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February 22, 2005
oh those ridiculous feminists
Don Herzog: February 22, 2005
Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women of 1792 produced all kinds of raucous and ribald jeers about the author's lack of femininity. A political woman? A woman who thought the status of women was a political problem, not a fact of nature or divinely mandated role? Hmph. As a young conservative, William Cobbett didn't think women should even read political pamphlets. But write them? Shudder: it would desex the lovely ladies. So in 1795 Cobbett pounced on the "well known fact" — it was false — that writing and publishing the Vindication turned poor Wollstonecraft's hair white. So too in 1833 the cranky Tory journal Fraser's asked, rhetorically, if women should write on politics.
Certainly not. We feel a determined dislike of women who wander into these unfeminine paths; they should immediately hoist a mustache — and, to do them justice, they in general do exhibit no inconsiderable specimen of the hair-lip.
Director's cut: we move to today's conservative columnists, assembled at townhall. Conservatives, we know, cling to tradition. Even, as it turns out, this unseemly one. Those poor, misguided feminists, with their vain and frantic revolt against nature: our columnists are happy to tut-tut them, all for the complacent pleasure of their readers.
In the runup to the election, Michelle Malkin assailed the "Sally the Sniveler[s]," the "Hysterical Women for Kerry," the "ultrafeminists who purport to speak for all women" who she thought were "an embarrassment to a nation at war." Feminism is a contemptible luxury in a world wrestling with "Islamofascists."
In battleground states, the Kerry campaign has dispatched such incoherent nervous Nellies to scare the pantyhose off of young women and moms.
In those same weeks, Kathleen Parker explained why "security moms" were gravitating toward Bush. Who knew she had such expertise in sociobiology?
When it comes to hearth and home, females vote their ovaries. It's the nest, dummy.
On a deep-brain level, mothers want what they dare not utter aloud in a culture that pretends the sexes are the same. They want a man to protect them and their helpless offspring. And the alpha male will be recognized on a level too primitive to be measured by polls.
Oh, by the way, those tremors you feel? Don't be alarmed. It's just the hate-Daddy Metro crowd stamping their feet in protest. This is not an unexpected response when long-buried truths bubble to the surface. It will pass. Sometimes they just need a nap. Meanwhile, as campaign strategists try to paint a portrait of their candidate as the more intellectual, or the smarter strategist, or the morally superior man, or the more nuanced or the tougher hombre, they're missing the point. The real issue in the post-9/11 dating game is simple: Which is the truer man?
In the same vein, Suzanne Fields, scholar of feminine instinct, explained why Kerry's flip-flops drove women away:
Women find no greater sign of weakness in a man than a propensity to constantly change his mind. Single or married, a woman wants to know exactly where the man in her life stands. Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, admonished the senator for weakness on women's issues and told him that he must apply more "muscle" to the pursuit of the women's vote. Women instinctively mistrust nuancy boys.
Poor effeminate Kerry, waffling and fickle instead of decisive. I don't know if Fields meant her "nuancy boys" to play on "nancy boys," an old phrase for gay men, but, um, when's the last time you ran into "nuancy" as an adjective? (It's not in the Oxford English Dictionary.)
Meanwhile, Phyllis Schlafly just weighed in on the debacle surrounding Lawrence Summers's comments. "The feminists, who have no sense of humor," and their "orgy of indignation" were exemplary of the intransigent stupidity of today's campuses.
The cornerstone of the political correctness that dominates campus culture is radical feminism. And the first commandment of feminism is: I am woman; thou shalt not tolerate strange gods who assert that women have capabilities or often choose roles that are different from those of men.
Fraser's would have grinned at her conclusion:
When will American men learn how to stand up to the nagging by the intolerant, uncivil feminists whose sport is to humiliate men? Men should stop treating feminists like ladies, and instead treat them like the men they say they want to be.
But first prize for a sniggering condensation of this distinguished tradition's treasured wisdom has to go to Mike S. Adams for crafting a "new disability claim" to an imagined human resources director. (Yeah, the man does a better job playing these venerable riffs than the four women do. Go figure.) After being shocked by the "angry ranting" of a woman coworker complaining about her husband's erectile dysfunction, the poor guy developed erectile dysfunction of his own. Why? Because he kept encountering those grim and strident feminists.
