CHAPTER 6
Feminism, Motherhood, and the Workplace
Eight women, all Princeton graduates, sat around a fireplace discussing books in an Atlanta, Georgia, home. Some of the women also had law degrees from Harvard and Columbia. Most of them were no longer working full-time and had voluntarily left to stay at home with their children. “Women today, if we think about feminism at all,” says one of the women, a former publisher, “see it as a battle fought for ‘the choice.’ For us, the freedom to choose work if we want to work is the feminist strain in our lives.” “I’ve had women tell me,” replied a former lawyer, “that it’s women like me that are ruining the workplace because it makes employers suspicious. I don’t want to take on the mantle of all womanhood and fight for some sister who isn’t really my sister because I don’t even know her.” Have these women failed the feminist movement?
FEMINISM
Many women entering college today think that feminism is no longer relevant to their lives—that women are liberated, that the days of discrimination in the workplace, home, and classroom are over. This belief that equality has been achieved is perpetuated by the media and other major institutions. However, in reality, women, particularly mothers, still earn significantly less than what men earn. Women in families where both spouses are working are still burdened with the majority of housework and child care. And sexual harassment in the workplace and classroom is still all too common.
British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was the forerunner of the first wave of feminism in the United States, which ran from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. She argued that biological differences are not a relevant ground for denying women equal rights. Women and men have the same capacity for reason and are governed by the same moral standards. John Stuart Mill took up the same arguments in his essay “Subjection of Women.” The first wave of feminists, which included Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Susan B. Anthony, focused on civil rights, access to contraception, and universal suffrage (the right to vote).
These early liberal feminists began with the assumption that there is a common rational human nature that transcends gender differences. The purpose of the state is to provide a sphere 229of liberty in which citizens can exercise their rights and freely determine their own lives. Social structures and institutions that limit the rational choices of women are morally wrong because they limit their autonomy. The solution is to demand equal access to the opportunities and privileges enjoyed by men.
The second wave of liberal feminism, popularly known as the women’s liberation movement, began in the 1960s following the publication of Betty Friedan’s controversial book The Feminine Mystique. Friedan wrote that “for women to have full identity and freedom, they must have economic independence. Equality and human dignity are not possible for women if they are not able to earn. Only economic independence can free a woman to marry for love, not for status or financial support, or to leave a loveless, intolerable, humiliating marriage.”1 The movement, which was composed primarily of white, middle-class women, focused on equal employment opportunities and abortion rights. Linda Hirshman, in “Homeward Bound,” expresses the liberal feminist point of view. Judith Jarvis Thomson’s 1971 ground-breaking article, “A Defense of Abortion,” also emerged from the liberal feminist movement.
In 1968, the liberal feminist National Organization of Women (NOW) published its Bill of Rights. Many, if not most, of their demands still are not realized. There has also been a move, which has met with some success, to eliminate sexist language that conveys women’s inferior status, as well as to replace male terms in referring to people in general with gender-neutral terms such as “humans” and “he or she.”
The radical feminist movement, which emerged in the late 1960s, claims instead that gender is a cultural construct used to sustain a patriarchy. Liberty rights are a male notion, generated by masculine reason for relationships among men. Men are socialized to be both protectors and sexual predators; women are socialized to be weak and to be sexual prey. According to radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon, one cannot be a woman without being objectified by men as an object of sexual violence.2 To use a slogan of radical feminists, the most important difference between men and women is that “men fuck and women get fucked.” Although women are taught to value connectedness, in reality, women want individuation and liberation from the shackles of intimacy. Women who want motherhood and marriage are operating under “false consciousness.”
Unlike liberal feminists, radical feminists do not place much stock in political or legal reform. If government and other social institutions, such as capitalism and religion, are patriarchal, then participation in these systems isn’t going to help women. For example, protecting pornographers’ freedom of speech to make and sell pornography harms women. Some radical feminists call for lesbianism, not necessarily in sexual terms but in terms of women working and living together without men and celebrating “gynergy”—the woman spirit/strength.
Other schools of feminism include Marxist and socialist feminism. Marxist feminists believe that the capitalist class system is the cause of oppression for women. French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir is a Marxist feminist, although she is sometimes considered a radical feminist as well. Socialist feminism grew out of Marxist feminism. While Marxist feminists are concerned primarily with the public realm, socialist feminists look at both the public and private realms. They believe that sexism is rooted in the sexual division of labor between the private home (the woman’s realm) and the outside public workplace (man’s realm). They maintain that this split is a product of capitalism.
Feminists reject conservatism, which regards the roles and capacities of men and women as biologically determined and unchangeable and seeks to retain patriarchy and traditional gender roles. The sexual division in the workplace and home, according to conservatives, is a natural 230expression of these biological differences. Rather than providing a critical analysis of women’s oppression, conservatism provides a justification for it. Steven Goldberg argues that patriarchy and male dominance are rooted in biological differences, not culture.3
Bill of Rights: National Organization for Women (NOW). Used with permission
Gender essentialists believe that there are essential, innate differences between men and women. However, unlike conservatives, they do not see this as justifying men’s dominance of women. Instead women’s distinctive nature is to be valued and liberated, primarily through consciousness-raising groups like the one in the scenario at the beginning of this chapter. In 1982, psychologist Carol Gilligan published her landmark book In a Different Voice, in which she argues that the liberal emphasis on autonomy and separateness from others is a male value. Gilligan maintains that women are fundamentally connected to life and value connection over individuation. Women’s moral reasoning and interaction with the world are based on responsibility, intimacy, and care, not on autonomy, justice, and rights reasoning as used by men. The liberal goal of androgyny, the sameness of men and women, is striving not toward true equality but 231toward the male ideal in dress, behavior, and career ambitions and the rejection of traditional female roles such as motherhood and social service. In the reading “Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism,” Ruth Groenhout examines gender-essentialist theories and concludes that liberal feminist theory offers a more powerful tool for securing the rights and freedom of women.
Another type of feminism is ecofeminism, which links men’s desire to control and dominate women to men’s domination and exploitation of the environment. Women, ecofeminists argue, should take the lead in preserving the environment because women are more in tune with nature.
In the 1980s feminism began moving away from its roots as a radical political movement. In the current postfeminist period, feminist dialogue and gender analysis occur primarily in the universities. Support for the feminist movement has declined during the past few decades. In a 1986 Gallup poll, 56 percent of women polled considered themselves feminists. This figure dropped to 33 percent in 1992 and to 23 percent in 2017. This decline may be caused, in part, by modern feminism’s primary focus on middle-class working women; the marginalization of African American women, poor women, and stay-at-home mothers; and disillusionment with the lack of progress made for women in the workplace, in politics, and at home. Also, the assertion by academic feminists that one must support abortion-on-demand to be a true feminist has alienated many women (see Serrin Foster’s reading, “Refuse to Choose: Women Deserve Better than Abortion,” in Chapter 2).
While the feminist movement in developed countries has focused primarily on equality in the workplace and reproductive rights, the issues of poverty and maternal and infant mortality, including death rates from AIDS, are more pressing in many developing nations. Other issues in developing nations are lack of access to education, lack of property rights for married women, and violence against women—both domestic and by military forces—as well as female genital mutilation (circumcision) in Africa, female infanticide and the sex trade in Southeast Asia, and divorce laws in Islamic countries that often make it difficult for women to get a divorce.
THE PHILOSOPHERS ON WOMEN
Philosophers bear part of the responsibility for perpetuating sexism—the belief that women are inferior to men. Plato taught that man is the true humanity and that woman is a deviation. Woman exists as the result of evil and failure to control one’s passions. A man’s destiny is to use his rational human faculties. If a man fails to control his emotions, he lives unrighteously and will be reincarnated as a woman.
Aristotle continued the philosophical tradition of misogyny. According to him, a female embryo is a deviation from nature and results from a deficiency in generative heat. A female is a misbegotten male, a “monstrosity,” a “mutilated male.” Like Aristotle, Goldberg maintains that patriarchy—the dominance of men—has a basis in biology. Although not arguing that women are inferior, Goldberg does maintain that patriarchy is inevitable.
The early Christian philosophers embraced the Platonic doctrine that women are inherently inferior to men. According to Augustine (a.d. 354–430), God created woman to be “in sex subjected to the masculine sex.” The second creation story in Genesis, in which Eve was created from the rib of Adam, is often use to reinforce the subservient role of women.
The philosophical view that privileges reason and equates male thinking with rationality continues to dominate much of Western philosophy. According to the Enlightenment philosophers, it is through reason that humanity progresses, socially and morally. Immanuel Kant believed that women are deficient in reason. Jean-Jacques Rousseau maintained that men and women have different duties, based on a natural sexual division of labor. Women can be forced to be free by compelling them to fulfill their duties as mothers and wives. Rousseau writes:
Woman was made especially to please man…. This is the law of nature. If woman is formed to please and to live in subjection, she must render herself agreeable to man instead of provoking his wrath; her strength lies in her charms.4
British philosopher and liberal feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman primarily as a response to Rousseau. In “The Subjection of Women,” co-authored by Harriet Taylor, John Stuart Mill also denounced patriarchal power, arguing that women need to be freed from subjection to men. The injustices perpetuated on women by an “almost despotic power of husbands over wives” need to be corrected by giving women the same rights and the same protection under the law as men.5 Friedrich Engels, in his Marxist analysis of women’s oppression, notes:
The husband is obliged to earn a living and support his family, and that in itself gives him a position of supremacy…. Within the family he is the bourgeois, and the wife represents the proletariat…. Equality will be achieved only when the special legal privileges of the capitalist class have been abolished…. and both [men and women] possess legally complete equality of rights…. [T]he first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands that the characteristic of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society be abolished.6
Freud was developing his theory of psychoanalysis at about the same time that the first wave of feminists were fighting for equal rights for women. Freud believed that such a project was doomed to failure. Girls feel wronged, he argued, because they don’t have a penis like boys and fall victim to penis envy and resentment. As the girl grows up, “the wish for a penis is replaced by one for a baby, in particular a son, from her father.” Freud maintained that women have little 233sense of justice, and a weaker social interest, because of the prominent role that envy plays in their lives.
Modern feminists reject theories claiming that women are inherently inferior to men. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) accuses the philosophical tradition of propagating the view of women as the “other,” as deviant human beings. She argues that gender inequalities are primarily the result of upbringing. Gender stereotypes are also reinforced by the media. (See Case Study 1: Life Imitating Art: Sex Stereotypes in the Media and Case Study 6: Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia: The Tyranny of Thinness.)
MOTHERHOOD
The experience of motherhood is central to many women’s lives. Many modern feminists view motherhood as an oppressive patriarchal institution. Radical feminists believe that motherhood is a social construct, rather than something women naturally want. In her 1949 book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that woman’s “misfortune is to have been biologically destined for the repetition of life.” Women’s connection to others, including pregnancy and motherhood, according to radical feminists, is a source of misery and oppression, not celebration and joy.7 Like sexual intercourse, pregnancy blurs the line between self and other and, hence, is objectionable and debasing. The solution to this “misfortune” is legalized abortion. Indeed, radical feminists maintain that women who claim to enjoy motherhood are operating from a false consciousness and fail to recognize their own oppression. In her book, de Beauvoir argues that it is only through participation in the workplace and public life that women can find fulfillment.
Despite this admonition, many professional women are choosing to become mothers. “Raising a family” was listed by 71.7 percent of students in the 2016 American college freshman survey as being an “essential” or “very important” objective in their lives. According to the National Centers for Health Statistics, women with a college education are more likely to delay childbearing until their 30s or early 40s. As a result, professional women tend to have more problems with infertility than their less educated counterparts.
Assisted reproductive technologies (ART) have increased options for motherhood. The birth of Louise Brown, the first “test-tube baby,” in England in 1978 heralded a new era of reproductive technology. In vitro fertilization (IVF) soon became a popular means of overcoming the problem of infertility. Millions babies worldwide had been born as a result of IVF. Some feminists criticize ART and the drive to have children who are biologically related for reducing women to their reproductive organs, especially when adoption is an option. Others praise ART for increasing women’s choices. (See Case Study: Infertility Treatment: Are Eight Babies Too Much?)
