:::THC::: Allan Carlson, Ph.D.: Speeches: The Howard Center

The Curious Case of Gender Equality

by Allan Carlson, Ph.D.

17-18 October 2003, The Ingersoll Prize Symposium, “The Dangerous Quest for Equality,” held at Belmont-Abbey College, Belmont, North Carolina.

Two years ago, I was sitting before a fire in the delightful, wood-paneled, common room of the Tabard Inn, an old hotel near DuPont Circle in Washington, DC. I was with a group of historians, some of whom could be fairly labelled the leaders in their specialties. It was evening and the conviviality was encouraged by the fruit of the vine and the distiller’s art. This group, I underscore, was exclusively male.

At one point, the conversation turned to the question: Over the course of the 20th century, what ideology had enjoyed the greatest success? Which worldview had been most influential in reshaping ideas, attitudes, and institutions? We considered the last flowering and then the ruin of monarchism in the fires of World War I, the rise and eventual defeat of Fascism, Naziism, and Japanese Imperialism, the Bolshevik victory in Russia and the spread of Communism to Eastern Europe, China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the development of Democratic Socialism in Scandinavia and its spread in Europe after World War II, the rise of new nationalisms such as Zionism and Pan-Arabism, the spread of Democratic Liberalism aided and abetted by the success of American arms, the re-emergence of a militant Islam in the latter decades of the century, and so on. But in the end, we concluded that the greatest success had been registered by a surprise candidate: the ideology known as liberal or equity feminism.

Now, I am not sure whether this conclusion would have survived a fresh, more sober conversation in the light of the next morning. Perhaps the academics in the group were simply discouraged by recent faculty meetings. All the same, I do want to explore here the nature and consequence of the ideology of strict gender equality that has enjoyed, by any measure, at least remarkable success during the last 40 years.

My favorite academic journal right now sprang into existence six years ago. Called Feminist Economics, it underscores the comprehensive sweep of the feminist worldview. For you see, like any other ideology worth its salt, feminism has its own theology, its own psychology, its own science, its own history, its own anthropology, and even its own economics, with special journals of academic inquiry created in each discipline. The charm of Feminist Economics lies partly in the unexpected, but entertaining articles that appear. Take, for example, the essay “Towards Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Perspectives in Economics.” It notes, by way of explanation, that “Lesbians—females who live by rejecting that primary form of obligation, obligation to men—bring about lesbian economics,” one reflecting debates over “liberal, radical, or socialist/Marxist changes and on the pluses and minuses of poststructuralist queer theory.”[1] That is a kind of analysis you will not normally find in, say, The Wall Street Journal.

Feminist Economics also carries narrative reports on feminist success in restructuring American life. For example, an article by Harriet Presser of the University of Maryland’s Center on Population, Gender, and Social Inequality describes the effort by “a small group of feminist social scientists” in the late 1970’s to force the U.S. Census Bureau to stop using the term “head of household.” Under this pressure, the Census Bureau did drop the term in the 1980 count, replacing it with the label “householder.” Dr. Presser complains, though, that the term “head of household” has somehow survived in the Bureau’s General Social Survey and notes:

The reluctance of the research community to drop the concept of ‘head’ reveals how ingrained the ideological notion of an authority structure within the family is.[2]

Indeed, another fascinating aspect of the journal is those articles—not infrequent—where feminist theorists confront the distortions of human life and human nature mandated by their own ideology. For instance, in the article “Subsidizing Child Care By Mothers at Home,” Barbara Bergmann of American University argues against the idea of extending tax credits for early child care—currently available only if children are put into paid day care—to parents who care for their children at home. She acknowledges that such an extension of the credit would expand child care choices for all women and would be very popular. But she continues: “The ability and willingness of mothers of very young children to work at jobs has been central to the changes in women’s status.... All women workers have better job opportunities when the custom is for most new mothers to return to work very soon after the birth of a child.” Bergmann underscores that “the provision of significantly large benefits to mothers caring for their own children...puts social pressure on all mothers to stay home.” She even attacks the generous paid parental leave provided in Sweden, where new mothers can take up to 18 months off from work at 90 percent of salary and with their old jobs guaranteed on their returns. Bergmann reasons: “Anything that increases the social pressure for having children cared for full time by their own mothers is a step back toward rigid gender roles, with each gender limited to sex-appropriate activities.”[3] In short, the feminist project requires that women be separated from their babies at the earliest feasible time and that women have only one practical way of reconciling work and family: the day care center.

