Female, Male (3)

Equal and the Identical

Not all ancient cosmologies give men and women the same status at the ontological level. Some interpretations of spiritual and religious traditions, both ancient and contemporary, come close to asserting that women’s ‘ontological’ difference (in terms of their nature, rationality and/or purity) justifies the transhistorical and transcultural inferiority of their status. The comments of the philosophers are no less essentialist. Even though men and women partake of the same being (the men and women who make up The Symposium’s androgyne are complementary), the male is the nobler of the two according to Socrates and Plato. Aristotle considers women to be ‘naturally defective’ and essentially inferior, and we find similar comments in some of Hume’s asides about the relationship between women and power in his essay Of Love and Marriage. Kant took a similar view and avoided philosophical discussions with women, whom he liked to be witty but better disposed for kitchen matters: ‘That is the way it is,’ he is reported to have said to a woman seeking intellectual recognition,‘and it will not change.’

Things changed, and reflection became clearer or more diversified over the centuries. Religious discourse began to place more and more emphasis on the basic equality of men and women in terms of their spiritual initiation and before God. Their natural equality finds expression in their functional complementarity at the family and social level, as the ‘biological differences’ and the specific nature of the spiritual and religious (and sometimes philosophical, ideological and political) teachings addressed to women have to be taken into account. Many women, both inside and outside religious and cultural communities and feminist movements, have developed critiques of theories of the ‘natural and functional complementarity’ of men and women. In their view, the recognition granted to women by discourses on equality in essence or before God is negated by the way theories of complementarity justify their confinement within roles that make them dependent in familial and social terms (and then justified actual discrimination). In the name of the complementary nature of the so-called ‘strong sex’ and the ‘weaker sex’, or the public man in society and the private woman at home, a hierarchy was established. It prevented women from achieving any autonomy in terms of their social being, and confined them to functions that were always dependent and always viewed as secondary.

The feminist literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries criticized and denounced these instrumentalizations and alienations. As early as the second half of the nineteenth century, there were calls, including those from the Christian activist (and feminist) Catherine Booth, the co-founder of the Salvation Army, for women to have equal access to the public sphere, recognition and upward social mobility. The critique was to become increasingly sophisticated, and sometimes radical. In an attempt to close any loophole that might lead to discrimination, some women recognized ‘no difference’ between men and women: both were human beings, and there was no need to take their biology into consideration. Others took quite the opposite view, and argued that women were fundamentally different from men.

Women were, as ‘cultural feminism’ asserts, the ‘other’, had nothing in common with men, had to fight for a recognition of what they were and had to resist men and their system of domination. There were lively and contradictory debates in America between Carol Gilligan, who argued that there was an ontological difference between men and women and that the gender polarity had to be reversed, and Christina Hoff Sommers, who argued the case for getting back to basics and advocated an equity feminism, as opposed to gender feminism. These debates demonstrate the difficulty of the problematic, and above all the blind alleys in which some currents found themselves trapped. By laying claim to either an ontological difference or an absolute essential similarity, feminists, wittingly or otherwise, established a permanent relationship – and an inverted relationship of dependency – with men and the way they saw men. There were a lot of exaggerations and a great deal of reductionism, and they were criticized by the many women intellectuals and/or activists who denounced the lack of any discourse based upon the core of women’s experience, which, whilst it could demand legitimate rights (to work, a wage, autonomy, and so on), was not afraid of either the biological specificity or the singularity of certain of women’s attributes (going so far as to accept the specificity of certain social functions such as teaching or nursing). On the basis of a very different reading, Black feminists, like Angela Davis in her famous Women, Race and Class, and then the promoters of postcolonial feminism, extended the critique to the relationship between race, gender and social class.

The pendulum then swung the other way. The reaction to theories that, either explicitly or implicitly, justified the social and political discrimination that denies women access to autonomy has seen the emergence of stances and ideologies, some of them exclusivist or radical, that either deny the differences between the sexes or exaggerate them in the name of the idea of absolute equality. In Susan Bolotin’s article ‘Voices of the Post-Feminist Generation’ (New York Times Magazine, 17 October 1982), women voiced their support for theses and struggles supporting autonomy, social recognition and equal rights, but did not identify (or no longer identified) with feminism and some of its ideological positions. Like them, many women want to be free and independent, to have access to work and to earn the same wages as men, but they also want to assume their status as women, their femininity and motherhood and even a family role. They expect more from men, but they are not men and recognize the differences between men and women. They want to be ‘equal’, but have no desire to be ‘identical’.

Achieving a balance is very difficult. All spiritual and religious traditions, all philosophical systems and all social struggles have always found it difficult to find a nuanced, balanced and rational approach to relations between men and women. Contemporary scientific discoveries (the neurosciences and neurobiology) confirm that there are biological differences between them, and that it would be insane to deny their existence. Scientists do not deny that our relationship with the social and cultural environment has a determining influence (epigenesis), but they have found some basic differences: the left hemisphere of the brain is more highly developed in women, who are actually less emotional than men but tend to be better at expressing their emotions because of their greater need to verbalize and communicate. Women have a more highly developed sense of hearing and touch, whereas men’s sight is more highly developed and means that they have a different relationship with visual spatial abilities. An analysis of hormonal functions shows that men and women relate differently to the environment and have different needs in terms of safety, no matter what culture they live in: women have a greater need for protection, and men a greater need for adventure. We are free to reject these scientific discoveries, or to regard them as irrelevant, but we have to admit that we must not confuse ‘equality’ with ‘identity’ in the sense of similarity. Some psychologists have tried to account for these obvious differences. The psychotherapist Jon Gray’s bestseller Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus expresses the same idea, with the stated intent of promoting a better understanding between men and women.

We have to negotiate a path between traditional and religious teachings, philosophical postulate and scientific discoveries in such a way that we can recognize beings and their identities (in terms of race and class as well as gender), their differences and similarities, and the way they contradict and complement one another without denying the need for ontological and social equality, and for the recognition of the legitimacy of women’s right to autonomy, work and equal treatment as both citizens and wage-earners. This requires a complex and multidimensional approach. We must keep a critical eye open for invisible and unspoken logics, for power relations and for theoretical arguments that justify their existence in philosophical, religious or ideological terms. This also presupposes a continued awareness of the subtleties and paradoxes involved: for indeed, treating what is not identical in the same way can produce inequality. We therefore have to adopt a global and diversified approach and avoid both the spirit of dogmatism and blind radicalism. We have to hope for a meeting between men and women who can come to terms with their being freely and autonomously. They must be aware of their respective rights and determined to defend them . . . but they must always be reasonable.