Surrogate motherhood, in which one woman agrees to bear a child for another, hit the front pages in 1986 when surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead, who was also the baby’s biological mother, went to court to get custody of the child she had contracted to have for William Stern, the biological father, and his wife. The Whitehead/Stern case raised a public outcry over treating children, and women’s reproductive capacities, as commercial commodities. The government is currently taking steps to curb this practice. In 2017 India passed legislation banning the transfer of surrogate embryos to foreigners. Many states in the United States as well as Canada and some European nations do not permit commercial surrogacy. Because commercial surrogacy was legalized in India in 2002, more and more Americans turned to women in India to act as surrogate 234mothers for their children, a practice that some feminists opposed as exploitation of poor women. (See Case Study 2: Commercial Surrogacy.)
Adrienne Rich, in her book Of Woman Born (1976), was one of the first of the contemporary feminists to write at any length about motherhood as an institution, her experiences as a mother, and the patriarchal notion of motherhood as a “sacred calling.” Carol Gilligan in A Different Voice (1982) and Sara Ruddick in Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (1989) further broke down the barrier between feminist theory and discussion of women as mothers and nurturers. Ruddick regards maternal thinking as “one kind of discipline among many [such as engineering or political science] each with identifying questions, methods and aims.” She suggests that “maternal practice is a ‘natural resource’ for peace politics.”8
Socialist feminists claim that the capitalist relegation of home and motherhood to the private realm has hurt both mothers and children. Because the home is considered outside the public realm in a capitalist society, the contributions of pregnant women and mothers are not valued or compensated. Although men in the United States are doing more of the housework and child care than they did forty years ago, women still do more than twice as much.9 This creates a “second shift” for working mothers. Indeed, Hirshman argues that it is not so much the “glass ceiling” at work that has held women back, but the “glass ceiling” at home. It is the failure to transform domestic life that is holding women back.
Liberal feminists such as Hirshman are wary of making motherhood the foundation of womanhood because most of the disadvantage imposed on women in the workplace—and at home—is based on women’s ability to become pregnant. Liberal feminists’ primary concern with motherhood has been how it interferes with the workplace. One solution proposed by liberal feminists is for men and women to share equally in the care of the children. They also support the establishment of twenty-four-hour day-care centers for working mothers and parental leave that would free mothers, as well as fathers, to compete in the job market.
Societal attitudes toward motherhood also contribute to the glass ceiling. During the 2008 presidential election, John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running made was loudly criticized in part because she was the mother of five children, despite the fact that her husband was going to be a stay-at-home dad had the Republicans won. No similar criticism was directed at Barack Obama, who has two young daughters and a wife who worked full-time, nor at any other male presidential candidates, past or present, who had large families.
WOMEN IN THE WORKPLACE
Studies have found that gender is the “best single predictor of the compensation for that job, surpassing in importance education, experience, or unionization.”10 The lack of fair opportunities in the workplace has been a major concern of feminists for almost two centuries. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics women earn about 80 cents for every dollar men make, despite the fact that more women than men are going to college. The wage gap increases when women start having children.11 Despite greater encouragement for women to go into professions such as medicine and law, most women have jobs, not careers. According to the United Nations, the gap between men and women in both the developed and the undeveloped world increased between 1990 and 2000, a phenomenon known as the “feminization of poverty.”12 Worldwide, the gap has remained relatively stable in the past seven years with women earning just a little more than 50 percent of what men earn.13 Globalization of the market economy has contributed to the feminization of poverty.
Source: Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), 1993.
Unlike college graduates at the height of the feminist movement, who combined full-time careers with motherhood, many women graduating from the elite colleges today say they plan to put their career on hold when they have children.14 In a 2017 Gallup poll, 55 percent of women stated that they favored staying at home over working outside the home. Twenty-nine percent of the men polled by Gallup in 2007 also said they would prefer to stay at home rather than go to work—an all-time high. Despite this trend, studies show that men’s sense of happiness and fulfillment is much more tied to their work than is women’s. While men who are not employed are less likely to report that they are very happy, there is little difference between the reported levels of happiness of women who are employed and those who are not.15
Socialist feminists argue that the primary cause of women’s oppression is capitalist assumptions about the value of women’s work and of men’s work, and the relegation of work to the public sphere and of home and family to the private sphere. By keeping women’s wages low in the workplace, men keep women dependent so that women will continue doing the majority of work in the home. Like the home, the workplace is a gendered institution. It is geared toward the needs of a man who has no or minimal home and family obligations. The traditional, inflexible work schedule is hostile to working mothers, who are often forced to compromise their careers. In addition, working mothers are now burdened with two full-time jobs—a career and caring for the children and home. They maintain that the workplace needs to be restructured so it is more family-friendly and flexible.
Conservatives as well as some gender essentialists argue that women do not do as well in the workplace because they are better suited for the home and parenthood than are men. Liberal feminists believe that it is discrimination and the rigid and demanding work schedules that make the workplace less personally satisfying for women. They point out that most professional women who leave their jobs are ambivalent about doing so and often leave only as a last resort. What is needed, liberal feminists argue, are gender-blind policies and legislation to achieve equality.
Critics of liberal feminism charge that while professing to be gender-neutral, liberal feminists define success by the male standard of power, professional achievement, and money. Liberal feminists encourage women to achieve equality by moving into higher-paying, traditionally male professions. However, studies show that even in the same profession, such as law, there are 236inequalities of pay, promotion, and opportunities. In universities, female faculty earn significantly less than male faculty at the same rank.16 This inequity is actually greater because male faculty are more likely to be promoted than female faculty.
While many women are frustrated because of workplace discrimination that prevents them from advancing, other professional women, such as the women mentioned in the opening scenario, no longer find the top so attractive. Professional women are suffering from burnout, stress disorders, and fertility problems. A survey found that 26 percent of women at the most senior levels of management who have a chance to advance don’t want promotions.
Probably nowhere has the conflict between the liberal “equal treatment” model and the “special treatment” model been so controversial as in work policies related to pregnancy. Liberal feminists argue that treating pregnancy as special demeans women.17 Instead, they regard pregnancy as a temporary disability, like any other temporary disability, that takes women away from work for a period of time.
Until the early 1970s employers could fire or refuse to hire a woman because of pregnancy. In 1978 Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which prohibited discrimination and denial of benefits to women because of pregnancy. The Family and Medical Leave Act was passed in 1993. Under the act, a woman’s job may be protected for a total of twelve weeks, including time taken off before and after birth. The law does not distinguish between mothers and fathers. The United States is currently one of only a few countries in the world that do not legislate paid maternity leave. (See Case Study 4: Lilian Garland: Pregnancy and the Workplace.)
Sexist attitudes also limit women’s opportunities in politics, especially at the upper echelons. In a survey of female members of the Junior League of Voters during the 2008 presidential campaign, racism was regarded as worse than sexism. While sexism was perceived as an “acceptable joke,” racism was seen as “politically incorrect” and “outrageous.”18
It has been half a century since Betty Friedan wrote in The Feminine Mystique. Are women better off than they were fifty years ago? Or have women been duped by feminism, as some conservatives claim? Is the fast-track superwoman, so glorified by feminists, actually “dehumanized by her career” and “uncertain of her gender identity”?19 Or is the problem the gendered structure of the workplace that prevents many women from finding equality and dignity in their work?
SEXUAL HARASSMENT
Sexual harassment—unwanted sexual attention—continues to be a problem in the workplace, the military, and schools. About half of working women experience sexual harassment on the job. In 2017, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received 12,428 charges of sexual harassment. About one-third of active-duty military women also report experiencing sexual harassment.20 Young women are most likely to be sexually harassed, with two-thirds of college students reporting that they have been harassed on campus, sometimes by a teacher or school employee.21
The law has been slow to recognize sexual harassment as a form of discrimination against women. Although an amendment was added in 1972 to the Civil Rights Act specifically prohibiting sexual harassment, women are still reluctant to complain, and in many cases courts have ruled against them.
In June 2001, seven California women who were former Walmart employees filed a suit alleging that female workers received lower wages than male workers, were denied promotions, 237and were constantly subjected to sexual harassment. Dukes v. Walmart Stores, Inc., which covered 1.6 million women who had worked at Walmart since December 1998, became the largest civil action suits in history involving workplace bias. The case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court which, in 2011, ruled in Walmarts favor, stating that the plaintiffs, because of the differences in their circumstances, did not have enough in common to constitute a class.
Some people believe that charges of sexual harassment are simply instances of miscommunication between men and women, or cultural differences, rather than a misuse of power.22 They also believe that sexual harassment is a “woman’s problem,” or that women use charges to get back at men. While not denying that sexual harassment can be a means of oppressing women, Journalist Katie Roiphe, in her essay “Reckless Eyeballing: Sexual Harassment on Campus,”23 questions the current definitions of sexual harassment. She argues that these definitions, like the “rape crisis” definitions of date rape, are so broad that they create distrust and suspicion among men and women by implying that men are sexual predators and that women are their helpless victims. Roiphe argues that in many cases women just have to stand up to their harassers instead of playing the role of victim.
THE MORAL ISSUES
Autonomy and Liberty Rights
Women’s autonomy and liberty right to pursue their legitimate interests is compromised by discrimination and limited choices in the workplace. The traditional family structure also restricts women’s autonomy. Liberal and radical feminists, in particular, emphasize autonomy and choice when it comes to motherhood.
Human Nature
Feminist theory is grounded in certain assumptions about human nature and the nature of women and men. These assumptions have a profound effect on what solutions feminists propose for overcoming the oppression of women. Conservatives believe that women are, by nature, subservient. Patriarchy is natural and society, including the family and workplace, is structured to reflect this reality. Feminist demands for equality are not only unreasonable but harmful to women. These views are still embedded in gender stereotypes that justify division of labor based on gender.
Liberal feminists disagree, arguing that men and women share the same rational nature. Gender essentialists believe that men and women have different natures, with women being more caring and nurturing. However, unlike conservatives, they do not believe the differences between men and women justify the oppression of women. Radical feminists also claim that women and men are different, with men being objectifiers and women being sexually objectified.
Some critics maintain that radical feminists have gone too far by promoting a false view of men as sexual oppressors of women. Others criticize liberal feminists for adopting what they regard as a male model of human nature.
Justice, Discrimination, and Gender Equality
At home women still perform the majority of housework and child care. At work women suffer from job discrimination and earn significantly less than what men earn. Conservatives claim that this discrepancy is natural and based on a natural division of labor.
Liberal feminists maintain that because men and women share the same nature, justice demands that they be treated the same. Liberals promote gender-neutral policies such as the Family and Medical Leave Act to achieve gender equality in the workplace. Some Marxist and socialist feminists recommend a policy of comparable worth to raise the wages in female-dominated occupations to the level paid to men in occupations of comparable worth. Socialist feminists also believe that much of the injustice in the home as well as the workplace is due to the relegation of the home to the private sphere and work to the public sphere. To correct these inequities, they recommend restructuring the work environment so it has flexible work schedules to accommodate the needs of working mothers and fathers.
Utilitarian Considerations: Harms and Benefits
Although parents are more likely to state that they are happy than people with no children, this association disappears once marital status is taken into consideration, since married people are significantly happier than single people.24 Indeed, some studies have found that having a child is associated with a drop in the level of happiness and an increase in stress in a marriage. What is the source of the unhappiness (harm)? Are women who are mothers today less happy because our culture does not support motherhood, as socialist feminists claim, or because motherhood is by nature an oppressive institution that stymies women’s “right to flourish,” as Hirshman argues?
While conservatives claim that traditional gender roles benefit both men and women, women clearly are getting the short end of the stick. Discrimination in the workplace not only harms women, but harms society by depriving society of the talents and valuable contributions of women. Women who are mothers are especially vulnerable. Women and children from economically disadvantaged families in particular suffer from the “feminization of poverty” as a result of lower wages paid to women and lack of adequate child-care facilities. The creation of more flexible work schedules, reasonable family leave policies, and twenty-four-hour day-care centers have all been proposed by feminists as means of improving the situation of working mothers. Sexual harassment also harms women by creating a work or school environment that interferes with women’s ability to participate fully and equally.
CONCLUSION
Discrimination against women permeates our society. Lower wages for women and sexual harassment in the workplace and on college campuses are just a few examples. Different feminist theories propose different solutions for overcoming the problems of oppression. These solutions, which range from rejection of motherhood and male institutions altogether to enforcing gender-neutral policies in the workplace, are based primarily on differing views of women’s and men’s nature as well as economic institutions. While liberal feminists believe that equality can be achieved within the existing capitalist structure, Marxist and socialist feminists maintain that in order to achieve equality for women we first need to replace the patriarchal capitalist economic system.
RUTH GROENHOUT
Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism
Ruth Groenhout is a professor of philosophy at Calvin College. Groenhout begins by summarizing the basic assumptions of liberal feminist theory regarding human nature. She then contrasts these assumptions with those of gender essentialists. Groenhout concludes that liberal theory provides a more powerful political tool than gender essentialism in the fight against sexual subordination.