More telling is an insightful article by Judith Galtry of Australia’s Victoria University of Wellington: “Suckling and Silence in the USA: The Costs and Benefits of Breastfeeding.” The author notes the overwhelming evidence of the benefits provided to women, children, and society by breastfeeding. Women who have breastfed report significantly lower rates of breast cancer and ovarian cancer and less osteoporosis in later life. Children who were breastfed as infants are also much healthier than bottle-fed babies. In industrialized nations, breastfed children have in general, a lower mortality rate and are far less likely to face sudden infant death syndrome. Breastfed babies record significantly lower rates of pneumonia, bacteremia, meningitis, serious ear infections, gastrointestinal and lower respiratory tract disease, and a number of chronic diseases later in life. Breastfeeding also enhances the growth and development of the brain and central nervous system of both pre-term and full-term babies. Society also benefits. Breastfed children do better in school and accrue much lower medical costs. Even employers gain, for the absenteeism rate of working mothers is seven times lower among breastfeeding mothers when compared to the mothers of babies fed on infant formula.

And yet, Professor Galtry notes, feminist theorists retain at best a stony “silence” and at worst an outright hostility toward breastfeeding. Even the argument that slightly over half of the industrialized world’s infants will grow up to be women leaves the equity feminist unmoved.

Why? For the clear reason that breastfeeding—even more than pregnancy and childbirth—exposes the fatal flaw in equity feminist theory: women are different from men, with effects on their lives and on the lives of others and of whole societies that cannot be ignored. Insistence on “equal treatment” between men and women in parenting creates what the author calls “an obvious, but generally unarticulated, dilemma.” She also notes another curious fact: the highest rates of breastfeeding in the U.S. and Britain are found among wealthy, white, professional women. They are the ones who are able to take advantage of parental leave policies, without fear of impoverishment; and it is their children who gain an advantage in their life prospects.

Equity feminists worry that acknowledging the benefits of breastfeeding might “undermine gender-neutral leave provisions,” or “reinforce the notion that childrearing and other household chores are primarily the responsibility of women,” or encourage “another version of pay for housewives,” or—most perversely—create the perception that women are “in need of paternalistic protection” and so define women “in terms of their presumed or actual maternal role.” Phrased another way, equity feminists see more cancer and death among women, higher infant mortality, diminished health and intellectual prospects for all children, and heightened racial and social class differences as acceptable prices to pay to avoid such “maternal” ends.[4]

The core equity feminist dilemma, of course, is that this movement—like all modern ideological movements—is at war with human nature. The equity feminist wants to deny the realities of sex-difference and engineer a new human type: the androgynous being. In practice, though, the attempt is no less amazing and no less futile than the effort by the German Nazis to create The New Aryan Man or the effort by the Bolsheviks to create The New Soviet Man.

For the natural sciences reveal, over and again, the futility of the androgyny project. In the fields of human biology and biochemistry, for example, dramatic new findings highlight the important effects of hormonal and psychological differences between women and men: in everything from the functioning of the nervous system and the brain to emotional drives. These lessons, of course, do not teach that one sex is “better” than or “superior” to the other; such claims are at once wrong and irrelevant. The true lesson is the remarkable complementarity of woman and man: in the creation of families and in the rearing of children, men and women are designed to work together, each bringing special gifts and aptitudes which make the union greater or stronger than the sum of its parts.

