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November 1997
Feminism's Unfinished Business
by Katha Pollitt
It takes a real talent for overlooking the obvious to argue
that women have achieved equality in contemporary America. After all, despite
thirty years of feminist activism and much social change, virtually every
important political, social, cultural, and economic institution is still
dominated by men: legislatures, courts, corporations, labor unions, the news
and entertainment media, education, science, medicine, religion. Study after
study shows that women make less money than men even when they do the same or
similar work, which they have a hard time getting; that they shoulder the bulk
of child-rearing and housework, even in families where both husband and wife
work full-time; that they are on the receiving end of a great deal of rape,
domestic violence, abuse, and harassment. The pervasiveness of sexism is by now
widely acknowledged, even on occasion in venues that are hostile to the
organized women's movement: it was The Wall Street Journal, whose
editorial page regularly inveighs against feminism as a form of "political
correctness" and "social engineering," that in 1995 prominently featured the
news that parents give daughters smaller allowances and more chores than they
give sons. Riffling through my magazine basket on a slow day recently, I
learned from Science News that scientifically gifted high school girls
are more likely to drop out of the field in college than are comparable boys;
from The Washington Post that most health-care plans won't pay for
contraceptives; and from The New Republic that forced marriages and
other oppressive customs persist in some immigrant communities without much
objection from the legal system.
But if the evidence is all around us, why doesn't everybody see it—or see it
for what it is? In recent years a seemingly endless parade of social critics
have achieved celebrity by portraying not sexism but feminism as the problem.
Some frankly glorify male dominance, among them Camille Paglia, who being a
woman can say things—that the California high school date-rape gang known as
the Spur Posse is "beautiful," for example—that might make even Rush Limbaugh
blanch. Others, such as Christina Hoff Sommers, Katie Roiphe, and the
conservative Independent Women's Forum, argue that feminism has completed its
real job—overturning formal and legal barriers to equal treatment—so women
are either already equal (more or less) or don't wish to be, and all evidence
to the contrary is false or trivial. Either way, women who feel victimized
should, as Mary Matalin puts it, "stop whining!"
Deborah Rhode, a professor of law at Stanford University and the
president-elect of the Association of American Law Schools, thinks the problem
is that women—and men who care about them —don't whine enough. Women's
second-class status, what Betty Friedan once called "the problem that has no
name," has become "the 'no problem' problem." In Speaking of Sex, Rhode
sets herself two tasks: to document gender inequality—separate chapters cover
child-rearing, the media, sexual violence, work, and marriage and divorce—and
to understand why so many of us are "in denial" about it. Although Rhode breaks
little new ground, the sheer accumulation of data and her cogent analyses make
this an excellent guide to sexism in our time. Exhaustively footnoted and
sourced (seventy-nine pages of notes for 250 of text), it is unlike most
general-interest books on any side of this debate in that it draws on a
vast amount of real scholarship and ranges widely over the available literature
in and out of academia. Although Rhode is not an exciting writer—her attempts
at humor are mostly quotations from others (including, I should mention,
me)—her calm, lawyerly, methodical approach lets the material speak for
itself. And it does.
Wall know that divorced mothers are rarely awarded enough child support to
cover the real costs of raising a child as a single parent, that toys are
stereotypically sex-typed, that teachers call more often on boys. But did you
know that "individuals give lower ratings to the same resumes, scholarly
articles, or artistic works when they carry a female rather than a male name"?
That "30 to 50 percent of surveyed Americans ... believe that women are to
blame for rape if they dress provocatively"? That Hispanic female college
graduates earn less, on average, than white male high school dropouts? That
when an ABC documentary team sent a man and a woman with equal credentials to
apply for the same advertised jobs, he got managerial offers and she got typing
tests?
