The Mothers Movement Online
www.mothersmovement.org

< back

THE MOTHERHOOD PAPERS

Doing Difference

Motherhood, gender and the stories we live by

By Judith Stadtman Tucker

September 2004

At a conference on social science and work-life journalism I attended in May 2004, writers and researchers alike were bemoaning the new trend in national press coverage of work-life issues— which, everyone agreed, hit a low point in October 2003, when Lisa Belkin’s “Opt Out Revolution” story made the cover of the New York Times magazine. (“Why don’t women run the world?,” Belkin pondered. “Perhaps it’s because they don’t want to.”) Why, we grumbled, were reputedly liberal media outlets wasting ink on news and commentary about the modest number of affluent professional women who swap their careers for stay-at-home motherhood, when more in-depth analysis of the myriad social and economic factors that disadvantage average working families is desperately needed?

The problem, several well-respected journalists suggested, has to do with what’s considered newsworthy. Old news doesn't sell, and -- thanks to a powerful resurgence of hide-bound attitudes about appropriate social roles for men and women -- the real news about work and family in America (which, just for the record, includes a profusion of cultural and structural barriers to women’s advancement in the workplace, the continuing economic inequality of men and women, the intersection of race, class and gender discrimination in just about any social problem you can name, and ongoing resistance to enacting adequate family policy in the U.S.) looks a lot like old news.

The deepest disenchantment with the stagnation of women’s progress wells up from the hearts of those of us who expected to be much farther along by now. Between 1960 and 1980, women made unprecedented gains in equality of rights and liberties as part of the larger human rights movement that flourished in that era. Supporters of the women’s movement believed that when enough feminist parents raised their sons and daughters to move fearlessly into the egalitarian future, our progress would simply roll over from generation to generation until all that irksome ideology about men’s and women’s relative capacities for love and work was ground to dust. In this new, improved, woman-friendly world, families would thrive because both mothers and fathers would devote equal time and effort to paid work and caregiving, and everyone would be happier, healthier and more financially secure. The patriarchy might not be ripped out by its roots, but at least men would be doing their full share of child care and housework, and women could enjoy the independence and self-respect that come from having a paycheck of one’s own.

Needless to say, things didn’t exactly work out that way. Today, educated, middle-class couples— who, by some popular accounts, are reduced to constant squabbling over who works harder and how often they have sex— are as likely to feel weighed down by the legacy of feminism as they are to feel emancipated by it. Even when they have supportive partners, many mothers still struggle with combining work and family— on both an emotional and practical level— and wonder if maybe the good old-fashioned arrangement of breadwinner dad/homemaker mom might not have certain advantages for all concerned. Far too often, the conviction that “women can do anything” works against the interests of low-income women who lack access to the education, resources and employment opportunities that lifted the oppression of their well-to-do sisters. Little wonder the mainstream media is having a love affair with the latest crop of smart, politically-savvy women who proclaim that feminism is no longer necessary, inexcusably elitist, hopelessly arcane, dangerously misguided, or just plain dead.

Over the last decade or so, a different group of writers and researchers— from both pro- and anti-feminist camps— have attempted to tease out why, as we settle into the twenty-first century, the high-speed train to liberty, equality and justice for women is stalled on the tracks at the half-way point. Conflicting theories abound, but most can be distilled down to a fairly simple formula: Is it nature or culture that continues to divide the fortunes of men and women— or some of each, and if so, how much and what should we do about it?

Ozzie and Harriet Are Dead?