Ruth E. Groenhout, “Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism,” Social Theory and Practice, Volume 28, Issue 1 (January 2002) pp 51–75. DOI: 10.5840/soctheorpract20022812, Used by permission of the Philosophy Documentation Center.
Liberal political theory begins with rights, autonomy, and reason. Humans have rights, and their freedom to exercise those rights is properly limited by others’ rights. This view of the basic shape of the political terrain is based on certain assumptions about humans. The most basic is the assumption that humans, whatever their other differences, share some basic qualities that make them properly bearers of rights….
Because liberal political thought bases rights on what would seem to be a gender-neutral concept such as rationality, it has been a traditional resource for feminist thinkers, from early thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Taylor Mill, to contemporary thinkers….
This easy and obvious association of liberal political thought with feminist theory has been challenged from two directions. On the one hand, some feminist theorists have challenged the tight connection between liberalism and feminism, because, they have argued, the notion of rationality on which liberal rights are based is not as gender-neutral as it seems. So in her critique of objective rationality, Catharine MacKinnon argues that traditional notions of objectivity that underlie claims about rationality are inherently tied to the objectification of women.1 If rationality/objectivity is inherently connected to the objectification of women, then the “rationality” of women becomes problematic. On this view, women must either deny their nature as women (become honorary men) and objectify other women in order to be rational, or they must accept their status as objectified (not objectifiers) and so be incapable of rationality. In either case, rationality cannot be exercised by women as women. If this account of rationality is accepted, the standard liberal assumption that men and women equally share in rationality must be given up….
In more recent years the rise of evolutionary ethics, or sociobiological accounts of human nature, have also contributed to a general skepticism about an account of human nature as either rational, or autonomous, or gender-neutral….
The aspect of evolutionary ethics that has proved most effective in distancing liberal thought from feminist thought is the assumption, deeply imbedded in evolutionary ethics, that men and women are genetically coded for different behavior due to their differing roles in the reproductive process and the different reproductive strategies these roles require. What counts as “rational” from the perspective of genes that find themselves in a male body is, we are told, profoundly different from what counts as “rational” for genes that find themselves in a female body. Strategies that lead to success in propagation for men are different from strategies that lead to success in propagation for women. These differences, further, have been selected for over millennia of evolutionary processes, and are now ineradicably a part of what it is to be a man or a woman. It follows from this that even if one wanted to continue the liberal project of grounding rights in (say) rationality, one could no longer assume that male rationality is the same as female rationality, and the easy connection between liberalism and feminism is again severed….
1. LIBERALISM AND FEMINISM: A NATURAL ALLIANCE?
… The first thing to note is that the term “liberal political thought” can be used to cover an extremely broad range of thinkers, from Mill to Rousseau, from Wollstonecraft to Hegel…. I am assuming that the notion of rationality that undergirds liberal thought is an extensive notion, including the ability to reflect on and choose among conceptions of the good life. This account of rationality is needed to make sense of the moral and political claims of liberal thought.
Liberalism grounds its basic rights in human nature, a nature characterized by rationality and autonomy. There are really two separable aspects to this claim. We might call the first the individualism thesis and the second the rights thesis. Both rely on the notion that there 241is something morally significant to human capacities for rational deliberation. The first notes that humans are properly thought of first as individuals, not as units in a larger whole. The respect that liberalism accords humans is accorded prior to and independently of membership in any particular community or class….
The rights thesis entails that the respect individuals should be accorded is best articulated in terms of rights, politically protected liberties or entitlements…. Which rights need to be protected is, of course, a contested issue in liberal thought. Libertarians defend a rather minimalist notion of protection, limited largely to protection of negative rights such as the right to own property. Rawlsian liberals and others defend a more expansive notion of rights, including rights to education and welfare, because these provide the basic necessities for exercising one’s rational capacities. But in either case, the rights being protected are justified on the basis of the individual’s capacity to exercise rational judgment and so act freely and be held responsible for his or her choices. This notion of rights naturally leads to a third thesis of liberal thought, that of a necessary, but limited state.
Individual rights cannot be protected without some form of governmental structures that protect them against both other individuals and governmental structures themselves. The liberal political theorist is committed to the notion that one cannot dispense with the state. Liberalism operates with a view of human nature that assumes that some political structures are needed to prevent humans from mistreating each other. This is not the only role the state can play, but it is a fundamental one….
So the state is necessary, but the state must also be limited. Just as humans, left unrestricted by the state, choose on occasion to mistreat others, so the state, left unchecked, will mistreat its citizens. The power of the state must be limited to protect a sphere of liberty for its citizens and for the non-governmental social structures that they create…. The notion of individual rights has been a politically powerful tool in the fight against sexual subordination. The history of the struggle against women’s oppression has shown that women need to be able to make decisions for and about their lives as individuals. The right to make decisions that determine the course of one’s life, in fact, has been a central right in the fight for women’s liberation. There is a deep disagreement between feminism and certain versions of communitarianism, both because women know too well the dangers of being treated as a member of the class or social role of Woman and because traditional values have frequently been the source of women’s oppression. The struggle to be recognized as an individual in one’s own right and the respect accorded that individuality in law and in society have been too hard won to be given up lightly. Further, the individual is not valued, in liberal thought, because of a specific role that she or he is required to play in society, but instead is valued as an autonomous, that is, self-determining being…. These are core feminist values as well; feminism’s goal is a world in which women are free to determine the course of their own lives and to play a significant role in political and social decision-making. As long as these remain central feminist values, feminists have reason to place themselves in the liberal tradition.
The second reason feminists should be reluctant to give liberalism up is that rights have been and continue to be important conceptual tropes for understanding the wrongness of gender oppression. There may be other moral frameworks for conceptualizing the moral wrong done to women when they are denied their rights, but few that explain that wrong so clearly, so straightforwardly, or so incontrovertibly. As an example, consider the arguments by Islamic feminists, or similar arguments made by Christians for Biblical Equality. In both cases, there are good reasons given for new interpretations of both religious traditions, arguments that support women’s autonomy and independence. But in both cases one faces an uphill battle to convince conservative interpreters of the tradition to change their minds. In contrast, Wollstonecraft’s arguments are relatively straightforward. No new interpretation of the notion of a right is needed to recognize that if rational agents deserve the rights intrinsic to autonomy, women must deserve those rights….
A third reason why feminism has good reason to continue to locate itself in the liberal tradition is that the basic analysis of power that is central to feminism finds its historical roots in liberal thought. Power analyses are central to feminist theory, and a basic understanding of how power affects human interactions has been a staple of feminist analyses … some of the more perspicuous analyses were offered by Harriet Taylor Mill and John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century. It is no accident that one finds a careful analysis of how power affects 242relationships between men and women in these thinkers; their liberal commitments provided a natural location from which to analyze the ways in which power affects individual relationships.
Finally, liberal political thought is based on a respect for the rational capacity of the individual. On this view, humans are more than stimulus response machines. They are capable of making decisions that are the result of critical reflection, and critical self-reflection, and are not purely determined in their actions by the biological and social forces that act on them. Both biological and social determinism truncate moral analysis in ways that make the wrongs done to women by sexism too limited….
The liberal picture of human nature, as more than either biologically or socially determined, is a crucial aspect of the feminist analysis of the wrongness of sexist oppression. Sexual oppression, and social systems that perpetuate sexual oppression, are morally evil because they limit or deny women’s capacity to reflect on and determine their own lives….
The basic assumption on which a feminist liberalism is based is the notion of a common human nature. Critics who reject such a conception of human nature offer a critique that is, if correct, devastating to feminist liberalism. I would like to begin by presenting the critique, then argue that, carefully examined, it is not correct, and does not provide grounds for a rejection of feminist liberalism.
2. AGAINST LIBERALISM: THE CHALLENGE FROM FEMINISM
Potentially the most devastating feminist critique of liberal thought arises from a denial of the most basic claim in liberalism: the claim that there is some essential human nature that is the source of moral rights. One feminist challenge to this claim arises from the belief that there is no neutral human nature, but rather there are men’s natures and women’s natures, and the two are radically different….
One theoretical vantage point from which such an attack on liberalism has been made is that of Catharine MacKinnon’s account of rationality, objectivity, and legal structures. I should state at the outset that MacKinnon does not consider herself a gender essentialist, since she believes that “man” and “woman” are socially constructed categories. That said, however, she offers no alternative account of what it would be like to be male or female in any other way than as they are currently constructed in terms of men and women. Since she also believes that an oppressive gender hierarchy is a universal feature of human societies,2 what she describes seems very close to an essentialist picture of men’s and women’s natures. Men and women are radically different in nature, they are shaped that way by their culture and cannot simply choose to be otherwise, and the very nature of our perceived reality is determined by these differences….
On MacKinnon’s view, women’s and men’s natures are determined by, respectively, their objectification as objects of sexualized violence or their objectification of others as objects of sexualized violence. What it is to be a woman is to be turned into an object that is an appropriate locus for sex and for sexualized violence; to be a woman is to be sexually vulnerable. What it is to be a man is to be one who can sexually objectify another, either through words or actions, and to be capable of sexual predation. Not all men are sexual predators, of course. Some see themselves as protectors of women rather than predators on women. But both of these roles, protector and predator, assume the same things about women—that women are weak and incapable of self-protection, that women are appropriate objects of sexual violence, and that it is men who control sexual access to women, not the women themselves.
On this view, then, women’s nature is essentially one of sexual prey. Women are defined in terms of their sexual accessibility and status. Likewise the essence of being a man is being a sexual predator/objectifier. While neither of these roles is, for MacKinnon, biologically or genetically essential, both are essential to the nature of being a man or a woman—the only way to be otherwise is to cease to be a man or a woman, and become we know not what.
MacKinnon offers one version of a sort of gender essentialism, but other feminists have offered other varieties. Others do not rest, as MacKinnon’s does, on a sexualized predator/prey relationship, but instead on a sharp dichotomy between male and female natures in terms of value hierarchies. Females, on this view, are primarily oriented toward life-giving, cooperative, nurturing activities, while males are primarily oriented toward death-dealing, 243aggressive, controlling activities. Sometimes these different orientations are simply assumed to be the case without explanation, sometimes they are explained as a result of a deep Jungian imaginary, or as a result of women’s ability to give birth and men’s envy of that ability…. For the purposes of this paper, however, I would like to focus on MacKinnon’s account, because she is concerned directly with the issue of women’s participation in a liberal society, and so she addresses precisely the issues with which I am concerned.
If men and women are fundamentally, essentially, different in the ways MacKinnon argues, then the liberal project of identifying basic human rights is misguided. If gender essentialism is correct, then there is no basic human nature, shared rationality, or fundamental similarity among people. There are two different sorts of beings that are lumped together under the rubric “human,” but these two sorts of beings think differently, see the world differently, and have completely opposed value systems.
Liberal rights, from this perspective, are rights that are valued by men, generated by masculine reason, and appropriate (if at all) only for relationships among men. MacKinnon writes:
The rule of law and the rule of men are one thing, indivisible, at once official and unofficial…. State power, embodied in law, exists throughout society as male power at the same time as the power of men over women throughout society is organized as the power of the state.3
… But MacKinnon’s critique does not end with the historical record. In addition to noting that rights have, as a matter of historical fact, been the prerogative of men, she also charges that the very notion of rights is an intrinsically masculine construction. Freedom of speech, for example, has functioned, MacKinnon argues, to protect male “speech” in the form of the violent pornographic portrayal of women. Such speech, as she sees it, makes true freedom of speech for women inaccessible, since anything a woman says in the public sphere is undercut by the definition of women as sexual objects in pornographic portrayals. So the legal notion of freedom of speech functions, she claims, to protect male speech and prohibit female speech. In similar manner, abortion rights, framed as privacy rights, function to protect male sexual access to women. Laws against sexual harassment, likewise, have not served to protect working women adequately because of their reliance on the “reasonable man” standard for judging harassment….
This perspectival bias indicates, according to MacKinnon, that these rights really are “basic” only from a male perspective. From the perspective of lived female experience, she argues, rights are the legal structures that both maintain and hide from view male dominance. This offers a serious challenge to any attempt to maintain a feminist liberalism. If liberalism, viewed accurately, is simply male dominance writ large, feminist liberalism is an oxymoron, which makes those who defend it perhaps just morons.
