A Gender-Neutral Society?

What are manly virtues and can they survive?*

by Patricia Lança

Manliness, Harvey C. Mansfield, 2006, Yale University Press

Professor Mansfield seems a very agreeable man: understanding of women’s problems, erudite and persuasive. Above all, perhaps, patient: excessively so with the academic feminists he aims to convert to some appreciation of manly virtues. This he tries to do by proposing to allocate manliness between the sexes, not quite equally but in part. He concedes that some men are not notable for manliness and that some women are. He believes that manliness has come into disrepute, that society, or at least that part of it which sets fashions, now prefers males to aspire to something called “sensitivity” rather than manliness. He thinks we are now living in what he calls a gender-neutral society, a state brought about by the campaigns of the radical feminists, especially in academia. They managed this, he says, by peaceful means; by 'consciousness-raising', by words rather than violent action. And they were astonishingly successful. Their adversaries caved in all around them and they managed to change practices by changing the language, making any kind of verbal 'sexism'—a word they themselves popularized—unacceptable among decent people. And the new dispensation was achieved with extraordinary rapidity, which Professor Harvey confesses causes him surprise and some puzzlement. He says he is still unable to explain feminists’ easy victory. So easy indeed, that manliness is now deprecated and men feminized Not that the author calls the process of sensitization by that name. But many others have and there may be some truth in it.

In measured and often witty argument he examines the concept of manliness in all its manifestations, practical and literary, historical and philosophical. No reader will be surprised at his citing Achilles or John Wayne; most will find the mention of Nietzche less consensual, unless uber-menschism can be construed as manliness. But Professor Harvey readily admits that not all manliness is commendable. However, its core characteristics certainly are and the feminists are mistaken to decry it. If only they were to accept society’s (and women’s) need of manliness in men they would lose nothing and strengthen their case.

—«»—

Professor Mansfield’s ideas in this regard are generally unexceptionable. The trouble lies with the feminist framework he appears to accept. There are a number of points he might have questioned. First, while academia may be a gender-neutral space, it is doubtful that this is true of society as a whole. Or even desirable. Secondly, the accession of women to full citizenship (something feminists call 'women’s liberation') cannot really be ascribed to the last three or four decades of radical feminist activism. The realization of sexual equality, still uncompleted in many areas and especially on the domestic front, owed itself to other causes and would have come about regardless of the activities or arguments of people like Greer, Friedan, Butler and their ilk. It can even be argued that most women—and society as a whole—might today be better off without the ranting of the radical feminists.

It is likely that the appearance of these figures in the first place was because new spaces had for a long time been opening up to women and those self-appointed spokeswomen for the female sex simply took advantage of their opportunities. Like the Bolsheviks in 1917 Russia the feminists assaulted a crumbling citadel and captured it with remarkable ease.

Professor Mansfield, however, leaves the premises of radical feminism untouched,. Refuting feminism is not his objective. He does not even talk about the ravages it has caused in terms of sexual harassment legislation, quarrels over quotas and affirmative action, the bitterness of the so-called culture wars, fatherless homes, mounting domestic violence, intellectual and moral obscurantism, the breaking down of civility and the coarsening of manners. What he wants is to put in a plea for men. He does so eloquently and with some elegance. But it is doubtful that he will get a hearing from either side.

Instead of looking to biology, anthropology, history and economics for the sources of women’s subordination, without which it is impossible to find the right solutions, radical feminism has been largely based on the Marxist theory of class war, discredited notions about primitive communism and what Engels called 'the overthrow of mother-right' in those halcyon days when savages were noble and there was no class exploitation.

One of the curious things about this book is that its author, who is a Professor of Government at Harvard, in over 280 pages scarcely mentions economics. What he is concerned with are philosophical ideas. It is as though he had been dazzled by radical feminism’s forays into the dismal labyrinths of post-modernism and had decided that philosophy would be the area in which he was most likely to impress his word-drunk feminist readers.

What follows is not intended to diminish the significance of ideas or their influence in human affairs. Of course, these are immensely important. But Professor Mansfield’s mistake is to forget that ideas only gain influence in an appropriate environment. Ideas which don’t catch on because they are ahead of their time or out of context are quickly forgotten. Plato, in the IVth century BC, had a great deal to say about the role of women in the communist society described in The Republic. And Professor Mansfield gives Plato frequent mention. Before the scientific revolution of the XVIIth century and the Enlightenment of the XVIIIth century, Plato’s social projects could not but remain a dead letter. And although what came to be known as “the woman question” began to come into the foreground in the nineteenth century it was not until the twentieth that matters really came to a head. It was the industrial revolution and accelerating technological advance that set the scene for women’s emancipation which could not have taken place without them.