In 1996, psychologist Rosalind Barnett and media critic Caryl Rivers co-authored a book based on their study of 300 dual-earner couples in the greater Boston area. She Works/He Works was one of several books published in the mid- to late-1990s— including Susan Chira’s A Mothers Place (1998) and Joan K. Peters When Mothers Work (1997)— offering much-needed reassurance to employed mothers that they would not destroy their health, marriages or children’s happiness by working outside the home. When Barnett and Rivers evaluated the mental and physical health of the dual-earner couples in their study, they found that both men and women in couples who shared responsibility for the economic and domestic aspects of family life were doing very well— even when there were young children in the home. Even though Barnett and Rivers acknowledged that “from outmoded ideas about men, women, work and family flow flawed and ineffective corporate dictates and public policy debates that see balancing work and family as merely a ‘woman’s issue’ and peripheral to the workplace,” they predicted with great confidence that sometime in the early 21st century, the overwhelming advantages of the dual-earner/dual nurturer arrangement would overshadow traditional gender-bound ideas about work and family, and “collaborative” coupling would become the predominant ideological model for married couples with or without children. In a chapter cheerfully titled “Working Moms are Good Moms,” the authors cite a U.S. Census report projecting that “nearly 80% of mothers with infants and young children will be employed by 2005.”

In retrospect, Barnett and Rivers’ gleeful refrain of “Ozzie and Harriet Are Dead” was overly optimistic. While it’s true that over 70 percent of mothers with children 18 and under are employed in the U.S. (and most are employed full time), a minority of married mothers— just 26 percent— earn nearly as much or more than their spouses (compared to 54 percent of married women without children under 18). In 2002, three out of four married mothers with at least one child under six earned less than $25,000 a year, whereas 73 percent of fathers in similar households earned over $25,000 a year (49 percent of such fathers earned more than $40,000 a year, compared to 11 percent of mothers). Current data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that with the exception of one two-year interval, the labor force participation of mothers with infants hovered between 53 and 55 percent in the 12-year period between 1990 and 2002; since 1998, the number of mothers with infants in the paid labor force has been trending downward (workforce participation of mothers with children under six also declined from a high of 65.3 percent in 2000 to 64.1 percent in 2002). Another recent Census analysis found that the total number of children age 15 and under with stay-at-home moms increased between 1994 and 2002.

The dimensions of the “Opt Out Revolution” have been dramatically overstated by the media, but obviously something’s afoot— something possibly related to a couple of the less favorable findings of Barnett and Rivers’ She Works/He Works study. When it came to sharing housework in collaborative couples, men and women spent about the same amount of time on household tasks each week, excluding child care. But women were more likely to be responsible for the low-control “female” tasks necessary to keep the family clean and fed (such as cooking, shopping, laundry and cleaning), while men were more likely to spend time in high-control “male” tasks such as yard work, taking out the trash and looking after the car. And according to Barnett and Rivers, nothing mitigates the added stress of being responsible for “female” household tasks: “Whether you have a good marriage or a bad marriage, whether you are a parent or not …doing these tasks takes a toll” on women’s well-being— “and it doesn’t matter whether you have a liberal sex-role ideology or a traditional one.” Barnett and Rivers also found that in the dual-earner couples they studied, mothers with pre-school children spent 25 more hours a week than their husbands doing child care and put in 17 more hours of total work a week— including paid work, housework and child care— than dads.

Why do things on the work and family front seem to be getting worse, not better, for idealistic moms and dads who imagined the whole shared work/shared care model would be road-tested and ready for roll-out by now? In their new book Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children and Our Jobs, Barnett and Rivers suggest the ideological drift of the last twenty years is partly to blame. “Incredibly, traditional ideas that we thought would soon vanish were back in full force. In the past few years, ideas of innate and rigid gender differences that were hurting the families we studied [in She Works/He Works] have reemerged, this time from new and unexpected places, dominating best-seller lists and becoming part of the academic canon. …Surely it was no coincidence that just as women successfully moved into the workforce in enormous numbers and challenged traditional male-female stereotypes, theories emerged that defined men and women on the basis of those very stereotypes.”

Could it simply be, as a number of minds great and small have proposed, that biology is destiny after all? That the survival of the human race has depended on men’s aggressive agency and women’s nurturing passivity since way back when, so that men and women literally evolved— almost like different species— to specialize in separate, interdependent social functions? It would certainly explain why more well-educated, middle-class mothers are bailing out of high-paying professional jobs to become “full-time” moms and the feminist ideal of even-steven co-parenting has been so difficult to sustain for even the most dedicated couples. Maybe we should forget about all that heady equality stuff and just give in.