3. GENDER AND GENES: THE CHALLENGE FROM SOCIOBIOLOGY
A similarly serious challenge to feminist liberalism comes from a very different group of theorists. Like MacKinnon, sociobiologists assert that men and women are essentially different.
Sociobiologists argue that the two sexes are shaped by a long history of evolutionary change. That evolutionary change is driven by success in breeding—those traits that lead to reproductive success are genetically passed on to future generations. Men and women play different roles in the reproductive process. Men’s reproductive role is one that can be accomplished relatively quickly and does not involve a great deal of investment. Women’s reproductive role, on the other hand, involves an extensive investment in terms of time and energy, first in the nine months of pregnancy, and subsequently in the two to five years of breast-feeding and care-giving….
… The assumption in sociobiology is that the differential success of these two different strategies has led to genetically based differences in men and women’s behavior. Cultural and social differences, then, between men and women are not so much reflections of differing social roles and expectations as they are reflections of basic genetic differences between men and women.
Men, on this view, are genetically programmed for promiscuity and minimal investment in their children. Some have even argued that men are predisposed to rape as a part of their impulse to procreate. Women are programmed for monogamy and heavy investment in their children…. Sociobiologists have argued that male 244and female tendencies to exhibit traits such as aggression and empathy are likewise tied to reproductive success, and so men are, by nature, more prone to aggression in all areas of life while women are more prone to docility and empathetic nurturing.
As I mentioned above, the picture sociobiologists have drawn is not wildly different from the view of masculine and feminine nature offered by feminists such as MacKinnon. On both views, men are inherently more aggressive, sexually promiscuous, prone to violence, and oriented toward dominating women sexually. Women are inherently more nurturing, more submissive (particularly to men), sexually less promiscuous, and less driven by sexual urges, while more concerned about care for children and infants…. In contrast to MacKinnon, whose writing is motivated by political concerns, sociobiologists see their work as having bearing on, but not directly dictating, social policy. They do, generally, imply that the differences between men and women will have social effects. Men’s natural aggression and sexual dominance will naturally make men the dominant sex in social settings. Women’s natural deference and nurturance will generally prevent them from acquiring social power, but will serve the continuance of the human race quite efficiently…. Rather than offering social criticism, then, there is a tendency in this literature to offer explanations for why the status quo is what it is. Underlying this explanatory technique, however, there is sometimes the assumption that since the way things are is dictated by the differing natures of men and women, social policy that attempts to change or modify the existing situation is fighting an uphill battle. This is problematic because of the implicit approval it offers to sexist hierarchies…. [T]he more problematic version of sociobiology denies that there are any truths about humans not captured by evolutionary science. Humans, on this view, are nothing more than the sum of their evolutionary heritage, and so all accounts of human nature, human rationality, and human morality must be based in evolutionary studies….
If one accepts this view of rationality, then one is forced to reject the notion that men and women share a common rational nature…. There may be a fundamental rational principle (“Propagate effectively!”) but at the level of evaluation of actions or of social policy there is no shared conception of rationality. What is rational for men is irrational for women, and vice versa.
On this view, liberal rights are merely a thin veneer of illusion over the biological reality of genetics…. [F]urther, there is a deep and abiding conviction that hierarchies, particularly hierarchies of gender, are ineluctably written into the human genetic code. So E.O. Wilson famously comments that “a schedule of sex- and age-dependent ethics can impart higher genetic fitness than a single moral code which is applied uniformly to all sex-age groups.”4 And, more recently, Matt Ridley describes the sexual division of labor as “an economic institution that is a vital part of all human societies.”5 Rights and a concern for justice for individuals are all very nice in philosophical treatises, the implication is, but in the real world it is reproductive success that counts.
4. PROBLEMS WITH GENDER ESSENTIALISMS
If either feminist gender essentialism or sociobiological gender essentialism is correct, then feminist liberalism is incoherent. Feminist liberalism assumes that one can speak of a common human nature, but both sorts of gender essentialists hold that men and women have different natures….
There are problems with both forms of gender essentialism, however, that defuse part of their challenge to liberal thought. The first problem is a matter of over-emphasis on difference. The second problem is an overstatement of determinism, in the one case cultural, in the second case genetic. I would like to deal with each of these in turn.
First, the over-emphasis on difference. Both gender-essentialist feminists and sociobiologists focus so heavily on gender difference that they lose sight of the huge areas of similarity between men and women. Two areas where this is particularly obvious are those of aggression and sexual promiscuity. According to both sorts of gender essentialists, men are more aggressive than women. In both cases theorists move from the statement that men are more aggressive than women to the assumption that aggression is a masculine trait. But the second claim is not entailed by the first. Both men and women are aggressive, though their aggression may show itself 245in different ways and be elicited by different occasions….
Moreover, sweeping generalizations about the aggressiveness of men frequently ignore the complexity of the notion of aggression itself. It often is used as a synonym for violence, and there are innumerable statistics that show that men engage in more violence against both men and women than do women. But aggression involves more than just “committing murders and making weapons”—the research definition used in one study. Aggression is a complex set of behavioral patterns…. If those studying aggression begin with the assumption that aggression is a masculine trait, they will interpret behavior by males as aggressive. Research bias is a well documented problem, and a glance at contemporary discussions of primate research indicates that it is not easily overcome.
But, setting aside for the moment the question of research bias and the difficulty of defining aggression, let us imagine that males can be demonstrated, as a class, to have a tendency to exhibit aggression at a higher level than women. What follows from that with respect to men’s and women’s natures? It certainly does not follow that women are not aggressive. The fact that men are taller than women does not entail the claim that women don’t have height, and the same absurdity occurs when a higher level of aggression in males is equated with a female lack of aggression. Women are aggressive; aggression is a necessary attribute for survival in human life. So from the fact that, as a class, men are more aggressive than women, one surely cannot conclude that women are not aggressive. Nor can one conclude that all men are more aggressive than all women—the statistics would clearly not bear that claim out either….
The second criticism of gender-essentialist thought involves a rejection of the deterministic assumptions such essentialism rests on. One can recognize that sex differences matter in life without moving to the further assumption that they entirely determine every aspect of one’s life…. We are constrained by the social setting within which we are born and socialized, and we are constrained by our physical nature…. But nothing warrants the move from constraint to determinism.
On MacKinnon’s account, one cannot be a man without being an objectifier, and one cannot be a woman without being objectified. Further, one cannot choose to opt out of being a man or a woman. Similarly, some sociobiological accounts of human nature assume that being male or female is absolutely determinative of personality…. In some cases, in fact, biologically based behavior is more amenable to change than is culturally constructed behavior. Medication can diminish the symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder, but no medication is likely to change a Westerner’s deeply ingrained food taboos against, say, eating grubs. Asserting the “naturalness” of certain sorts of behavior, however, implies the opposite. It implies that biological features of our characters and personalities are fixed and determined in ways that are clearly false when we consider the issue carefully.
MacKinnon’s own commitment to making legal changes in the way U.S. law deals with pornography suggests, in fact, that she herself has no trouble seeing herself as an agent rather than a sexualized object. Her legal successes suggest that the judicial system is capable of seeing women as more than sexualized objects. Likewise, the dedication to their research that scientists may display suggests that any account of human rationality as determined by the drive to procreate is seriously defective….
5. LIBERALISM AND CRITICS
While I think that the essentialist case is overstated, I also think that there are valuable lessons to be learned from the critics of liberalism…. The first area concerns autonomy. MacKinnon rightly pushes us to recognize that autonomy is not something one either has or does not have. Autonomy occurs along a continuum, and one of the things that makes one more or less autonomous is one’s enculturation and socialization into a way of life that may enhance or diminish one’s capacity to make and act on choices. MacKinnon is right to point out that women’s life choices are diminished when the culture they grow up in defines them as appropriate objects for sexualized violence. She is less concerned with the fact that men’s lives, likewise, are diminished when they receive a cultural image of manliness as requiring mindless aggression and the sexual subordination of women. These definitions create a culture that is destructive of human lives and human autonomy….
Likewise, criticisms from sociobiology are healthy for liberal political thought as well. Humans are not 246disembodied rational intellects. We are embodied, physical beings, whose lives and choices occur always in the context of our physical needs, our evolutionary heritage, and our hormonal present. This does not, in and of itself, negate our freedom and responsibility, but it does situate it in important ways. Careful thinkers have always realized that human freedom and responsibility do not merely occur in an embodied context: they require an embodied context for their exercise. Without a physical existence, it is hard to know what respect for another’s needs or rights would even be.
Sociobiologists also help us to avoid the tendency to utopian thinking that can be tempting for moral and political theorists. Humans will always need some form of social safeguards, to prevent them from exploiting others and from being exploited in turn….
Knowing that humans may have natural predispositions to act in certain ways is valuable information for moral reasoning. But it can never substitute for moral reasoning, since from the fact that humans naturally do something we cannot conclude that they ought to do that.
Further, both the feminist and the sociobiological critiques keep liberalism more honest about what it can and cannot do…. While both views encourage liberalism to remain humble about its limitations, however, a similar caution is needed in each of their respective cases as well. Sociobiology cannot tell us what the good human life must be, and MacKinnon is quite frank about her own inability to offer a determinate picture of a non–sexually objectified woman. Ultimately, each individual needs to be the one who decides what sort of life she will pursue, but in stating this I find myself back on familiar, liberal, terrain.
6. CONCLUSION
… The belief that women, as women, can fight and win legal battles is one worth holding on to. It seems to be one that MacKinnon herself holds. But it is in rather serious tension with the notion that women are defined, as women, in terms of their sexual violability. The two ideas do not sit well together. A liberal notion that women, oppressed though they may be, are still more than the sum of that oppression is, I think, exactly what is needed to make sense of the many ways in which women have exercised their agency to bring about political change. And it is a belief that is situated squarely in liberal theory.
Liberalism does have its weaknesses. Among them are the tendencies to erase differences among people and to overlook how culture and physical circumstances affect the very meaning of terms such as rights and autonomy. But having recognized these tendencies, is liberalism to be rejected? Not until a better alternative comes along, and that is what often seems missing from the critics of liberalism…. If we are not willing to give up the protection of basic rights, and if we think that individual autonomy is worth defending, then what is called for is a new and improved liberalism, not the rejection of liberal theory.
NOTES
1. Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 162–63.
2. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, p. 94.
3. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, p. 170.
4. E.O. Wilson, “The Morality of the Gene,” excerpts from Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, in Paul Thompson (ed.), Issues in Evolutionary Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 153–64; see p. 163.
5. Matt Ridley, On the Origins of Virtue (New York: Viking, 1996), p. 92.
LINDA HIRSHMAN
Homeward Bound
Linda Hirshman is an author, attorney, and retired professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Brandeis University. Hirshman argues that the traditional patterns of motherhood are harmful to women. By emphasizing choice in whether to work or stay home, feminism has failed women. Instead, women ought to get out to work since it is the workplace and public sphere that provide the most opportunities for women to be empowered and to flourish.
Linda Hirshman, “Homeward Bound,” The American Prospect, vol 16, no. 12, December 20, 2005. Copyright © 2005 The American Prospect. Used with permission.
I. THE TRUTH ABOUT ELITE WOMEN
Half the wealthiest, most-privileged, best-educated females in the country stay home with their babies rather than work in the market economy. When in September The New York Times featured an article exploring a piece of this story, “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,” the blogosphere went ballistic, countering with anecdotes and sarcasm….
… [A]mong the educated elite, who are the logical heirs of the agenda of empowering women, feminism has largely failed in its goals. There are few women in the corridors of power, and marriage is essentially unchanged. The number of women at universities exceeds the number of men. But, more than a generation after feminism, the number of women in elite jobs doesn’t come close.
Why did this happen? The answer I discovered—an answer neither feminist leaders nor women themselves want to face—is that while the public world has changed, albeit imperfectly, to accommodate women among the elite, private lives have hardly budged. The real glass ceiling is at home.
Looking back, it seems obvious that the un-reconstructed family was destined to re-emerge after the passage of feminism’s storm of social change. Following the original impulse to address everything in the lives of women, feminism turned its focus to cracking open the doors of the public power structure. This was no small task. At the beginning, there were male juries and male Ivy League schools, sex-segregated want ads, discriminatory employers, harassing colleagues. As a result of feminist efforts—and larger economic trends—the percentage of women, even of mothers in full- or part-time employment, rose robustly through the 1980s and early ’90s.
