Page iii Paradoxes of Gender Judith Lorber Yale University Press \ 'r w iiiivcti itnJ London Page iv Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College. Copyright © 1994 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Jill Breitbarth and set in Perpetua and Copperplate Gothic types by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printed in the United States of America by Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lorber, Judith. Paradoxes of gender / Judith Lorber. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-05807-1 (cloth) 0-300-06497-7 (pbk.) 1. Sex role. 2. Gender identity. 3. Social institutions. 4. Feminist theory. I. Title. HQ1075.L667 1994 305.3—dc20 93-23459 CIP A catalogue record for this hook is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 Page v For Jesse, Julian, and Gabrielle, and again, for Matt Unless the past and future were made part of the present by memory and intention, there was, in human terms, no road, nowhere to go. —Ursula Le Gum, The Dispossessed Page vii CONTENTS Preface ix Introduction 1 Part I. Producing Gender 11 1. "Night to His Day": The Social Construction of Gender 13 2. Believing Is Seeing: Biology As Ideology 37 3. How Many Opposites? Gendered Sexuality 55 4. Men As Women and Women As Men: Disrupting Gender 80 5. Waiting for the Goddess: Cultural Images of Gender 97 Part II. Gender in Practice 121 6. Out of Eden: The Social Evolution of Gender 123 7. Rocking the Cradle: Gendered Parenting 144 8. Daily Bread: Gender and Domestic Labor 172 9. Separate and Not Equal: The Gendered Division of Paid Work 194 Page viii Part III. The Politics of Gender 223 10. Guarding the Gates: The Micropolitics of Gender 225 11. The Visible Hand: Gender and the State 253 12. Dismantling Noah's Ark: Gender and Equality 282 Notes 303 Bibliography 335 Index 413 Page ix PREFACE This book has been two years in the writing and twenty years in the thinking. I taught my first sex roles course in 1972; it was a new course, called Male and Female in American Society. A few years later, I got the name changed to Sociology of Gender. A few years after that, I taught my first women's studies course. (Actually, I taught a precursor of all these courses in 1970—a two-credit, large-enrollment course called, of all things, Courtship and Marriage!) These titles in many ways chart the development of the field, which was paralleled by my own intellectual development in thinking about the relationships between women and men, relationships we took for granted in the days of "courtship and marriage." Sociologists for Women in Society (sws) started twenty years ago, too. In addition to countless absorbing conversations about gender with women whose thinking was also evolving, sws gave me the opportunity of being the founding editor of Gender & Society from 1986 through 1990. In this position, I had the privilege of helping to develop feminist social science theory and research. As editor I was able to hone my own ideas about gender, particularly its social construction. The language of this book reflects the style I developed as editor of Gender & Society. I made a distinction between gender as a social phenomenon and the social phenomenon of biological sex. Gender, sexuality, and sex are distinct concepts in this book. "Women" and "men" are not equated with "females'' and "males" and are not assumed to be heterosexual. Where "sex" is used, it connotes a biological or physiological category that is also socially constructed. I distinguish sex from sexuality, because sexual orientation, identification, and Page x sexual practices are similarly socially constructed and have their own genealogy and politics. In an effort to bring more precision to the designation of racial ethnic groups, particularly in a country as heterogeneous as the United States, I have tried to indicate the groups' social relationship to each other as "dominant group and subordinated group," rather than "majority" and "minority," which are clearly misnomers. For authors who use their birth name and their married name, both last names are used in the text. In the citations in parentheses only the final name is given, and the references are alphabetized by the first letter of the final name, following English-language practice. The exceptions are women who follow Hispanic usage, where both names are integral as final names. In Oriental names, I have used the first name as the family name, the second name as the given name. The bibliography, long as it is, is by no means exhaustive. For the most part, the citations represent the works that were most interesting to me and most important to scholars in the area, as indicated by frequency of citation. However, a glance at the references in publications in any of the specialized areas will demonstrate that their depth and breadth far exceed my limited listing. I concentrated on publications since 1980, but many of the ideas, theories, and premises of feminist scholarship were first presented in the early 1970s in books and papers that have become classics. Although many of the early journal articles have by now been reprinted, some in many anthologies, I have tried to cite the earliest appearance in order to give the reader an idea of how feminist thinking has developed. The last chapter ofthe book is a greatly revised version of "Dismantling Noah's Ark," originally published in Sex Roles 14 (1986): 567-80. For helping me organize and refine the concepts presented in this book, I am indebted to my students at the CUNY Graduate School, who commented on early drafts of chapters of the book, and the members of the gender seminar at Bar Ilan University, who commented on later drafts. Patricia Y ancey Martin, Barbara Katz Rothman, and Dafna Izraeli, who read the entire manuscript, have my heartfelt thanks. I am also grateful to Susan Farrell for being a sounding board for my ideas during the years she was managing editor of Gender & Society and for supplying me with many pertinent articles during the time I was writing this book. My thanks also to Susan Zimmerman, who gave me the citations on Renaissance cross-dressing and the theater and The Roaring Girl, Daphne Page xi Achilles, who lent me her copy of The Exultation of Inanna, and David Abrams and Diane Kelly for a wonderful firsthand experience of prehistoric cave art in France with Past Times Tours. My editor, Gladys Topkis, recognized the worth of my ideas about gender from a very sketchy proposal and gave me the impetus to launch this project. Elliot Weininger, Susan Farrell, and Sharon Sherman did the indispensable runs back and forth from the various CUNY libraries. Helga Feder and the CUNY Graduate School Mina Reese Library staff have my gratitude for filling with dispatch my endless requests for interlibrary loan books. During 1992-93, when I was finishing the book, I had the benefit of a sabbatical fellowship in Israel that was funded by the United States—Israel Educational Foundation (Fulbright Award). Most of all, I am indebted to all those feminists who have done the research and developed the theories of gender I used. My book is a synthesis of their gigantic and heroic endeavors. If I have taken feminist ideas a little farther by showing the underlying structure and processes of what I call the social institution of gender, it will pay off some of my great debt to the feminist scholarship of the past twenty years. Page 1 INTRODUCTION When a new field of study emerges, it is usually based theoretically and in research practice on premises and problems current at the time. But as research brings in data that do not fit into accepted theory, the field begins to go through what Thomas Kuhn (1970) calls a scientific revolution. Eventually, if the field is to progress, it needs a new paradigm: new theories and new research questions. In this book, I offer a new paradigm of gender—gender as a social institution. Its focus is the analysis of gender as a social structure that has its origins in the development of human culture, not in biology or procreation. Like any social institution, gender exhibits both universal features and chronological and cross-cultural variations that affect individual lives and social interaction in major ways. As is true of other institutions, gender's history can be traced, its structure examined, and its changing effects researched. My concept of gender differs from previous conceptualizations in that I do not locate it in the individual or in interpersonal relations, although the construction and maintenance of gender are manifest in personal identities and in social interaction. Rather, I see gender as an institution that establishes patterns of expectations for individuals, orders the social processes of everyday life, is built into the major social organizations of society, such as the economy, ideology, the family, and politics, and is also an entity in and of itself. When studies of gender started, the field was called "sex roles." The perspective of sex roles is psychological and focused on individual attitudes and attributes.