Or maybe not. Barnett and Rivers and other progressive social scientists insist it’s not human nature, but human culture and the gendered structure of our society that’s holding women back. In Same Difference, Barnett and Rivers reviewed over 1,500 studies to determine if there is indeed a surplus of reliable data to support what most people accept as plain common sense: that men and women think differently, speak differently, behave differently, work differently, have different capacities for competition and caring, and want different things from relationships and family life because that’s just the way men and women are. Barnett and Rivers found that while differences do exist, they are small— it’s not so much that men and women are different, it’s that everybody is different. “Of course there are differences between the sexes— how could it be otherwise?” they write. “But more important is the size of the differences between men and women compared to those among women and among men. In most areas of life, the latter are much larger. If you are a woman named Sarah, you may be very different from Jessica, Elizabeth or Susan in the way you tackle a math problem, deal with subordinates, relate to your spouse, soothe your child, feel about yourself. In fact, you are just as apt to be like Richard, Tom and Seth in these areas as you are to be like other women.” According to Barnett and Rivers, “it’s situation, not sex” that determines men's and women's social behavior.

Sex, gender and the stories we live by

Sex happens. From a purely biological standpoint, sex— whether an organism is genetically male or female— is determined in that magic moment when gametes collide. Sex determines which bodies produce eggs and sperm and (in mammals) which bodies get pregnant, give birth and lactate. In some species, including humans, sex also produces secondary physical characteristics like women’s breasts and men’s facial hair, but there is significant variation in the expression of these traits (which can also be intentionally modified or concealed). So the business of being “male’ or “female” is fairly straightforward; it’s the meaning we attach to it that makes life so damn difficult.

As social psychologist Carol Tavris notes in her 1992 book The Mismeasure of Woman: Why Women Are Not the Better Sex, the Inferior Sex, or the Opposite Sex, throughout human history both individuals and societies have organized their experience and understanding of the world in a series of interlocking stories. There are monolithic stories that explain the creation of the universe, the origin of the species, the properties of the invisible and miraculous, the possibility of transcendence and the nature of good and evil, life and death. There are other overarching stories we rely on to explain why things can be counted on to work a certain way in the context of a specific social order. For example, in 21st century America we have an active collection of stories about democracy, liberals, conservatives, the free market, rights and liberties, the nature of happiness, romantic love, the objectivity of scientific inquiry, equal opportunity, personal responsibility, crime and punishment, checks and balances, the deserving and undeserving poor, the mind, the body, aging, race, class, work, family, adults, children and teenagers, motherhood, fatherhood, and of course, men and women— just to name a few. These stories don’t reflect absolute truths, although more often than not they are represented as if they do.

In world where everything— everything— is subject to change, the stories we construct are like signposts that help us make sense of our daily lives and string our personal and collective experiences into a coherent history. It may be that as time goes on, some of our stories get better— perhaps they become more just, more humane and more inclusive. But they are still only stories, and they can be and are revised in response to pressure. As Tavris writes, “In the space of only a few years, social movements and economic upheavals can alter the stories people are able to envision for themselves. And in our private lives, we frequently change explanatory themes as a result of love, tragedy, everyday experience, political conversion or psychotherapy.” Because stories are so critical to our sense of personal and social equilibrium, the groups and individuals that have the means to reshape their content are exceptionally powerful.