In 2001, I was jogging on campus when I passed a group of feminists marching in the annual “Take back the night” event. After they marched by me shaking their fists and screaming, I first experienced ED. They certainly took back that night!
In 2002, I read the book “Intimate Reading” by a feminist professor in the English Department at UNC-Wilmington. After I read the section about her losing her virginity at age 16 (told in graphic detail), I again experienced ED.
In 2003 (February), when campus feminists marched around stage chanting “vagina, vagina” during the Vagina Monologues, I experienced ED again. Even worse, it happened to me on Valentine’s Day (which, by the way, is not known as VD)!
The columnists' advice is clear. Troubled by feminists? Just laugh them off. Mannish or hysterical, castrating bitches or not, all these feminists are at war with nature, idiotically trying to change what can't and shouldn't be changed. So no, don't rouse yourself from your dogmatic slumbers, your nap is just fine, nothing to worry about, roll over, go back to sleep, feminism is absurd.
The columnists sound just like Cobbett and Fraser's jeering at the likes of Wollstonecraft. But here's the irony — and it's a regular irony of conservative homage to tradition in a world where society has been changing very fast for centuries now. The last laugh goes to Wollstonecraft. Women (and not just the poor women who always have) work outside the home. Women vote. Women run for office. Women get elected.
Women even write on politics — and a conservative website is happy to post their work. And we don't sneer that their hair greys or that they sprout mustaches. So yesterday's feminists, scorned by yesterday's conservatives as crazy radicals vainly struggling against natural necessity, created the very traditions that today's conservatives take for granted and even prize.
Today's feminists may be creating tomorrow's traditions; they may not. (And I am the last person to imagine that history has a direction or a one-way ratchet labeled "progressivism" against which "reactionaries" rail in vain.) Their ideas may be good; they may not. (And let's remember that feminism, like any other ism, is a big tent.) But brushing them aside as struggling against natural necessity, biology or providence, is hopeless. That time-honored conservative tactic is just a way of sweeping real political issues under the rug, pretending we don't have a choice — when we do. Lots more can be said in particular cases: should the legislature or courts be involved? or should the issue be left to private struggles over culture? And so on. But I reject the view that as a general matter today's gender norms are natural or necessary.
PS: Far be it from me to try to control the gleeful chaos of the comments on this or any other thread. But astute readers will notice that they are not beginning to respond to anything I've said here if they inveigh against what they take to be feminist lunacies.
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Comments
Posted by: Jay Cline
So, Don, the right-wing's "girly-boys" anti-feminist slurs have delved into the realm of the left-wing's "macho-man" feminist slurs. Whaddasaying?
Are we talking mudfight here?
Posted by: Jay Cline | Feb 22, 2005 7:48:05 AM
Posted by: Don Herzog
No, nothing about or against macho men. In part, I'm saying: the idea that particular gender roles are assigned by nature or necessity or providence, that they are simply beyond our control, and so that we can simply mock those challenging them as ridiculous and confused, is 1/a long-running theme among conservatives and 2/makes no sense.
Posted by: Don Herzog | Feb 22, 2005 7:52:07 AM
Posted by: oliver
I find the word "conservative" especially confusing in discussions of feminity and feminism. I hope the women's studies people have more helpful categories.
Posted by: oliver | Feb 22, 2005 8:40:11 AM
Posted by: oliver
"astute readers will notice that they are not beginning to respond to anything I've said here if they inveigh against what they take to be feminist lunacies"
The direct response would be for men to start citing feminist women who give them hard-ons. Maybe a list of the ten sexiest feminists?
Posted by: oliver | Feb 22, 2005 8:50:21 AM
Posted by: Ken
Don:
I certainly agree that the right is mockable in thinking that biology determines appropriate gender roles in some direct and inflexible way. But I think those on the left who think that gender is socially constructed "all the way down'" and that culture sort of floats free of biology are mockable too. Though the latter is a more intellectually respectable view, actually backed by things that have the form and function of actual arguments, it still seems to me to deploy concepts of biology and culture that can't be sustained.