But then the pace slowed. The census numbers for all working mothers leveled off around 1990 and have fallen modestly since 1998. In interviews, women with enough money to quit work say they are “choosing” to opt out. Their words conceal a crucial reality: the belief that women are responsible for child-rearing and homemaking was largely untouched by decades of workplace feminism. Add to this the good evidence that the upper-class workplace has become more demanding and then mix in the successful conservative cultural campaign to reinforce traditional gender roles and you’ve got a perfect recipe for feminism’s stall….
And there is more. In 2000, Harvard Business School professor Myra Hart surveyed the women of the classes of 1981, 1986, and 1991 and found that only 38 percent of female Harvard MBAs were working full time. A 2004 survey by the Center for Work-Life Policy of 2,443 women with a graduate degree or very prestigious bachelor’s degree revealed that 43 percent of those women with children had taken a time out, primarily for family reasons….
Although college-educated women work more than others, the 2002 census shows that graduate or professional degrees do not increase workforce participation much more than even one year of college. When their children are infants (under a year), 54 percent of females with graduate or professional degrees are not working full time (18 percent are working part time and 36 percent are not working at all). Even among those who have children who are not infants, 41 percent are not working full time (18 percent are working part time and 23 percent are not working at all).
Economists argue about the meaning of the data, even going so far as to contend that more mothers are working. They explain that the bureau changed the definition of “work” slightly in 2000, the economy went into recession, and the falloff in women without children was similar. However, even if there wasn’t a falloff but just a leveling off, this represents not a loss of present value but a loss of hope for the future—a loss of hope that the role of women in society will continue to increase.
The arguments still do not explain the absence of women in elite workplaces. If these women were sticking it out in the business, law, and academic worlds, now, 30 years after feminism started filling the selective schools with women, the elite workplaces should be proportionately female. They are not. Law schools have been graduating classes around 40-percent female for decades—decades during which both schools and firms experienced enormous growth. And, although the legal population will not be 40-percent female until 2010, in 2003, the major law firms had only 16-percent female partners, according to the American Bar Association. It’s important to note that elite workplaces like law firms grew in size during the very years that the percentage of female graduates was growing, leading you to expect 249a higher female employment than the pure graduation rate would indicate. The Harvard Business School has produced classes around 30-percent female. Yet only 10.6 percent of Wall Street’s corporate officers are women, and a mere nine are Fortune 500 CEOs….
It is possible that the workplace is discriminatory and hostile to family life…. It is also possible that women are voluntarily taking themselves out of the elite job competition for lower status and lower-paying jobs. Women must take responsibility for the consequences of their decisions. It defies reason to claim that the falloff from 40 percent of the class at law school to 16 percent of the partners at all the big law firms is unrelated to half the mothers with graduate and professional degrees leaving full-time work at childbirth and staying away for several years after that, or possibly bidding down.
This isn’t only about day care. Half my Times brides quit before the first baby came. In interviews, at least half of them expressed a hope never to work again. None had realistic plans to work. More importantly, when they quit, they were already alienated from their work or at least not committed to a life of work….
II. THE FAILURE OF CHOICE FEMINISM
What is going on? Most women hope to marry and have babies. If they resist the traditional female responsibilities of child-rearing and householding, what Arlie Hochschild called “The Second Shift,” they are fixing for a fight. But elite women aren’t resisting tradition. None of the stay-at-home brides I interviewed saw the second shift as unjust: they agree that the household is women’s work….
Conservatives contend that the dropouts prove that feminism “failed” because it was too radical, because women didn’t want what feminism had to offer. In fact, if half or more of feminism’s heirs (85 percent of the women in my Times sample) are not working seriously, it’s because feminism wasn’t radical enough: It changed the workplace but it didn’t change men, and, more importantly, it didn’t fundamentally change how women related to men.
The movement did start out radical. Betty Friedan’s original call to arms compared housework to animal life. In The Feminine Mystique she wrote, “[V]acuuming the living room floor—with or without makeup—is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman’s full capacity…. Down through the ages man has known that he was set apart from other animals by his mind’s power to have an idea, a vision, and shape the future to it…. when he discovers and creates and shapes a future different from his past, he is a man, a human being.”
Thereafter, however, liberal feminists abandoned the judgmental starting point of the movement in favor of offering women “choices.” The choice talk spilled over from people trying to avoid saying “abortion,” and it provided an irresistible solution to feminists trying to duck the mommy wars. A woman could work, stay home, have 10 children or one, marry or stay single. It all counted as “feminist” as long as she chose it….
Great as liberal feminism was, once it retreated to choice the movement had no language to use on the gendered ideology of the family. Feminists could not say, “Housekeeping and child-rearing in the nuclear family is not interesting and not socially validated. Justice requires that it not be assigned to women on the basis of their gender and at the sacrifice of their access to money, power, and honor.”
The 50 percent of census answerers and the 62 percent of Harvard MBAs and the 85 percent of my brides of the Times all think they are “choosing” their gendered lives. They don’t know that feminism, in collusion with traditional society, just passed the gendered family on to them to choose. Even with all the day care in the world, the personal is still political. Much of the rest is the optout revolution.
III. WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
Here’s the feminist moral analysis that choice avoided: The family—with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks—is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. This less-flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally un-just. To paraphrase, as Mark Twain said, “A man who 250chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read.”
… Like the right to work and the right to vote, the right to have a flourishing life that includes but is not limited to family cannot be addressed with language of choice.
Women who want to have sex and children with men as well as good work in interesting jobs where they may occasionally wield real social power need guidance, and they need it early. Step one is simply to begin talking about flourishing. In so doing, feminism will be returning to its early, judgmental roots…. Next, feminists will have to start offering young women not choices and not utopian dreams but solutions they can enact on their own. Prying women out of their traditional roles is not going to be easy. It will require rules….
There are three rules: Prepare yourself to qualify for good work, treat work seriously, and don’t put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry.
The preparation stage begins with college. It is shocking to think that girls cut off their options for a public life of work as early as college. But they do. The first pitfall is the liberal-arts curriculum, which women are good at, graduating in higher numbers than men. Although many really successful people start out studying liberal arts, the purpose of a liberal education is not, with the exception of a miniscule number of academic positions, job preparation.
So the first rule is to use your college education with an eye to career goals. Feminist organizations should produce each year a survey of the most common job opportunities for people with college degrees, along with the average lifetime earnings from each job category and the characteristics such jobs require. The point here is to help women see that yes, you can study art history, but only with the realistic understanding that one day soon you will need to use your arts education to support yourself and your family….
After college comes on-the-job training or further education…. So the second rule is that women must treat the first few years after college as an opportunity to lose their capitalism virginity and prepare for good work, which they will then treat seriously.
The best way to treat work seriously is to find the money. Money is the marker of success in a market economy; it usually accompanies power, and it enables the bearer to wield power, including within the family. Almost without exception, the brides who opted out graduated with roughly the same degrees as their husbands. Yet somewhere along the way the women made decisions in the direction of less money. Part of the problem was idealism: idealism on the career trail usually leads to volunteer work, or indentured servitude in social-service jobs, which is nice but doesn’t get you to money….
If you are good at work you are in a position to address the third undertaking: the reproductive household. The rule here is to avoid taking on more than a fair share of the second shift. If this seems coldhearted, consider the survey by the Center for Work-Life Policy. Fully 40 percent of highly qualified women with spouses felt that their husbands create more work around the house than they perform. According to Phyllis Moen and Patricia Roehling’s Career Mystique, “When couples marry, the amount of time that a woman spends doing housework increases by approximately 17 percent, while a man’s decreases by 33 percent.”…
How to avoid this kind of rut? You can either find a spouse with less social power than you or find one with an ideological commitment to gender equality. Taking the easier path first, marry down. Don’t think of this as brutally strategic. If you are devoted to your career goals and would like a man who will support that, you’re just doing what men throughout the ages have done: placing a safe bet….
If you have carefully positioned yourself either by marrying down or finding someone untainted by gender ideology, you will be in a position to resist bearing an unfair share of the family. Even then you must be vigilant. Bad deals come in two forms: economics and home economics. The economic temptation is to assign the cost of child care to the woman’s income. If a woman making $50,000 per year whose husband makes $100,000 decides to have a baby, and the cost of a full-time nanny is $30,000, the couple reason that, after paying 40 percent in taxes, she makes $30,000, just enough to pay the nanny. So she might as well stay home. This totally ignores that both adults are in the enterprise together and the demonstrable future loss of income, power, and security for the woman who quits. Instead, calculate that all parents make a total of $150,000 and take home $90,000. After paying a full-time nanny, they have $60,000 left to live on.
The home-economics trap involves superior female knowledge and superior female sanitation. The solutions are ignorance and dust…. If women never start playing the household-manager role, the house will be dirty, but the realities of the physical world will trump the pull of gender ideology. Either the other adult in the family will take a hand or the children will grow up with robust immune systems.
If these prescriptions sound less than family-friendly, here’s the last rule: Have a baby. Just don’t have two. Mothers’ Movement Online’s Judith Statdman Tucker reports that women who opt out for child-care reasons act only after the second child arrives. A second kid pressures the mother’s organizational skills, doubles the demands for appointments, wildly raises the cost of education and housing, and drives the family to the suburbs….
IV. WHY DO WE CARE?
The privileged brides of the Times—and their husbands—seem happy. Why do we care what they do? After all, most people aren’t rich and white and heterosexual, and they couldn’t quit working if they wanted to.
We care because what they do is bad for them, is certainly bad for society, and is widely imitated, even by people who never get their weddings in the Times. This last is called the “regime effect,” and it means that even if women don’t quit their jobs for their families, they think they should and feel guilty about not doing it….
As for society, elites supply the labor for the decision-making classes—the senators, the newspaper editors, the research scientists, the entrepreneurs, the policy-makers, and the policy wonks. If the ruling class is overwhelmingly male, the rulers will make mistakes that benefit males, whether from ignorance or from indifference. Media surveys reveal that if only one member of a television show’s creative staff is female, the percentage of women on-screen goes up from 36 percent to 42 percent. A world of 84-percent male lawyers and 84-percent female assistants is a different place than one with women in positions of social authority….
… Why should society spend resources educating women with only a 50-percent return rate on their stated goals? The American Conservative Union carried a column in 2004 recommending that employers stay away from such women or risk going out of business. Good psychological data show that the more women are treated with respect, the more ambition they have. And vice versa. The opt-out revolution is really a downward spiral.
Finally, these choices are bad for women individually. A good life for humans includes the classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy to direct one’s own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world…. At feminism’s dawning, two theorists compared gender ideology to a caste system. To borrow their insight, these daughters of the upper classes will be bearing most of the burden of the work always associated with the lowest caste: sweeping and cleaning bodily waste….
When she sounded the blast that revived the feminist movement 40 years after women received the vote, Betty Friedan spoke of lives of purpose and meaning, better lives and worse lives, and feminism went a long way toward shattering the glass ceilings that limited their prospects outside the home. Now the glass ceiling begins at home. Although it is harder to shatter a ceiling that is also the roof over your head, there is no other choice.
KELLY OLIVER
Fifty Shades of Consent: Rape Culture Versus Feminism
Kelly Oliver is a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt and author of fifteen scholarly books, including Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape (2016), as well as three novels. In the following reading, Oliver analyzes the prevalence of a rape culture on many college campuses and looks at attitudes that contribute to it.
Kelly Oliver, “Fifty Shades of Consent: Rape Culture Versus Feminism” The Feminist Wire, May 15, 2017. Copyright © 2017 The Feminist Wire. Used with permission.
As I started research on campus rape for my book Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape, I fancied myself a nerdy feminist avenger who could take on the bad guys, footballers, and frat boy rapists. But, just scratching the surface of rape on college campuses was eye-opening. The issue was much more complicated than sexist athletes or fraternity brothers conspiring to rape women. Of course, I did find many outrageous examples of athletes and fraternities doing just that. The high profile Vanderbilt rape case is one such example. Another is a fraternity at the University of Wisconsin that was suspended for a “rape conspiracy” that involved spiking punch and serving it to select girls wearing red wristbands; several young women ended up in the hospital as a result. Then there is the Kappa Delta Rho fraternity at Penn State where police found a Facebook page run by the frat that contained hundreds of pictures of nude and unconscious women in sexually compromising positions.
