The Undivided Past Read online

  In a very different tradition and idiom, the Bible also proclaimed the divinely sanctioned difference between the two sexes, and their relationships of superiority and subordination.14 As related in the book of Genesis, God first created man in his own image, and only as an afterthought did he make woman (Eve) from one of man’s (Adam’s) spare ribs, establishing her both in time and anatomically as the second and lesser sex. This fundamental biological difference had significant behavioral consequences, for while Adam wisely eschewed wicked temptation, Eve foolishly succumbed to the serpent’s sinful entreaties and beguiling enticements, consuming the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, and thus tainting all men and all women with original sin. In the New Testament, Saint Paul pointed out the moral: “Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet woman will be saved though bearing children, if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.” From these observations and injunctions, several conclusions followed about the essential differences between men and women, which became the bedrock of all Christian teaching: unlike man, woman was weak in mind and body; she was the agent and scapegoat of man’s downfall, for which her travails in childbirth were her punishment; and as a necessary precaution against her lesser mind, unruly nature, and fickle character, she must be subordinate to man in all things.15

  These classically adumbrated and divinely sanctioned doctrines about the nature and ranking of men and women were also upheld by later secular thinkers. In Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau insisted that female deference, submission, and domestic dutifulness was in accordance with the natural law that underlay the common good, since women were weaker than men, and less clever.16 Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Tom Paine subversively proposed the abolition of all hereditary distinctions of rank, and urged a significant broadening of the electoral franchise, but he upheld traditional gender hierarchies, proclaiming in the pages of his Common Sense that “male and female are distinctions of nature.” In 1871, Charles Darwin took the same view in The Descent of Man, arguing that man was “more courageous, pugnacious and energetic than woman [with] a more inventive genius,” and that compared to the female of the species, the male brain was “absolutely larger.”17 Friedrich Nietzsche embraced a similar view: “everything about woman is a riddle,” he wrote in Also Sprach Zarathustra, “and everything about women has one solution: its name is pregnancy.” And it was Sigmund Freud who coined the phrase “anatomy is destiny,” and who divided humanity into the opposed constituencies of “masculine-active” and “feminine-passive.” For Freud, sexual biology determined everything, explaining how and why women were defined and characterized by what he called their “castration complex,” as they “envied” men their penises.18

  The belief in such “essential differences” between men and women, which have always been an amalgam of the anatomical, the mental, and the behavioral, has persisted across the twentieth century into our own day, in both popular and academic writing. In the first category is John Gray, whose best-selling book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus appeared in 1992, mingling self-help with popular psychology, and (albeit without apparent awareness) effectively updating the Adam-and-Eve dichotomy for our modern, secular world. For Gray depicts a binary division of the sexes, founded on “biological difference,” that he believes is eternal and immutable. “Men and women,” he writes, “are supposed to be different,” as if they came from separate planets, and as a result they “think, feel, perceive, react, respond, love, need and appreciate differently.” “When you remember,” he portentously concludes, “that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, everything can be explained.”19 At a more sophisticated level, in a book revealingly entitled The Essential Difference, the Cambridge developmental psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen argues that the brains of men and women are fundamentally unalike, because of “essential sex differences in the mind,” so that while “the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems,” by contrast “the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy.”20 Although buttressed with extensive experimental research, this conclusion scarcely differs from the story of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, and the serpent (with whom Eve had clearly empathized too much).21

  If these views are correct, the dividing line between men and women, by virtue of their different biologies, brains, and behaviors, has always been a more significant fault line than that which religious leaders have drawn between the saved and the infidel, or that political leaders have proclaimed between their nation and its enemies, or that Marx and Engels thought they had discerned between the (male) employers and their (male) employees in the cotton mills of mid-nineteenth-century Manchester. One way of describing this alternative and apparently more fundamental sexual division of humanity is that men (whatever their economic status) are designed primarily for the purpose of production, whereas women (whatever their social status) are programmed primarily for the purpose of reproduction, and therein lies the most insuperable divide between people, which even gender reassignment cannot completely bridge. (Hormones can be administered to alter body fat and hair, and breasts can be enlarged or reduced, but penises and wombs cannot—as yet—be fabricated, and the DNA in every cell of a transgendered person still “knows” what sex it was born into.)22 But as this male-female, production-reproduction dichotomy suggests, and as even John Gray himself concedes, the “biological differences” that divide and rank male and female are not the only ones, and are not necessarily the most important ones, for to the bodily dissimilarities and anatomical distinctions of sex must be added the cultural differences and social constructions of gender.23