Think about it this way. There is a massive three way gender-coordination problem faced by ours and any other species that reproduces sexually. Males have to coordinate with males, so that they don't kill each other over the potential female partners. Females have to coordinate with females so that they don't kill each other over potential male partners. And females and males have to coordinate with each other so that mate selection strategies and preferences are convergent rather than divergent.
Now there are probably lots of solutions to the set of coordination problems that sexually reproducing species face -- some of them not very "demanding" to use not quite the right word. But in creatures like us who have the capacity for a complex form of social life, who remain immature and dependent on parental support for a comparatively long period of our lives, any "solution" to the three way coordination problem is going to be massively tied up all sorts of social structures, including facts about the distinctive structure of a characteristically human life.
Now even if you think, as I do, that both our capacity for a distinctive form of social life and the generlat sturcture of an individual human life are the result of some sort of evolutionary process -- the dynamics of group selection is my guess -- It certainly doesn't follow that evolution gave us a single solution to the three way coordination problem in the sense of giving a fixed set of gender roles once and for all. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if it turned out that evolution supplied us with cognitive and emotive make ups that in some way more or less tightly constrain the possible solutions to the three way coordination problems. How tightly? I can't say. But obviously not so tightly that gender roles are fixed across cultures. I suspect that not so loosely that just anything goes. But that's just a hunch in need of evidence and argument.
I'm not making any normative claim here. I don't know what would ground a priori any particular normative claim about what the distribution of gender roles should be. The only question for me is what, if anything, constrains the solutions to the gender coordination problems that really possible social/cultural orders can "settle" into. Probably history and culture and the distribution of power are sources of constraint. But probably too evolutionarily instilled facts about the very general structure of male/female cognitive/affective make ups play some constraining role too.
Can we easily separate out the contributions of the various constraining factors? Certainly not easily.
Is it worth trying? Do we have the methods, the data? I think it is worth trying. The problem with the methods and the data is that we have only one actual walk through the space of possibilities and we don't know in advance how large that space really is.
If we could freely employ the method of hypothesis testing and generation, we would be a lot better off. To some extent we clearly can -- since history provides us some alternative arrangements and social experimentation -- especially in an age like ours -- happens relatively constantly.
But it's hard to separate out the contributions of the different possible constraining sources when you can't manipulate the data and experiment to your heart's content.
Not to say it's hopeless. Just hard.
Anyway. that may not be directly a challenge to anything you said. And like I said, I agree that the right, at least the sort of rightist you have in mind here, is thoroughly mockable. Plus I respect many arguments from the left about the social construction of gender as really having the form and function of arguments rather than merely serving as ideological blinders -- though there are exceptions. But I'd really like to see this debate about biology vs culture vs politics vs history, etc entirely rephrased. I think it's beginning to be reconfigured. But it's not there yet.
Posted by: Ken | Feb 22, 2005 9:03:26 AM
Posted by: S. Weasel
Hm. That men two centuries ago absurdly mischaracterized the relationship between gender and intellect doesn't make any investigation of the topic absurd. It's becoming increasingly obvious that gender isn't a purely social construct, however fashionable that belief has been for the last few decades.
Ah, what was the name of that poor creature who offed himself last year? Born with indeterminate gender, so they made him a girl (or was it the other way around?) and declared it an entire success...when, in fact, he had spent his short lifetime miserably unhappy with his assigned gender, hormone injections notwithstanding? He was held up for years as proof that gender is malleable.
I've just realized Googling "hermaphrodite" and "suicide" from my work machine isn't a career-advancing behavior.
Posted by: S. Weasel | Feb 22, 2005 9:28:49 AM
Posted by: Paul Shields
Thoughtful post, Ken.
