December 28, 1992 The Nation. 799 ARTICLES. MAROONED ON GILLIGAN’S ISLAND in thepeace movement but goes way beyond issuesof war and peace. At present it permeates discussions of just aboutevery field, from management training to theology. Indeed, although Are Women Morally the media like to caricature feminism as denying the existence of sexual differences, for thewomen’s movement and its op- ponents alike “difference” is where the actionis. Thus, busi- Superior to Men? ness writers wonder if women’s nurturing, intuitive qualities KATHA POLLITT will make them better executives. Educators suggest that female students suffer in classrooms that emphasize competition over ome years ago, I was invited by the wife of a well- cooperation. Women politicians tout their playground-honed known writer to sign a women’s peace petition. It negotiating skills, their egoless devotion to public service, their made the pointssuch documents usually make: that gender-based commitment to fairness and caring.A variety women, as mothers, caregivers and nurturers, have of political causes-environmentalism, animal rights, even aS special awareness of the precariousness ofhuman life, see vegetarianism-are promoted aslogical extensions of wom- through jingoism andcold war rhetoric and would prefer na- en’s putative peacefulness, closeness to nature, horror of ag- tions towork out their difficultiespeacefully so that themil- gression and concern for others’ health. (Indeed,to some ex- itary budget could be diverted to schools and hospitals and tent these causes are arenas in which women fight one another housing. It had the literary tone such documents usually have, over definitions offemininity, which is whydebates over dis- as well-at once superior and plaintive, as if the authorsdidn’t posable diapers and over the wearing of fur-both rather know whether they were bragging or begging. We are wiser minor sources of harm, even if their opponents areright- than you poor deluded menfolk,was the subtext, so will you loom so large and are so acrimonious.) In the arts,we hear please-please-please listen to your moms? a lot about whatwomen’s “real” subjects, methodsand ma- To sign or not to sign? Of course, I was all for peace. But terials ought to be. Painting is male. Rhyme is male. Plot is was I for peace (IS a woman? I wasn’t a motherthen4 wasn’t male. Perhaps, say the Lacanian feminists, even logic and lan- even an aunt.Did my lack of nurturing credentials makemy guage aremale. What is female? Nature. Blood. Milk.Com- grasp of the horrorsof war and thefolly of the armsrace only munal gatherings. The moon. Quilts. theoretical, like a white person’s understanding of racism? Were mothers the naturalleaders of the peace movement, to whose judgment nonmothers, male andfemale, must defer, because after allwe couldn’t know, couldn’tfeef that tender- Women’S real mksion was ness toward fragilehuman life that a woman who had borne and raised children had experienced? On the other hand,1 was to ‘humanize’ men beforemen indeed a woman. Was motherhood wlth its special wisdom blew up the world. somehow deep inside me, to be called upon when needed, like my uterus? Complicating matters in a way relevant to this essay was my Haven’t we been here before? Indeed we have. Woman as response to the famous writer’s wfe herself. Here wasa woman sharer and carer, woman as earth mother, woman as guard- in her OS, her child-raising long behind her. Was motherhood ian of all the small rituals that knit together a family and a the only banner under which she could gain a foothold on communlty, woman as beneath,above or beyond such manly civic life? Perhaps so. Her only other publlcidentity was that concerns as law, reason, abstractideas-these images are as of a wlfe, and wifehood, even to a famous man, Isn’t much old as time. Open defenders of male supremacyhave always to claim credit for these days.(“To think I spent all those years used them to declare women flatly inferior to men; covert ironing his underpants!” she once burst out to a mutual ones use them toplace women on a pedestal as too goodfor friend.) Motherhood was what she had in the work-and- this naughty world. Thus, in the Eumenides,Aeschylus cele- accomplishment department, so it was understandable that brated law as the defeat by males of primitive female principles she tryto maximize its moral status.But I was not inher sit- of bloodguilt and vengeance, while the Ayatollah Khomeini uation: I was a writer, a single woman, a Jobholder. By send- thought women should be barred from judgeships because ing me a petition fromwhich I was excluded even as I was in- they were too tenderhearted. Different rationale, same out- vited to add my name, perhaps she was telling me that, by come: Women, because of their indifference to animperson- leading a nondomestic life, I had abandoned themoral high al moral order, cannot be full participants in civic life. ground, was “acting llke a man,” but could redeem myself by There exists an equally anclent line of thought, however, acknowledging the moral pre-emmence of the class of women that uses femininity toposit a subversive challenge to theso- I refused to join. cial order: Think of Sophocles’ Antigone, who resists tyranny Theascription of particular virtues-compassion, pa- out of love and piety, or Aristophanes’ Lysrstrata, the origi- tience, common sense, nonviolence-to mothers, and theten- nal women’s strike for peace-nik, or Shakespeare’s Portia, dency to conflate “mothers” with “women,” hasa long history who champions mercy against the savage letter of the law. For 800 The Nation. December 28. I992