Gender is one of our biggest stories— a thick, invisible film that overlays the biological inevitability of sex. Gender is not so much about who we are as it is about how others expect us to be. But since many people accept at least some aspects of the culture’s dominant gender norms as “the way things are and should be”— and there are heavy social penalties for non-conformists, including shaming, ostracism and persecution— most people, if not all, incorporate some elements of gender into their identity from an early age, or they learn how to perform gender. As sociologist Barbara Risman writes, gender is so deeply encoded in norms of interpersonal conduct in our public and private lives that “doing gender is usually the easiest means to thrive, or even survive, in our society.” Men— so our present day narrative of gender difference informs us— are active and aggressive, hardwired to compete. Their motives are objective and rational, as opposed to those of women, which are often described as subjective and “relational.” Women are more nurturing than men, more emotionally expressive and less emotionally stable. Men attack problems head-on and work to get results; women “feel” their way through problems and work to build and strengthen social connections that serve the common interest. Men are more proficient with hard logic, such as math and science or describing the positions and relationships of objects in space; women are more proficient with the soft logic required for processing language and reading the emotions of others. Men are all about detachment and autonomy, whereas women are all about attachment and dependency. From this baseline understanding of the “nature” of men and women, popular culture elaborates stereotypes of masculinity and femininity by layering on characteristics that range from the sublime to the absurd.

But the most critical thing to recognize about our story of gender— and why developing a sensitivity to the way gender operates is important for mothers who yearn for social change— is that it divides the world very neatly into two different parts and assigns men and women to the segment where their supposedly innate qualities are most in demand. Men get gainful work and public authority; women get family work and private authority. Each hemisphere has its own set of drawbacks and rewards, and one complements the other to constitute a functional whole. There is, of course, just one slight problem— this arrangement gives men, as the leaders of public institutions, disproportionate access to social and economic power. As Cynthia Fuchs Epstein writes in Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender and the Social Order (1988), “Whether consciously or unconsciously, from the time gender distinctions were made …the social order generated a system of thought that legitimated gender inequality. Agents of the social order, people with a stake in it and people persuaded by them, are the insiders.”

In other words, not only does our gender story substantiate a social order that continues to marginalize and subordinate women— especially if they happen to be mothers, or poor, or people of color— it also ensures that women have limited access to the power they need to change the story.

The difference problem

Difference, in and of itself, is neither a good nor bad thing. For example, most people who haven’t suffered a catastrophic brain injury perceive there is a difference between a dog and a daisy. That dogs and daisies are dissimilar is not presumed to make one organism essentially better or worse than the other (although in the scope of Western thinking, the lives of animals do have a higher value than those of plants). Most people are capable of encountering dogs and daisies without automatically making positive or negative comparisons between the two.

There are obvious biological differences between males and females, particularly in their reproductive functions, but gender makes distinctions between men and women in ways that are unrelated to reproductive biology— such as defining the ways men and women normally think, feel and act in a vast array of social situations— and attributes a relative value to each set of characteristics. Unlike dogs and daisies, males and females are considered “opposites,” which means that if gender assigns certain characteristics to females, such as sensitivity and selflessness, males must therefore be callous and self-absorbed or the formula of opposites won't work. As a result, we are primed to accept preposterous gender equations that defy all observations of reality, such as “women only want committed relationships but men just want to get laid.” Consequently, if you are a woman who just wants to get laid, you might feel badly about yourself or you might feel judged by others as being of low moral character, and if you are a guy who only wants commitment, some people might question your judgment or your masculinity and women might mistrust your motives. Alternately, if you are a man who just wants to get laid you might act like you want a committed relationship because you’re convinced that’s what all women desire, which increases the likelihood you will end up hurting someone’s feelings and reduces your chances of hooking up with women who just want to get laid. This is just one small example of how the story of gender makes a mess of our lives.

On the macro level, gender works to persuade us that most men (but few women) possess the unwavering objectivity, decisiveness and inner drive to crush the competition that is so highly valued in the fields of business, finance, law, politics, academia, the military and the criminal underworld; and that most women (but few men) have an exceptional capacity for developing the emotional sensitivity, protective instincts and practical skills required to run a household efficiently and raise happy, healthy children. (By demanding equal opportunities for women in higher education and the professional workplace, second wave feminists managed to make some minor edits to the first half of this difference story— women now enter male dominated fields as a matter of course, but they still earn considerably less than comparable male workers, and are rarely admitted to the highest ranks of their professions.) Both men and women are credited with having some kind of essential ability, but the presumed sex-linked capacities of men are far more highly regarded and rewarded in terms of money, prestige and social power than the presumed sex-linked capacities of women.