Posted by: Paul Shields | Feb 22, 2005 9:31:51 AM
Posted by: Don Herzog
Ken, thanks for your thoughtful comment. I'm not myself a big fan of this kind of speculative evolutionary argument -- it smacks too much of just-so stories told after the fact. But I'm not even a little bit opposed to empirical work on the biology of sex and what it means. Nor do I think, in your language, that gender is a social construction all the way down. I think in all these matters "nature or nurture" is a terrible framing. The two always interact, and we can deploy the economist's conception of elasticity to ask, say, how much variation you can get from a given natural endowment as you vary social setting across various parameters.
Still, the best evidence that something is possible is that it's actual. And it's impossible to spend any time with historical and anthropological sources without realizing that there's lots and lots of flexibility about gender.
And all this, as you acknowledge, is miles away from a public debate in which a columnist can suggest that the millions of moms who voted for Kerry are mysteriously out of touch with their ovaries.
Posted by: Don Herzog | Feb 22, 2005 9:36:34 AM
Posted by: Dallas
No, nothing about or against macho men. In part, I'm saying: the idea that particular gender roles are assigned by nature or necessity or providence, that they are simply beyond our control, and so that we can simply mock those challenging them as ridiculous and confused, is 1/a long-running theme among conservatives and 2/makes no sense.
Hypertrophic extension of an adaptive behavior to the point it becomes maladaptive tends toward extinction. Let's face reality here: incipient humans develop in a woman's womb. Not much we can do about that.
Posted by: Dallas | Feb 22, 2005 10:31:10 AM
Posted by: Don Herzog
Um, Dallas, which were the feminists proposing that men become pregnant? Let's distinguish sex and gender. Sex is a biological category: it's all about XX and XY, hormones, genitals, lactation, and so on. Gender is a social, cultural, political category: it's all about what's properly feminine and properly masculine.
Posted by: Don Herzog | Feb 22, 2005 10:33:15 AM
Posted by: Don
Don:
I take your point about elasticity. Same thing applies for example in heritability studies. You have to distinguish between l point heritabilities and heritability functions. Point heritabilites are heritabilities defined over a fixed range of environments. Add a new environment to the mix and point heritabilites can change. What you really want to know are not point heritabilites but heritability functions or maybe even the slope of the heritability function.
About "just so" stories and evolutionary speculation. I'm a fan, but only if the distinction between having a novel style of hypothesis generator and a style of hypothesis tester is kept always in mind. Generating evolutionary hypotheses is sort of easy. Testing and confirming them is a REALLY HARD THING. That I admit. Not even completely sure it can be done. The main problem with evolutionary arguments is that people sometimes mistake the hypothesis generator for the hypothesis tester.
One might think that since testing evolutionary hypotheses is so hard, and generating them is so easy, maybe we should just set evolutionary hypotheses to one side as more trouble than the are theoretically worth. I think that would be a mistake. What really is required is just a little modesty -- well, maybe a lot of modesty about what you can and can't actually establish at this stage in the history of inquiry.
Of course, culture formation doesn't wait on scientific progress. So we will go on trying to construct our culture, even if science can't tell us anything terribly deep about the possibility space we are walking through. But that happens all the time. Unfortunately, lot's of time when science "catches up" it turns out that we are attempting to construct a culture on a foundation that wouldn't support it. But we're pretty good at living in castles built on sand for generations.
But I'm beginning to digress.
Plus I gotta get back to work.
Posted by: Don | Feb 22, 2005 10:34:11 AM
Posted by: ken
oops that name should have ben "Ken" in the last post. Don't know how that happened.
Sorry
Posted by: ken | Feb 22, 2005 10:35:22 AM
Posted by: Tad Brennan
"Let's face reality here: if you clog up your arteries, doctors can't go in and clean them out for you."
"Let's face reality here: you've only got one heart: it's not like they can be transplanted."
It's funny how reality manages to make way for technology in so many areas where men's health is concerned. But where women's health is concerned--especially their reproductive health--we get lines like:
"Let's face reality here: incipient humans develop in a woman's womb. Not much we can do about that."
Completely false about the future, not so accurate about the present, either.
If we wanted to create artificial gestation environments, this would not be the greatest technological challenge that medicine has faced. We can do lots about it. Whether we would want to or not is a different question.
And face it--we have already done lots about it. Incipient humans need many fewer months in the womb now than they did a hundred years ago, exactly because there has been a concerted effort to study the technology needed to make preemies viable.