reasons of power, money and persistent social structures,the dividualistlc, competitive, resistant to connectlon with others vision of the morally superior woman can never overcome and focused on abstract rules and rights. Chodorow’s theory the dominant ethos realityin but exists alongside it as a kind has become a kind of mantra of difference femlnlsm, endless- of permanent wish or hope: If only powerful and powerless ly cited as ]fit explamed phenomena we all agreeare universal, could changeplaces, and themeek inherit theearth! Thus, it though this is farfrom the case. The central question Chodorow is perpetually being rediscovered, dressedin fashionable clothes poses-Why are women the primary caregivers of children?- and presented, despite its antiquity, as a radical new idea. could not even be asked before the advent of modern birth control, andcan be answered without resorting to psychology. ‘Relational’ Women, ‘Autonomous’ Men Historically, women have taken care of children because In the1950s, which we thmk of as the glorydays of tradi- high fertility and lack of other options left most of them no tional sex roles, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu argued in choice. Those rich enough to avoid personally raising their “The NaturalSuperiorlty of Women” that females had it all children often did, as Rousseau observed to his horror. over males in every waythat counted,Including the possession Popularlzers of Chodorow water down and sentimentalize of two X chromosomes that made them stabler, saner and her thesis. They embrace her proposition that traditional healthier than men, with their X and Y. Montagu’s essay, pub- mothering broduces “relational” women and “autonomous” llshed in The Saturday Revlewand later expanded to a book, men but forget her less congenial argument that it also results is witty and high-spirited and, interestingly, anticipates the in sexual inequality, mlsogyny and hostility between mothers current feminist challenge to male-defined categories. (He and daughters,who, like sons, desire Independence but have a notes, for example, that while men are stronger than women In much harder time achievlngit. Unlike her followers,Chodorow the furniture-movingsense, womenare stronger than men when does not romanticize mothering: "Exclusive single parent- faced with extreme physical hardship andtests of endurance; ing is bad for mother and child alike,” she concludes; in a so when we say that men are stronger than women, we are tragic paradox, female “caring,” “intimacy” and “nurtur- equating strengthwith what men have.) But the fundamental ance” do not soften but produce aggressive, Competitive, , thrust ofMontagu’s essay was to confirmtraditional gender hypermasculine men. roles while revising the way we value them: Havingproved to Thus, in her immensely Influential book In u Different his own satisfaction that women could scale the artisticand Vo‘orce,Carol Gilligan uses Chodorow to argue that thesexes intellectual heights, he arguedthat most would (that IS, should) make moral decisions according to separate criteria:women refrain, because women’s true genius was “humanness,” and according to an“ethic of care,” men according to an“ethic of their real mlssion was to “humanize” men before men blew nghts.” Deborah Tannen, In the best-selling You Just Don’t up theworld. And that, he left no doubt,was a full-time job. Understand,clams thatmen and women growup with “differ- Contemporary proponents of “difference feminism" ad- ent cultural backgrounds”-the single-sex worldof children’s vance a variationon thesame argument, without Montagu’s play in which glrls cooperate and boys compete-“so talk be- puckish humor. Instead of his whimsical chromosomal expla- tween men and women is cross-cultural communication.” nation, we get the psychoanalytic one proposed by Nancy While these two wrlters differ in important ways-Tannen, Chodorow inThe Reproductlon ofMothering: Daughters de- writing at a more popular level, 1s by far the clearer thinker fine themselves by relating to their mothers,the primary love and the one moreinterested in analyzlng actual human inter- object of all chddren, and are therefore empathic, relationship- actions in daily life-they share important liabilities, too. Both oriented, nonhierarchical and Interested in forging consensus; largely confine thelr observationsto thewhite middle class- sons must separate from their mothers, and are therefore in-especially Gilligan, much of whose elaborate theory of gen- December 28, I992 The Nation. 801 dered ethics rests on interviews with a handful of Harvard- Radcliffe undergraduates-and seem unaware that this limits the applicability of their data. (Inher new book, Meetrng at the Crossroads, Gilligan makes a similar mistake. Her whole theory of “loss of relationship” as the centraltrauma of fe- male adolescence rests on interviews withstudents at oneposh single-sex private school.) Both massage their findingsto fit their theories: Gilligan’s male and female responses are ac- tually quite similar to each other,as experimenters have sub- sequently shownby removing the namesand asking subjects to try to sort thetest answers by gender; Tannen is quick to attribute blatant rudeness or sexism in male speech to anxi- ety, helplessness, fear of loss of face-anything, indeed, but rudeness and sexism. Both look only at what peoplesay, not what theydo. For Tannen this isn’ta decislve objection because verbal behavior is her SubJect, although It limits the applica- bility of her findings to other areasof behavior; forGilligan, it is a major obstacle, unless you believe, as she apparently does, that the way people say they would resolve farfetched hypothetical dilemmas-Should a poor man steal drugs to OURconcept of family IS, well, broader than Dan save his dying wife?