is to construct and maintain a certain power relationship over women.
In such a society, much of what is taken to be traditional or even "true" is really
an extended political maneuver to maintain the unequal power relationship
between males and females. This does not necessarily imply a conspiracy in
which every man colludes with every other man to keep women out of power. That would imply
malevolent intention. It is rather the case, feminists believe, that in the
enjoyment of privilege and individual advantage, all (or most) men accede to the
system that is in place and have no particular interest in making change.(6)
This theory was first outlined by Kate Millett, who began with the
observation that males and females are traditionally differentiated on three
dimensions, dimensions she called temperament, role, and status.(7) Everyone in
our society, from the man on the street to the professional psychologist, harbors
certain cherished beliefs about sex differences. Women, they will tell you, are
more passive; men are more active. Women are dependent; men are independent.
Women are emotional; men are rational. So as an outgrowth of these
temperamental differences, women are less comfortable with and less likely to
seek a life of their own and more likely to rely on their feelings for truth, whereas
men will concentrate on what is demonstrably true. Obviously, these sex
differences--real or perceived--will have a significant impact on women trying
to succeed in a world whose values are dictated by men.(8)
After temperament, Millett examined the prevailing views of adult roles.
Patriarchs, she explained, want people to believe that adult role differentiation is
natural and in fact grows out of temperamental differences. The desire to marry,
to mother, and to make a home is as natural for females as is the male's need to
make his mark in the outside world. Woman is a private entity, man a public one.
And as a consequence of role differentiation, observed Millett, men enjoy higher
status than women because what men like and do are given more social value
than what women like and do.
Virginia Woolf, an early-twentieth-century British novelist and one of our
inspirers, once wrote that Leo Tolstoy was considered a greater writer than Jane
Austen because he wrote about war and peace, whereas Austen limited herself
to the drama of interpersonal relationships. But who decides, Woolf asked
provocatively in her book Three Guineas, that war is more important than
interpersonal relationships?(9) Society, of course, she replied, the particular
society in which the novelists write and are read. Since men derive status from
what they do, the argument soon becomes cyclic: What men do is more
important because men do it.
In the popular view, the causal chain of temperament-role-status begins with
temperament and ends with status. Temperamental differences are supposedly
present at birth and lead inevitably (no one plans or needs to enforce this
pattern) to role and status differentiations. And since the key years of
professional advancement in an industrial society are between the ages of
twenty-five and forty, the years when "normal" women are fulfilling their home
and motherhood yearnings, without conspiring to, men end up in higher status
positions than women.
In Millett's view, that causal chain is reversed. Status really comes first in
patriarchy, Millett argued, for patriarchy's most important goal is to maintain the
superiority of males over females. Then in a direct effort to reduce competition
from women, patriarchy assigns women roles that isolate them from other adults
and busy them in caretaking.
How are these roles assigned? And what causes women to accept them
without rebellion? In her most brilliant insight, Millett saw that the people
professionals--social and behavioral scientists, therapists, and
educators--directly contribute to patriarchy by defining what is normal and
what is not. Let a woman declare the mother role to be constricting or want the
kind of economic power usually enjoyed by men, and she is judged in need of
"professional help." And that, Millett helped a whole generation of feminists to
see, is the way women in our society are made to accept their social roles.(10)
Millett's analysis was unsettling both because it shed new light on so many
previously accepted traditions and because it made women angry. Like the
Copernican revolution that took the earth from the center of the solar system,
where the ancients had thought it was, and put it in an orbit around the sun,
Millett turned conventional assumptions about women's temperament, roles, and
status upside down. Reading Millett or hearing her theories secondhand, women
in the early 1970s began to look at the arrangements they had made in their lives,
particularly in their relationships with men, and had what they called the "click!"
experience, a sudden awareness of how political those relationships were.(11)
Sexual politics, as Millet defined it, bears heavily on women in our culture. It is
clear that the temperament required for dedicated, original work--the
staying-up-all-night kind of dedication, the
I-can't-think-about-anything-else-darling-not-even-you-tonight-because-I've-got-those-things-growing-in-the-petri-dish
kind of intensity--is, of course,
antithetical to what is considered normal behavior for a female. So the American
female finds herself in a double bind. Insofar as she experiences the ambitions of
a careerist, she is not feminine, and insofar as she accedes to the needs of her
feminine nature, she will not be taken seriously as a professional. As mentioned,
those childbearing years, when a woman is healthiest and has the most energy
for childrearing, coincide with the peak opportunity years in any profession.
