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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Feminism of every stripe has failed. It's time for a gender equality movement.
Jan 26, 2000 | The 20th century was, among other things, the century of feminism. For the first time in history, the belief that women have the same rights and the same worth as men is not the vision of a few radicals but the cultural norm in a large proportion of human societies. In the United States, women's gains have been, in many ways, especially impressive. Yet one would have to be a wild-eyed optimist to insist that the gender revolution of the past 30 years has been an unqualified success.
"Modern feminism, until recently at least," the late social critic Christopher Lasch wrote in a 1993 essay, "promised not to intensify sexual warfare but to bring about a new era of sexual peace in which women and men could meet each other as equals, not as antagonists." If so, its promise certainly hasn't been fulfilled. Harmony between the sexes sometimes seems more elusive than ever. It's no accident that a perennial bestseller of the 1990s was a book built on the concept that the problems between men and women stem from forgetting that we're creatures from different planets.
The unabashedly retro vision of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" -- men want achievement and sex, women want relationships and love -- is echoed on a more sophisticated level by neo-traditionalists like Danielle Crittenden ("What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us") and Wendy Shalit ("A Return to Modesty"), who deplore the damage allegedly wrought by the feminist denial of woman's essential difference from man and propose a slightly updated version of old-fashioned femininity as the path to happiness.
But what about those of us who believe that the answer is to go forward, not back? Can feminism serve as our compass, and what goals should it be pursuing? The law no longer gives men any privileges; and, while it would be Pollyannaish to assert that women have reached fully equal economic opportunities, many leading feminists -- such as University of Southern California law professor Susan Estrich -- now acknowledge that disparities in pay and advancement are due at least partly to women's personal choices about work and family.
As for sexist cultural attitudes, they form a tangled web in which women are as implicated as men (even liberated and successful women often regard status and high earnings as essential criteria of eligibility in a mate), and male and female disadvantages are profoundly intertwined.
Women, for the most part, are the ones who must wrestle with hard decisions about balancing work and family. Men, for the most part, have much less freedom to cut down on work and spend more time with their children, or trade a lucrative job for a more fulfilling one. Today, the social pressure on fathers to bring home a paycheck is considerably stronger than the pressure on mothers to be at home.
Faced with these complexities, feminism has moved further and further away from its dictionary definition of belief in the equality of the sexes. Some feminists now declare that equality is a failure if women must give up their "female values" to succeed -- in the process reverting to hoary cliches of male and female. Others, loath to concede victory, cling to exaggerated or mythical claims of oppression. They insist, for instance, that women earn 75 cents to a man's dollar "for the same work," even though economists like Harvard University's Claudia Goldin readily concede that the pay gap largely reflects differences in occupation, skills and length of employment, and even though the gap is rapidly closing for young women whose career patterns are more similar to men's. They also claim that schools are rife with anti-female bias (when 55 percent of college degrees are obtained by women).
No less disturbingly, the women's movement often seems to have shifted from the goal of equal treatment to one of female advantage. After helping bring down the maternal custody presumption in an effort to eliminate discriminatory laws in the 1970s, the movement turned increasingly hostile to fathers' claims of equality (at least when those claims conflict with those of mothers and not those of employers stingy with paternity leave).
Some feminists, such as psychologist Phyllis Chesler, openly invoke the biological superiority of mother love; others, including the National Organization for Women, dress up the defense of maternal privilege in equal-rights garb, portraying women as victims of bias. A 1999 NOW resolution asserts that "women lose custody of their children despite being good mothers [and] despite a lack of involvement of the father with the children" -- which may occasionally happen but is hardly a pattern. Invariably, too, feminists flock to the side of women in high-profile custody fights, particularly when the demands of the mother's career become an issue. They seem to forget that a father, regardless of the demands of his job, would lose his children in a custody battle simply as a matter of course.
The tension between individual rights and sisterhood has probably always existed in feminism. But back when women's civil rights were routinely denied or severely abridged, the question, "Do we champion fairness or do we champion women?" may have seemed moot. Today, it would be hard to argue with a straight face that taking the woman's side is always synonymous with being for justice.
In 30 years, for example, rape victims' advocacy has gone from challenging clearly unjust practices (such as jury instructions that "unchaste character" could be held against the woman's credibility) to insisting that if a woman feels raped, the man must be guilty. As legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon put it, "Feminism is built on believing women's accounts of sexual use and abuse by men."