The picture that emerges from the hundreds of similar facts gathered here is
pretty depressing, and even I, a connoisseur of bad news, wondered occasionally
if Rhode wasn't determined not to look on the bright side. Which, for example,
is more significant: kindergarten "graduation awards" that singled out girls as
"All-Around Sweetheart" and "Cutest Personality" and boys as "Very Best
Thinker" and "Most Eager Learner," or the fact that a father protested and the
episode made headlines—in The Wall Street Journal? In her discussion of
child custody Rhode contends that mothers who don't fit the 1950s
chaste-homebody stereotype are at a disadvantage, and that fathers get more
credit than mothers for the same level of involvement with their children, and
I believe her, because I hear these attitudes expressed in casual conversation
fairly often. All her examples, however, are of widely publicized legal
outrages: the judge who took custody from a lesbian mother and gave it to the
father, a convicted murderer; the judge who barred a custodial mother from
letting her male partner sleep over; the judge who transferred custody to a
previously uninvolved father because the mother, a college student, enrolled
her toddler in day care. Representative cases, or flukes, or something in
between? More significant than these shocking anecdotes are studies suggesting
that 20 percent of divorcing husbands use the threat of a custody fight to
obtain financial concessions, and that half of Massachusetts judges surveyed
believe that a mother should be home when school lets out, and many would shift
custody to the father if she isn't.
So why is gender inequality the no-problem problem? Rhode sees three kinds of
denial at work. People fail to see how unequal women are, or they see it but
"rationalize [it] as the result of women's own choices and capacities," or they
see it but believe they have no responsibility to work for change. Doubtless
there's much truth to this analysis. Many people have a hard time seeing that
lifting a prohibition is a far cry from making something accessible or even
possible, whether it's an equal shot at tenure or an abortion (some studies
show that one in five women seeking an abortion is frustrated by economic or
legal hurdles—those "undue burdens" theoretically forbidden by Supreme Court
rulings). For many reasons, too, and in many areas of life, Americans have a
curiously shallow understanding of the relationship of the individual to
society: we greatly underestimate the role of social forces in making us what
we are and in limiting our real, as opposed to abstract, choices. We tell
ourselves that obstacles exist to be overcome, citing the handful of people who
manage to overcome them as proof that everyone could if she chose. Moreover, in
all fairness, some patterns of gender bias are genuinely hard to see: perhaps
I, too, give my daughter a smaller allowance than I would give her if she were
a boy—but since I don't have a son, how can I tell? If you don't know how much
your colleagues earn (a taboo subject in the American workplace), how do you
know if you're being underpaid because of your sex? As Rhode points out, lots
of decisions—who gets a promotion, who wins a prize—are close calls involving
many factors. If each decision seems reasonable, it may not be easy to pinpoint
the bias, even if the overall pattern heavily favors men.
RHODE'S psychological perspective also leaves out a lot, however. Gender
inequality is, after all, not just a social phenomenon about which people have
more or less carefully reasoned and well-informed ideas, such as they have
about capital punishment, or gun control, or the draft. It's one of the
fundamental aspects of the American social and economic system. Not only
psychological comfort but actual concrete interests are at stake. To equalize
the standings of men and women would cost billions of dollars, require the
overhaul of many institutions, and destabilize many kinds of personal and
professional relationships. It would threaten many men, and some women, with
increased competition, while depriving men as a group of the important
psychological bonus of feeling superior to women. There would be losers as well
as winners. This would all be true whether or not people denied the existence
of gender inequality, just as economic inequality exists independent of our
fitful bouts of awareness of it. Denial is not an explanation of a social fact
but an adaptation to it.
And do most people even deny that gender inequality exists? The studies Rhode
mentions suggest that denial is mostly the privilege of those who benefit, or
hope to benefit, from the status quo. Judges may be astonished when state
commissions publish reports documenting widespread discrimination against women
in the legal system (the male judge who co-chaired California's Gender Bias
Task Force joked, "Until I was on this ... Task Force, there was never any
bias in my court"). I suspect that female lawyers, witnesses, plaintiffs, and
defendants are rather less thunderstruck. More than 90 percent of female senior
managers believe that men's and women's opportunities remain unequal; 40 to 50
percent of female workers believe that an old-boy network persists, and that
they would have higher salaries if they were men. These figures and many
others—the large numbers of women who report having experienced sexual
harassment, for example—suggest that plenty of women see their circumstances
rather plainly. At least in surveys, it's men who hold rosy beliefs about
equality, like the two thirds of fathers in one study who claimed to share
child care equally with their wives—an outcome wildly inconsistent with
virtually all the research, not to mention the experience of most mothers.
