IDEAL IMAGES AND REAL ROLES

...Social groups, as we have seen, work hard to separate the sexes, insuring that separate remains unequal...

...the competent and the incompetent...

...If we can look at what men and women actually do—without the distorting mirror of "ideal" gender roles—we must acknowledge a fundamental similarity in personalities, behavior, and competence...

...and that they cannot cope with children, the home, and other aspects of life in the female domain...

...Because of social change, many women are no longer satisfied with secondary gains and limited power in a segregated sphere...

...12 Mary L. Walshok, Blue Collar Women (New York: Doubleday, 1981...

...Women who work in the home are not, indeed, considered to be "working" at all...

...There is a second level to this enforcement of gender division...

...Thus division according to sex is reinforced by requirements that men and women dress differently, learn different skills, and engage in different forms of activity—and violators are severely punished...

...Such women were often trained to perpetuate the myth of special male qualities...

...9 The maintenance of conceptually and physically segregated spheres always reduces women's visibility, supporting the myth that women do not perform adequately even in the roles they actually occupy...

...But gender differences are only one aspect of the larger scheme of conceptual ordering based on dichotomous distinctions...

...that their egos need bolstering because they are unsure of themselves and easily threatened at work...

...In studying the position of women in law, for example, I found that male colleagues regarded them as socially awkward, stiff, inflexible (as opposed to the men's view of themselves as warm and relaxed)—and therefore unacceptable as partners in law firms...

...As more and more women demonstrate competence in once-proscribed areas, reality-testing makes it difficult for both men and women to retain inaccurate conceptions of women's potential...

...Vance Packard, Our Endangered Children: Growing Up in a Changing World (Boston: Little, Brown 1983...

...their work is not viewed as essential for the perpetuation of society...

...Women have been commonly believed to suffer role conflict when they work at jobs outside the home as well as performing housekeeping chores, but recent evidence demonstrates that these women actually suffer less stress than housewives who are not otherwise employed...

...Some theorists today maintain they are different and superior...

...Women's folklore, expressed through informal channels (consider the manuals of instruction provided by women's magazines), has always maintained that women know best about what men need: that men are often childlike and incompetent...

...Yet many women still keep alive old beliefs about their competence...

...Why, then, do women subscribe to their devalued position and accept the notion that they are not only "other" and different, but lesser...

...they all require primary rewards and are less subject to the guilt that women with employed spouses are made to feel about entering the "male" work world...

...Yet it should come as no surprise that the "emotional" Iranian man is accorded higher cultural esteem than the "rational" Iranian woman...

...A number of writers have examined the nature/culture distinction in various societies and analyzed its ideological consequences for women, since women are usually associated with nature and men with culture...

...Rose Laub Coser, "Stay Home, Little Sheba: On Placement, Displacement, and Social Change," in R. Kahn-Hut, A. Kaplan Daniels, and R. Colvard, eds., Women and Work: Problems and Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982...

...See also Judith Lorber and Martha Ecker, "Career Development of Female and Male imaged things real, scholars and activists are discovering a nondichotomous reality and are developing a counterintelligence that may sabotage the dynamics of the self-fulfilling prophecy...

...This has, alas, affected some modes of feminist scholarship that, like the biased research of the past, focuses on the small differences between the genders rather than on the large similarities found in human behavior—and so they conclude that men and women are essentially different...

...Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language (New York: Premier Books, 1963) p. 10...

...they also prevent women from seeing that what men do in these places is nothing that women can't do as well—and might prefer to do...

...Myra Strober, "Segregation by Gender in Public School Teaching: Toward a General Theory of Occupational Segregation in the Labor Market...

...Like men, they are seduced by theology, tradition, and folk wisdom...

...Because polar sex distinctions reflect dichotomous thinking, it is useful to step back for a moment to consider the general functions of such thinking...

...it is not tallied and accumulated as human capital that then becomes marketable as a resource...

...One could argue, as Emile Durkheim did in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), that religions have their own self-maintaining mechanisms, and that distinctions based on polarities, such as heaven and hell, sacred and profane, good and bad—perhaps even male and female—serve these functions...

...Rose Laub Coser wrote recently that the Nixon administration vetoed child-care legislation in order to keep women out of the domain of men, much as opponents of busing mean to restrict black children's integration with white children...

...All these prescribe actions and attitudes for each sex while pressuring individuals to conform to the prescribed "normal" roles...

...In contrast to the popular view that women are unconcerned about achievement and even fear success, new investigations show that they share the same success values as men in school and in the competitive marketplace...