What's the record for earliest gestational age of a surviving preemie now? Any reason it cannot be brought down to zero, i.e. move straight from in vitro fertilization to a viable infant? I rather doubt it. It's not reality that constrains us here. It's just attitudes. Maybe this future isn't one we want to move towards. But then we should say that out loud: what prevents us from going there is our values, as perhaps should be the case with cloning. That would be an honest thing to say. But to say that reality prevents it is simply false.
Posted by: Tad Brennan | Feb 22, 2005 10:47:57 AM
Posted by: john t
"Astute readers"etc. Nothing like heading them off at the pass I always say. I would think a counter argument would presuppose citations as to why conservatives feel as they do as Don H cited quotes to support his position. Oh well I guess I better retreat and save what's left of my astuteness lest I stand accused of,among other things,that mysterious affliction known as "whataboutery". A couple of thoughts before I disappear into the dark night of illiberal ignorance;it is a unhappy fact that more women are staying home to raise children,having found that the workplace is not the land of milk and honey,equally unhappy is the weaker commitment to abortion that organized feminists believe in. So to that as women mature ,get married,face household expenses,and of course face the IRS inthe face of these expenses,the female voting patterns tend to change.That is more women vote Republican,now that's really unhappy! Ialso note with interest that one of Don H's colleague's specializes in something called female epistemology[paging Larry Summers]. This wouldn't be a singular indication of innate and unchanging gender difference would it? I did like the line about"society has been changing very fast for centuries". Yes for centuries now change has been a veritable blur,but only for centuries.
Posted by: john t | Feb 22, 2005 10:54:06 AM
Posted by: Dallas
Um, Don, if you presume that social, cultural, and political categories are something entirely apart from biology, you don't fully appreciate our evolutionary heritage.
I never cease to be amazed that adamant opponents of intelligent design in the biological arena are generally the ones who turn to it most fervently in the cultural arena.
Posted by: Dallas | Feb 22, 2005 11:39:39 AM
Posted by: Lynn Sanders
David Reimer, aka John/Joan, who died a suicide last year, was indeed for years held up as proof that gender was malleable. But it is incorrect to link his case to any kind of feminist celebration of this claim of malleability.
Instead, cases like David Reimer's are regarded as tragedies attributable not to feminism but to misguided scientific authority. Dr. John Money, a sex researcher who operated on David Reimer and advocated raising him as a girl, worked for years at Johns Hopkins, where he was a very powerful shaper of medical practice. (He was also the model for Dr. Peter Luce, a character in Jeffrey Eugenides novel Middlesex.) For years, Money believed that true men needed good equipment: that without sufficient material for a big-enough penis, it was better to make intersexed infants into girls. Money had strong ideas about gender, and he shaped many lives, but I don't think very many people would embrace him as a feminist. As far as I know, he never promoted his ideas about intersexuality as feminist.
A good way to get a quick lesson in some feminist thinking on intersexuality, and on the work of John Money too, is by reading Suzanne Kessler's 1990 Signs article "The medical construction of gender: case management of intersexed infants." (available from JSTOR). Kessler also wrote a book called "Lessons from the Intersexed" http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0813525306/102-2407325-5120964
On some other issues raised by Don's post: How peculiar that Michelle Malkin sees feminism as a dispensible luxury in a war with Islamofascists. I thought feminism had become a tool in that war. That is, our President is never so feminist as when he's talking about what's good about our political culture compared to theirs. Ours is good because we give rights to women.
On that note - feminism in the context of our international adventures - I'm currently fascinated by this administration's efforts to combat sex trafficking. http://www.state.gov/g/tip/
These efforts are a product of a political coalition between conservatives and radical feminists, indeed the very folks who brought you Take Back the Night marches. And ED! I'm not sure whether or not clicking that State Department link will cause ED - I don't have the equipment to make that kind of assessment - but I did notice that the State Department will want to set a cookie.