And to the extent that she is tempted to take a break, the cost to a woman's
career, given the dominance of the male model, is high. Indeed, many of the
reasons women give for leaving their careers and the reasons men give for not
encouraging them to stay involve this double bind.
In the Millett model, only three roles have traditionally been appropriate for
women in our society: the mother role, the wifelike role, the decorative role (only
possible, incidentally, for women when they are young). Whoever does not
naturally fit into any of those is dumped into
the one remaining category: the witch-bitch trough. Careers that are considered
most appropriate for women are precisely those that appear to be natural
extensions of women's three approved roles. Working with children or the
handicapped or the old in some nurturing capacity is an obvious extension of
the mother role. Women who function as research associates, secretaries, lab
technicians, or assistants all their lives are playing out a wifelike role for the men
they serve. And women whose femininity is their strongest selling point are
decorative objects.
Within the ideology of patriarchy, another bias inhibits women seeking work
in the intellectual professions and the arts. This is the powerful idea that any
really good work has to begin in youth. If a woman returns to university training
to do science, for example, at thirty-five, even if she intends to spend the next
thirty years in full-time research, her colleagues believe she is not likely to make a
major contribution. Science and many other intellectual and artistic professions
are considered to be young people's fields. The myth about science, the arts, and
the professions comes from data culled from the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries when young men did not live as long. Most likely, another variable is at
work besides the number of brain cells in youth: newness to the field.(12)
In the end, of course, knowledge is power, and so it is not surprising that any
dominant group will try hard to keep subordinate groups away from knowledge.
During slavery and beyond, African Americans were not allowed to learn to read,
the first tool of knowledge; women in earlier centuries were forbidden formally to
study art--the presence of nude models was thought to compromise women's
purity.(13) In the same spirit, every colonial power has limited the education of its
colony's native born. Increased knowledge brings with it not only increased
status but also increased power, exactly what the entire patriarchal structure is
designed to prevent.
Can a political movement change ideology? As with differences of opinion
over religion, it is difficult to argue people out of a set of beliefs from which they
have derived status and power. But theory can provide the glue that holds a
movement together and can give it direction. First, theory offers a sense of
shared identity. Second, by revising history, theory can give a group the
knowledge of its past together with the possibility of a future that will be
different from that past. Lastly, theory provides the group with a political agenda
by which to get from here to there.
A feminist strategy, then, begins by taking back control over the meaning and
interpretation of events. Millett offered one new way of thinking about the
present and the past. So long as feminists shared that view, they rapidly
achieved their first set of political goals. But even in feminist politics, gender is
not the only influence on human behavior, and in
time differences among women had to be dealt with both in feminist theory and
feminist practice.
Race, Gender, and Class
Women are not just female. Like men, they are situated in certain economic and
social classes. In America, with its history of slavery, its conquest of indigenous
and border peoples, and its persistent racism, there is a caste-based set of issues
and stigmas affecting women as well. Feminist scholars disagree as to whether
race, class, or gender (sometimes called sex class) is the most fundamental of the
oppressions women suffer. Socialist feminists see economic change (including
the overthrow or substantial modification of capitalism) as a first step toward
women's liberation. Even when women of color share white feminists' overall
views, as numerous people have observed, the term women usually implies white
women, and the terms blacks, Native Americans, and Hispanics generally mean
men.(14) Thus, female members of groups already stigmatized may suffer hardship
as well as isolation because of race, gender, and class.(15)
Women of color, immigrant women, and women whose families needed their
financial support have always worked outside the home, many in low-paid
service or manual labor, and so have different levels of experience of sexual
harassment and gender discrimination on the job and different views of the
relative value of marriage and work. Such experiences cause them to question
whether employment outside the home is inherently meaningful, as so many
white middle-class feminists assert, and whether it is innately liberating--issues
that illustrate the intersection of class and race. As regards image, there are
differences, too. African-American women, according to writer bell hooks (who
spells her name with lowercase letters), are most negatively stereotyped.
Speaking specifically for women of color, bell hooks argues that such
stereotypes dehumanize black women--even more than black men, even more
than white women.(16)
Nevertheless, most analysts agree that white women and women of color
share many of the same degrading experiences in a sexist society--prejudice in
the workplace (in terms of access and wages), sexual harassment, imposition of
the "feminine mystique" (see Chapter 5), exclusive domestic responsibilities, and
battering and the inability to protect themselves and their children from
battering--but that women of color face different and greater limitations
imposed by a racist and classist society as well. Hooks believes that women of
color are deeply feminist but are reluctant to join the "white" women's movement
because it is deeply
racist.(17) As we see in a brief review of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century
struggle for women's rights, many white women activists promoted gender
equality while tolerating, and in some instances exploiting, racism as well.