The radical feminists are quite mistaken in their theories about the patriarchy being the source of women’s subordinate status. The unwelcome truth of the matter is that until modern technology could produce efficient means of contraception on the one hand and on the other multiple labour-saving devices, women and children—the human race, in fact—could not survive at all without the protection of the male sex. Radical feminists forget that young humans need their mothers because they have a very long childhood, required for learning language and other exclusively human skills. Men, as the necessary protectors of women, had manliness thrust upon them by Nature and this was reinforced by culture; their reward was honour and the status of leadership in the home and outside it. Some exercised their power magnanimously, others were tyrants. But women could not avoid dependence until technology freed females from annual childbirth and both sexes from back-breaking labour.

It is an extraordinary commentary on the obtuseness (not to say scientific illiteracy) of some female academics that they continue to mythologize patriarchy as an evil imposed from outside of nature, and insist that “gender” is a social construction. Schools may no longer provide adequate teaching of biology or zoology but our television screens and newspaper columns are filled daily with studies of animal behaviour, the courting rituals of alpha males, programmes about genetics and the role of mitrochondrial DNA in heredity, X and Y chromosomes, testosterone and the rest. Everything indicates that the males of mammalian species are hard-wired for masculinity (manliness). During 99.99 per cent of the human and pre-human past men had to go hunting and kill animals for food, and some of the attributes of manliness are associated with this activity—boldness, aggressiveness, stoicism, etc., while associated cultural traditions account for most of the rest. But feminists have preferred to learn from a crackpot male philosopher, Michel Foucault who thought heterosexuality had been imposed on society by the bourgeoisie. They have made him one of their most significant intellectual icons. But this is not really surprising if they are misguided enough to dismiss science as a male enterprise: part of phallogocentrism condemned by Foucault..

—«»—

However, rather than persist in beating that dead horse, it is more to the point to mention once again just a few of the many factors that brought about women’s emancipation and in which the radical feminists had no hand at all. It should also be borne in mind that those phenomena which helped to liberate women had the inevitable tendency of making many masculine attributes redundant. These phenomena are to be found in the history of transport, production, technology and education.

Take transport. The advent of the motor car at the end of the nineteenth century had far-reaching social repercussions. When the first members of the upper classes bought motor cars and reserved their horses for the hunt, it really was the beginning of the end of chivalry in every sense. It ushered in the possibility of freedom of movement for women as well as men, and with no muscular exertion. Not only could people get from place to place rapidly, safely and dry: chaperones could be dispensed with. In southern Europe where the chaperone was ubiquitous and middle and upper-class women were not allowed to go out alone, a driving licence became a woman’s access to freedom of movement and escape from the home. The Saudi Islamic fundamentalists know what they are doing when they ban women from driving cars.

More or less simultaneous with the appearance on the market of motor-cars was that of the condom. Whether or not the latter was first thought of as a prophylactic its use as a contraceptive soon became widespread and from that time onwards the size of families among the educated classes dropped dramatically. The path was opened for separating sex from reproduction and women were set for biological freedom.

Long before the First World War sent droves of women into the factories to replace men who had departed for the armed forces, growing mechanization during the previous century had already lured working women into industry. The sewing machine needed female operatives at home and in the workplace. As capitalism developed so did its concomitant service industries. In offices everywhere the typewriter became ubiquitous and with it the female typist. Employers had been quick to see the advantages of lower-paid female labour and there were simply not enough men to fulfil the growing need for clerical workers. Of course, women had never been absent from economic life. Throughout history peasant women had worked long and hard in the fields and villages, even though some of their tasks might have been lighter than those of men. But with the advent of machinery, agriculture needed less and less manpower and the exodus of whole families to the towns provided expanding industry and commerce with the human beings needed as producers and consumers.

In truth the long, slow movement towards female emancipation ran parallel with the growth of capitalism. As did education to fill the need for a more educated workforce. None of these needs or their satisfaction grew at an even pace. As usual it was the political sphere that lagged behind and this was the arena where conflicting interests met and policies were hammered out. Hence there were women physicians before there were women members of parliament, women writers before there were women cabinet ministers. Family law was one of the last bastions to give way but now, for good or ill, an entire generation of women has grown up into a world of easy divorce, contraception and abortion. The United Kingdom even got itself a woman prime minister and she was certainly no product of radical feminism. And now all over the developed world there are more women university graduates than men.

Why then the remarkable rancorousness of feminist discourse? Why does even a man as urbane as Professor Mansfield make so much rueful mention of the domestic battle to get husbands to share the housework so that their wives might have careers. Why did Betty Freidan’s unremarkable book The Feminine Mystique have such success that it is now regarded among feminists much as The Communist Manifesto among socialists? The answer is simple: the educated woman’s boredom with housework. A glance at the pace of female emancipation in places like southern Europe, Latin America or India tells it all. Surprising as it might seem it is much easier for an educated woman to combine marriage, motherhood and a career in poorer countries than in rich ones. Where there is still a large peasant population but the cities are approaching Western standards, there is no shortage of domestic servants to staff the more spacious southern or non-western homes of professional women and at much lower wages than those of the European or American nanny. Husbands have little to lose from their wives’ pursuit of careers. No doubt this state of affairs will not last for ever, but while it does, the middle-class women it benefits will be freer to enter politics than their Anglo sisters. And with notably less friction in the home with their men-folk. All this, of course, is to leave out the special case of Islam, but that is an altogether different story.