Posted by: Lynn Sanders | Feb 22, 2005 11:49:12 AM
Posted by: oliver
See! Who can deny that that post from Professor Sanders was hot! A woman like that I bet could mother a whole mess of children too, especially with the affordable child care and enlightened partner she's liable to demand. I'm starting to sweat just thinking about it.
Posted by: oliver | Feb 22, 2005 12:06:22 PM
Posted by: pedro
Ken: very thoughtful comments indeed. I particularly like this piece of personal disclosure:
About "just so" stories and evolutionary speculation. I'm a fan, but only if the distinction between having a novel style of hypothesis generator and a style of hypothesis tester is kept always in mind. Generating evolutionary hypotheses is sort of easy. Testing and confirming them is a REALLY HARD THING. That I admit. Not even completely sure it can be done. The main problem with evolutionary arguments is that people sometimes mistake the hypothesis generator for the hypothesis tester.
But the rest is very good as well. Evolutionary speculation may be fun, but the problem is that laymen think it is every bit as scientific as anything else out there, and so it can be effectively used in the pursuit of disgusting political agendas. Now, we may all feel quite free to believe that culture, economics and socialization are not entirely to blame for group inequalities in the world, but it is entirely a different thing to use those intuitions as the scientific basis for policy-making. On the other hand, what Don Herzog has called elasticity is so well documented, that it does indeed deserve a place in our considerations of policy. Knowledge that elasticity is a fact of life, it is harder to implement exclusionary policy. As a rule of thumb: when biologically essentialist arguments about group differences make it to the public sphere, they are invariably tied to political agendas (like in the nazi case).
Dalls says: "Um, Don, if you presume that social, cultural, and political categories are something entirely apart from biology, you don't fully appreciate our evolutionary heritage."
I say, if you presume that social, cultural, and political phenomena are somehow reducible to evolutionary heritage, then you understand neither culture nor evolution, and you probably have a meager understanding of History.
Posted by: pedro | Feb 22, 2005 12:29:19 PM
Posted by: Don Herzog
I'm with pedro. I'd add that it's an open and interesting question in what ways or to what extent gender is linked to sex. I introduced the distinction only to head off the complaint that it is indeed ludicrous to think men could give birth: that's about sex, not gender.
Posted by: Don Herzog | Feb 22, 2005 1:03:24 PM
Posted by: Nick
pedro,
If I read Dallas correctly, she wasn't saying that, "social, cultural, and political phenomena are somehow reducible to evolutionary heritage", just that they are connected and saying they aren't is rather stupid (my words). Nature/nuture isn't a one or the other affair and neither side should argue that it is.
- Nick
Posted by: Nick | Feb 22, 2005 1:21:14 PM
Posted by: Dallas
Thanks, Nick; you saved me the trouble.
Posted by: Dallas | Feb 22, 2005 1:47:27 PM
Posted by: abab man
"Sniggering condensation" is not limited to conservative authors. What is your point? Is it that in general todays gender norms are neither natural or necessary? why just come out and say it? I'm not sure that pointing out extreme views on the conservative side and belittling them to show how reasonable your view is does much to advance any discussion. Or maybe you do not believe these views are extreme, but they seem extreme to me. At the risk of not being astute, could not several excerpts from radical feminists be posted, then belittled, with the conclusion that you reject the thought that todays gender norms are either unnatural or unnecessary. Not really much of a way to have a discussion. Maybe there is some truth to be found in both positions. Reasonable people can disagree, but concensus and understanding must be reached from some common ground. I thought that was the point of this blog, not more rehashes of how stupid the other side is. Why not accord some respect to the other side?
I do not have much difficulty accepting your premis in general. On the other hand there things my wife can do much better than I ever could. Taking care of our kids seems to be one of them. Is this natural or just the result of my wife being a better person than I am? Hard for me to say. Necessary? Well someone has to do it. If she had decided to work could I have raised our kids as her husband? Probably yes, I have most of the domestic skills down. Would I have done it? I doubt it, I have neither the selflessness or dedication.
Before our first child was born I wanted my wife to go back to work after the delivery. She wisely refused and became our children's primary caregiver. I won't bore you with "Times were tough" stories because for us it has been worth twice as much struggle. To the extent that her choice and contributions to society as the caregiver of our children is minimized by femninists and traditional conservatives I am angered. The femninists seem to say she should have been doing something more meaningful, and the conservatives she is unfit to do anything else.