This is why research shows:

That children raised outside intact, two-natural-parent families are 40 times more likely to be physically or sexually abused than are children raised within intact families.[5]
Or that “maternal care” of young children provides “a protective factor” in psychological well-being that neither fathers nor non-parental caregivers can provide.[6]
Or that the level of the male hormone, testosterone, goes down among married men, who by marrying become less aggressive and more cooperative in socially constructive ways: that is, they became gentle men.[7]

Indeed, even the theorists of evolution testify to family living as a defining trait of humanity. In his seminal article for Science magazine, paleo-anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy marshals the evidence showing that both human survival as a species and evolutionary progress have depended on what he calls “the unique sexual reproductive behavior” of humankind. Lovejoy shows that the human family system, rooted in complementary pair-bonding, reaches back hundreds of thousands of years; he even implies that the very definition of “human” rests on this family behavior. As Lovejoy writes: “[B]oth advanced material culture and the Pleistocene acceleration in brain development are sequelae to an already established hominid character system, which included intensified parenting and social relationships, monogamous pair-bonding, specialized sexual-reproductive behavior [by male and female], and bipedality. It implies that the nuclear family and human sexual behavior may have their ultimate origin long before the dawn of the Pleistocene.”[8] That is, even as the paleo-anthropologists’ early man began to walk on two legs, he was already living in a recognizably human family system built on the complementarity and cooperation of the sexes.

Indeed, there is growing evidence pointing to the looming failure of the feminist experiment. A recent article in Social Forces examines seven surveys between 1974 and 1997 of attitudes toward masculinity and femininity. Unexpectedly, the researchers report that “the major findings have been stability [or] increasing sex typing. Of the 24 comparisons [between men and women investigated in this study], ten have shown stability and eleven an increase in sex typing, the strongest of these being the increased femininity of females, both in the ratings of the typical female by both males and females and in the self-ratings of the female respondents.” Noting the failure of feminist sociological theory to account for this, the researchers conclude that this strengthening of gender stereotypes reflects “predispositions based on innate patterns as posited by the evolutionary model.”[9] Other new research underscores the biological rootedness of man and woman.[10]

But if this is true—if gender stereotyping that defies feminist theory is growing stronger—why does our current national situation seem so completely different, even disordered?

The new problem is that key American political and economic institutions have been distorted over the last forty years, during the period of equity feminism’s institutional dominance. To explain how that occurred, I need to say more about the history of equity feminism in 20th-century America.

A casual look at America today shows pro-life and pro-family voters largely attached to the Republican Party and so in political alliance with Big Business. Equity feminism, meanwhile, dominates in the Democratic Party, in alliance with the labor unions and the pro-abortion cause. These are, however, historically unusual coalitions.

Indeed, from the 1920’s until the early 1960’s, the Republican Party was the party of equity feminism, a movement which had a natural bond with the interests of big business: both were products of the liberal vision focused on the priority of the individual; and both wanted women in the fulltime workforce. When the National Woman’s Party crafted the proposed “Equal Rights Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution back in 1923, it was Republicans who first introduced the measure in the U.S. House and Senate. The National Association of Manufacturers, seeking access to cheap female labor, was the first major national organization to endorse the ERA. Indeed, there is some evidence that the Manufacturers Association covertly funded the radical National Woman’s Party during the 1920’s and 1930’s.[11] The Republican Party was the first party to include the ERA in its national platform. And, after the Birth Control Federation of America cleverly changed its name to Planned Parenthood, this organization became a favorite charity among Republican Women’s Clubs.

The Democrats, meanwhile, were the party more-or-less defending small property, Christian sexual morality, and traditional family values. So-called “social feminists” or “maternalists” in the Party such as Frances Perkins and Molly Dewson gave first priority to the protection of motherhood and traditional homes. They believed in equality for women and men in civic and legal rights, but also in the political recognition of differences between the sexes in function. Central to “maternalist” economic thinking was support for The Family Wage regime, a system of custom and law that delivered to a father and husband a wage sufficient to support a mother and children at home, and a system that celebrated and protected the roles of homemaker and mother. As Julia Lathrop, chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau during the Woodrow Wilson years, explained: “The power to maintain a decent family living standard is the primary essential of child welfare. This means a living wage and wholesome working life for the man, a good and skillful mother at home to keep the house and comfort all within it. Society can afford no less and can afford no exceptions. This is a universal need.”[12] As implied here, the primary support for the “family wage” came to be a system of “job segregation by gender”: the cultural assumption that there were “men’s jobs” and “women’s jobs,” and that men’s jobs deserved higher compensation because they commonly supported a wife and children, as well as the man. This method of taming capitalism’s creative destruction actually proved to be highly effective, helping to produce both economic prosperity and the Marriage and Baby Booms of the 1940’s and 1950’s.