-tells us how they reason in real-life sit- uations or, more important, what they do. Quayle’s. That’s why we save you 20% on calls to But the biggest problem with Chodorovlan accounts of gen- everyone on our network, be they frmds, relatlves der difference is that they credit the differences they find to essential, universal features of male and female psychosexual or slmply kmdred splrlts. development rather than to theeconomic and social positions men and women hold, orto the actualpower differences be- We’re Worklng Assets Long Distance. Every tween individual men and women. In The Mismeasure of Woman,her trenchant andwitty attack on contemporary the- call you make on our fiber-optlc network sends ones of gender differences, Carol Tavrls polnts out thatmuch of what canbe said about women applies aswell to poor peo- money to groups hke Chlldren’s Defense Fund, ple, who also tend to focus more on family and relation- ships and less on work and self-advancement; to behave Planned Parenthood and dozens more... at no cost deferentially with those more socially powerful; and to ap- to you. pear to others more emotional and“intuitive” than ratlonal and logical in their thinking. Then, too, there1s the question Our rates start lower thanAT&T, MCI’” and of whether the difference theorists are measuring anything beyond their own willingness to thinkIn stereotypes. If Cho- Sprmt’. We then add automatic volume dlscounts up dorow 1s right, relational women and autonomousmen should be the norm, but arethey? Or IS it Just thatwomen and men to 15%. Plus 20% off every call to other network use different language, have dlfferent soclal styles, different explanations for similar behavlor? Certamly, it is easy to find members (over 50,000 so far). in one’s own acquaintance, as well as In the world at large, men and women who don’t fit the models. Difference femi- So call our toll-free number and ]om our nists like toattribute ruthlessness, coldnessand hyper- extended famlly. You’ll appreclate the value we rationality in successful women-Margaret Thatcher 1s the standard example-to the fact that men control the networks offer, whde you strengthen the values we share. of power and permit onlywomen like themselves to rise. But I’ve met plenty of loudmouthed, msensltive, aggressivewom- en who are stay-at-home mothersand secretarles and nurses. And I know plenty of sweet, unambltlous men whose main satisfactlons lie in their social, domesticand romantlc lives, although notall of them would admit this to aninqumng so- cial scientist We tend to tell strangers what we thmk will make us sound good. I myself, to my utter amazement, informed a telephone pollster that I exerclsed regularly, a baldfaced 1-800-CITEN lie. How much more dlfflcult to describe truthfully one’s 416 moral and ethlcal values-even if one knew what they were, 802 The Nation. December 28, 1992 which, as Socrates demonstrated at length, almost no onedoes. mentative, writers self-centered. Thus mothers constitute a So why are Gilliganand Tannen the toasts of feminist so- logical constituency for pacifist and antiwar politics, and, by cial science, endlessly citedand discussed in academia and out extension, a “caring” domestic agenda. of it too, in gender-sensitivity sessions in the business world But what is the jobof mothering? Ruddick defines “mater- and even, following the Anita Hill testimony, in Congress? nal practice’‘ as meeting three demands: preservation, growth The success of the difference theorists proves yet again that and social acceptability. She acknowledges the enormously social science is one partscience and nine parts social. They varying manifestations of these demands, but shedoesn’t in- say what people wantto hear: Women really are different,in corporate into her theory the qualifications,limits and con- just the ways we always thought. Women embrace Gilligan tradictions shenotes-perhaps because to do so would reveal and Tannen because they offer flattering accounts of traits these demands asso flexible as to be practically empty terms. for which they have historically been castigated. Men like Almost anything mothersdo can beexplained under one them because, while they urge understanding andrespect for of these rubrics, however cruel, dangerous, unfair or author- “female” values and behaviors, they also let men off the hook: itarian-the genital mutilation of African and Arabgirls, the Men have power, wealth and control of social resources be- foot-binding of pre-revolutionary Chinese ones, thesacrifice cause women don’t really want them. Thepernicious tenden- of some children to increase the resources availabIe for others, cies of difference feminism are perfectly illustrated by the as in thekilling or malnourishing of female infants in India Sears sex discrimination case, in which Rosalind Rosenberg, and Chinatoday. I had a Caribbean student whose mother a professor ofwomen’s history at Barnard College, testified beat all her children whenever one got into trouble,to teach for Sears that female employees held lower-paying salaried them “responsibility” for one another. In this country, too, jobs while men worked selling big-ticketitems on commission many mothers who commit whatis legally child abuse think because women preferred Iow-risk, noncompetitive positions they are merely disciplining their kids the in good old-fashioned that did not interfere with family responsibilities [see Jon way. As long as the practices are culturally acceptable (and Wiener, “Women’s History on Trial,” September 7, 19851. sometimes even when they’re not), the mothers who perform Sears won its case. them thinkof themselves as good parents.But if all these be- Mother Best haviors count as mothering,how can motheringhave a nec- Knows essary connection with anysingle belief about anything, let While Chodorow’sanalysis