...the second, that the distinctions are also ranked...

...Women may live and work with men, often performing the same tasks, experiencing the same emotions, and learning the same subjects...

...It keeps women from the knowledge that the work men do is not hard or mysterious and from the truth that men, as a class, are not 444 necessarily smarter, more courageous, less emotional, or even physically stronger...

...Split thinking along male/female lines is so firmly entrenched, however, that there remains considerable resistance in theoretical scholarship as well as in popular perception to the notion that it is a social artifice with little basis in fact...

...Since the original distinction, whatever it might once have represented, has become meaningless in the modern workplace, society's denial of reality imposes a false perception of reality on the ideal preferred by the power structure...

...Moving into occupations that men disdain and spheres they have deserted, women are caught up in the endless routine of the household or its workplace equivalent...

...nowhere do they depend on "nature" to get the jobs done...

...The philasophes of the 18th century, especially Diderot, entangled mechanistic physiological theory with social and moral considerations...

...Men also conspire at keeping up this incompetence (once again, real roles following "ideal" roles) because, as women well know, such skills are poorly rewarded...

...they saw women's role in civic and social reform as merely that of becoming better mothers, and Rousseau urged the importance of breast-feeding to that end...

...67-88...

...Thus women were not only instructed to stand by (and behind) their men as helpmates but were subject to a reward system that tied their own social rank or their very jobs to their role in the conspiracy...

...These assignments are justified on the basis of ideologies that maintain the assignments are just and based on popular cultural opinions that the arrangement is good (or that, if not, little can be done about 441 it...

...446 The encouraging news is that this mounting evidence makes it increasingly difficult to obscure the overwhelming similarities between men and women...

...This is not because women holding high positions are resistant to helping other women, as is widely believed in the popular culture—the term commonly used to characterize them is "Queen Bee"—but because so few women have these high positions...

...In agricultural families, for example, only men call themselves farmers, while their wives—who also work the land, drive tractors, and so on—identify themselves as housewives...

...Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New French Feminisms: An Anthology (New York: Schocken, 1980...

...The economist Myra Strober shows how this happens in employment, and in spheres that are uncontested (such as the household where, as William J. Goode pointed out in his 1963 study of family systems, women retain power only until men show a competitive interest in it).' The benefits of such a strategy are short-lived...

...Both Western and Eastern philosophic and religious systems (for example, Pauline Christianity) provide ideological foundations for these beliefs...

...Such splintered thinking that recasts the world in male and female categories has long seemed "right...

...And although their activities there are, paradoxically, less supervised, less routine, and potentially more creative than the opportunities afforded women in the official labor force, they are simultaneously less rewarded and virtually ignored, except by other women in no position to bestow recognition and prestige...

...A growing body of knowledge indicates that, under the same conditions, men and women show similar competence, talent, ambition, and desire in activities that range from running races to doing scientific research...

...And because women are not seen as breadwinners (although many women workers are in fact heads of households), their jobs hold less power and prestige and they are paid less than men...

...The hierarchy is more subtly kept in place by the insistence that people behave in the ways society's opinionmolders say they should...

...Women's cynicism today about these sycophantic activities indicates that the agenda has not always been latent...

...They want everyone to conform to "ideal" roles, and correspondingly to deemphasize the real roles they play...

...Here a structural distinction, whose origins are buried in history, has become institutionalized in society's value system...

...Above all, they are a product of the massive social investment in maintaining these distinctions...

...But gender-linked preconceptions and prejudices cut both ways.' In a current study of employees in a giant corporation, I am finding that female telephone operators, whose jobs have been desegregated by sex, regard male operators as inappropriate in these "women's jobs" and expect them to be transferred to better ones faster than women...

...Men, however, still get maximum rewards for minimal activity in these areas and have little incentive to improve their performance or to work harder or longer at them than women...

...but society must insist that they are doing different things and feeling different emotions...

...Women's domestic labor, as we now realize, suffers from not being called work...

...Paper presented before the National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, Committee on Women's Employment and Related Social Issues, Workshop on Job Segregation by Sex, Washington, D.C., 1982...

...The latter generally implies control or superiority over nature, but this distinction is by no means universal, as it depends on each society's particular characterization of nature—as, for instance, wild or orderly...

...To challenge this notion that basic differences between men and women distinguish their behavior in most spheres of activity is part of the agenda of the women's movement and of much of the "new scholarship" on gender...

...New York Times/CBS Poll, conducted November 11-20,1983, as reported in New York Times, December 19,1983...