Against this backdrop we need to take a further look at Professor Mansfield’s book and his concern with manliness. There can be little doubt that modern life does indeed threaten traditional ideas of manliness. The multiple social and economic factors which were crucial to the emancipation of women have also been significant in creating a deficit of manliness in men. This is observably so where muscular aspects of manliness are concerned. Who needs muscle when you’ve got machines? Even the horny-handed sons of toil have mostly disappeared to be replaced by clean, neatly overalled technicians. There are, of course, still enclaves where brawn and endurance are needed, and the fork-lift truck and bull-dozer are not always the complete answer. But even extractive industries, abattoirs, or fishing vessels are easier places to work in than they once were. As for the legions of office-workers, where is there scope here for old-style manliness? What scope does exist is on the streets and playing fields where much male aggression stubbornly persists to everybody’s inconvenience.

Much as all normal women appreciate manly men, and normal men prefer womanly women, it really does seem time to get rid of these words, certainly of their use as nouns. What we want today is character in both sexes and this is something that western education systems have been remiss in developing. If educators, professors, school-teachers and those who run their institutions, can pull themselves together and set about this task a good many of our troubles would be over.

—«»—

*First published in The Salisbury Review, London, Autumn, 2006

HUMPTY DUMPTY'S PROBLEM*

A Review of Two Books on Crisis in the Family

(From The Salisbury Review, Spring, 2000)

By Patricia Lança

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

(English nursery rhyme)

The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male, Melanie Phillips, The Social Market Foundation, London, 1999.

A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, Wendy Shalit, The Free Press, New York, 1999.

BOOKS DESCRIBING the negative consequences of the sexual revolution provide dismal reading and provoke mounting impatience. Not simply because of the less than edifying facts they recount but because they rarely get to the heart of the matter: they discuss neither causes nor cures other than superficially. After all, if we are to find our way out of the present deplorable mess (and both these books show that it is indeed deplorable), we need to know how we got here in the first place. Melanie Phillips, with the same care with which she built up her case against the education establishment in All Must Have Prizes, provides a catalogue of factors leading to family breakdown. Promotion of single motherhood and a new definition of the family unit as consisting of mother and offspring; the exclusion of fathers; policies and propaganda to the effect that male and female are identical; denigration of traditional male (and female) virtues such as responsibility, protectiveness, courage and loyalty; divorce rates of epidemic proportions.

Melanie Phillips documents all of these and adds to them by discussing what she calls the ‘growing crisis among men’, whose sense of identity has been eroded, leading to ‘despair, irresponsibility and violence’.

Wendy Shalit is more anecdotal, impressionistic and to some extent autobiographical. She describes nostalgically the orthodox Jewish approach to conjugal modesty as she learned it from members of her own family. She is damning in her denunciation of a society where: Nowadays, a girl can’t get aspirin from her school nurse without parental permission, but in many states, she can get on the Pill or have an abortion. It is her decision alone.

Shalit speaks for her own generation, the offspring of the baby-boomers, declaring that ‘…sometimes we would prefer not to have learned about AIDS in kindergarten.’ She is describing contemporary US society and the truly staggering (by European standards) promiscuity of college students, for whom old-fashioned dating seems to have been replaced by indiscriminate and instant copulation. If the account she gives is not exaggerated one wonders when these young people find time or energy to study.

Melanie Phillips is mainly concerned with British society and especially with the misconceived legislation which has now got to the point of creating fiscal disincentives to marriage. Her book is so packed with facts and figures that it is a pity the lack of an index makes it less useful than it should be. She ends her indictment with a concluding chapter proposing ‘ A Policy for all the Family’.

Consequences of Gender feminist ideology

Shalit, whose book is, by contrast, almost excessively documented and indexed, makes various constructive proposals and concludes by asking for a new sexual revolution. She thinks that many of her contemporaries are unhappy with the present state of affairs and that this accounts for the popularity of period romance on TV and in films. Phillips depicts British ruling circles as being concerned about the breakdown of the family as a cause of disorder and the development of the ‘lad culture’ but she sees government as condemned to adoption of incoherent and counterproductive policies because of the proliferation within its ranks of gender feminists.