of psychosexual development alone how to stopwar, or any single set of personality traits, is the point of departure for mostof the difference feminists, let alone nonviolent ones? it is possible to construct a theory of gendered ethics on other grounds. The most interesting attempt I’ve seen is by the pac- We should not be surprised that motherhooddoes not pro- ifist philosopher Sara Ruddick. Although not widely known duce uniformbeliefs and behaviors: It is, after all, not a job; outside academic circles, her Maternal Thinkrngmakes an ar- it has no standard of admission, and almost nobody gets gument that canbe found in such mainstream sources as the fired. Motherhood is open to any woman who can have a baby columns of Anna Quindlen in The New York Times. For Rud- or adopt one. Not to be a mother is a decision; becoming one dick it is not psychosexual development that produces the requires merely that a woman accede, perhaps only for as long Gilliganian virtues but intimateinvolvement in child-raising. as it takesto get pregnant, to thousands of years ofcumulative the hands-on work of mothering. Men too can be mothers social pressure. After that, she’s on her own; she can soothe if they do the work that women do. (And women can be Fa- her child’s nightmares or let him cry in the dark.Nothing in- thers-a word Ruddick uses, complete with arrogant capital trinsic to child-raising wlll tellher what is the better choice for letter, for distant, uninvolved authority-figure parents.) Moth- her child (each has beenthe favored practice at different times). ers are patient, peace-loving, attentive to emotional context Although Ruddick starts offby looking closely at maternal and so on, because those are the qualitiesyou need to get the practice, when that practice contradictsher own ideas about job done, the way accountants are precise, lawyers are argu- good motheringit is filed away as an exception, a distortion ~mposedby Fathers or poverty or some otheroutside force. But if you add upall theexceptions, you are left with a rather small group of people-women like Ruddick herself, enlight- ened, up-to-date, educated, upper-middle-class liberals. MOVING? PROBLEMS? And not even all of them. Consider the issue of physical Send both your old mad- If you have any problems punishment. Ruddick argues that experience teaches mothers lng label and your new or questlons regarding that violence is useless; it only creates anger, deceptionand address to. your subscription, please more violence. Negotiation is the mother’s way of resolving write to us at the address disputes and encouraging good behavlor. As Ann Crittenden THE NATION to the left, or call. put it in The Nation during the Gulf War: “One learns, in P.O. Box 10763 1 (800)333-8536 theory and in practice, to tryto resolve conflict in ways that Des Moines IA 50340-0763 Monday to Frlday do not involve the sheer imposition of wllI or brute force. One 700arnto1100pmCST learns that violence just doesn’t work.” Crittenden would have Please allow 4-6 weeks for Saturday & Sunday processmg. 800arnto600pmCST a hard time explaining all those moms In uniform who par- ticipated in Desert Storm-but then she’d have a hard time December 28, 1992 The Nation. 803

explaining all those mothers screaming at their kids in the supermarket, too. As it happens, I agree that violence is a bad way to teach, and I made a decision never, no matter what, to spank my daughter. Butmothers who do not hit their children, or pennit their husbands to do so, are as rare as conscientious objec- tors in wartime. According to onesurvey, 78 percent approve of an occasional “good, hard spanking”-because they think violence is an effective way of teaching, because theythink that hitting children isn’t really violence,because they just lose it. 111 and Hlllary Cllnton both Tlkkun, Even Parenting found that more than a thirdof its readers hit mad 8s do many of the most serious Intellectual, their kids. And Parenting’s audience is not only farmore ed- B cultural and polttlcal flgumr In tho U.S. You ucated, affluent and liberal than the general population; don’t have to be Jewlsh to mad America’s it consists entirely of people who care what experts think most excMng and controverolal magazine. about child development-and contemporary experts revile Become part of the nkkun communlty, corporal punishment. Interestingly, the moms who hit tended get lnvlted to our reception at the Cllnton I to be the ones who fretted the most about raising their children lnnauguratfon, our Tikkun salons, our 1 well. Mothers who think too much? national conferences, our welcome to NY Like old-style socialists finding “proletarianvirtue” in the bash in January (how can we invite you If you working class, Ruddick claims to be describing what mothers buy It on the newsstands-we don’t have your do, but all too often sheis really prescribing what she thinks address!) So, please get the following: they ought to do. “When their children flourish, almost all mothers have a sense of well-being.’’ Hasn’t she ever heard of postpartum depression? Of mothers who belittle their chil- A one-year subscription to Tlkkun dren’s accomplishments and resent their growing ~ndepend- 1 Magarlne (holiday gift cost: $25) ence? “What mother wouldn’t want the power to keep her “Tlkkun is the mostexciting new journal children healthy . . . to create hospitals, schools, jobs, day to enter the intellectual and political care, and work schedules that serve her maternal work?” No- arena in many years. For Jew and non- tice how neatly the modest and common-sensical wish for a Jew alike, Tikkun is a cause for healthy childballoons into the hotly contestedand by no means celebration.”