Since women are not, in fact, inferior to men or less sensitive to injustice, their consignment to the second-class sex throughout the course of human history was bound to rankle. However, their lack of substantive social power prior to the nineteenth century made it difficult to set the record straight. One of the counter-strategies women developed, possibly to dull the sting of their subordinate status, was cultivating an alternate gender fable that subverts the assumption of male dominance. In Deceptive Distinctions, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein observes that

There has always been a theme in women’s folklore, at least in the Western world, that women know best what men need, that men are often childlike and incompetent, that their egos need bolstering because they are unsure of themselves and easily threatened at work, that they are vulnerable weak reeds depending on a woman’s strength in matters of emotion, and that they cannot cope with children, the home, or other aspects of the female domain. This is expressed visibly through the media most egregiously in articles in women’s magazines and in television comedies, and experientially in the jokes and conversations of women beyond the earshot of men. This cynicism occurs worldwide. I have heard it expressed by colleagues and journalists in the north of Europe, in the Mediterranean countries, in India, and right at home.

The “men are clueless” discourse seems as vigorous today as it did when I was growing up in the 1960s; I have vivid memories of the countless times my mother, with hands on hips, uttered -- in a low voice brimming with contempt -- a single word: “men!” (Taking this concept to new heights, David and Goliath, a Clearwater, Florida based clothing manufacturer, markets a popular line of t-shirts for teen girls bearing such inspirational messages as “boys are dumb— throw rocks at them” and “boys lie— poke them in the eye.” The tongue-in-cheek inscriptions are not meant to be taken seriously, but still you’ve got to wonder— what were they thinking?) Yet despite the unflattering light this kind of talk shines on them, men have done little to contest the assertion that they are— at least in the areas of life and love where women are assumed to have cornered the market— complete idiots. One recent advice-seeker writing to Salon’s Since You Asked column deliberated if and how to tell a platonic friend he was romantically attracted to her. “I’ve tried being more observant to see if I can get any sort of hint via her body language that she may or may not feel the same way, but alas, I’m a stupid male and can’t seem to read any signals one way or the other.” When Barbara Risman interviewed egalitarian couples for a study on how these co-parents shifted their attitudes about gender, she found that a key area of negotiation involved differing standards of cleanliness. As one father confessed, “I know the thing men have the hardest time learning how to do is noticing that there is dust. Men can’t see dust. Men don’t know what dust is.”

Perhaps when all the intricacies of the human genome are finally unraveled, we will discover that the male chromosome does indeed lack the dust perception gene— but until then it might be reasonable to theorize that men can’t see dust because, at least for the last few hundred years and probably for countless centuries beforehand, they’ve rarely been held accountable for it. The matter of dust is, of course, just one small quirk in the ever-unspooling tale of gender difference. The overwhelming issue with women’s blanket endorsement of men’s professed stupidity in the domestic/relational sphere is not just that men are willing to buy into it; it’s that if women cling to the belief that mothers are better adapted— because of biology, psychology, temperament, acculturation or whatever— for child-rearing and the type of housework that invariably goes along with it, they will never have enough confidence in men’s care-giving abilities to relinquish half the load. According to Epstein:

Women participate in the conspiracy; they protect men and help maintain the myths... Women who ‘prop up’ men …also protect their own sphere (the home) from male control by arguing that they have special competence for their domain as men do for theirs— asserting that women manage the home better and are more suited to it. Women prevent men from becoming competent in the home, holding that men’s personality traits are not suitable for women’s roles and that men’s biological makeup impedes their acquisition of the required attributes such as nurturance or home management. Men also conspire to remain incompetent, as women suspect, because such skills are poorly rewarded.