...the female the weaker (the "weaker sex"), more erratic in work situations, tending to be guided by emotions...

...Some continue to claim the secondary benefits of "femininity" even while assuming roles still regarded as belonging to the male sex...

...Indeed, men have been repeatedly surprised to find women performing creditably as lawyers, doctors, and prime ministers...

...See my paper "The Dynamics of Ambiguity: Costs and Consequences for Nurses and the Nursing Profession," part of The Fourth Conference on Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing (Kansas City, Missouri: American Nurses Association, 1979...

...Women are again accused of abrogating responsibility for their children, but this time on novel evidence: critics suggest that children "no longer have a childhood" because of the greater frequency of divorce and the entrance of women into the work force...

...See also Bonnie and Vern Bullough, New Directions for Nurses (New York: Springer, 1971...

...Sherry Ortner has explored the possibility that the female/male contrast is a metaphoric transformation of a universal nature/culture contrast.' Claude Levi-Strauss attributes the transition from nature to culture to the capacity to distinguish between "us" (as a kin category) and the "other," leading to the creation of rules in favor of exogamous marriage and against incest...

...Women's demonstration of abilities equaling those of men in business, the professions, and skilled blue-collar work has often resulted in a 445 backlash directed not at their technical abilities but at their interpersonal skills...

...the deserving and the nondeserving...

...Others hold to a "separate-but-equal" notion, stressing the complementary quality of many conceptual differences...

...Social groups do not leave role assignments and ideology to chance...

...But two-thirds (responding to another question) are wary about whether women have changed for the better, and many feel that the movement has "led women astray"—even those (both men and women) whose work lives have improved in the last 15 years...

...Often this work does not have discrete boundaries allowing women to know when it is finished (as in mothering and household chores...

...Moreover, dichotomous distinctions rarely avoid ranked comparisons, and, in the case of female/male, the hierarchy almost always favors the male, whatever the characteristics ascribed to each gender...

...Gender inequality, then, is maintained by the distortion and reshaping of real roles in the name of ideal roles, and the denial and mislabeling of real roles...

...Witness the old adage, "men may work from sun to sun, but women's work is never done...

...The arguments of the common culture persuade them to acceptance and accommodation.' For example, women in the United States are negatively regarded as having emotional personalities...

...People persist in wanting to see the world in terms of sex differences...

...Today's "typical" American worker, for instance, is popularly seen as male, even though nearly half the work force is female...

...1" Debra Kaufman and Barbara L. Richardson, Achievement and Women: Challenging the Assumptions (New York: Free Press, 1982...

...Out of such research we can expect the realities of men's and women's lives to emerge, superseding the stereotyped perceptions of the past...

...Within any social class, women do more lower-class work than men...

...This just may be the time when we discover (paraphrasing a grandfather of sociology) that "what [we thought] was solid, melts into air...

...Women continue to meet resistance, but the gatekeepers must invent new grounds for keeping them out...

...Most dichotomous conceptual pairs are linked to qualitative distinctions—for instance, good is better than bad, and beautiful better than ugly...

...Societies assign groups to be responsible for such social needs as food, shelter, and child care...

...In her study of women working in traditional blue-collar jobs, Mary Walshok documents instances of women forced into incompetence by the hazards put in their way by resistant men, such as assignment to broken-down trucks or poor schedules...

...Not only is the construction of polar oppositions one possible extension of human logic, it is also, in various ways, upheld by a structure of prescribed dogmas and rules...

...Several studies, for example, have observed that nurses devise ways to make doctors believe that they make decisions actually made by the nurses themselves...

...See also Marie Winn, Children Without Childhood (New York: Pantheon, 1983...

...that they are vulnerable, weak reeds depending on women's strength in matters of emotion...

...That conditions vary so regularly and decisively for men and women has more to do with divisions of power in society than with innate sex differences...

...447-56...

...Modern labor practices extend this phenomenon...

...Social change has persuaded some men that they have missed an important part of life by neglecting such women's assignments as contact with children...

...In the case of the two sexes, it appears that whole societies are capable of what psychologists call selective perception...

...The maintenance of separate spheres perpetuates myths of difference in another way...

...secretaries and nurses, for instance, were not expected to become executives or physicians...

...In all these instances, real roles and attitudes are ignored in order to perpetuate "ideals" that support the existing power structure by keeping women in "their" place conceptually, even if they have left it behind in practice...

...The range of work that men and women do in each society is stipulated by that society, and few individuals are permitted to choose outside the approved range...

