Can women beat men at their own game? - the consequences of women assuming roles traditionally reserved for men - Cover Story

National Review, Dec 27, 1993 by Steven Goldberg

BACK in the Sixties, many ridiculed the idea of lifelong marriage because they saw it as inherently undesirable. Today the idea is ridiculed because it seems virtually impossible. The divorce rate is half again as high as it is virtually anywhere else in the modern world--and it is high virtually everywhere in the modern world. And increasing numbers of people choose not to marry at all.

This will not engender social disintegration; individuals and societies have a way of stumbling through. But the increasing fragility of marriage does threaten to make the breakup of the parents and absence of the father the typical experience of the child; years of loneliness the typical experience of the older woman; and self-destructive and anti-social behavior the typical contribution of increasing numbers of men not constrained by the intimacy and responsibility of marriage.

A tendency in this direction is probably inherent in modern industrial society's decreasing dependence on physical labor, its increasing need of huge numbers of workers skilled in the intricacies of modern work life, and the entailed requirement that women be socialized, educated, and trained to join the labor force in large and increasing numbers.

In many ways, this tendency serves women well; it makes possible a choice of lives and a legal equality in areas that were formerly rewards for simple maleness. Furthermore, while no modern society can accord women's feminine, maternal, and familial roles a status as high as that accorded these roles in some primitive and agricultural societies, no modern society--with its requirement of reward according to perceived contribution, equal treatment by the law, and other exchanges of status for rights---can treat women as chattels, as in other non-modern societies.

However, the tendency for females to be socialized and educated to compete with males in superfamilial areas--rather than to define their primary value in terms of the traditional roles for which men cannot compete carries a heavy cost, including a reduction of: the sense that one is doing what one should be doing; the satisfaction, perhaps even happiness, that this engenders; the sense that one belongs to a complete and self-contained community; and the support of the individual by this community.

Women bear the brunt of this process. The annoyance many men feel at having to take into account the corporate presence of women is--however noisy the men's complaints--insignificant compared to the conflicting demands on women of the public sphere and the home. Moreover, the socialization of women to value behaviors that are more strongly inherent in maleness, and to devalue behaviors that are more strongly inherent in femaleness, has had a terrible--and terribly ironic--effect: it has only minimally increased women's tendency to effectively behave in male ways while it has severely decreased women's ability to effectively behave in female ways.

Through most of our history one could assume of women an understanding of men. This understanding meant every woman had, in her armamentarium, a host of weapons with which to defend herself against male stupidity by deflating the male. Few women felt the need of the protection of dubious laws against the wolf whistle; women knew how to handle men. Today many young women, not having learned the self-defense that gives confidence, tremble at the sight of a male aggression they cannot handle.

Masculinity Rules

THE ASPECTS of modernization mentioned above render unavoidable women being socialized and educated to see the roles associated with males as the worthwhile roles. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that many contemporary women derogate the feminine. (There are feminist attempts to "redefine femininity," but the "redefinitions" are simply an acceptance of the non-feminine, supported by claims about how well women can do the things men do.)

In any case, the public arena, the marketplace, is becoming for great numbers of women the primary status arena. It is an arena in which femininity is far less powerful than it is when status is determined by marriage and family. The conflicts encountered by women represent not just the clash of physiological impulse with social reward (i.e., maternal possibility vs. the status now given women in the public arena), but also incongruous social demands (expectations of feminine and maternal behavior away from the job vs. the behavior expected in the battle for public status). When the physiological nature of those concerned conflicts with social expectation and when the natures of the required social abilities conflict with each other, a woman is being asked to possess a universality that very few human beings possess.

All this might be less of a problem if men were wired to respond to the infant as readily as women do. But the experience of China, the Soviet Union, Scandinavia, and a number of other countries--combined with the evidence of physiology--shows that equal child-rearing is an impossibility. American women are painfully and rapidly realizing that there are some things a man just won't do, and taking equal responsibility for child care is one of them.