-Utne Reader Buy gift subs friends. and one for yourself also. universal wish of mothers for day careand flextime. Notice for .. too how Ruddick moves from a mother’sdesire for social in- stitutions that serve her children to an assumption that thls The Tlkkun Anthology desire translates into wanting comparable care for allchildren. 2 The best essays, poetry and fiction from But mothers feature prominently in local struggles against writers including: Allen Ginsberg, busing, mergers of rich and poor schools, and the placement Marge Piercy, Cornel West, Todd Gitiln, of group homes for foster kids, boarder babies and the re- David Mamet, Carol Gililgan, Christopher tarded in their neighborhoods. Why? The truereason may be Lasch, Arthur Waskow, Annie Dillard, Larry property values and racism, but whatthese mothers often say Kramer, Judith Piaskow, Michael Walzer, is that they are simply protecting their kids. Ruddlck seems Michael Lerner, JimSleeper, Linda to think MaternalThinking leads naturally to Sweden; in the Gordon,and many more. 550 pages, $42. United States it is equally likely to lead to Fortress Suburbia. As Gilligan does with all women, Ruddick scrutinizes mothers for whatshe expects to find, and sure enough, there it The Soclallsm of FooI6: Anti= is. But why look to mothers for her peaceful constituency in 3Semltfmm on the Left by Michael the first place? Whynot health professionals, who spend their Lerner. Ideal for college students or lives saving lives? Or historians, who know how rarely war those needing to confront anti- yields a benefit remotely commensurate with its cost in human Semltism in the Black community or In misery? Or I don’t know, gardeners, blamelessly tending their liberal social change movements. innocent flowers? You can read almost any kind of work as Send your check or Visa/Mastefcafd info affirming life and conferring wisdom. Ruddlck chooses moth- immediately to: Tikkun, 51 00 Leona St., ering because she’s already decided that women possess the Oakland, CA 94619. We will send a card to Gilliganian virtues and she wants a non-essentialist peg to your gift recipients immediately informing hang them on, so that men can acquire them too.A disinter- them of your thoughtful present. If you buy ested observer scouring the world for labor that encourages five gift subs,you can buy the Tikkun humane values would never pickchild-raising: It’s too quirky, Anthology for only $101 too embedded in repellent cultural norms, too hot. 804 The Nation. December 28. 1992

Man’s,-World, Woman’sPlace rious as those of men (if not more so), Gilligan and others Despite its intellectual flabbiness, difference feminism is let women feel that nothingneeds to changeexcept the social deeply appealing to many women. Why? For one thing, it valuation accorded to what they are already doing. It’s a ra- seems to explain some important phenomena: that women- tionale for the status quo,which is why men likeit, and a burst and this is a cross-cultural truth-commit very little criminal of grateful applause, which is why women like it. Men keep violence compared with men; that women fill the ranksof the the power, but since power is bad, so much the worse for them. so-called caring professions; that women are much less likely Another rather curious appeal of difference feminism that is than men to abandon their children. Difference feminists want it offers a way for women to define themselves as independent to give women credit for these good behaviors by raising them of men. In a culture thatsees women almost entirelyin rela- from thelevel of instinct or passivity-the Camille Paglia vi- tion tomen, thisis no small achievement. Sex, for example- sion of femininity-to the level of moral choice and principled the enormousamount of female energy, moneyand time spent decision. Who canblame women for embracing theories that on beauty and fashion and romance, on attracting men and tell them the sacrifices they make on behalf of domesticity keeping them, on placating male power, strategizing ways and children are legitimate, moral, even noble? By stressing around it or making itserve one’s own ends-plays a minute the mentality of nurturance-the ethic of caring, maternal role in these theories. You would never guess from Gilligan or thinking-Gilligan and Ruddick challenge the ancient dlvi- Ruddick that men, individually and collectively, are signal ben- sion of humanity into rationalmales and irratlonal females. eficiaries of female nurturance, much less that this goes far to They offer women a way to argue that theirviews haveequal explain why society encourages nurturance in women. No, it status with those of men and toresist the customary marginali- is alwayschildren whom women are described as fostering and zation of their voices in public debate. Doubtless many women sacrificing for, or the community, or even other women-not have felt emboldened by Gilliganian accounts of moral dif- husbands or lovers. It’s as thoughwives cook dinneronly for ference: Speaking in a different voice is, after all, abig step their kids, leaving the husband to raid the fridge on his own. up from silence. And no doubt many women, quietlysmoldering at their mate’s The vision of women as sharers and carers is tempting in refusal to share domesticlabor, persuade themselves that they another way too. Despite much media blather about the pop- are serving only their children, or their own preferences, rath- ularity of the victim position, most people want to believe they er than confront the inequality of their marriage. act out offree will and choice. The uncomfortable truth that The peaceful mother and the “relational” woman are a women have alltoo little of either is a difficulthurdle for fem- kinder, gentler, Ieftish versionof “family values,” and both are inists. Acknowledging