Whether it’s men’s resistance to taking on work that will degrade their status and power or women’s low estimation of men’s domestic ability that buttresses the inequitable distribution of domestic labor in our society, there can be no doubt that— with exception of a tiny minority of stalwart feminist couples— we're still “doing gender,” big time. For example, the results from the first American Time Use Survey (Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 2004) found that 84 percent of women, but only 63 percent of men, devote some time to housework every day. 20 percent of men reported doing cleaning, laundry or yard work— as opposed to 55 percent of women— and 66 percent of women, compared to 35 percent of men, prepared meals and washed dishes as part of their daily routine. We can joke about cave-men and cave-women and complain about the intransigence of human nature, but the bottom line is that the amount and type of unpaid labor women contribute to the economy is hazardous to both their short- and long-term well-being.

There is, in fact, plenty of anecdotal and empirical evidence suggesting that men can learn to do this work just as well as women— when they have to. “Can only women be effective primary nurturers?” asks Risman in Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition (1998). “The answer is crucial, for no one would want to abolish gender structure at the cost of harming our children.” But Risman’s study of 55 “reluctant” single fathers— those who had absolute custody of their young children because they were widowed or deserted by their wives— found these fathers were just as competent at “mothering” as the mothers in her control group. Risman also found that “responsibility for housework is better explained by parental role than by sex. Primary parents, whether men or women (housewives or single parents) reported doing much more housework than other parents.” Because the caretaking behavior of single fathers and fathers in dual-income couples was significantly different from that of the breadwinner fathers she studied, Risman concluded that men are perfectly capable of keeping house and nurturing children— but they are less likely to take on domestic/relational work when a women is available to assume the caregiving role.

Gender, new and improved

When Cathi Hanauer’s anthology, The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood and Marriage, was first released in 2002, it was pitched as a book about the anger that bubbles up when real life fails to match women’s egalitarian expectations. But the essays in Hanauer’s collection tend to reveal more about women’s disappointment and disillusionment with the new complexity feminism forces into the work/marriage/motherhood mix than the searing rage and righteous indignation one would expect to find. When these woman writers get angry, they get angry at their men, not at the system; when they reach an impasse they resort to envious daydreaming about the uncomplicated lives of June Cleaver and Mrs. Brady of The Brady Bunch fame. Although the contributors to The Bitch in the House are not representative of the general population— all the authors are well-educated writers and editors, which is a rarified kind of life and not one most people can depend on to pay the rent— the book’s popularity suggests that the uncomfortable sensation of being squeezed between the ideal world that never was and the ideal world that could be is an experience many women share.

Partly in reaction to reviews of The Bitch in the House which called attention to the singular domestic/relational ineptitude of some of the Bitches love interests, Hanauer’s husband set to work editing a companion anthology from the male point of view. Even the title of Daniel Jones’s book, The Bastard on the Couch: 27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood and Freedom (2004), speaks volumes about our knee-jerk acceptance of gender difference; bitches come right out and “tell the truth,” but bastards must “try really hard to explain their feelings.” The bitches delve into themes of the personal— sex, solitude, work and marriage— while the bastards tackle big universal subjects like love, loss and freedom.

I actually enjoyed the essays in The Bastard on the Couch, although once again they represent the lives and lifestyles of an elite group. On the whole, the Bastards took more chances than the Bitches, which made for more interesting and nuanced storytelling. But what really surprised me was how easily these men made the connection between doing housework and relinquishing both power and the male prerogative of leisure. Calling on metaphors of Man the Hunter and the iconography of Ward Cleaver and his TV Land ilk, the bastards also find their lives painfully constrained by gender edicts about masculinity, femininity and male norms of success. As Fred Leebron writes in “I am Man, Hear Me Bleat”

I always wanted to marry my equal or better— anyone less never occurred to me. This is what our generation of men does; we marry our equals. …But you know what men give up when they venture into this kind of so-called equality? The give up equality. Why? Because there is no such thing as equality. Because men have long recognized that women are their domestic superiors, and perhaps that’s why we’ve so staunchly and unjustly guarded our castles of work. Because women haven’t had the so-called privileges we men have had for the entire history of the world, they are now knocking on the door of the patriarchal fortress, and as the patriarchal door comes crashing down in my particular house, who is there to be squashed underneath it but me.

