Balancing Biology and Equality

...258 pp...

...Men shied off, dismissing the whole subject as "women's stuff," and women were in many instances more reluctant...

...The other is the strident feminism of the 1970s, with its attempt to clone the male competitive model and to disdain anything that smacks of protective treatment for women...

...Her life speedily degenerated into a series of increasingly disagreeable compromises as she tried to balance the conflicting requirements of her dual role...

...The college's president, Ellen Futter, herself an alumna o f the class of 1971, has had two children since taking over in 1980, the second just last December...

...The nation was committing its resources to the abolition of poverty and urban rot, despite the drains of the Vietnam War...

...But neither the substantial prestige she enjoys in this post nor the flexibility of hours it permits to accommodate her familial responsibilities has caused Hewlett to lose her anger over the cross-pulls that make life a hell for millions of working women seeking to fulfill the demands of two irreconcilable social imperatives...

...Today she is vice president for economic studies of the Economic Policy Council of the United Nations Association, a think-tank that brings together a hundred ranking industrialists, financiers, labor leaders, and academics to advise on public policy...

...The speed of marriage breakdowns (not to mention the failure of marriages to materialize) has enormously aggravated the financial pinch on the working mother...

...Hence the state is in conflict with the 1978 Federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act, specifying that for all job-related purposes "women affected by pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions" shall be treated the same as other individuals "similar in their ability or inability to work...

...But the body of knowledge emerging from any new approach will be no less flawed than the conceits she is challenging if the researchers get carried away with her admonition that theirs must be a "feminist" program to meet the needs of a just society...

...Alimony is paidin only 5-10 per cent of divorces, and two-thirds of mothers awarded custody of their children get no child support...

...At the beginning of this academic year, Barnard instituted a policy allowing faculty members six months of pregnancy leave at half pay, plus up to two half-year periods for infant care, also at half pay...

...A Federal appeals court, in backing the receptionist's right to reinstatement, put things in proper perspective by ruling that Congress' purpose was to "construct a floor beneath which pregnancy disability benefits may not drop—not a ceiling above which they may not rise...

...Hewlett, a scrapper, bounced back strongly from her initial upset...

...A great forward leap along these lines seems improbable in the dawn of the Gramm-Rudman era...

...Half of the current marriages are winding up in court, and a 10-year study by Professor Lenore J. Weitzman of Stanford University indicates that the spread of no-fault divorce laws has left women holding an ever shorter end of the stick...

...That is too bad...

...The ostrichlike effects of such feminist absolutism are painfully on exhibit in a case now awaiting rev iew by the Supreme Court...

...Women are different from men, their physical functions are different, and the future of the race depends upon their ability to produce healthy children," was the core of her philosophy...

...Raskin Former chief labor correspondent and editorial board member, the New York "Times" Throughout most of its history the United States has ranked as the country in which the frontiers of women's rights were expanding fastest...

...All this on top of a built-in pay bias against women workers that has been frozen for two decades at a level about 60 per cent of the average for men...

...The great bulk, though, remain anchored in female ghettos in clerical pools, garment factories, hospital kitchens, and other dead-end jobs...

...Blacks, women and young people were all on the march...

...To be sure, women are beginning to make it as MBAs, doctors, lawyers, TV an-chorpersons, astronauts, and even as coal miners, plumbers and truck drivers...

...The ironic upshot of a decade of militant feminism at Barnard, Hewlett notes, is that its economics department has gone from having 100 per cent of its senior faculty made up of women to a current ratio of only 25 per cent...

...By contrast, she points out, the social feminists of Europe have consistently placed motherhood at center stage and have sought to reconcile the demands of childbirth and child-rearing with those of the workplace and the larger community...

...Her euphoria on that score evaporated when she gave birth to her first child in 1977, at the age of 31...

...They reached a consensus on an action program involving a combination of governmental and private initiatives...

...18.95 Reviewed by A.H...

...In Myths of Gender, Anne Fausto-Sterling, an associate professor of medical sciences at Brown University, tackles another major area of misconceptions and injustices inflicted upon women by our still overwhelmingly male-dominated society...

...The difficulty here is that, as an ardent feminist, Fausto-Sterling is excessively eager to prove there is no such thing as apolitical science when it comes to gender...

...Hewlett is no Phyllis Schlafly, declaiming against the bra burners and crockery smashers...

...With grants from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations she established a family policy panel in the Economic Policy Council, jointly chaired by Alice S. Ilchman, president of Sarah Lawrence College, and John J. Sweeney, president of the Service Employees International Union...

...Benjamin Spock and similar pediatric savants...

...The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing rallied to the fired clerk's support...

...Now we have to put our money where our mouth is...

...Much of the fault for this, in her estimation, lies in the dogmatism of feminist leaders...

...In the end she was denied tenure by Columbia despite a unanimous recommendation by her department and by the Barnard tenure committee...

...The women's liberation movement was by then in full swing and Hewlett was buoyed by a triumphant conviction that she would make it on the fast track as a pioneer in a golden generation...

...The specific case involves a receptionist at a Los Angeles bank who lost her job after taking off two months to have a baby...

...Not so the arch-feminists...

...One is the cult of all-embracing motherhood built up in the ultradomestic 1950s and still enshrined in the preachments of Dr...

...Nonetheless, Hewlett persevered until she signed on luminaries like former President Gerald Ford, former Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall and Joyce Miller, president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, plus a baker's dozen of top industrialists, unionists and educators...