the systematic oppression of women modern versions of the separate-spheresideology of the Victo- seems to deprive them of existential freedom, to turn them rians. In the nineteenth century, too, some women tried to into puppets,slaves and Stepford wives. Denyit, andyou can’t turn theideology of sexual difference on its head and expand make change. By arguing that the traditional qualities, tasks the moralclaims of motherhood toinclude the public realm. and ways of life of women are as important,valuable and se- Middle-class women became social reformers, abolitionists, temperance advocates, settlement workers and even took pay- ing jobs in the “helpingprofessions”-nursing, social work, teaching-which were perceived as extensions of women’s do- mestic role although practiced mostly by single women.These women did not deny that their sex fitted them forthe home, but argued that domesticlty did not endat the front doorof the house, or confine itself to dusting (or telling the housemaid to dust). Even the vote could be cast as an extension of domes- ticity: Women, being more moral than men,would purify the government of vice and corruption,end war and make Amer- ica safe for family life.(The persistence of this metaphor came home tome this summer when I attended a Women’s Action Coalition demonstration during the Democratic National Convention. There-along with WAC’S funny and ferocious all-in-black drum corps and contingents of hip downtown artists brandishing BarbaraKruger posters and shouting slo- gans like “We’re Women! We’re Angry! We’re Not Going Shopping!”-was a trio of street performers with housecoats and kerchiefs over black catsuits and spiky hair, pushing brooms: Women will clean up government!) Accepting the separate-spheres ideology had obvious ad- vantages in an era when women were formally barred from hgher education, political powerand many jobs. But Its defects are equally obvious. It defined all women by a single stand- ard, and onedeveloped by a sexist society. It offered women December 28,1992 The Nation. 805

no way to enter professions that could not be defined as ex- tensions of domestic roles-you could be a math teacher but not a mathematician, a secretary but nota seacaptain-and no way to challenge any but the grossest abuses of male privi- lege. Difference feminists are makinga similar bid for power News,Opinion,History,Analysls,ArticlesfromtheInshand on behalf of women today, and are caught insimilar contra- Britlshleft. Also,InterviewswithPoliticalParties:SlnnFem. dictions. Once again, women are defined by their family roles. SDLP, DUP, and with Paramilitaries: the IRA, UFF, UVF. Child-raising is seen as women’s glory and joy and opportu- INLA , as well as Community Activ~sts. nity for self-transcendence, while Dad naps on the couch. "Essential reading A viral conrrlbution to the debalc on Women who do not fit thestereotype are castigated as unfem- Ireland. I hrghly recommend 11 ” inine-nurses nurture, doctors do not-and domestic labor - Bernadette Devlin McAliskey (Civil Rights Activist) is romanticized and sold to women as a badge of moral worth. ”Thoughtprovoking and serious A must read for anyone What’s Love Got to Do With It? concerned about Northern Ireland I’ For all the many current explanations ofperceived moral -Kevin Keuey (authorof Thehngest War:Northern Ireland difference between the sexes, one hears remarkably little about orndrhelRA) the material basis of the family. Yet the motherhood and With progressive change occurringin womanhood being valorizedcannot be considered apart from Eastern Europe, El Salvador, South A . questions of power, privilege and money. There is a reason and Israel, the protracted conflict in I a non-earning woman can proudly call herself a “wife and Northern Ireland not only mother” anda non-earning man is just unemployed: The tra- deserves our attention ditional female role, with its attendant real or imagined char- - it demands it. acter traits, implies a male income. Middle-class women go to great lengthsto separate themselves from this uncomfortable fact. One oftenhears women defend theirdecision to stay at home by heaping scornon paid employment-caricatured as making widgets or pushing papers or dressing for success- and thedifference feminists also like to distinguish between altruistic, poorly paid female Jobs and thenasty, profitable ones performed by men. In Prrsoners of Men’s Dreams,Su- zanne Gordon comes close to blaming the modest status of jobs like nursing and flight attending onwomen’s entry into jobs like medicineand piloting, as if before the women’s move- GET PERSONAL WITH ment those female-dominated occupations were respected and rewarded. (Nurses should be gladthe field no longer has a huge captive labor pool of women: The nursing shortage hasled The Nation. to dramatic improvements in pay, benefits and responsibility. Now nurses earn a man-sized income, and men are applying to nursing school In record numbers-exactly what Gordon wants.) It’s all very well for some women to condemn others for “acting like men”-i.e., being ambitious, assertive, inter- ested in money and power. But if their husbands did not “act like men,” where would they be? Jean Bethke Elshtain, who strenuously resists the notionof gendered ethics, nevertheless bemoans the loss to their communities when women leave vol- unteering and informal mutual supportnetworks for paid em- Double your fun for halfprice the with a PERSONALS ployment. But money must come fromsomewhere; if women ad in the Classified sectionof America’s oldest news- leave to men the job of earning the family income (an option weekly. Get two ads forthe price of one, four forthe fewer and fewer families can afford), they will be economi- price of two and so on.