It may be that acceptance of women as men’s “domestic superiors” sensitizes men to the true scope of what’s at stake if we strive for sexual equality without seriously rethinking gender. On one hand, if women become men’s true equals in the public sphere but retain a larger share of authority in the home, men will end up without a domain of influence— something that men, at least those in the dominant class, are not accustomed to and might predictably feel a little bitter about. On the other hand, if women relinquish their primacy in matters of home and child-rearing to include men as equal caregivers but fail to achieve full social, political and economic equality, they stand to loose even the smattering of social power that flows from their presumed mastery of the domestic/relational realm. In other words, our current gender story ends in a stalemate, and we will need a far more capacious imagination and collective vision to move forward. As Cynthia Fuchs Epstein writes, “It is no surprise that dichotomous models are an ideological weapon and survive challenge because it is easier to propose a dichotomy than to explicate the complexities that make it invalid.” No wonder Ozzie and Harriet have come back to haunt us.

Meanwhile, an emerging sub-culture of “rebel” mamas are reconstituting traditional gender ideology as an act of dissent. In The Paradox of Natural Mothering, sociologist Chris Bobel describes her study of mothers who embrace a particularly intensive style of “full time” motherhood she defines as natural mothering. “While her contemporaries take advantage of daycare, babysitters, and bottle feeding, the natural mother rejects almost everything that facilitates mother-child separation. She believes that consumerism, technology, and detachment from nature are social ills that mothers can and should oppose.” One of Bobel’s interview subjects, who describes herself as a “radical feminist,” explains: “I would like to be considered an equal person in society. But that doesn’t mean I have to do the exact same things that somebody else does. …I feel that someone, and I feel that it should be the woman, needs to be the focus of the family, to keep the family running, organized, on track, spiritually, physically, and emotionally.”

Natural mothers actively resist the deteriorating values of a culture they perceive as excessively materialistic, over commercialized, and un-family-friendly through the practice of mothering, and believe they have the power to transform society by modeling an alternative, child-centric lifestyle. But as Bobel notes, “Natural mothering, rooted in biologically determinist understandings of gender, reifies a male-centered view of role-bound women. The ‘natural’ in natural mothering may liberate mothers from a mechanized and commodified experience of their maternity, but it reproduces a gendered experience that subordinates their needs to those of child and husband.”

“Natural” mamas are just the most recent cohort of feminist-informed women to claim that women have a special prowess when it comes to caring for others and repairing the damage men— and “male” values— have visited upon the world, and to argue that women's “innate” capacities should be elevated in social stature so they are honored as different from but equal to men. As Cynthia Fuchs Epstein writes, “…Two feminist perspectives compete today to explain the sex division in our society. One model— a dichotomous one— holds that there are basic differences between the sexes. Some of its proponents believe the differences are biologically determined; others believe they are products of social conditioning… or lodged in the differing psyches of the sexes by the [processes] that create identity; still others believe the causes of the difference are a mixture of both factors.” Difference or cultural feminists “believe that differences are deeply rooted and result in different approaches to the world, in some cases creating a distinctive ‘culture’ of women. Such differences, they think, benefit society and ought to be recognized and rewarded.”

According to Epstein, a second feminist model of gender contradicts this essentialist perspective, suggesting that “most gender differences are not as deeply rooted or as immutable as has been believed, that they are relatively superficial, and that they are socially constructed (and elaborated in the culture through myths, law and folkways) and kept in place by the way each sex is positioned in the social structure.” Barnett and Rivers, along with Epstein, Tavris and other reputable scholars agree that most definitive research from the fields of sociology, anthropology, physiology and psychology supports the view that the actual differences between the sexes are relatively insignificant and that it’s the social meaning we attach to maleness and femaleness which generates and enforces gender difference.

Nature, nurture or structure?