That last item raises the question of how much denial is sincere and how much
is a matter of convenience or rhetorical strategy or political agenda. When
Alan Dershowitz, not only a famous trial lawyer but also an immensely
knowledgeable professor of law, claims that rape is "the most overreported
serious crime in America" because 8.4 percent of reported rapes are
"unfounded," one suspects he knows that "unfounded" means not false or
fabricated but failing to meet the legal statute, lacking in the kind of
evidence that fits the requirements of the law, or unlikely to prevail in
court—hardly the same thing. (As Rhode says, the overwhelming consensus among
researchers using government statistics is that only two percent of rape
complaints are false—no more than for other crimes.) Similarly, the
conservative antifeminist pundits and talking heads who are all over the news
media right now—Laura Ingraham, Mona Charen, Christina Hoff Sommers—represent
mostly themselves and the right-wing think tanks and foundations that fund
them. Rhode is concerned that out of 90 million adult American women, only
250,000 belong to the National Organization for Women—but maybe this says less
about women's denial of sexism than it does about NOW. In any case, only about
a thousand belong to Laura Ingraham's home base, the Independent Women's Forum,
an anti-feminist group that claims to favor women's rights.
Rhode's hope is that people awakened to gender injustice will take action
against it. I share her hope, but a century of muckraking journalism should
have taught us the limits of this model for social change. America is full of
certifiably innocent victims whose desperate straits persist despite repeated
publicity: the homeless mentally ill, children in foster care, old people
confined to substandard nursing homes. People seem able to live with a
considerable amount of awareness of other people's hard luck—and even of their
own. Feminism is, after all, no more stymied—and maybe less—than movements
that seek a fairer piece of the pie for African-Americans, labor, or the 70
percent of Americans whose wages have stagnated or eroded over the past two
decades. Why so many people are politically passive, and under what conditions
they might rouse themselves, are fascinating questions, but I don't think the
concept of denial will take us far toward an answer. The problem is not so
much, as Rhode argues, that people mistakenly believe the world is just;
actually, only the privileged think that. It's that they believe they are
powerless. And much of the time they're right.
The rather tepid kinds of action that Rhode urges on her readers underscore
this powerlessness: angry letters; consumer boycotts of products that are
sexist or advertised in ways insulting to women; contributions to feminist
organizations, which will presumably lobby for the "model initiatives" and
"projects" she believes will point the way toward wider change. None of
these are bad ideas, exactly. But they're not likely to draw in new troops or
energize old soldiers for a renewed assault on inequality—who joins a social
movement in order to get a form letter back from a senator? And if inequality
is as pervasive and entrenched as Rhode argues, these activities aren't going
to make enough of a difference. Rhode herself seems to understand that women's
inequality is tied to other features of the status quo: she explains Congress's
inattention to gender justice with Pat Schroeder's observation "There's no
money in women's issues." But this moment of realism yields immediately to a
renewed bout of wishful thinking: feminists, Rhode suggests, must therefore
make a "central priority" of campaign-finance reform, that elephants' graveyard
for civic-minded activists.
What would a revitalized feminist movement look like? What made the movement so
compelling in the 1970s was in part the clarity of the demand it made on
America to live up to its own values: fair play, equal treatment under the law,
respect for individual merit and difference and so forth, and the
responsibility of government to ensure that women receive an equal helping of
these important social goods. This is the strand of feminism Rhode emphasizes,
as one would expect a law professor to do, and it's clear that we still have a
long way to go in making even these modest goals a reality. But there was
another, more radical side to the movement, which had to do with the promise
feminism held out to women of a life not just with more justice but also with
more freedom, more self-respect, more choices, and more pleasure. Feminism
promised that one could become more conscious of the social forces limiting
one's life, and that from this new awareness positive change could come. That
is what the much-maligned slogan "The personal is political" meant. This aspect
of feminism was the opposite of "model initiatives" and sending in $50 so that
someone else could be paid to lobby your congressman to vote your way on a few
high-profile bills. It was a do-it-yourself, direct-action social movement. It
might take a revival of this spirit to get us beyond "denial."
