Doing Difference

page six

Where we go from here

Gender— including the archetype of the heroic, self-sacrificing mother— is part of the story we depend on to stabilize the dominant social order and get the work of economic and social reproduction done. And even though what we “know to be true” about men and women seems to be time-tested and unalterable, our story of gender is changing all the time. It changed in the late 1700s, when mothers were first called upon to instill the values of democracy in the sons of the new American republic. It changed in 1920, when the U.S. finally ratified women’s right to vote. It changed when women filled men’s stateside jobs during WWII, and again in 1963, when Betty Freidan deconstructed the feminine mystique. Our common understanding of gender changed in 1964, when Title VII of the Civil Rights Act established women’s right to equal opportunities in the workplace, and once again when sexual harassment at work was recognized as a form of illegal discrimination. It changed in 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, and again when mothers of young children flooded into the paid labor force in the 1980s. It changed when Title IX was enacted, requiring educational institutions to provide fair funding for women’s athletic programs, and in 1993 when the FMLA was passed, guaranteeing 12 weeks of unpaid leave to both mothers and fathers when a baby is born or adopted. It changed in 2004, when Pfc. Lyndie England was photographed abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Graib. And these are just some of the major benchmarks; men and women are constantly working and reworking the story of gender in their public and private lives.

But no matter how far we stretch the boundaries of gender in our movement toward equality, there will always be stakeholders— generally those who stand to lose power in the disruption of the status quo— who want to push progress back into the box. As Cynthia Fuchs Epstein writes, “The powerful are gatekeepers of ideas, the owners of intellectual production, who can affix and have affixed values to distinctions between men and women.” And they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future in an attempt to protect their special interests. Barnett and Rivers also note that gender has seductive pull for average men and women who feel confused or conflicted about living in a half-changed society: “The gender-difference narrative is also appealing because it helps us rationalize the sex segregation and discrimination that still pervade our society. It’s easier to believe that men and women have different capacities and inclinations because of their genes, their hormones, their motivation, or their brain structures than it is to take the necessary step to expand the opportunities of both sexes.”

If we have any hope of one day living in a society where the work of caregiving is fully acknowledged and accommodated as an essential public good, where mothers have full rights and liberties to ensure their equal authority in both the public and private domain— indeed, if we want to reverse the arbitrary bifurcation of human activity into male and female spheres— we will be forced to confront the vigorous relationship between our stories of gender and the social, economic and political marginalization of women who mother. And it may take both strength and courage, but we will have to let go of the cherished idea that women are— in all the ways that really count— the “better” sex, that caregiving comes more easily to women than it does to men, that childbearing imbues women with a special sensitivities that make them more suited to the care and protection of children— not just their own children, but all children (and, by extension, the entire world). We'll have to abandon the notion that women— due to some inborn quality— are the more emotional, relational and empathic half of the human species, and that men are boorish slobs who can’t be trusted with housework and child-rearing. We must do this, even if it means forgoing the accolades we receive for doing “the most important job in the world.” We need to cultivate a heightened awareness of the intrinsic connection between gender and social power. And we can never lose sight of the fact that challenging gender is a profound act of political resistance.

We'll have to do more than slap a few revisions on our old tale of gender, or to sketch a scenario where the problem of difference is resolved by encouraging women to act more “manly” and men to be more “womanly.” As Barbara Risman suggests, we may have already taken that strategy as far as it can go. We must come up with a brand new story— an original and innovative work that will expand the meaning of motherhood and fatherhood, love and duty, work and play, and put the sex differences that do exist into a realistic perspective. We will probably end up with a more open-ended story than the one we have now, one where the rules of social conduct are more fluid but less transparent. The story that overwrites the mythology of gender will be one that frees individual men and women to form a sense of their own true natures from the inside-out rather than the outside-in.

And that will make a new world -- and a new kind of motherhood -- possible.

mmo : September 2004

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books discussed in this essay

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