~ cally dependent on their husbands, a situation that, besides carrying obvious risks in an age of frequent divorce, weak- Nation readers arePERSONALS readers, interested ens their bargaining posltlon in the family and insures that In polltics, literature, film, theater, dance,music and men will largely control majordecisions affecting family life. art. And they’re waiting to read your ad. So to meet Dlfference theorists would llke to separate out the aspects new people and make new music, Just accept our of trad~tlonalwomanhood that they approve of and speak lnvltation to GET PERSONAL WITH THE NATION1 only of those. But the partsthey like (caring, nurturing,Inti- See the coupon in the Classified section. macy) are inseparable from the partsthey don’t like (economic a06 The Nation. 1992 December 28, dependence and thesubordination of women within the fam- for girls; the equalizationof college-attendance rates of males ily). The difference theorists tryto get around this by positing and females; the explosion of employment for married women a world that contains two cultures-a female world of love and and motherseven of small children; the crossing of workplace ritual anda male world of getting and spending and killing- gender lines by both females and males; the culturalpressure which mysteriously share a single planet. That vision is ex- on men to be warm and nurturant fathers, doto at least some pressed neatly in a recent pop-psychology title, Men Are From housework, to choose mates whoare their equals in educa- Mors, Women AreFrorn Wnus. It would be truer tosay men tion and income potential. are from Illinois and women are from Indiana-different, It’s fashionable these days to talk about the backlash against sure, but not in ways that have much ethical consequence. equality feminism-I talk this way myself when I’m feeling blue-but equality feminism has scored amazing successes. It has transformed women’s expectations in everyarea of their lives. However, ithas not yet transformed society to meet those women in the work force expectations. The workplace still dlscriminates. On the home won’t be more honest, kind, front few men practice egalitarianism, although many preach it; single mothers-and given the high divorce rate, every egalitarian, empathic. mother is potentially a single mother-lead incredibly diffi- cult lives. In this social context, dlfference fernlnisrn is essentially a The truthis, there is only one culture, and it shapes each way for women both to take advantage of equality feminism’s sex in distinct but mutually dependentways in order repro-to success and to accommodate themselves to its limlts. It ap- duce itself. To the extent that the stereotypes are true, women peals to particular kinds of women-those in the “helping have the “relational”domestic qualities because men have the professions” or the home, for example, rather thanthose who “autonomous” qualities required to survive and prosper in want to be bomberpilots or neurosurgeons or electricians. At modern capitalism. Sheneeds a wage earner (even if she has the popular level, it encourages women who feeldisadvantaged a job, thanks tojob discrimination), and he needs someone or demeaned by equality todirect their anger againstwomen to mind his children, hold his hand andhave his emotions for who have benefited from it by th~nkingof them as gender trai- him. This-not, as Gordon imagines, some treason to her tors andof themselves as suffering fortheu virtue-thus the sex-explains why women who move into male sectors act very hostility of nurses toward female doctors, and of stay-at-home much like men: If they didn’t, they’d find themselves back mothers toward employed mothers. home in a jiffy. The same necesslties and pressures affect them For its academic proponents, the appeal lies elsewhere: as affect the men who hold those jobs. Because we are in a Difference feminism is a way to carve out a safe spacein the transition period, in which many women were ralsed with face of acadern~a’sresistance to female advancement. It works modest expectations and muchemphasis on the need to please much like multiculturalism, making an end-run around a static others, social scientists who look forit can findtraces of em- and discriminatory employment structure by creatlng an pathy, caring and so on in somewomen who have risen in the intellectual niche that can be filled only by members of the world of work and power, but when they tell us that women discnminated-against group. And like other formsof multi- doctors will transform American medicine, or women exec- culturalism, it looks everywhere for its explanatory force- utives will transform the corporate world, they are looking biology, psychology, sociology, cultural identity-except backward, not forward. If women really do enter the work economics. The difference feminists cannot say that the dif- force on equal termswith men-if they become 50 percent ferences betweenmen and women are the result ofthelr relative of all lawyers, politicians, car dealers and prison guards- economic positionsbecause to say that would be to move the they may be less sexist(although theexample of Russian doc- whole discussionout of the realm of psychologyand feel-good tors, a majorityof them female, is not inspiring to thosewho cultural pride and into therealm of a tough political strug- know about thebrutal gynecological customs prevailing inthe gle over the distributionof resources and Justice andmoney. former U.S.S.R.). And they may bring with them a