So in my world neither you or "conservatives" seem to have a clue. To the extent my wife has been a stay at home mom we fall under cultural gender norms. Division of houlhold chores, who controls the money, maybe we fall outside. Our lives are certainly as much different from our parents as they are the same concerning gender roles. You seem to be fighting a 300 year old battle when a lot of the rest of us have moved on.
Posted by: abab man | Feb 22, 2005 2:03:18 PM
Posted by: Steve Horwitz
Abab man wrote:
To the extent that her choice and contributions to society as the caregiver of our children is minimized by femninists and traditional conservatives I am angered. The femninists seem to say she should have been doing something more meaningful, and the conservatives she is unfit to do anything else.
So in my world neither you or "conservatives" seem to have a clue. To the extent my wife has been a stay at home mom we fall under cultural gender norms. Division of houlhold chores, who controls the money, maybe we fall outside. Our lives are certainly as much different from our parents as they are the same concerning gender roles.
I'm not so convinced that this point "scores" against Don's original post, but in any case, I think it's right on target and describes my own situation pretty well. In fact, my wife has moved back into the labor force on a part-time basis in the last several years as my youngest has gone full-time to school. Neither one of us regret the choices we made *together* and our kids are better off for it. At the same time, we both realize that the ability to make that choice was something of a luxury of both my income and living in a cheap rural community. And I, certainly, am grateful for the ways in which her being at home have enhanced my career.
For me, the real advance of the last 100 years comes in the ability for these things to be done increasingly as a matter of choice, thus forcing us to recognize that there's nothing "natural" here. The life I've led as the working spouse of a stay-at-home mom is different from that of a man in the same situation 100 years ago in that this was a collaborative choice and that my gratitude for its impact on me and my career derives precisely from the recognition that it cannot and should not be taken for granted. And I would say the same thing about marriages in which the gender roles are reversed. That very flexibility and the choices it offers are the advance.
Posted by: Steve Horwitz | Feb 22, 2005 2:29:21 PM
Posted by: duus
very good point, Tad Brennan.
Posted by: duus | Feb 22, 2005 2:35:41 PM
Posted by: Tad Brennan
abab man's post is I think a very important one for the editors of this blog to hear.
It illustrates how the success of the left's agenda has gone hand in hand with increasing resistance to--indeed hatred of--the left's rhetoric and explicit ideology. The left is winning like never before, and losing like never before.
What abab man describes does, just as he claims, sound like a marriage that is "as much different from our parents as they are the same concerning gender roles." From the perspective of Mary Wollstonecraft, or Emma Pankhurst, or even Eleanor Roosevelt, huge, breathtaking progress has been made. Social and economic forces have made possible new lives for women that older generations would have envied. They have also made possible new and better lives for men who are open to the possibilities. Many of the old molds are broken.
But just when the left should be celebrating the broken molds, it finds itself despised instead, for sounding like a broken record. The very beneficiaries of its efforts are just *sick* of hearing it. Someone like abab man is not finding kindred spirits among the left-ish writers of this blog; he is finding nags and scolds.
So too, young women today are the beneficiaries of many of feminism's struggles. And yet very few of them are willing to identify themselves as feminists. The most notable feminist-bashers have themselves been the direct beneficiaries of its efforts, as e.g. the Ph.D.-earning Schlafly demonstrates. (And as the original post demonstrates: bashing feminism used to be an all-male job, and it is an index of progress that it is now a gender-neutral career option).
This dynamic--of winning most of the substantive battles while losing the war for affiliation and membership--is probably more important for the left, and more worthy of the site's attention (in light of its stated aims), than are the details of any particular issue (feminism, atheism, missionary zeal) it could address.
Shorter version: abab man is someone whom the classical liberal feminist tradition should count as a story of huge, incremental progress and success. So why is he so fed up with feminism? Left2right should ponder.
Posted by: Tad Brennan | Feb 22, 2005 2:36:18 PM