Of course, there is one irrefutable difference between men and women, which is that women can get pregnant, gestate an embryo, give birth and produce breast milk and men cannot. There are quasi-scientific theories— captured under the heading of “sociobiology”— that propose the gendered division of labor arose from women’s (so far) inalterable biological condition and glorify Early Man as the mighty hunter/warrior who fearlessly set out to stalk his prey and subdue the enemy, while Early Woman, with her baby in a sling and her basket of roots and berries, trailed meekly behind in his protective aura. Over time, so the story goes, natural selection would favor men with aggressive tendencies and women with nurturing instincts because their children would be more likely to survive and reproduce. Then, voila!— after a few hundred million years of human adaptation to a vast array of cultural and environmental conditions, here we are in our historically complex, technologically advanced society, freshly minted versions of Man the Provider and Woman the Nurturer. We will all be infinitely better off, these theorists assert, when we simply accept our true natures— which, on inspection, generally means giving men all the money and leadership and sticking women with the kids and housework.

There are quite a few things that are troubling about this approach, not the least of which, as Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers point out in Same Difference, is that it’s impossible to know how our pre-historic ancestors actually lived or how they functioned in social groups. Most conclusions about the social behavior of early humans are merely conjectures based on observations of primate behavior and/or anthropological studies of modern non-literate cultures. The other problem with sociobiological theories is that they are rarely used to challenge traditional gender ideology. The notion that the social behavior of men and women is predetermined from the get-go is most often used to make sense of women’s subordination. (And, as Barnett and Rivers note, it makes for great news copy: “The idea that we humans were hardwired back in the Stone Age has become a favorite theme in the media despite its speculative nature.”) Sociobiology casts the saga of human evolution as a dramatic tableau— just imagine all those virile hunter-types strutting around in their loin-cloths!— but it shouldn’t be confused with real science. As Epstein remarks, “Gender distinctions are basic to the social order in all societies. Like age, gender orders society and is ordered by it.”

Sociobiologists, like social philosophers, churchmen and others before them, argue that the division of labor by sex is a biological rather than a social response. But if this were so, sex-role assignments would not have to be coercive. Social groups do not depend on instincts or physiology to enforce social arrangements because they cannot reliably do so. Societies make it the responsibility of people from certain groups to be responsible for such social needs as food, shelter, child care and leadership. Nowhere do they depend on “nature” to get the jobs done.

There appears to be ample evidence that gender is not a fixed expression of biological sex, but rather a set of rules that govern the status and mobility of individuals based on the sex role assigned to them. And if human nature plays any part in the expression of gender difference, it’s probably a minor one: as Robert W. Connell writes in Gender and Power (1987), “It is possible that there are some innate differences in temperament or ability between men and women. The hypothesis cannot be ruled out entirely. But if they exist, we can say quite confidently that they are not the basis of major social institutions."

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

< back

Judith Stadtman Tucker is the editor and publisher of the Mothers Movement Online.

Works cited:

Same Difference:
How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children and Our Jobs

Rosalind Barnett/Caryl Rivers, Basic Books, 2004

She Works/He Works:
How Two Income Families Are Happy, Healthy, and Thriving

Rosalind Barnett/Caryl Rivers, Harvard University Press, 1998

Deceptive Distinctions:
Sex, Gender and the Social Order

Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Russell Sage, 1998

The Mismeasure of Woman:
Why Women Are Not the Better Sex, the Inferior Sex, or the Opposite Sex

Carol Tavris, Touchstone, 1992

Gender Vertigo:
American Families in Transition

Barbara J. Risman, Yale University Press, 1998

Gender and Power
Robert W, Connell, Stanford University Press, 1987

The Paradox of Natural Mothering
Chris Bobel, Temple University Press, 2002

The Bitch in the House:
26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood and Marriage

Cathi Hanauer, Editor, William Morrow, 2002

The Bastard on the Couch:
27 Men Try Really Hard to Explain Their Feelings About Love, Loss, Fatherhood and Freedom

Daniel Jones, Editor, William Morrow, 2004

Copyright 2003-2008 The Mothers Movement Online. All rights reserved. Permissions: editor@mothersmovement.org