  In the Western world, the forces affecting these constructions of gender have included religion, the law, politics, education, and employment, all of which have accorded men privileges and opportunities that women were deliberately and systematically denied, and to these should be added such social conventions as the double standard, whereby men enjoyed sexual freedom whereas women were expected to preserve their virginity before marriage (and still are by Pope Benedict XVI).24 One indication of this gendered ordering of the world was the pervasiveness of the language of “false universalism,” based on the premise that “man embraces woman,” so that what we would now call “humanity,” in a nongendered way, was customarily referred to by the word “mankind,” in which women were indeed embraced and incorporated, but only so as to disappear completely (as in such phrases as “the seven ages of man,” or “man the measure of all things,” or “all men are created equal,” or “the rights of man”).25 A second aspect of this relationship of systemic male superiority and female inferiority was well summarized in Edward Gibbon’s observation that “in every age and country, the wiser, or at least the stronger, of the two sexes, has usurped the powers of the state, and confined the other to the cares and pleasures of domestic life.”26 Hence the doctrine and practice of “separate spheres” for men and women, partly as a function of their different biologies, but also because the difference between them was asserted, constructed, and institutionalized in many other ways.

  Although Gibbon believed this separation of men and women into the respective spheres of public and private life existed in “every age and country,” many historians have argued that this gendered polarization between work and home took place at a specific time (between the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries) and in a particular part of the world (the rapidly industrializing West), and it is noteworthy that Gibbon’s comments on this subject, and also those of William Thompson, date from just this period. Before then, so this argument goes, men and women lived and worked together in conditions of relative equality, and interacted easily both in private and in public. But as a result of the Industrial Revolution, these arrangements and relationships were disrupted, and this was a change by which women were greatly disadvantaged.27 For as production ceased to be domestically based and move
d to the factory floor, the physical separation of home and workplace became the new pattern; the result was that women were increasingly denied the political, professional, and business opportunities they had previously enjoyed, and were confined to the home, prisoners of the private sphere, while men still enjoyed unrestricted access to the public sphere of paid work, sociability, politics, and government.28 This construction of separate spheres, on the basis of more strict gender differentiation, was especially pronounced in the United Kingdom and the United States, and it coincided with a reassertion of the view that men and women, with their different anatomies, were so unalike as to be separate and incommensurable.29

  According to this interpretation, between 1780 and 1850 biology and culture combined to divide men from women and to subordinate the latter to the former to a greater extent than ever before. But these changes did not take place at all levels of British or American society; they were confined to the middle classes who were both the creators and the beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution. Here was an attempt to incorporate women into the male and Marxist narrative of class formation and class consciousness, by arguing that the bourgeoisie made itself during this formative period by establishing precisely demarcated places and roles for men and women. The result was that while energetic, happy, and eager men went out into the great world, making money, inventing new technologies, transforming the economy, building the railroads, governing the country, and waging war, women reluctantly embraced the cult of domesticity that was increasingly being foisted upon them, and dutifully devoted themselves to being wives and mothers and homemakers: the angel in the house, but with her wings firmly clipped. As such, the sexually and culturally polarized sexes of the Anglo-American middle classes, inhabiting their “separate spheres” and behaving in appropriately differentiated ways, were the direct precursors to those Martian males and Venusian females that John Gray claimed to have discovered a century and a half later.

  Like E. P. Thompson’s heroic chronicle of the making of the English working class, these recent attempts to chart the formation of the industrial bourgeoisie are also stories of undeserved damnation followed by hard-won redemption achieved by collective action made possible by the creation of a shared identity and consciousness. In the case of workingmen, a prelapsarian agrarian idyll is said to have been ruined by the abrupt and degrading Industrial Revolution, and it was only as they came to understand their situation as exploited and proletarianized labor that they were able to organize and agitate to win back lost freedoms, improve their circumstances, and change the world. Likewise for middle-class females, their traditional idyll of equal gender relations was shattered by the divisive impact of the Industrial Revolution, and it was only as they came to understand their situations as passive, isolated, alienated, and imprisoned wives that they were able to nurture a sense of gender-group solidarity that was ultimately expressed in mid-Victorian feminism, as the attempt to right the wrongs and fight the constraints of “separate spheres.”30 Thus understood, feminism was a necessary and spirited reaction to the new regime of domestic frustration and incarceration, in which sex and biology, gender and culture were powerfully allied to subordinate women more fully to men and to exclude them from the public realm. Indeed, it was directly from those deplored categories of difference and circumstances of inferiority that there issued forth what has been called a grand, inspiring narrative of “gender oppression, the experience of sisterhood, and a feminist consciousness.”31 Perhaps so, but then again maybe not.