There can be little doubt that each of these writers has valid arguments and their contributions to an ever-growing critical bibliography in this area are to be welcomed. However, neither nostalgia for a largely mythical past nor denunciation of the lunacies of the gender feminists will do much to change things. After all, the disappearance of modesty, reticence and ordinary decency in relations between the sexes is part of a general deterioration in manners. A certain modicum of formality, of ritual and of hierarchy is essential for the preservation of social order, as chimps and other social animals know instinctively. For individuals to flourish within a collective there must be a recognized and respected space allowed to them. It is surely not coincidental that bad manners and bad morals seem to go hand in hand with the growth of over-familiarity, contempt for ritual and disregard for promises given.

The three essential facts of human life, birth, marriage and death, have all been vitally affected by the advance of technology and the increasing modernization of society. Birth is regulated by contraception and abortion instead of the traditional means of abstinence. Death has been almost eliminated from child-birth for both mother and child. Infant mortality is now rare and life expectancy far exceeds the biblical span. Death itself has been evicted from the home and takes place in the near-secrecy of the hospital ward and in the presemce pf professional 'careers' rather than the family.

All this, of course, is very ‘eurocentric’. We only have to watch the news on TV on any night of the week to see that death in every shape and form is the everyday experience of half the world’s population. However, it is the world of Anglo-American and European civilization we are concerned with, and whether modernization will bring the same ills as ours to the ‘developing’ world need not for the moment trouble us. What is our concern is that the banishment of death from the home and the proliferation of material comfort have brought about momentous changes in outlook and behaviour. Among them are the cult of equality and informality and increasing reluctance to discuss serious matters seriously, and so increasing impatience with ritual. Ritual is the way all societies attempt to inculcate in their members an awareness of the seriousness of happenings and occasions. As Dr Johnson pointed out with regard to the prospect of hanging, it concentrates the mind wonderfully to be faced with death. Ritual has the same function. In a society in which death is invisible and ritual trivialized, we can scarcely expect seriousness to be widespread.

The trouble, however, is that there is no going back. Nostalgia may be a pleasant self-indulgence but it is scarcely useful. Nobody wants to return to the world of suffering before the alleviations provided by modern medicine and modern comforts. Even the sincere practising Catholic is unlikely to follow the Pope’s ukases on birth control. No politician would get very far if he proposed returning to legislation that would uphold the indissolubility of marriage. Nor would most people relish going back to the extremes of social formality, scarcely practical anyway in industrial society. And so we might continue with the long catalogue of changes that have brought us to the present pass.

So what is to be done?

The question must be put seriously for if nothing is done decadence will certainly have its course. Our cities will become increasingly disordered and dangerous; a helot class of uneducable and unemployable will grow; civilization itself will be endangered. Now that the Cold War is over and communism conspiracies can no longer be blamed we need to ask ourselves what interests in our own societies stand to benefit. We really do need to identify and name those capitalist interests benefited by disorder. A market economy must not be confused with a black market economy. We also need to take a long, hard look at old customs and institutions and see whether it isn’t reform they need rather than abolition. Melanie Phillips thinks that many British politicians would like to abolish marriage. But there is something else you could do to restore its dignity. What about making divorce extremely difficult for couples with children and easier still for everyone else? Or even irrevocable 20-year marriage contracts, with an option to renew, rather than ‘till death do us part’? This would end once and for all the present appalling get-rich-quick divorce scams some women manage. And people might find sacrificing themselves for the sake of the children a reasonable proposition if there were light at the end of the tunnel.

Such proposals as this may shock good conservatives. But isn’t the present state of affairs even more shocking? If the nuclear family of man, wife and children is to be saved and the nanny-State defeated, there need to be innovation together with the imagination to conceive it and the will to implement it.

^* Salisbury Review, London, Spring 2000

HUMPTY DUMPTY'S PROBLEM*

By Patricia Lança

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

(English nursery rhyme)

The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male, Melanie Phillips, The Social Market Foundation, London, 1999.

A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, Wendy Shalit, The Free Press, New York, 1999.

BOOKS DESCRIBING the negative consequences of the sexual revolution provide dismal reading and provoke mounting impatience. Not simply because of the less than edifying facts they recount but because they rarely get to the heart of the matter: they discuss neither causes nor cures other than superficially. After all, if we are to find our way out of the present deplorable mess (and both these books show that it is indeed deplorable), we need to know how we got here in the first place. Melanie Phillips, with the same care with which she built up her case against the education establishment in All Must Have Prizes, provides a catalogue of factors leading to family breakdown. Promotion of single motherhood and a new definition of the family unit as consisting of mother and offspring; the exclusion of fathers; policies and propaganda to the effect that male and female are identical; denigration of traditional male (and female) virtues such as responsibility, protectiveness, courage and loyalty; divorce rates of epidemic proportions.

Melanie Phillips documents all of these and adds to them by discussing what she calls the ‘growing crisis among men’, whose sense of identity has been eroded, leading to ‘despair, irresponsibility and violence’.