Compared to today, though, this world that I just described almost seems to be an alternate moral universe. How did we get from there to here?

Actually, we can trace the change to a single day, February 8, 1964, when the American social-political order underwent a seismic shift, and equity-feminism won arguably its most important policy victory. But it is a change that you will never read about in a civics or history textbook, because it is also—for feminists—a tale of embarrassing political farce, one exhibiting the dangerous and destructive force of the concept of equality once loosed.

The occasion was debate in the U.S. House of Representatives over the proposed Civil Rights Act of 1964. The language of the bill on that Saturday morning—as first drafted at the Lyndon Johnson White House—aimed at ending discrimination “on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin” in the areas of voting, public accommodations and education, federally assisted programs, and private employment. Reading between the lines, it was clear that the latter provision on private employment—Title VII—would renew an old maternalist goal from the New Deal years: to remove those job barriers resting on race prejudice that prevented African-American men from being good fathers, husbands, and breadwinners. Advocates used an argument that would surface again in the famed Moynihan Report a year later: if the traditional family home was the basis of American civilization, then full citizenship for black Americans required shoring up the economic side of their faltering family system. Disproportionately characterized by matriarchy, female-headed households, and illegitimacy, “the Negro-American family”—as it was then called—needed to be reconfigured on the prevailing breadwinner/homemaker model found among whites. If this could be done, racial equality would result.[13]

Yet Southern Democrats in the House chamber, their backs to the wall, had resolved on a desperate strategy. Some, we may infer, were defending the segregated order; all presumably opposed this proposed extension of federal power into private life. Seeking a “killer” amendment to the Civil Rights bill, these “Dixiecrats” urged a change in the language of Title VII that would—they thought—expose the danger of the concept of “equality.”

Congressman Howard Smith of Virginia rose on that February day and, with a broad smile, proposed that the word “sex” be added to the list of prohibited discriminations in employment under Title VII.[14] To the laughter of his colleagues, he reported on a letter he had received from a woman protesting the excess number of American females, when compared to the count of American men, revealed by the 1960 Census. Smith read:

Just why the Creator would set up such an imbalance of spinsters, shutting off the ‘right’ of every female to have a husband of her own is, of course, known only to nature. But I am sure you will agree that this is a grave injustice to womankind and something the Congress and President Johnson should take immediate steps to correct.

After making his little joke, though, Smith moved to other, real issues: “Now, I am very serious about this amendment,” he told his colleagues. “I think we all recognize...that all throughout industry women are discriminated against in that...they do not get as high compensation for their work as do the majority [sic] sex.”

As the debate took form, Smith’s Dixiecrat colleagues added their sometimes whimsical support. J. Russell Tuten of Georgia said that as “a man, which places me in the minority and makes me a second class citizen—and the fact that I am white and from the South—I look forward to claiming my rights under this legislation.” Joe Pool of Texas argued that the amendment would “safeguard American women from such inequities with regard to their civil rights as are now threatened in the pending civil rights bill.” And L. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina praised the proposed change for “making it possible for the white Christian woman to receive the same consideration for employment as the colored woman.”

In retrospect, it is clear that a half century of political reforms aimed at restoring “the traditional family” and built on the family-wage ideal hung in the balance. And it appears that the heirs of this maternalist or social feminist vision, and of the New Deal policies that had solidly embedded it into the law, understood that their legacy was threatened. Pro-family Democrats mounted their last stand.

Emanuel Cellar, Democrat from New York, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and floor leader for the Civil Rights bill, rose to challenge Mr. Smith. Notably, Congressman Cellar argued for the natural inequality of woman and man:

You know, the French have a phrase for it when they speak of women and men... “vive la difference.” I think the French are right.

Imagine the upheaval that would result from the adoption of blanket language requiring total [sexual] equality. Would male citizens be justified in insisting that women share with them the burdens of compulsory military service? What would become of traditional family relationships? What about alimony?...Would fathers rank equally with mothers in the right of custody to children?...This is the entering wedge, an amendment of this sort.