The class issue also divides women differently than men. When is a woman
working class? Is it when she holds a working-class job, or is it when she is
married to a husband who does? The question is not just academic. As women
divorce, they discover all too late that their class membership was tied to their
husband's income and place in a community. As Wilma Scott Heide put it
dramatically in a 1972 speech as president of the National Organization for
Women (NOW), quoting Johnnie Tilmon, "Every middle-class married woman is
one man away from welfare."(18) Friedrich Engels, coauthor with Karl Marx of The
Communist Manifesto, claimed that in terms of "economic class," married women
were not even operating in the same economic system as their spouses.(19) They
were mired, Engels wrote, in a "preproperty" phase of economic development.
Insofar as they exchanged their service for protection, they functioned in the
marriage much as serfs did, farming the lord's land in exchange for his army's
defense.
Differences in class account in part for differences in politics. During the
nineteenth century, even though all women were deprived of certain civil and
political rights, not all women felt the pangs of gender disadvantage in the same
measure. In the 1970s, antifeminism on the political Right was fueled by fear
among economically dependent women of loss of privilege. Class issues also
contribute to the distrust some working-class women feel for women of privilege,
even when that privilege is earned. Women today acknowledge what was only
dimly perceived twenty years ago: that there are profound and unalterable
differences among women. It has not been easy--indeed, it may not be
possible--to forge a common agenda among women who work in low-paying,
low-status fields; women who are in the higher reaches of personal career
attainment; women who are disadvantaged by race or immigrant status; and
women who do not want to give up dependency on men to compete in an
economic race they feel they cannot win.
The Politics of Difference
Whether women can claim equal civil rights with men while retaining their
different aspects is an issue that was born in the suffrage movement and remains
unresolved even today. In a thoughtful history of the women's suffrage
movement, 1890-1920, historian Aileen Kraditor points out that the arguments for
suffrage oscillated between two views of women: one, that women are equal,
virtually indistinguishable from
men in their political capacity--the "natural rights" argument; the other, that
women, being morally and socially more upright than men, would, when
enfranchised, bring peace to the world and uncompromising rectitude to the task
of governing.(20) Kraditor names the first of these assertions the "argument from
justice" and the second the "argument from expediency. She notes that, whereas
the earliest pioneers in the women's rights movement held a radical position on
women's moral and political sameness with men, as the movement widened in its
appeal, the argument that women's differences would introduce new and higher
standards of civic behavior weakened the case for women's suffrage.
We can date the beginning of the reappearance of the "differences argument"
to the publication in 1982 of Carol Gilligan's influential book In a Different Voice.(21)
In this work, based on interviews and a fresh interpretation of gender differences
in children's moral development, Gilligan found young women's sense of morality
to be different in interesting ways from that of young men. In place of an almost
impersonal, mechanistic view of justice and fairness, Gilligan located women's
moral values in a more personal, contextual view of life. Women, she asserted,
seek wholeness and connectedness to others, and when faced with conflict, they
want to change the rules to avoid conflict, if at all possible, rather than manage it
(as men would do). Many women readers of In a Different Voice, finding
themselves mirrored in the comments made by Gilligan's subjects, agreed. Not
long after, a team of women educators carried the moral development argument
further. In Women's Ways of Knowing, Mary Belenky and her colleagues
suggested that women learn in different ways from men.(22)
Kraditor found, in the writings of suffragists, inherently irreconcilable points
of view. Gilligan, Belenky, and their followers may be said to have created the
argument anew, and much of feminist scholarship and feminist debate over
strategy since the early 1980s has hinged on the equality/difference issue. The
political implications of either side of the debate are just as divisive now as they
were at the turn of the century. If women are fundamentally different--and not
just as a result of their socialization--they may never be interchangeable with
men. And if women have to become too much like men to compete for the power,
positions, and resources that men have heretofore reserved for themselves, in
the end women's "victory" may be without meaning. As Betty Friedan put it more
than once, "Women don't want to be equal to unfree men." What is the point of
equality if women's specialness is to be compromised?
Issues of race, class, and women's specialness weave in and out of feminist
politics, especially after 1975. The possibilities afforded by military service,
surrogate motherhood, the Mommy Track, and electoral office are simply not of
equal value to all women. In the decade that witnessed the rebirth of feminism,
however--in the period 1967 to 1977--these
divisions were not yet so obvious, and the problems women faced were far more
pressing. Today, however, disagreements among feminists are not just
theoretical but also present a challenge to the future of feminism itself.