Wendy Shalit is more anecdotal, impressionistic and to some extent autobiographical. She describes nostalgically the orthodox Jewish approach to conjugal modesty as she learned it from members of her own family. She is damning in her denunciation of a society where: Nowadays, a girl can’t get aspirin from her school nurse without parental permission, but in many states, she can get on the Pill or have an abortion. It is her decision alone.

Shalit speaks for her own generation, the offspring of the baby-boomers, declaring that ‘…sometimes we would prefer not to have learned about AIDS in kindergarten.’ She is describing contemporary US society and the truly staggering (by European standards) promiscuity of college students, for whom old-fashioned dating seems to have been replaced by indiscriminate and instant copulation. If the account she gives is not exaggerated one wonders when these young people find time or energy to study.

Melanie Phillips is mainly concerned with British society and especially with the misconceived legislation which has now got to the point of creating fiscal disincentives to marriage. Her book is so packed with facts and figures that it is a pity the lack of an index makes it less useful than it should be. She ends her indictment with a concluding chapter proposing ‘ A Policy for all the Family’.

Consequences of Gender feminist ideology

Shalit, whose book is, by contrast, almost excessively documented and indexed, makes various constructive proposals and concludes by asking for a new sexual revolution. She thinks that many of her contemporaries are unhappy with the present state of affairs and that this accounts for the popularity of period romance on TV and in films. Phillips depicts British ruling circles as being concerned about the breakdown of the family as a cause of disorder and the development of the ‘lad culture’ but she sees government as condemned to adoption of incoherent and counterproductive policies because of the proliferation within its ranks of gender feminists.

There can be little doubt that each of these writers has valid arguments and their contributions to an ever-growing critical bibliography in this area are to be welcomed. However, neither nostalgia for a largely mythical past nor denunciation of the lunacies of the gender feminists will do much to change things. After all, the disappearance of modesty, reticence and ordinary decency in relations between the sexes is part of a general deterioration in manners. A certain modicum of formality, of ritual and of hierarchy is essential for the preservation of social order, as chimps and other social animals know instinctively. For individuals to flourish within a collective there must be a recognized and respected space allowed to them. It is surely not coincidental that bad manners and bad morals seem to go hand in hand with the growth of over-familiarity, contempt for ritual and disregard for promises given.

The three essential facts of human life, birth, marriage and death, have all been vitally affected by the advance of technology and the increasing modernization of society. Birth is regulated by contraception and abortion instead of the traditional means of abstinence. Death has been almost eliminated from child-birth for both mother and child. Infant mortality is now rare and life expectancy far exceeds the biblical span. Death itself has been evicted from the home and takes place in the near-secrecy of the hospital ward and in the presemce pf professional 'careers' rather than the family.

All this, of course, is very ‘eurocentric’. We only have to watch the news on TV on any night of the week to see that death in every shape and form is the everyday experience of half the world’s population. However, it is the world of Anglo-American and European civilization we are concerned with, and whether modernization will bring the same ills as ours to the ‘developing’ world need not for the moment trouble us. What is our concern is that the banishment of death from the home and the proliferation of material comfort have brought about momentous changes in outlook and behaviour. Among them are the cult of equality and informality and increasing reluctance to discuss serious matters seriously, and so increasing impatience with ritual. Ritual is the way all societies attempt to inculcate in their members an awareness of the seriousness of happenings and occasions. As Dr Johnson pointed out with regard to the prospect of hanging, it concentrates the mind wonderfully to be faced with death. Ritual has the same function. In a society in which death is invisible and ritual trivialized, we can scarcely expect seriousness to be widespread.

The trouble, however, is that there is no going back. Nostalgia may be a pleasant self-indulgence but it is scarcely useful. Nobody wants to return to the world of suffering before the alleviations provided by modern medicine and modern comforts. Even the sincere practising Catholic is unlikely to follow the Pope’s ukases on birth control. No politician would get very far if he proposed returning to legislation that would uphold the indissolubility of marriage. Nor would most people relish going back to the extremes of social formality, scarcely practical anyway in industrial society. And so we might continue with the long catalogue of changes that have brought us to the present pass.

So what is to be done?

The question must be put seriously for if nothing is done decadence will certainly have its course. Our cities will become increasingly disordered and dangerous; a helot class of uneducable and unemployable will grow; civilization itself will be endangered. Now that the Cold War is over and communism conspiracies can no longer be blamed we need to ask ourselves what interests in our own societies stand to benefit. We really do need to identify and name those capitalist interests benefited by disorder. A market economy must not be confused with a black market economy. We also need to take a long, hard look at old customs and institutions and see whether it isn’t reform they need rather than abolition. Melanie Phillips thinks that many British politicians would like to abolish marriage. But there is something else you could do to restore its dignity. What about making divorce extremely difficult for couples with children and easier still for everyone else? Or even irrevocable 20-year marriage contracts, with an option to renew, rather than ‘till death do us part’? This would end once and for all the present appalling get-rich-quick divorce scams some women manage. And people might find sacrificing themselves for the sake of the children a reasonable proposition if there were light at the end of the tunnel.