There have been several notorious cases of videos or snapshots of unconscious girls being dragged, undressed, prodded, peed on, written on, and/or penetrated with fingers and objects, or raped: a high school girl in Steubenville Ohio referred to by her rapists as a “dead girl,” a college girl on a beach in Panama City Florida who was drugged and then raped while by-standers watched and recorded, teenager Rehteah Parsons who committed suicide after photographs of her being raped circulated online, Audrie Potts, another suicide after photographs of her semi-naked body went viral at her high school, and then there was the Vanderbilt University rape case where police finally convinced an unbelieving college junior that she’d been gang raped by her boyfriend and his football player buddies by showing her videos and photographs the perpetrators took of her, which they sent around to friends. The girls and young women in Steubenville, at Vanderbilt, on Panama Beach in Florida, and those featured on the Facebook page of the Penn State fraternity all found out about their sexual assaults through third parties showing them images of themselves passed out and abused.
But, to my surprise, I also found lots of cases that are not so clear-cut, cases where young women got drunk, seemingly consented to sex—if drunken consent is possible (and that’s the ten-thousand-dollar question)—and then when they sobered up, claimed they were raped. For example, at Occidental College in California, during her first week on campus, “Jane Doe” as she is called in the report, got drunk during orientation, and went to the dorm room of another first year student, “John Doe” (no relation), who had also been drinking. Realizing she was drunk, Jane’s friends escorted her back to her own dorm room, where they thought they left her for the night. Next, she texted a friend she was about to “have sex,” and then went back to John’s room. The next day, she accused John of rape because she didn’t want to have sex—at least her virgin sober self didn’t want to have sex. John was expelled from school.
Like this alcohol-related case, I also found cases where sober girls or young women seemingly consented, but actually didn’t want to have sex. The case at St. Paul of a fifteen-year-old girl who went along with sex with an eighteen-year-old boy because she was afraid, as she said later at the trial. In this case, consent is colored by the significant fact that she was under the age of legal consent while the boy was of age. But, at the trial, the issue became not her age, but whether or not she resisted. She said she didn’t resist, although she was crying (which should have been a sign to the boy that she didn’t want sex), because she was scared. The boy was acquitted on charges of sexual assault, even though, at one time, this would have been considered statutory rape.
As I continued my research, I became more confused about the issue of consent. Looking for clarity, I investigated the so-called “Mattress Girl” at Columbia University. As a senior project for an art class, Emma Sulkowicz did a performance piece where she carried a twin mattress around campus, rain or shine, to and from classes, 254because she claimed she’d been raped by her then-boyfriend, or at least regular hook-up, on that very mattress. She was protesting what she took to be the university’s lack of appropriate response to her claim that what began as consensual sex turned into anal rape when her partner flipped her over against her protests. Whether or not there was consent or protest became a “he-said she-said” situation, like most sexual assault cases where there is no witness (or Selfie). Of course, feminists have fought hard to get marriage rape to count as rape. Yes, what begins as consensual can quickly become nonconsensual. An invitation to a dorm room isn’t an invitation to sex or assault. And a consensual kiss isn’t necessarily consent to anything more.
But instead of clearing my head, reading about this case made me more confused. I have had good and bad sexual encounters, and I’ve done things I wish I hadn’t, and more to the point, some people have done things to me that I wish they hadn’t, but I’d never considered that I’d been sexually assaulted…until reading some descriptions of recent sexual assaults. It made me wonder whether most people have been raped, if rape means doing something you don’t really want to do. I also began to think that in some of these cases at least, there was serious confusion between consent and desire. If “Mattress Girl” objected to anal sex and voiced her objection, then her partner should have stopped immediately; otherwise, he was guilty of assault. In some cases I read about, however, it was unclear whether the woman accusing a man of rape voiced her objections—and thereby made her lack of consent clear, or whether she felt violated and expected her sexual partner to intuit her lack of consent. In some cases, accusers seemed to be admitting consent to sex, while denying they wanted sex. And therein lies the rub: consent is not the same as desire.
For example, in the Occidental case, the drunken girl consented insofar as any drunk can, and the next day her sober self was clear that she hadn’t wanted to have sex. Intoxicated consent is a sticky wicket. Where do we draw the line to determine whether or not a person is too impaired to consent? Unlike drunk driving, we don’t have blood alcohol standards for drunk consent. Recently, there has been a spate of high profile rape cases involving unconscious girls and women. Clearly, an unconscious person cannot consent. But, can a drunk person consent? And doesn’t it depend on how drunk? There is a difference between being a little tipsy and being shit-faced and nearly or completely unconscious. And what about the Occidental case where both parties are drunk? She accused him of nonconsensual sex because she was intoxicated, but could he also accuse her of nonconsensual sex because he was drunk, too? Were they raping each other? Or, should men be expected to be reasonable enough, even when drunk, not to have sex with an intoxicated woman? Perhaps they should.
It’s one thing if a young woman chooses to drink, or even drinks due to peer pressure, it’s quite another if unbeknownst to her, her drink has been spiked with a Roofie or the “rape drug,” GHB. Spiking girls’ drinks shows obvious intent to rape well before any of the parties is intoxicated. The use of rape drugs is also evidence that for some young men, lack of consent is actually the goal. They want nonconsensual sex with semi-conscious or unconscious girls, and plan accordingly. As I mentioned earlier, that was the plan at the University of Wisconsin fraternity that spiked a punch bowl and then targeted “hot” girls to receive “free” drinks. More recently, a father and son were charged with drugging a girl during orientation at Illinois State University. Allegedly, the father bought alcohol for underage students, and then slipped a pill into the soda of a girl that she then drank. She became ill and returned to her dorm room, and the son followed and allegedly raped her at least twice. The father and son duo were arrested boarding their train back to Chicago, and the father had 22 tablets of the drug Ecstasy in his pocket.
Obviously, it’s not just millennial frat boys or privileged athletes that think its okay to drug girls and rape them. Think of the now infamous statement of convicted Stanford University swimmer and rapist Brock Turner’s dad, who said his son shouldn’t do jail time for a mere “twenty minutes of action.” Are these fathers encouraging their sons to assault women, or excusing them when they do?
Of course, rape is nothing new. And neither is rape culture—a culture that accepts sexual assault as “boys will be boys,” and blames victims for wearing short skirts or being “sluts.” What is new is the visibility of sexual assault, and consequently a heightened awareness of the scope of the problem. Media, especially social media, combined with our society’s embrace of certain kinds of sexual images and sex talk, along with rape 255activists’ work to bring sexual assault into public consciousness, have led to what we could call a clash of cultures, rape culture meets feminism. On the one hand, images of sexual assault circulating on social media as entertainment by perpetrators encourages sexual assault as part of men’s coming of age. On the other hand, rape activists and other women’s empowerment movements have worked to raise awareness of rape without victim blaming, and as a result, more women are able to talk about their experiences of sexual assault. Social media plays a central role in both rape culture and rape activism. Social media is used by some men to document their conquests to share with their friends. And social media is used by some women to support each other and share their stories of sexual assault. Social media emboldens both rapists and survivors to document their experiences. The huge difference is that while the perpetrators seem to feel they are just having fun and what they’re doing is typical or even amusing, the victims feel she has been violated and images of assault just adds insult to injury.
While I don’t buy the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” line of thought, there is a deeper culture clash going on here. Like rape, pornography is nothing new. But, with the Internet, pornography is readily available, even to children and teens, as never before. And again with changing attitudes towards sex and sexual taboos, violent pornography and S/M pornography is on the rise. Most boys are raised on pornography, and images of sexual relations between men and women from pornography inform their ideas and fantasies about women. Their sexual desires are formed, in part, by watching porn.
While girls are much less likely to watch or use porn, they are feeling the “trickle down” effects of pornography on what counts as sexy these days. Poses emphasizing cleavage and butt cheeks, along with the ubiquitous pouty kissy lips, are staples of many social media posts. At the same time, however, girls are still spoon-fed fantasies of “Prince Charming” and romance, especially at the movies. Girls’ expectations for intimate relationships are formed by Disney Princesses, who recently are strong and empowered, but still cute and sexy, and oft times snag a handsome prince. As girls graduate to live action Hollywood films, they get stories of “having it all,” careers and families both, empowerment and prince charming, and a chance to live happily ever after….
At one end of the spectrum, young women are waking up the next morning after drunken sex and knowing they were raped because they didn’t want to have sex, at least their sober selves didn’t want sex. They may have seemed to consent when intoxicated, and in some cases even initiated sex, but in “reality”—the reality of their innermost desires—they didn’t want sex. On the one hand, some young men want sex with unconscious girls and flaunt the lack of consent, while on the other, some young women appear to consent, but then feel violated because they didn’t want it, or didn’t like it.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have frat boys hanging banners and chanting “No means Yes. Yes means anal.” In recent years, every fall, on college campuses across the country, inevitably some fraternities welcome freshman with banners and chants explicitly celebrating nonconsensual sex. For example, a few years ago, Yale fraternity brothers marched around the freshman dorms chanting, “No means yes, yes means anal.” Just last fall, there were similar chants and banners welcoming freshman at Ohio State University, Western Ontario University, and Old Dominion. Then there was the chant used at St. Mary’s University in Halifax to welcome new students: “SMU boys, we like them young. Y is for your sister, O is for oh so tight, U is for underage, N is for no consent, G is for grab that ass.” These examples suggest an aggressive campaign on the part of some fraternities and men on campus to insist “No” means “Yes,” and consent is not only irrelevant, but also undesirable.
Education is key in counterbalancing both Cinderella fantasies (my prince will come) and pornutopia fantasies (that women want to be raped). Enter feminism. Feminist education can provide alternative conceptions of both femininity and masculinity such that women are not seen as passively waiting for a man (to pick their drunken body up off the floor), and men are not seen as the agents of consent (getting women to consent to something they don’t actually want). The Fifty Shades version of contractual consent wherein the woman consents to let the man do stuff to her is highly problematic, and not just because the woman is again imagined as passive but also because of the split between desire and consent…and because she never did sign that contract, dude. Every college student should be required to take Feminism 101 to debunk the myths of both Disney princesses and porn fantasies that feed rape culture.
ANITA HILL
Opening Statement: Sexual Harassment Hearing Concerning Judge Clarence Thomas
Anita Hill (b. 1956) is an attorney and professor of law, social policy, and women’s studies at Brandeis University. The following is from the testimony she gave in October 1991 before the U.S. Senate Judiciary regarding the sexual harassment she experienced while working for Judge Clarence Thomas. Thomas, at the time, was waiting to be confirmed as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. The following is her statement about the sexual harassment she received at the hands of Clarence Thomas when he was her employer.
Anita Hill, “Opening Statement: Sexual Harassment Hearings Concerning Judge Clarence Thomas” testimony in the thomas hearings, October 11, 1991.
Ms. Hill: Mr. Chairman, Senator Thurmond, members of the committee:
My name is Anita F. Hill, and I am a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma….
My childhood was one of a lot of hard work and not much money, but it was one of solid family affection, as represented by my parents. I was reared in a religious atmosphere in the Baptist faith, and I have been a member of the Antioch Baptist Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, since 1983. It is a very warm part of my life at the present time.
For my undergraduate work, I went to Oklahoma State University and graduated from there in 1977….
I graduated from the university with academic honors and proceeded to the Yale Law School, where I received my JD degree in 1980. Upon graduation from law school, I became a practicing lawyer with the Washington, DC, firm of Ward, Hardraker, and Ross.
In 1981, I was introduced to now Judge Thomas by a mutual friend. Judge Thomas told me that he was anticipating a political appointment, and he asked if I would be interested in working with him. He was, in fact, appointed as Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights. After he had taken that post, he asked if I would become his assistant, and I accepted that position.
In my early period there, I had two major projects. The first was an article I wrote for Judge Thomas’s signature on the education of minority students. The second was the organization of a seminar on high-risk students which was abandoned because Judge Thomas transferred to the EEOC where he became the chairman of that office.
During this period at the Department of Education, my working relationship with Judge Thomas was positive. I had a good deal of responsibility and independence. I thought he respected my work and that he trusted my judgment. After approximately three months of working there, he asked me to go out socially with him.
What happened next and telling the world about it are the two most difficult things—experiences of my life. It is only after a great deal of agonizing consideration and sleepless number—a great number of sleepless nights that I am able to talk of these unpleasant matters to anyone but my close friends.
I declined the invitation to go out socially with him and explained to him that I thought it would jeopardize at what—at—at the time I considered to be a very good working relationship. I had a normal social life with other men outside of the office. I believed then, as now, that having a social relationship with a person who was supervising my work would be ill-advised. I was very uncomfortable with the idea and told him so.
I thought that by saying no and explaining my reasons my employer would abandon his social suggestions. However, to my regret, in the following few weeks, he continued to ask me out on several occasions. He pressed me to justify my reasons for saying no to him. These incidents took place in his office or mine. They were in the form of private conversations which not—would not have been overheard by anyone else.