Representative Cellar also noted that the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor (long a maternalist stronghold) opposed this amendment, because sex discrimination involved “problems significantly different” from race and other factors covered by the bill’s language.

Edith Green, a Democratic Congresswoman from Oregon, attacked Mr. Smith’s amendment as an attempt to “jeopardize” the primary purpose of the Civil Rights Act: “For every discrimination that has been made against a woman in this country there has been 10 times as much discrimination against the Negro.... Whether we want to admit it or not, the main purpose of this legislation today is to try to end the discrimination...against Negroes.” Moreover, she insisted that there were real “biological differences” between men and women that must be taken into account “in regard to employment.”

But the equity feminists found on the Republican side of Congress, having spent forty years in the political wilderness, sensed on that day their extraordinary, if peculiar, opportunity. Congresswoman Katharine St. George, a Republican from New York, took the podium and suggested that foes of the “sex” amendment still saw women as “chattels.” She added: “Why should women be denied equality of opportunity? Why should women be denied equal pay for equal work?” Congresswoman Catherine May, a Republican from Washington, cited the deep concerns of The National Woman’s Party over the effect of an unamended Title VII on “the white, native-born American woman of Christian religion.”

Much to Mr. Smith’s surprise, this unexpected coalition of Republican equity feminists and Dixiecrat segregationists carried the day, on a vote of 168 to 133. Two days later, the House approved the Civil Rights Act, as amended. The measure went on to the Senate, where Hubert Humphrey pushed the measure through unchanged, throttling a Southern filibuster.

So, in July, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, became law. A measure originally designed to aid black men—five percent of the population—was redirected to give aid to white women—45 percent of the population. The new Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, according to one friendly analyst, soon “converted Title VII into a magna carta for female workers, grafting to it a set of rules and regulations that certainly could not have passed Congress in 1964, and perhaps not a decade later, either.”[15]

Most significantly, the Commission quickly eliminated sex-specific hiring, seniority, and promotion practices. Again, it was these forms of job segregation by gender that had long served as the buttresses to America’s family wage system, guiding men toward the higher-paid positions and women toward the lower ones or toward home. But now the economic foundation of households would shift. The flow of married women into the labor force accelerated. In consequence, it became more difficult to sustain the “traditional American family”—white and black—on one income. As female wages rose, male breadwinners working full-time experienced a 28 percent decline in real wages over the next two decades.

In the early 1970’s, women such as Phyllis Schlafly would battle Republican hierarchies to end that party’s support for the ERA and liberalized abortion: by 1980 so-called “Reagan Democrats”—notably working class Catholics and Southern evangelicals—moved into the Republican camp. Equity feminists migrated the other way, producing the anomalous political situation in which we live today. Beyond party politics, though, we can see here how the feminist values of radical individualism and strict gender equality undermined arrangements that had sustained families within the dynamic turbulence of the modern economic order.

What, then, might the future hold? I am confident of one thing: Feminist leaders are right to be worried. Their institutional and policy ascendance will be undone, for it violates the deeper truths of human nature that will win out in the end.

Relative to the “family wage” ideal just explored, it may be that incremental tax policies will restore significant protection to married-couple families and their children. For example, the indexing to inflation of the child exemption in the federal income tax in 1986, the creation of the child-tax credit in 1996, and repairs to the “marriage penalty” in the income tax made just this year have already begun to restore some economic protections to marriage and childbearing. Indeed, between 1995 and 2000, the U.S. marital birth rate rose 15 percent and the proportion of infants enjoying full-time maternal care also rose for the first time since the 1960’s. Of more direct threat to the equity feminist agenda, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has just introduced a bill to extend the child care tax credit to stay-at-home parents (the very idea denounced three years ago by Barbara Bergmann in Feminist Economics).

But it may also be that “equity feminism” will be undone by the feminists themselves. The “social feminist” or “maternalist” vision focused on “equality in rights, difference in function.” After its own intellectual exile for the last forty years, maternalism may now be coming back. A recent article—again in my favorite journal Feminist Economics—brilliantly lays out the case for maternalism. Entitled “The Other Economy,” the essay argues that the most important questions that feminist economists should ask “are related to caring and children.”[16] Author Susan Donath argues that mainstream economics, with its focus on competitive production and exchange, is too simple a theory to account for women’s caring work. Children, too, “tumble out of every category economists try to put them in.”[17] There are two economies, she concludes: one focused on markets and competition where money is the medium of exchange; and the “other economy” focused on gifts, reciprocity, and caring where love is the medium of exchange. “In my view,” Donath concludes, “the feminist economics project is concerned with describing and analyzing the other economy, both in its own right, and as it interacts with the market economy.”