Such proposals as this may shock good conservatives. But isn’t the present state of affairs even more shocking? If the nuclear family of man, wife and children is to be saved and the nanny-State defeated, there need to be innovation together with the imagination to conceive it and the will to implement it.

^* Salisbury Review, London, Spring 2000

HUMPTY DUMPTY'S PROBLEM*

By Patricia Lança

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

(English nursery rhyme)

The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male, Melanie Phillips, The Social Market Foundation, London, 1999.

A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, Wendy Shalit, The Free Press, New York, 1999.

BOOKS DESCRIBING the negative consequences of the sexual revolution provide dismal reading and provoke mounting impatience. Not simply because of the less than edifying facts they recount but because they rarely get to the heart of the matter: they discuss neither causes nor cures other than superficially. After all, if we are to find our way out of the present deplorable mess (and both these books show that it is indeed deplorable), we need to know how we got here in the first place. Melanie Phillips, with the same care with which she built up her case against the education establishment in All Must Have Prizes, provides a catalogue of factors leading to family breakdown. Promotion of single motherhood and a new definition of the family unit as consisting of mother and offspring; the exclusion of fathers; policies and propaganda to the effect that male and female are identical; denigration of traditional male (and female) virtues such as responsibility, protectiveness, courage and loyalty; divorce rates of epidemic proportions.

Melanie Phillips documents all of these and adds to them by discussing what she calls the ‘growing crisis among men’, whose sense of identity has been eroded, leading to ‘despair, irresponsibility and violence’.

Wendy Shalit is more anecdotal, impressionistic and to some extent autobiographical. She describes nostalgically the orthodox Jewish approach to conjugal modesty as she learned it from members of her own family. She is damning in her denunciation of a society where: Nowadays, a girl can’t get aspirin from her school nurse without parental permission, but in many states, she can get on the Pill or have an abortion. It is her decision alone.

Shalit speaks for her own generation, the offspring of the baby-boomers, declaring that ‘…sometimes we would prefer not to have learned about AIDS in kindergarten.’ She is describing contemporary US society and the truly staggering (by European standards) promiscuity of college students, for whom old-fashioned dating seems to have been replaced by indiscriminate and instant copulation. If the account she gives is not exaggerated one wonders when these young people find time or energy to study.

Melanie Phillips is mainly concerned with British society and especially with the misconceived legislation which has now got to the point of creating fiscal disincentives to marriage. Her book is so packed with facts and figures that it is a pity the lack of an index makes it less useful than it should be. She ends her indictment with a concluding chapter proposing ‘ A Policy for all the Family’.

Consequences of Gender feminist ideology

Shalit, whose book is, by contrast, almost excessively documented and indexed, makes various constructive proposals and concludes by asking for a new sexual revolution. She thinks that many of her contemporaries are unhappy with the present state of affairs and that this accounts for the popularity of period romance on TV and in films. Phillips depicts British ruling circles as being concerned about the breakdown of the family as a cause of disorder and the development of the ‘lad culture’ but she sees government as condemned to adoption of incoherent and counterproductive policies because of the proliferation within its ranks of gender feminists.

There can be little doubt that each of these writers has valid arguments and their contributions to an ever-growing critical bibliography in this area are to be welcomed. However, neither nostalgia for a largely mythical past nor denunciation of the lunacies of the gender feminists will do much to change things. After all, the disappearance of modesty, reticence and ordinary decency in relations between the sexes is part of a general deterioration in manners. A certain modicum of formality, of ritual and of hierarchy is essential for the preservation of social order, as chimps and other social animals know instinctively. For individuals to flourish within a collective there must be a recognized and respected space allowed to them. It is surely not coincidental that bad manners and bad morals seem to go hand in hand with the growth of over-familiarity, contempt for ritual and disregard for promises given.

The three essential facts of human life, birth, marriage and death, have all been vitally affected by the advance of technology and the increasing modernization of society. Birth is regulated by contraception and abortion instead of the traditional means of abstinence. Death has been almost eliminated from child-birth for both mother and child. Infant mortality is now rare and life expectancy far exceeds the biblical span. Death itself has been evicted from the home and takes place in the near-secrecy of the hospital ward and in the presemce pf professional 'careers' rather than the family.

All this, of course, is very ‘eurocentric’. We only have to watch the news on TV on any night of the week to see that death in every shape and form is the everyday experience of half the world’s population. However, it is the world of Anglo-American and European civilization we are concerned with, and whether modernization will bring the same ills as ours to the ‘developing’ world need not for the moment trouble us. What is our concern is that the banishment of death from the home and the proliferation of material comfort have brought about momentous changes in outlook and behaviour. Among them are the cult of equality and informality and increasing reluctance to discuss serious matters seriously, and so increasing impatience with ritual. Ritual is the way all societies attempt to inculcate in their members an awareness of the seriousness of happenings and occasions. As Dr Johnson pointed out with regard to the prospect of hanging, it concentrates the mind wonderfully to be faced with death. Ritual has the same function. In a society in which death is invisible and ritual trivialized, we can scarcely expect seriousness to be widespread.