My working relationship became even more strained when Judge Thomas began to use work situations to discuss sex. On these occasions, he would call me into his office for reports on education issues and projects, or he might suggest that, because of the time pressures of his schedule, we go to lunch to a government cafeteria. After a brief discussion of work, he would turn the conversation to a discussion of sexual matters.
His conversations were very vivid. He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes. He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involved in various sex acts. On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess.
Because I was extremely uncomfortable talking about sex with him at all, and particularly in such a graphic way, I told him that I did not want to talk about these subjects. I would also try to change the subject to education matters or to nonsexual personal matters such as his background or his beliefs. My efforts to change the—the subject were rarely successful.
Throughout the period of these conversations, he also, from time to time, asked me for social engagements. My reaction to these conversations was to avoid them by eliminating opportunities for us to engage in extended conversations. This was difficult because at the time I was his only assistant at the Office of Education—or Office for Civil Rights.
During the latter part of my time at the Department of Education, the social pressures and any conversation of his offensive behavior ended. I began both to believe and hope that our working relationship could be a proper, cordial, and professional one.
When Judge Thomas was made chair of the EEOC, I needed to face the question of whether to go with him. I 258was asked to do so, and I did. The work itself was interesting, and at that time it appeared that the sexual overtures which had so troubled me had ended. I also faced the realistic fact that I had no alternative job. While I might have gone back to private practice, perhaps in my old firm or at another, I was dedicated to civil rights work, and my first choice was to be in that field. Moreover, the Department of Education itself was a dubious venture. President Reagan was seeking to abolish the entire department.
For my first months at the EEOC, where I continued to be an assistant to Judge Thomas, there were no sexual conversations or overtures. However, during the fall and winter of 1982, these began again. The comments were random and ranged from pressing me about why I didn’t go out with him to remarks about my personal appearance. I remember his saying that some day I would have to tell him the real reason that I wouldn’t go out with him.
He began to show displeasure in his tone and voice and his demeanor and his continued pressure for an explanation. He commented on what I was wearing in terms of whether it made me more or less sexually attractive. The incidents occurred in his inner office at the EEOC.
One of the oddest episodes I remember was an occasion in which Thomas was drinking a Coke in his office. He got up from the table at which we were working, went over to his desk to get the Coke, looked at the can and asked, “Who has pubic hair on my Coke?” On other occasions, he referred to the size of his own penis as being larger than normal, and he also spoke on some occasions of the pleasures he had given to women with oral sex.
At this point, late 1982, I began to feel severe stress on the job. I began to be concerned that Clarence Thomas might take out his anger with me by degrading me or not giving me important assignments. I also thought that he might find an excuse for dismissing me.
In January of 1983, I began looking for another job. I was handicapped because I feared that, if he found out, he might make it difficult for me to find other employment and I might be dismissed from the job I had. Another factor that made my search more difficult was that there was a period—this was during a period of a hiring freeze in the government. In February 1983, I was hospitalized for five days on an emergency basis for an acute—for acute stomach pain, which I attributed to stress on the job.
Once out of the hospital, I became more committed to find other employment and sought further to minimize my contact with Thomas. This became easier when Allison Duncan became office director, because most of my work was then funneled through her and I had contact with Clarence Thomas mostly in staff meetings.
In the spring of 1983, an opportunity to teach at Oral Roberts University opened up. I participated in a seminar—taught an afternoon session and seminar at Oral Roberts University. The dean of the—of the university saw me teaching and inquired as to whether I would be interested in furthering—pursuing a career in teaching, beginning at Oral Roberts University. I agreed to take the job in large part because of my desire to escape the pressures I felt at the EEOC, due to Judge Thomas.
When I informed him that I was leaving in July, I recall that his response was that now I would no longer have an excuse for not going out with him. I told him that I still preferred not to do so. At some time after that meeting, he asked if he could take me to dinner at the end of the term. When I declined, he assured me that the dinner was a professional courtesy only and not a social invitation. I reluctantly agreed to accept that invitation, but only if it was at the very end of a working day.
On, as I recall, the last day of my employment at the EEOC in the summer of 1983, I did have dinner with Clarence Thomas. We went directly from work to a restaurant near the office. We talked about the work I had done, both at Education and at the EEOC… Finally, he made a comment that I will vividly remember. He said that if I ever told anyone of his behavior that it would ruin his career. This was not an apology, nor was it an explanation. That was his last remark about the possibility of our going out or reference to his behavior.
In July of 1983, I left Washington, D.C. area and I’ve had minimal contacts with Judge Clarence Thomas since…. From 1983 until today, I have seen Judge Thomas only twice. On one occasion, I needed to get a reference from him, and on another he made a public appearance in Tulsa.
On one occasion he called me at home and we had an inconsequential conversation. On one occasion he called me without reaching me, and I returned the call without reaching him, and nothing came of it. I have, on at least three occasions, been asked to [act] as a conduit to him for others….
It is only after a great deal of agonizing consideration that I am able to talk of these unpleasant matters to anyone except my closest friends. As I’ve said before these 259last few days have been very trying and very hard for me, and it hasn’t just been the last few days this week. It has actually been over a month now that I have been under the strain of this issue.
Telling the world is the most difficult experience of my life, but it is very close to having to live through the experience that occasion this meeting. I may have used poor judgment early on in my relationship with this issue. I was aware, however, that telling at any point in my career could adversely affect my future career. And I did not want early on to burn all the bridges to the EEOC.
As I said, I may have used poor judgment. Perhaps I should have taken angry or even militant steps, both when I was in the agency, or after I left it. But I must confess to the world that the course that I took seemed the better as well as the easier approach.
I declined any comment to newspapers, but later when Senate staff asked me about these matters I felt I had a duty to report. I have no personal vendetta against Clarence Thomas. I seek only to provide the committee with information which it may regard as relevant.
It would have been more comfortable to remain silent. It took no initiative to inform anyone—I took no initiative to inform anyone. But when I was asked by a representative of this committee to report my experience, I felt that I had to tell the truth. I could not keep silent.
JOHNATHAN ANDERSEN
The Feminine Antidote: Reflections on Masculinity, Patriarchy, and Feminism
Jonathan Andersen is currently working on a MEd in Counseling and Human Development. He is an advocate for social justice for all people who face injustice and oppression.
In the following reading, Andersen deconstructs our current harmful cultural concept of masculinity. He then offers a more constructive redefinition of masculinity.
Jonathan Anderson, “The Feminine Antidote: Reflections on Masculinity, Patriarch, and Feminism,” A Daring Adventure, https://thedaringadventurelife.wordpress.com. December 23, 2015. Copyright © 2015 by Jonathan Anderson. Used with permission.
MASCULINE(?) MESSAGES
Sit around some time and think about the stereotypes about men that exist. What does society say about what constitutes masculinity, being manly, and “being a real man”?
Think about the cultural expectations placed on men. How often is crying seen as weakness? The last thing a man should want to be perceived as is weak. Think about how men are taught to express only anger and suppress all other emotions. Think about the media, news, and movies and how men are told to be and what constitutes masculinity by these forces that shape and influence us all, unlike any other time in history.
Look at how stay-at-home dads are frowned upon and taught they are lesser than their wives, because a man must earn more than a woman so he can be the “provider”.
Think about gender stereotypes and how they play into this. Men must be tough, manly, emotionless, stoic, brave, and not weak. It’s there if we think about the messages, the shame, the cultural expectations, and stereotypes constantly bombarding us!
I think a lot of cultural expectations via media and socio-political factors telling men that they have to be physically strong, emotionally numb/unavailable, the breadwinner to the point that all that matters is how much one makes and how much one works, and that crying or emotional sensitivity is weakness that must be ratified. That a man is to be tough, grow a beard, drink beer, conquer women, and rise above the competition. Any man outside these expectations is shunned….
For me, there is no doubt masculinity is lost and struggling in our culture of porn, death, violence, fear, shame, broken homes, and fatherlessness.
A COLLECTIVIST/FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE
It’s American culture to think individually. Civil rights are all about that. Libertarianism goes hand-in-hand with individualism. I, as an aspiring therapist, on the other hand, share more with collectivist cultures. I see things systemically and societally through a collective lens for me that is Feminism, Constructivist/Narrative Theory, Family Systems, Multiculturalism, and Existentialism.
I don’t hone in on individuals and their problems or challenges per se. For me, a lot of the time problems and such lie outside the individual in society, culture, and the structures placed above us. It’s good to keep that in mind with a conversation about patriarchy, what I want address next, which is clearly a systemic issue, not an individual one. However, we should think beyond individualism to address such issues.
PATRIARCHY
“Patriarchies are the near-universal hierarchical social systems in which attributes associated with maleness are privileged and those attributed to women are denigrated…no matter the sex of the individual in whom those qualities are found. Patriarchal systems are 261identified by feminist therapy and theory as the primary sources of human distress, including those kinds of distress that are organized into diagnostic categories and labeled psychopathology by the mental health disciplines…. Such toxic social hierarchies of value are construed inherently inimical to personal power and healthy function for all people, even those apparently privileged by patriarchal norms of dominance and hierarchy.”1
Patriarchy has its own, what I believe to be false, definitions of masculinity and “what it means to be a man.”
Eve Ensler, in her TEDTalk “Embrace Your Inner Girl,” points out the fact that patriarchy doesn’t equate being male and that it has harmed males just as much if not more as it has harmed females. She doesn’t degrade or say anything hateful about being a male. Male doesn’t equal patriarchy. Patriarchy is more of an ideology and system that is oppressive and caters to what it considers male.
Patriarchy, in my own words, is the established privilege one gets with being born male, especially white, European-descended, Christian male in American culture, and degrading being female. Examples today can include, but aren’t limited to:
Women who continue to make less for doing the same job
Targeting female infants in the womb for extinction
Males getting promotions over females for the sole reason that they are male
Men dominating politics
Men raging war around the globe
Male support of abortion to get out of parenthood
Males thinking women are overly sensitive and overly emotional
Men being willing and able to only express anger as the only valid emotion
Men not allowing themselves to feel or cry
Men treating women as sex objects
These are but a few examples, and it is also very easy for women to participate in the continual reinforcement of these examples and to discriminate or stereotype, so don’t think it’s just men participating in patriarchy….
Modern Feminism, rightly understood and practiced (which means radicals can and will pervert it), isn’t about blaming men at all, but working together to end patriarchal ideas that harm men and women from the start.
“[Feminism is] the belief that human beings are of equal worth and that the pervading patriarchal social structures which perpetuate a hierarchy of dominance, based upon gender, must be resisted and transformed toward a more equitable system.” -Funderburk and Fukuyama (John Sommers-Flanagan and Rita Sommers-Flanagan, 2015)
MY OWN DEFINITION OF FEMINISM IS:
Feminism means that all humans, whether men, women, children, gays, lesbians, transgender, black, white, people of color, disabled, deaf, blind, religious or not, whatever, all have equal worth in being first and foremost human persons. Thus, all persons, especially in a culture as rich and full of opportunities as ours, should have equal access to those opportunities. No one should be treated differently or as less than human based on any of those characteristics. Being a Feminist means respecting the rights and dignity of all people.
Being a Feminist, I also believe it includes resisting patriarchal ideals, values, and ways. Resisting patriarchy isn’t about bringing boys down or “killing men”, because again, at the heart of feminism is acknowledging equality of men and women and sharing power, resources, leadership, etc. Resisting patriarchy isn’t about degrading men and boys or making them lower than or subordinate to women!
Patriarchy should be resisted by men and women because it creates an unfair, corrupted, and watered-down version of masculinity and completely does away with an egalitarian view of society and the world. It’s harmful to all because it places men and women at odds with one another instead of helping us take one another’s hands and working together.
Even aside from patriarchy, which is where I target the source of the problem lying, the main point is what is being taught that constitutes a “real man”. Patriarchy or not, that isn’t the point, there are still false ideas influenced, even based off patriarchal ideals and definitions, that influence and damage men.
Men are taught from birth to not be emotional, that any emotion besides anger is not appropriate to display. Counseling sessions across the country are full of broken, hurting marriages where men like that approach marriage, love, and relationships. I’ve read and studied enough books and research on marriage to know that is true.
I firmly believe Feminism isn’t for women alone, but for all people! I also believe that, as Eve points out in her video I spoke of earlier, that the way to develop a more robust, thorough, fair, nuanced, egalitarian Masculinity that men need to “embrace their inner girl cell,” which means learning to be in touch with our feelings, recognize the dangers in patriarchal “masculinity,” learn to voice and express our emotions in healthy ways, be in tune with our sensitive, nurturing parts, and begin to open ourselves up to the feminine within us all.
