CAN WE MAKE BOYS AND GIRLS ALIKE?: Stanley Kurtz

...Sociologists have thought long and hard about the cultural "reproduction of society"--the transmission of deeply held cultural attitudes across the generations. Some social thinkers focus on the conscious transmission of cultural messages through religion and custom, while others highlight the influence of deeper social structures, such as economic organization or family forms. The most sophisticated feminist theories of gender--those that offer the most plausible alternatives to biological explanations--take the latter view. To explain the reproduction of gender differences, they zero in on family structure, especially during the first months and years of life, to a time when the way we care for children is far more important than the words we speak. ...

Chodorow hypothesizes that the differences between the sexes simply derive from the contingent circumstance that women happen to be the primary caretakers of children. The special, "feminine" empathy required for rearing children, she suggests, becomes indelibly associated in our minds with people who just physically happen to be female. Identifying with their daughters, moreover, mothers tend to stay tightly connected with them for years, drawing them into a circle of mutual dependence and empathy that is the essence of femininity. So it's not television ads or Barbie dolls that turn little girls into caring women, who themselves want to be mothers. It's the emotional closeness of mothers and daughters that perpetuates the conventional female sexual role for generation after generation.

Boys learn their gender lessons early, too, Chodorow maintains. Since traditional mothers assume that boys are different from girls, early on they tend to encourage their sons to be independent. As mothers begin to push their sons out of the warm circle of empathy, boys get the message that people with Daddy's kind of body should act differently from the way Mommy acts. If they want to be men, boys learn, they've got to overcome the qualities of emotional empathy of people like Mom. Masculinity thus finds its ground in a rejection of "feminine" qualities.

If we could just break the association between gender and child care, thinks Chodorow--if men as well as women could "mother" children--then we might vanquish gender. Men and women would still have a few distinct body parts, of course, but "masculine" and "feminine" personality differences would no longer have anything to do with bodily equipment. No one would assume that only people with a certain kind of body should be caring and empathic. The speed with which a child became independent would no longer depend on whether it was male or female. A new era would dawn.

Yet even if this understanding of gender as learned behavior is right, androgyny proponents quickly run into a problem. As Chodorow herself underscores, mothering by women produces women who themselves want to be mothers. The mechanism at work may be social and psychological, rather than biological, but it's no less real for that. How, then, do you get women to mother less and men to mother more, especially when, according to Chodorow, everything in a typical male's early rearing makes him wrong for the job? ...

But what if a society actually existed--not just a theoretical utopia--whose inhabitants yearned for androgyny? What if a society existed whose citizens, motivated by a burning passion for perfect justice, committed themselves to a total reorganization of the traditional family system, with the express purpose of eliminating gender? Such a society has existed, of course: the early Israeli kibbutz movement. The movement wasn't just a precursor to modern feminism, it's important to add. The kibbutzniks were utopian socialists who wanted to construct a society where the ideal of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" would govern the production and distribution of goods. It was as part of this larger socialist vision that the kibbutzniks set out to wipe away gender.

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posted by Eve at 9:06 AM VOTE

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