...The ideology of the powerful is translated into behavior through socialization, persuasion, imitation, custom, and even force...

...In modern societies, women who work in the relatively prestigious public sector also have responsibility for the household: they work two shifts, as sociologist Arlie Hochschild confirms (as, of course, do many others) in her current research on this problem...

...This argument relies on the maintenance of gender differences...

...All these positions, however, perpetuate gender inequality...

...Claude Levi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1969 [1949...

...When women "prop up" these men, while at the same time viewing them as superior, they are also protecting their own sphere (the home) from male competition by doing exactly the kind- of thing men do—asserting that women manage it better and are naturally suited to it...

...In the past, men have permitted women limited access to knowledge about male spheres as long as the women did not aspire to male jobs...

...Changes in society also have meant that many women can no longer benefit from the secondary gains of gender inequality because they lack an appropriate man (husband, father, brother, son) to offer them the possibility of status, security, or "vicarious achievement" (to use Jean Lipman-Blumen's term...

...Some feminist academics, notably in France, argue that science constitutes a masculine mode of thought, reflecting the order of the "outside" structures: those of system and hierarchy.' Defining reason and logic according to masculine/feminine opposites, such critics merely repeat what men, whose thinking they deplore, have traditionally propounded...

...In the past, most of those who held women to be different from men judged them to be inferior...

...Defining something as real when it is not may fly in the face of logic, but it can be partly explained by its usefulness in supporting the idea that "in-groups" have characteristics different from (and superior to) those of "outgroups...

...447...

...The ambivalence here is unmistakable...

...But, as the sociologist Robert K. Merton has pointed out, "What everyone should know from the history of thought is that what everyone knows turns out not to be so at all...

...Dichotomous systems of thought serve existing power structures by reinforcing the notion 443 of the we and the not-we...

...This division of the world into men's and women's roles has generated invidious comparisons: the male is typically considered strong, courageous, logical, the more dependable and competent in work situations, the more gifted in intellectual, scholarly, or artistic pursuits...

...Studies are also bringing to light the processes by which the powerful contrive to manufacture, overemphasize, and broadly maintain gender differences...

...Sociologist Jessie Bernard has suggested that women and men live in two separate cultures (even within the same households), and psychologist Carol Gilligan has asserted that they have different moral systems...

...Because they are the gatekeepers of ideas (to use Lewis Coser's term), those in power can affix values to these distinctions and—when the distinctions lack a basis in reality—actually impose this conceptual inequality on reality...

...And women, still unsure of their new gains, often hesitate to relinquish power totally in this sphere...

...On the basis of current research, the biological differences between men and women have little or no relevance to their behavior and capacities apart from the sexual and reproductive roles...

...Women are not perceived as working in the economically productive marketplace...

...Of particular note, however, is its ironic tenacity in the work of certain distinguished feminist scholars...

...Women's work outside the home is more routine and more supervised than men's, reducing their chance of accumulating power...

...In an extension of this observation, Levi-Strauss has claimed that the foundation of social structure is the human capacity to build a perception of the world by perceiving opposites or contrasts...

...Assuming negative trends in the way children are raised, such arguments inevitably (as in earlier times) trace the fault to women as mothers, not to men as fathers...

...See my article "Women's Attitudes Toward Other Women: Myths and Their Consequences," American Journal of Psychotherapy, July 1980...

...Women prevent men from becoming competent in the home, holding that men's personality traits are not suitable for women's roles (because they are different traits) and that men's biology impedes their acquisition of the required attitudes, such as nurturance—although some now concede that men could use remedial help in trying to become a little more like women...

...This error has led to two faulty assumptions...

...Anthropologists studying Iran, however, have concluded that Iranian men are seen as emotional and women as rational...

...Even within the same occupations, women tend to do the less visible work, as my study of lawyers, and Judith Lorber's of medical professionals, and similar investigations have shown.' Because women's work overlaps the boundaries of institutional spheres, women as a group have more work to do than men...

...7 Grace Baruch, Rosalind Barnett, and Caryl Rivers, Lifeprints (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983...

...See also my book Women in Law (New York: Basic Books, 1981, and paperback, Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1983...

...In my current research, I have found that the women most likely to take on nontraditional blue-collar work are older women, divorced women, and black women with dependents...

...These contradictions are revealed in numerous studies...

...These writers, rejecting the corrupt mores of French society, saw a return to nature as a move toward freedom...

...and their personality traits, learning capacity, wish and ability to control, and needs to compete and excel are not seen to be essentially similar to those of men...

...and men [and women] at last are forced to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men [and women...