  SAMENESS AND EQUALITY

  In November 1967, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed a Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, its preamble asserting that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity,” which meant there ought to be “equal rights for men and women.”32 Discrimination against women was “incompatible with human dignity,” since it was “an obstacle to the full development of the potentialities of women in the service of their countries and humanity” and it prevented “their participation, on equal terms with men, in the political, social, economic and cultural life of their countries.” Yet such involvement and such equality were indisputable, because “the full and complete development of a country, the welfare of the world, and the cause of peace” required “the maximum participation of women as well as men in all fields.” That being so, the preamble concluded by “considering that it is necessary to insure the universal recognition in law and in fact of the principle of equality of men and women,” and the eleven articles that followed declared that discrimination against women was “fundamentally unjust and constitutes an offence against human dignity,” calling (among other things) for the abolition of laws and customs that deliberately disadvantage women, for the equal right to education regardless of gender, and for women to enjoy full political and constitutional rights, complete equality in civil law, and equal treatment in the workplace. These principles and these proposals were reaffirmed and extended in 1979, when the UN adopted its Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

  Here is a very different view of women, and of their relations with men, from that to be found in the West’s foundational writings of Aristotle or Genesis, or in the works of Charles Darwin or Sigmund Freud—one built around the essential sameness of “all human beings” rather than their anatomical difference, and thus around their innate equality. From this perspective, the biological dissimilarities between men and women are deemed to be relatively insignificant, their affinities and their likeness counting for more than relative upper body strength, or penises and wombs, or testicles and ovaries, or testosterone and estrogen, or male and female brains.33 Yet all too often, the common humanity that the two sexes share with each other, but with no other living creatures, does not translate into the equality that it seems to promise, and these undoubted inequalities and differences between men and women are more likely to be matters of gender that are culturally determined than matters of sex that are biologically determined. This means that unlike the anatomical differences of sex, the cultural differences of gender could be eliminated and outlawed, by the sort of measures enumerated in the articles of the UN Declaration. Moreover, the impulse to see relations between the sexes this way was not a twentieth-century leap of insight, but has roots that reach back into antiquity, and arguments to this effect were advanced and developed alongside the alternative view stressing the ultimate and essential differences between men and women.

  Once again, ancient Greece is the place to begin. In Book V of The Republic, Plato contended that the inferior status of women was not the expression of an immutable otherness based on the innate differences of body and brain, but a perversion of the natural state of affairs in which men and women were created equal, each the other’s complement. A woman’s biology, as Plato saw it, should not settle the question of her destiny, and it was only the educational, legal, constitutional, and cultural arrangements put in place by male authorities to divide and rank the sexes that made it appear as though it did. Plato insisted there was nothing inherent in a woman’s nature to prevent her from engaging in all the social and political functions of an active and engaged citizen, and he believed it was a waste of human resources that half of the population stayed at home discharging the private duties of wife and mother. Instead, Plato argued, women should be brought fully into public life for the general benefit of society, the nuclear family should be abolished so that women might be relieved of the domestic chores that held them back, and if in such a more equal world her education and her talents allowed, then a woman might even become a philosopher-ruler.34

  This belief in the intrinsic equality of men and women, on the basis of their common humanity and personal potential, was largely eclipsed with the ascendancy of Judeo-Christian teaching in the West, but it was revived in the more secular climate of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. During the 1670s, François Poullain de La Barre, influenced by the principles of René De
scartes, proposed that the human mind had no sex, either male or female, which meant that, in corroboration of Plato, there was no good reason to presume that women’s brains were intrinsically inferior to men’s.35 In 1791, the Marquis de Condorcet, a leading philosophe, published A Plea for the Citizenship of Women, which in opposition to Tom Paine made the case for full political rights for women as well as men on the basis that the capacity to reason was universal, not sex-specific: “Now the rights of men result only from this, that men are beings with sensibility, capable of acquiring moral ideas, and of reasoning on those ideas. So women, having these same qualities, have necessarily equal rights.” Condorcet accordingly concluded that “either no individual of the human race has genuine rights, or else all have the same,” and by “all” he clearly meant women as well as men.36 In the same year, Olympe de Gouges published her Declaration of the Rights of Women, which, again as a retort to Paine, insisted on adding women to the exclusively masculine discourse of contemporary radical political polemic; she critically challenged the false universalism of the word “man” by suggesting the alternative formulation of “men and women,” and urged that “woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights.”37