The trouble, however, is that there is no going back. Nostalgia may be a pleasant self-indulgence but it is scarcely useful. Nobody wants to return to the world of suffering before the alleviations provided by modern medicine and modern comforts. Even the sincere practising Catholic is unlikely to follow the Pope’s ukases on birth control. No politician would get very far if he proposed returning to legislation that would uphold the indissolubility of marriage. Nor would most people relish going back to the extremes of social formality, scarcely practical anyway in industrial society. And so we might continue with the long catalogue of changes that have brought us to the present pass.

So what is to be done?

The question must be put seriously for if nothing is done decadence will certainly have its course. Our cities will become increasingly disordered and dangerous; a helot class of uneducable and unemployable will grow; civilization itself will be endangered. Now that the Cold War is over and communism conspiracies can no longer be blamed we need to ask ourselves what interests in our own societies stand to benefit. We really do need to identify and name those capitalist interests benefited by disorder. A market economy must not be confused with a black market economy. We also need to take a long, hard look at old customs and institutions and see whether it isn’t reform they need rather than abolition. Melanie Phillips thinks that many British politicians would like to abolish marriage. But there is something else you could do to restore its dignity. What about making divorce extremely difficult for couples with children and easier still for everyone else? Or even irrevocable 20-year marriage contracts, with an option to renew, rather than ‘till death do us part’? This would end once and for all the present appalling get-rich-quick divorce scams some women manage. And people might find sacrificing themselves for the sake of the children a reasonable proposition if there were light at the end of the tunnel.

Such proposals as this may shock good conservatives. But isn’t the present state of affairs even more shocking? If the nuclear family of man, wife and children is to be saved and the nanny-State defeated, there need to be innovation together with the imagination to conceive it and the will to implement it.

GENDER AS IDENTITY

What Kind of women? What kind of men?

by

Patrícia Lança

Introduction

In no other area have traditional ideas been so challenged in recent years as in that of the relationship between the sexes and the way men and women see themselves and each other. In western universities and the forums of some international organizations a paradigm as old as the human species is being questioned and strange new patterns adumbrated. Never before have these subjects been so much discussed, studied, written up, campaigned about and legislated on as in the last three decades. Until very recently sexual identity and a broad typology of character for men on the one hand and women on the other have been thought to be fixed and unalterable. How sexual identity defined a person was seen as of a quite different order from other defining characteristics of human beings such as class, religion, nationality and ethnicity. And so it still is—except by proponents of what are known as ‘gender theory’ and its close relative, ‘queer theory’.

The apparent immutability of sexual identity is still the rule for the vast majority of human-kind and it is doubtful whether even in modern societies most people are likely to have had their fundamental perceptions changed by such theories. The fact that women have risen in recent years to high positions in the State has very little to do with the matter. History is, after all, peppered with female figures who have exercised real power and this has never been a factor in changing perceptions about the respective vocations and nature of ordinary men and women. What has indeed been changing is the attitude of members of both sexes to the participation of women in economic and public life.

Despite women’s emancipation in the industrialized countries, the majority of people still seem to have little doubt that most men will become fathers and most women mothers and that children are best raised in families. Or the corollary that mothers are women and fathers are men. There is, however, growing public concern over some recent social trends, most evident in the English-speaking world and Scandinavian countries, which seem to indicate increasing family breakdown. Working wives and mothers, full citizenship rights for women, easy divorce and abortion and a growing number of women in leading positions in public and private administration have certainly had familial and wider social repercussions. It is therefore appropriate to examine the position of ‘gender theorists’ in relation to these questions.

It might be useful first to look at sexual identity and character in three phases: before women’s emancipation; secondly, during that process; and thirdly the situation as it exists today. This examination requires to be undertaken in a spirit of realism rather than with a mind-set bent on seeking evidence of class oppression and the alleged predisposition of men to dominate and exploit women. What follows is necessarily schematic and concerned rather with the lives of ordinary people than with the particularities in habit and outlook of tiny élites.

The sexes before modernization

Before the onset of modernization it was impossible for women to be other than dependent upon men. This fact requires brief elaboration because its implications are overlooked, denied or misinterpreted by ‘gender theory’ whose tenets are notable for lack of empathy with the main features of human history and of compassion for its essentially tragic content.