MORE ON MEDIA
“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence towards women. Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact ritual of power that will assault his self-esteem.” -Bell Hooks
I mean, think of media alone. Think about movies, shows, etc. How are men portrayed? You often have one of two things. The handsome, tough, no-nonsense, no emotions, guy in action and drama or the goofy, incompetent, lost, submissive “girly” men like Ray Romano from “Everybody Loves Raymond” or Phil Dunphy from “Modern Family.”
A lot of the messages we hear as men are taught in culture, in societal expectations, gender roles, stereotypes, shame messages, media, movies, sports, high school locker rooms, and many other places.
For my male readers, have you heard anywhere at any moment of your life any of these messages?:
Crying is for pussies!
Real men don’t cry!
Men are tough!
Men must be providers and heads of their homes!
Men must work, work, work! Climb the ladder of materialistic and wealth-driven success!
Men must conquer females sexually!
Men who show emotions are weak!
Men aren’t afraid!
Men keep control!
Men who cry are girls!
Men who are sensitive are like women!
Men play sports, drink beer, and win!
Never heard these? Not once heard any of these messages being taught, reinforced, and believed? I find that incredibly hard to believe if not, but I’m sure that’s not the case. I’ve heard it, read it, seen it, experienced it, lived it, researched it, and believed it. My first marriage ended, in part, because I was taught to suppress my emotions and never show anything but anger and frustration, which led me to bottling things up and then exploding more often than not.
And media today reinforces these messages more than anything.
CONCLUSION
Masculinity is patriarchally defined in our culture and hence why I find it damaging to men, manhood, masculinity, and fatherhood. I find Feminism a helpful antidote to recovering what it means to be male, manly, and a “real man!” However, even if one isn’t a Feminist, I know we can’t have this conversation without talking about shame, culture, media, society, fear, and false ideas of what masculinity entails.
Masculinity is wavering and hurting in our culture due to the patriarchal ideas and values spread through various means of influence that men see and hear.
The cure to combatting these false ideas lie in recognizing the destructive ways patriarchy has hurt men and the healing ways true Feminism can help men. It also informs being aware of and educated about the ways media influences men and masculinity.
Finally, we can’t have this conversation without being vulnerable, open, real, raw, transparent, honest, introspective, and without including the females in our lives.
CASE STUDIES
1. LIFE IMITATING ART: SEX-STEREOTYPES IN THE MEDIA
When it comes to the regulation of media that objectify women and portray them as subordinate, feminists focus primarily on adult pornography. However, their efforts may be coming too late. Research shows that children have already formed their sex-role stereotypes by the age of seven. Television and movies, in particular, exert a strong influence on children’s perception of gender roles.28 In most children’s shows females are portrayed in passive roles, such as housewives, waitresses, and secretaries. Males are portrayed in active roles such as doctors, detectives, and commanders. Even television shows for very young children promote sex stereotyping. Teletubbies and Barney & Friends, for example, while opening up the range of acceptable behavior for boys, reinforce sex stereotypes for girls.29 The media’s belittlement of females does not end with children’s shows. The media tend to denigrate motherhood and glamorize the childless, single life in the written media as well as in television shows such as Nanny 911 and Law and Order: SVU.
2. COMMERICAL SURROGACY IN RUSSIA
Twenty-four-year-old Julia Petrov, who is eight months pregnant, is staying in a comfortable bedroom at a large house in Moscow that she shares with a dozen other women, all carrying babies for couples, mostly from Europe and North America. A team of housekeepers, cooks, and medical staff care for the women. This is the second child Julia Petrov has carried for infertile couples from other countries. In exchange for turning over the baby, she will receive $12,000—more than her husband Mikhail earns in a year as a seasonal construction worker. Without the income for her surrogacy, Julia and her husband would be living in poverty.
Russia is one of the few countries that still allows commercial surrogacy, in which a woman is paid to carry another person’s or couple’s baby. The practice has become increasingly popular with infertile couples from industrialized countries where commercial surrogacy is illegal or very expensive. Although still legal in some states in the United States, the practice was banned in India in 2016 and in China in 2017, two of the most popular destinations at one time for couples seeking surrogate mothers.
According to Russian law, the child the surrogate mother is carrying cannot receive any genetic material from the surrogate mother. She can provide the childless couple with her body for the period of pregnancy but not with the actual egg. However, surrogate mothers are allowed in Russia to decide to keep the child they carried for another couple or to raise the price.
3. INFERTILITY TREATMENT: ARE EIGHT BABIES TOO MANY?
In 2009, thirty-three-year-old Nadya Suleman gave birth to eight premature babies ranging in weight from 1 pound 8 ounces to 3 pounds 4 ounces. Suleman, a single mother who already had six young children at home, had six embryos implanted from in vitro fertilization, and two of the embryos resulted in twin births. A team of forty-six doctors as well as other medical staff were involved in the delivery. Some of the eight infants were in the hospital for months. The entire cost ran into the millions of dollars, part of which was paid by taxpayers. In addition, some of the infants may have lifetime medical and developmental problems.
Suleman, who says she was lonely as an only child and has “a deep need to connect,” is delighted at the new additions to her family. The octuplets’ birth, she said, was a “miraculous experience.”
However, the public, for the most part, responded with disapproval and condemnation and dubbed her “Octomom.” The negative publicity along with the responsibility of caring for 14 young children contributed to her growing depression and thoughts of suicide. Now, several years later, she says she has finally come to peace with herself.30
4. LILLIAN GARLAND: PREGNANCY LEAVE AND THE WORKPLACE
Lillian Garland was employed as a receptionist by the California Savings and Loan Co. in Los Angeles. Her difficult pregnancy required that she take several months’ leave. When she tried to return to work after four months, she expected her job to have been protected by a California law that granted unpaid pregnancy disability leave. However, there was no job awaiting her. She sued her employer for not giving her maternity leave. Her employer argued that unpaid job-protection maternity laws discriminated against men.
Feminist groups such as NOW and the National Women’s Political Caucus filed amicus briefs siding with the employer in the court hearing, arguing for “equal treatment” as opposed to “special treatment” for pregnancy. They contended that pregnancy should be treated just like any other disability. Since men are not given disability leave for pregnancy, neither should pregnant women get disability leave. The federal court ruled with the employer and struck down the California law.
The case was taken to the U.S. Supreme Court where in 1987 in California Savings and Loan v. Guerra (1987), the Court overturned the earlier ruling and upheld the California law granting unpaid pregnancy disability leave.
5. THE MILITARY CULTURE OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT
Only since 1976 have women integrated into the once all-male bastion of the military academy. However, many women drop out of the academies and the military because of sexual harassment. Sexual assaults at the U.S. Military Academy and the Naval Academy hit record highs in 2016 with 48 percent of female cadets and midshipmen reporting being sexually assaulted. Reports of sexual assaults are particularly high in combat areas such as Afghanistan.31
Private Sarah Tolaro and four other enlisted women from the Army base at Fort Meade, Maryland, one of whom had wanted to make the Army her career, all left the Army because of sexual harassment. When Tolaro told someone about the harassment, she was told to drop it and “not to make waves.” One of the women from Fort Meade, rather than make an issue of sexual harassment, accepted the Army’s claim—”inability to cope with military life”—as the official reason for her leaving the Army.32
Many female cadets who are sexually harassed or assaulted do not report the incident for fear of reprisal, not being taken seriously, or being blamed for the assault. The military places a high priority on training programs related to sexual misconduct, programs they maintain are working. The military also provides the option of “restricted reported,” in which a victim is 267provided with support services without having to give up her anonymity by pursuing legal charges and participating in an investigative process.
Sexual Assault Reports in U.S. Military Reach Record High: Pentagon, NBC News, May 1, 2017.
6. ANOREXIA NERVOSA AND BULIMIA: THE TYRANNY OF THINNESS
Philosophical views, rather than being merely abstract ideas, have real-life consequences. Philosophers have traditionally associated women with the body and men with the mind. The myth that the female body and female sexuality are evil contributes to another type of violence against women’s bodies: anorexia nervosa and bulimia. These two disorders, which were rare thirty years ago, have reached epidemic proportions today. Tyra Banks, at 5 feet 10 inches, weighed 110 pounds when she began her modeling career at the age of eighteen. While her thinness and beauty made her highly sought after as a supermodel, her weight at the time was well below the healthy range. It also would have made her ineligible to model in Brazil or Spain, where models who fall below a certain weight are barred from modeling in fashion shows. According to the National Eating Disorders Screening Program, more than 5 million Americans had eating disorders, including 15 percent of young women. About one hundred women die each year of anorexia nervosa.33
After her semiretirement, Banks put on weight. While happy about her new weight, she has had to endure slurs and headlines referring to her as fat and as “America’s Next Top Waddle.” Fortunately, Banks—unlike many other women—was able to resist the pressure to lose weight. She told People magazine, “If I had lower self-esteem I would probably be starving myself right now.”34
NOTES
1. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell Books, 1963), 370–371.
2. See Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of State (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989).
3. Steven Goldberg, “The Logic of Patriarchy,” in Fads and Fallacies in the Social Sciences (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003).
4. Source: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, translated by Barbara Foxley. London: Dent, 1974.
5. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978/1859), 104.
6. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1942), 144–145.
7. See Jeffner Allen, “Motherhood: The Annihilation of Women,” in Joyce Trebilcot, Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory (Towota, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld, 1984), 315–330.
8. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 24.
9. Olga Khazar, “Emasculated Men Refuse to Do Chores—Except Cooking,” The Atlantic, October 24, 2016.
10. H. Remick, ed., Comparable Worth and Wage Discrimination (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University, 1984), ix.
11. Sarah Glazer, “Future of Feminism,” CQ Researcher, April 14, 2006.
12. “The Feminization of Poverty,” www.un.org/
13. World Economic Forum, “Ten Years of the Global Gender Gap Report,” 2015.
14. Louise Story, “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,” New York Times, September 20, 2005.
15. Pew Research Center, “At First Blush, Parents Are More Likely to Be Happy,” http:/
16. John Curtis, “Persistent Inequality: Gender and Academic Employment,” April 2011, www.aauw.org/
17. Lisa Vogel, “Debating Difference: Feminism, Pregnancy and the Workplace,” Feminist Studies 16, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 9.
18. Randi Kaye, “Some Voters Say Sexism Less Offensive Than Racism,” http://
19. See N. Holla, “Blame It on Feminism,” Mother Jones 16, no. 5 (September 1991): 24–29.
20. Terri Moon Cronk, “Department of Defense Releases Latest Military Sexual Assault Report,” May 17, 2017, http://
21. AAUW, “Sexual Harassment Statistics,” www.aauw.org./
22. Vaughana Macy Feary, “Sexual Harassment: Why the Corporate World Still Doesn’t ‘Get It,’” Journal of Business Ethics 13 (1994): 648–662.
23. Katie Roiphe, “Reckless Eyeballing: Sexual Harassment on Campus,” The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism (Canada: Little, Brown & Company, 1994).
24. Pew Research Center, “At First Blush, Parents Are More Likely to Be Happy,” November 8, 2010.
25. Lisa Belkin, “The Opt-Out Revolution,” New York Times, October 26, 2003.
26. Cathy Young, “The Return of the Mommy Wars,” Reason, April 2006.
27. David Cantor et al., “Association of American Universities (AAU): Report on the AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct,” September 21, 2015.
28. F. E. Barcus, Images of Life on Children’s Television: Sex-roles, Minorities, and Families (New York: Praeger, 1983), 20–22.
29. Kimberly A. Powell and Lori Abels, “Sex-Role Stereotypes in TV Programs Aimed at the Preschool Audience: An Analysis of Teletubbies and Barney and Friends,” Women and Language 25, no. 1 (2002): 14–22.
30. “Octomom Says She Is Finally at Peace with Her Fourteen Children,” Daily Mail (UK), December 20, 2017, http//
31. Elizabeth Bumiller, “Sex Assault Reports Rise in Military,” New York Times, March 16, 2010.
32. Linda Bird Francke, “The Military Culture of Harassment,” in Sexual Harassment: Issues and Answers, ed. Linda LeMoncheck and James P. Sterba (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 95–102.
33. American Anorexia Bulemia Association, www.aabainc.org/
34. “Tyra Talks Back,” People, cover story, January 25, 2007.