...The statute requires employers to allow up to four months of unpaid leave to pregnant employees, and to reinstate them upon their return unless demonstrable "business necessity" gets in the way...

...Barnard had no program of maternity leave, paid or unpaid, and she had to be back at her teaching post in 10 days...

...It calls for maternity leaves, quality child care, flexible work schedules and improved health care services for mothers and children...

...Some things are changing for the better, however...

...The tidal wave of women assuming jobs has made her point even more pertinent today...

...Undermining the female scramble to manage both roles, Hewlett stresses, is the failure of Democratic and Republican administrations alike to provide statutory underpinnings for the maternity leaves and child-care facilities that are taken for granted by working parents in the industrialized democracies of Western Europe...

...A Lesser Life represents an effort by one outraged woman to wake up America to the necessity of doing something to bring practices in the U.S...

...They are so captivated by the intellectual purity of their demands for formal equality in every realm of male-female relationship that they have pushed aside and often actively campaigned against measures aimed at better reconciling the pressures of motherhood and employment—a tragic disservice to the 50 million women now in the work force, the great bulk of whom are out there because they need to earn a living...

...She would have it all: career success and motherhood, without having to sacrifice fulfillment in one role to advance the other...

...at least up to those already well-ingrained in Europe's democracies...

...The senior vice-president of a major manufacturing company excused herself on the ground that it had taken her 15 years to get "a hard-nosed reputation," and she dared not put it at risk by getting into "these messy women's issues...

...Although I am no expert in socio-bi-ology, I found Fausto-Sterling's pronouncements sufficiently unsettling to make me a ready assenter to her concluding observation that it is time for the scientific community to "clean up its act" and undertake a new program of research on gender-related matters affecting human potentialities and behavior...

...That was very much the focus of the old Women's Trade Union League and of other ground-breaking feminists in this country, Eleanor Roosevelt prominent among them...

...When Sylvia Ann Hewlett, one of six daughters of a struggling schoolteacher in a South Wales mining village, came to Harvard on a fellowship in 1967 after graduating from Cambridge, she was exhilarated by a sense of being in the right place at the right time...

...Recruiting blue-ribbon executives for the panel proved a lot harder than it had been to get members for groups analyzing such issues as monetary policy, full employment or global trade...

...Three out of every five women with children under 16 are now in the job market...

...It has brought about a weird alliance, in which the National Organization for Women and the American Civil Liberties Union are lined up alongside Ronald Reagan's Justice Department and a broad array of employer groups in asking the High Court to strike down a California law...

...I have nowhere seen women occupying a loftier position," he wrote in his perceptive Democracy in America...

...The Federal law, as the feminists are well aware, was passed with an intent precisely opposite to the position they are currently championing...

...The result in California, where the first no-fault divorce law was passed in 1970, has been that a woman's standard of living drops an average of 73 per cent one year after divorce, while that of her former husband rises by 42 per cent...

...Consequently, the evidence she meticulously assembles— on distorted notions about menstruation, menopause and other subjects— is rendered suspect by the book's accusatory tone: Her findings are put forward as a societal indictment of male determination to keep women permanently submerged and subservient...

...I don't think the work market has to accommodate itself to women having children...

...One fellow faculty member crystallized their senti-iment by reminding Hewlett that Barnard was a college, not a creche...

...Nevertheless, Mayor Dianne Fein-stein of San Francisco, in explaining why she feels women should be against the laws for pregnant employees adopted by her state and four others, declared: "What we have been saying all along is we want to be treated equally...

...She impressively debunks many venerable shibboleths masquerading as scientific truths concerning the supposed intellectual and physical limitations of women, and they have been used through the years to disadvantage females in industry, the professions, academe, sports, and dozens of other fields...

...Alexis de Tocqueville subscribed to this view as far back as 1830...

...families, as against roughly 50 per cent in the 1950s...

...It was designed to prevent employers who had disability programs that provided leave for sick workers from denying leave to mothers...

...16.95 Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men By Anne Fausto-Sterling Basic Books...

...Yet the establishment character of the panel, and the forcefulness with which Hewlett presents the arguments supporting its recommendations in her decidedly readable book, should convince many legislators —if not the White House—that reforms of this type represent a realistic, indeed a modest, investment in the nation's future...

...Her sense of having become a straggler in academe at the same time that she was short-changing her family was heightened by the undisguised hostility of her feminist colleagues in an institution whose Women's Center had long established it as a liberationist stronghold...

...But she doesn't pull any punches in arguing that the legislative campaigns the women's movement has mounted on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights have no parallel in the area of urging policies geared to helping women deal with the grinding realities of their daily lives as mothers and wage-earners...

...The author's flamboyant parading of her own sexual biases, though, robs her book of much of the persuasiveness the caliber of her research and insights would otherwise entitle it to have...

...There is nothing of Don Quixote in Hewlett's approach...

...No one leaves her a note of reproof when her first child, now four, drops into the office accompanied by nanny...

...They here argued that the law is invalid because California did not mandate corresponding protection for workers disabled by sickness, as distinct from pregnancy...

...One-quarter of all children are being raised—and largely supported—by their mothers in female-headed families, and over half of those households have incomes below the poverty line...

...The classic mold of a bread winning husband, dependent homemaking wife and two children at presentfitsonly6percentofU.S...

...Seven years later, after completing her PhD studies at the London School of Economics, she moved here permanently and became an assistant professor of economics at Barnard...