In traditional agrarian societies average life-expectancy was around forty years, about half what it is today. High mortality meant that a high birth rate was essential for a community’s survival, hence large families were very desirable. Most females were expected to marry as soon as they reached puberty and, if they were reasonably healthy and their husbands were not absent from home, the natural course was for women to conceive and give birth almost every year. Access to and knowledge of birth-control was unsought and therefore almost unknown. All but rich women, who could afford wet nurses, had to breast-feed their babies. Human beings of both sexes toiled from dawn to dusk in order to keep alive. Nearly everybody, including members of ruling castes, was illiterate. Only a few belonged to the class of clerics and literati who could cultivate things of the mind. There was scant leisure for the masses. Public order and security in face of marauders and the elements were fragile. In such circumstances the very survival of humanity meant that women and children required protection. This requirement has been sacralized by religion and enshrined in law. It is here that we must seek the origin of the family and not in what Engels called ‘the overthrow of mother-right’ and ‘…the first class oppression… of the female sex by the male.’1

Of course women suffered from the necessarily subordinate position that dependence implies. But men suffered too. They frequently had to sacrifice life and limb in defence of their homes and families. Their incentive and reward were the honour and glory associated with the valour demanded of the ‘stronger sex’. Women brought up their sons in the cult of courage and duty to the family. It can well be argued that as the first educators and socializers of children during their long infancy women were in fact the ones who imposed the rules. These were frequently broken. Invading and conquering armies often put entire communities to the sword. But even in such atrocious cases, history tells us that the men were the first victims and women’s lives were often spared even if their destiny was to be carried off into slavery.

Beliefs about some golden age in palaeolithic times when people lived peacefully together in harmonious matriarchy have dubious foundation. It has, indeed, been claimed, with better evidence, that hardly any human remains have been found in prehistoric burial grounds that did not show signs of their original possessors having met with violent deaths.

Hence it is not surprising that in pre-modern times attitudes to sexuality were quite different from those current in our affluent, medicated and pleasure-loving societies. Whatever cults of eroticism may have existed among tiny ruling élites, or dionysiac orgies and fertility festivals ritually indulged in by the masses of lowly folk, peasant women could do no other than look on sexual activity as something to be strictly regulated. Pregnancy and childbirth were risk-laden enterprises. Perhaps some sturdy peasant girls might give birth painlessly in the fields and then happily carry on with their work. But for very many this was not the case. Under-nourishment and disease were widespread and death in childbirth was common. So, too, after the fifteenth century was syphilis. No wonder then that families reared daughters in the cult of pre-marital virginity and fidelity in marriage. Men did not have to impose the idea of sexual sin on women. Nature usually provided sanctions enough. To say this is not to imply that society generally did not reinforce these sanctions by custom and by law. Young people’s strong instinctual urges had to be contained by the older and wiser who knew the dangers involved.

Women taken in adultery have been stoned to death in some societies. Clitoridectomy still persists in certain parts of the world. Chastity belts are said to have been forced on medieval ladies. Chinese upper-class women had their feet bound and whether this was for aesthetic reasons or originally to prevent them straying is open to question. Barbarous customs indeed! As were those of the castration of men to produce guards and choristers. Until the advent of Enlightenment humanism everybody, male and female, even in Christian lands, took barbaric practices for granted. People were hanged, drawn and quartered and burned at the stake—men in far greater numbers than women—and multitudes of both sexes and all ages flocked avidly to view these horrible spectacles as lately as the eighteenth century, often taking picnic baskets along with them to enjoy the show. To maintain a sense of proportion, and of shame, we should also not forget that our own ‘enlightened’ twentieth century has been a time of periodic mass slaughter of both sexes even in the most advanced countries. So it is quite simply not true that cruelty, labour or the regulation of sexual activity were inventions of the post-Enlightenment bourgeoisie composed of ‘white European males.’

At certain times in history physically defective and girl babies were ruthlessly eliminated. Male children have been generally regarded as more desirable than female children but not merely out of some perverse masculine preference. It has been said that this is yet one more example of patriarchal oppression of the female sex. However, it has more to do with the fact that, until very recently, both foetal and infant mortality in males has been significantly higher than in females as any study of sex ratios in this area demonstrates. So boy babies were, and in most parts of the world still are, especially precious. Medical science, hygiene and better nourishment have caused infant mortality to drop to almost negligible levels in the industrially advanced world. Because nature provides for more males to be conceived, more boys than girls are now being born and reaching adulthood—a historically unique phenomenon.

People generally did not question their sexual identity or the rules concerning marriage and the family that prevailed in their respective cultures. Within Christian and certain other societies, clerical celibacy and the monastic life have been practised by a minority and in some places honoured more than marriage. Chastity, it was said, was a higher state but monasticism may well have been as much a matter of ecclesiastical economics as of virtue. It certainly had nothing to do with sexual identity. The choice of celibacy, involving discipline and self-sacrifice, was rather a matter of character. Joan of Arc may have been a warrior but she never claimed to be other than a woman.