The author makes other important points. In services such as early child care and elder care, she notes, “few or no productivity gains are possible,” meaning that purchased day care and institutional nursing care can rarely—if ever—be cost effective, once quality of care is taken into account. The exception to this comes only when the wealthy employ the very poorest or illegal immigrants to provide child care or elder care, revealing again the degree to which day care rests on the distortion or exploitation of the lives of the poor. To underscore the point, she notes that a 1995 plan put forward by equity feminists—called “Help for Working Parents”—would provide a working mother with $9,500 in annual child care subsidy; while mothers employed full-time at a minimum wage job could earn only $8,500: this would amount to a net loss to the market economy of at least $1,000, not to mention the negative psychological and medical costs of group care on children.[18]

Donath so confirms what the English journalist G.K. Chesterton first reported eighty years before: “The whole [day care argument] really rests on a plutocratic illusion of an infinite supply of servants....Ultimately, we are arguing that a woman should not be a mother to her own baby, but a mother to somebody else’s. But it will not work. Not even on paper. We cannot all live by taking in each other’s washing, especially in the form of pinafores.”[19]

In short, through this article we see the journal Feminist Economics arriving at the same conclusions regarding child care and economic justice for families as did the great Catholic Distributist, Mr. Chesterton. Perhaps the Heavens have parted as well; or perhaps Hell has just frozen over. In any case, that is why I am optimistic about the true post-feminist future.

Endnotes

1 M.V. Lee Badgett and Prue Hyman, “Introduction: Towards Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Perspectives in Economics: Why and How They Make a Difference,” Feminist Economics 4 (1998): 50.

2 Harriet B. Presser, “Decapitating the U.S. Census Bureau’s ‘Head of Household’: Feminist Mobilization in the 1970’s,” Feminist Economics 4 (1998): 145-58.

3 Barbara R. Bergmann, “Subsidizing Child Care By Mothers at Home,” Feminist Economics 6 (2000): 77-78.

4 Judith Galtry, “Suckling and Silence in the USA: The Costs and Benefits of Breastfeeding,” Feminist Economics 3 (1997): 1-24.

5 Joy J. Lightcap, Jeffrey A. Kurland, and Robert L. Burgess, “Child Abuse: A Test of Some Predictions of Evolutionary Theory,” Ethology and Sociobiology 3 (1982): 61-67.

6 Mohammadreza Hojat, “Satisfaction with Early Relationships with Parents and Psychosocial Attributes in Adulthood: Which Parent Contributes More?” The Journal of Genetic Psychology 159 (1998): 202-220.

7 See: Martin VanCreveld, “A Woman’s Place: Reflections on the Origin of Violence,” Social Order 76 (2000): 825-46.

8 C. Owen Lovejoy, “The Origin of Man,” Science 211 (23 January 1981): 348. Emphasis added.

9 Lloyd B. Lueptow, Lori Garovich-Szabo, and Margaret B. Lueptow, “Social Change and the Persistence of Sex Typing 1974-1997,” Social Forces 80 [2001]: 1-35.

10 See: J. Richard Udry, “Biological Limits of Gender Construction,” American Sociological Review 65 (2000): 443-57; Shawn L. Christiansen and Rob Palkovitz, “Why the ‘Good Provider’ Role Still Matters,” Journal of Family Issues 22 (Jan. 2001): 84-106; and Pamela Wilcox Rountree and Barbara D. Warner, “Social Ties and Crime: Is the Relationship Gendered?” Criminology 37 (1999): 789-810.

11 Reported in: Lillian Holmen Mohr, Frances Perkins (n.p.: North River Press, 1979): 192; and Mary Anderson and Mary N. Winslow, Women at Work: The Autobiography of Mary Anderson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951): 171.