...Thus Levi-Strauss maintains that we can achieve a Rousseauian social contract, giving up the state of nature for 442 reciprocating non-kin ties.' Unlike most of the basic requirements for individual survival, procreation— which is necessary to maintain society as a whole—demands paired opposites, male and female...

...It appears, furthermore, that popular investment in the "reality" of behavioral differences between the sexes is so strong that often the same behavior is labeled differently, depending on which sex is referred to...

...Their view of women, though correspondingly positive, was essentially conservative...

...Its findings are surprising, since they appear to be contrary to so much popular belief and much of the older "social-scientific" findings (based on biased methodology and interpretation...

...it appears in all societies, from the most primitive to the most modern...

...Indeed, the marketplace is structured so that women are virtually excluded from the reward structure set up by the powerful...

...Elise Boulding, "The Labor of Farm Women in the United States: A Knowledge Gap," paper presented before the American Sociological Association, session on "Women and Work," Boston, 1979...

...An insistence that gender differences are rooted in the most basic nature of men and women still colors the work of respected scholars in such disciplines as economics, sociology, psychology, and the hybrid field of sociobiology...

...Sociobiologists argue that the division of labor by sex is a biological rather than a social response...

...Thus "ideal" roles (or archetypes, in Max Weber's sense) mask real behavior...

...The first is the assertion that feminine/masculine distinctions have an empirical reality in addition to the biological reproductive apparatus...

...Exclusive clubs, special schools, and segregated workplaces not only function to keep women out of interesting and important areas of activity...

...in M. Z. Rosaldo, L. Lamphere, eds., Woman, Culture and Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), pp...

...Jean Lipman-Blumen, Alice Handley-lsaksen and Harold J. Leavitt, "Achieving Styles in Men and Women: A Model, an Instrument and Some Findings," in Janet T. Spence, ed., Achievement and Achievement Motives (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1983...

...Both processes reinforce a belief in the inevitability of social differences caused by sexual differences...

...The literal binding of women's feet or constraint of their minds by law and social custom, however, is only part of the process by which the gender division of human beings perpetuates a two-class system...

...Physicians," Journal of Medical Education, June 1983, pp...

...Some expression of this conflicted response can be found in a 1983 New York Times/CBS Poll," which shows that one-fourth of a sample of Americans (men and women) feel that their lives have been improved by the women's movement...

...They deny their common cause with women as an underclass and cling to a definition, complimentary to men, of women as "other" (being different...

...See also William J. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York: Free Press, 1963...

...Anthropologists also have contributed much to this discussion...

...Such ideologies and popular views, in other words, suppose that a "fit" exists between job and worker—a fit that makes sense...

...But if this were so, sex-role assignments would not have to be coercive...

...as cited in Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, eds., Nature, Culture and Gender (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980...

...But the hierarchical structure persists without reference to specific value judgments...

...even the effects of early gender socialization may be reversed by adult experiences...

...Under whatever auspices, the association of women with nature and therefore, by anatomical analogy, with child care has long provided an excuse for excluding them from the political realm.' Anatomical sex characteristics, such as the physiological correlates of age, provide a framework to which cultures can attach a broad range of social differences that in fact have little to do with anatomy...

...paperback Doubleday/Anchor, 1983...

...others have had little choice but to fill in at some of the tasks that employed women, now newly endowed with power, have relinquished...

...Not only have such polarities become part of the common culture, they have been integrated into systems of scientific thought supposedly designed to be free of illogical distinctions...

...I will examine some of the reasons for this conviction of gender inequality and identify some processes by which it maintains itself...

...Some feminist anthropologists claim that, while both men and women have power, women's power lies in the private, men's in the public sphere...

...Although people "manage reality" and make Notes ' Sherry B. Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture...

...In most societies, women seek to maximize their power in those domains where they find an opportunity to exert control...

...The activities for women are repetitious and poorly valued, and the skills they develop are rarely transferable (or are considered untransferable) to the part of the workplace that is highly regarded or highly paid...

...Furthermore, the men complain that customers show surprise and anger at hearing a male voice when they expect to hear a woman, sometimes taunting them as "faggots" or using other pejorative terms...

...Social groups do not in fact depend on instincts or physiology to enforce social arrangements— because they cannot reliably do so...

...See my book Women in Law (New York: Basic Books, 1981...

...Typically, these are spheres relinquished by men...

...The wife whose status depends on her husband's rank can similarly be counted on to assist in mystifying his occupational role, making it seem that he does something others cannot do...

...thus male is better than female...