distinct Although it is couched in the language of praise, difference set of manners,a separate socialstyle. But they won’t be, in feminism is demeaning to women. It asks that women be ad- some general way, more honest, kind, egalitarian, empathic mitted into public life and public discourse not because they or indifferent to profit.To argue otherwiseis to believe that have a right to be there but becausethey will improve them. the reasonfactory owners bust unions, doctors refuseMedi- Even if this were true, and not the wishful thinking I believe caid patients and New York City school custodians don’t mop it to be, why should thetask of moral and soclal transforma- the floors is because they are men. tion be laid on women’s doorstep and not on everyone’s- The ultimate paradox of difference feminismis that it has or, for that matter, on men’s, by the you-broke-it-you-fix-it come to the fore aat moment when the lives of the sexes are principle. Peace,the environment, a more humaneworkplace, becoming less dlstinct than they ever have been in theWest. economic justice, social support for children-these are issues Look at thedecline of single-sex education (researchers may that affect us all and areeveryone’s responslbility. By prom- tout thebenefits of all-female schoolsand colleges, but girls ising to assume that responsibility, difference feminists lay the overwhelmingly choose coeducation); the growth of female groundwork for excluding women again, as soon as it be- athletics; the virtual abolition of virginity as a requirement comes clear that the promise cannot be kept. December 28, 1992 The Nation. 807

No one asks that otheroppressed groups win thelr freedom by claiming to be extra-good. Andno otheroppressed group thinks it must make such a claim in order to be accommodated BULK ORDERS- fully and across the board by society. For blacks and other - racial minorities, it is enough to want to earna living, exercise one's talents, get a fair hearing inthe public forum. Onlyfor women is simple justice an insufficient argument. It is as PUBLIC SCHOOLS though women don't really believe they are entitled to full citizenship unless they can make a special claim to virtue. Why isn't being human enough? In the end,I didn't sign that peace petition, although I was sorry to disappointa woman 1 liked, and althoughI am very much for peace. I decided to wait for a petition that welcomed my signature asa person, an American,a citizen implicated, against my will, In war and the war economy. I still think I did the right thing. right the did LETTER FROM TOKYO Children of The Bubble KARL TARO GREENFELD n March 1, 1990,22-year-old Geraldine Fitzpatrick disembarked from Pakistan International Airlines Flight 760 and stepped into abubble. After clear- ing Narita Airport customs, Jerry, as her fnends called0 her, hauled her backpack filled with old blue jeans, a This special issueon education takes onthe determined and few T-shirts, sneakers and one pressed and carefully folded well-financed assault by conservatives onAmerica's system of public education. The plan to create privatized "McSchools," black cocktail dress onto an orangelimousine bus boundfor run for profit and turning out docile workers for big corpora- downtown Tokyo. She was to meet her friend Nina, the only tions, poses a serious challenge to our beleaguered, under- person she knew in Japan, ata bar for gavin (foreigners) in funded public school system. Trenchant articles by Deborah the Roppongl night-life section of the clty. W. Meier, Jonathan Kozol, Margaret Sptllane and Bruce Sha- Jerry had been in the air for twenty-seven hours since her pro, Nancy Folbre, Susan Millar Willlams and IraEmery Rodd €250 one-way flight from London's Heathrow Airport to expose the myths of privatlzation and show how parents can take back and enrich their schools.In addition, ahost of edu- Narita via Amsterdam, Karachi and Manila had departed cators and activists, includingIshmael Reed, Adrienne Rich, England on a cloudy, frigid spring day. She had f 100 in her Angela Y. Davis and Herbert Kohl, nominate the most impor- belt pouch. She had come to Tokyo because she had heard, tant books on education of the past fifty years. from Nina, that this was wherethe money was-more money Bulk Order Price List than she made slaving as an asslstant account manager for 1 - 9 copies .O $3.00 each a London marketing firm, and certainly more money than she 10 - 49 copies, $1.50 each could make on thedole. And life in Surrey, the London sub- 50 - 99 copies $ . $1.25 each urb where she lived, had become dull: a routme of Friday- 100 - or morecopies 1.2 $1.00 each night drinking sprees, Saturday hangovers and Sunday fights ""-9 ORDER FORMK ------with her boyfrlend, a junkle who smoked about a gram of heroin a week off bits of tinfoil that Jerrykept findlng all over Send me copies of The Natlon Speclal Issue The Battle for I the flat they shared. Public Schools. I enclose $ payment In full I The bar was quiet on that Thursday night. Jerry, a waif- like figure wlth stringy, dirty-blond halr and a pert nose, dressed ina red T-shut and leans, leaned her backpack against ADDRESS I the dingy wall. CITY STATE ZIP I

PHONE I Karl Taro Greenfeld, The Nation's Tokyo correspondent, IS Mad check or money order to Nabon Bulk Sales, 72 Flfth Avenue, Nw York. NY 10011 I currently working on a book about Japanese youth culture (US currenq only N Y State residents please add appropnate sales tax ) All sales flnal to be published by HarperColkns. ."""""""IJ