Christina Hoff Sommers has a post at The Atlantic today, devoted to ankle-biting Sheryl Sandberg's hot new book Lean In. It's a nice mixture of misreading and illogic, which I gather is typical of Sommers.
First she takes a swipe at Katha Pollitt, who defended Sandberg as being "like someone who’s just taken Women’s Studies 101 and wants to share it with her friends." Sommers complains that Lean In "is mired in 1970s-style feminism ... What Pollitt intends as a compliment goes to the heart of what is wrong with Lean In." I think Sommers's ear for tone is a bit off. Read in context, Pollitt's remarks feel patronizing (or rather matronizing) to me.
I gather that by "1970s-style feminism" Sommers means a sort of blank-slate approach to gender, where social conditioning is all and biology is nothing. True, some 1970s feminists did talk that way, but even those who did had a tendency to fall back into essentialist "women are naturally gentle and nurturing" talk. Like many people discussing differences between groups, however, Sommers tends to turn relative differences between men and women into absolute ones, and to forget how those absolutes have shifted just in the past century, and how much they vary from place to place even now. So, for example:
Sandberg's goal is to liberate her fellow Americans from the stereotypes of gender. But is that truly liberating? In a 2008 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a group of international researchers compared data on gender and personality across 55 nations. Throughout the world, women tend to be more nurturing, risk averse and emotionally expressive, while men are usually more competitive, risk taking, and emotionally flat. But the most fascinating finding is this: Personality differences between men and women are the largest and most robust in the more prosperous, egalitarian, and educated societies. According to the authors, "Higher levels of human development—including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth—were the main nation-level predictors of sex difference variation across cultures." New York Times science columnist John Tierney summarized the study this way: "It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India's or Zimbabwe's than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France."First, notice "women tend to be more nurturing, risk averse and emotionally expressive, while men are usually more competitive, risk taking, and emotionally flat" (italics mine). Like many sex/gender reactionaries, Sommers papers over the immense variation among men and among women. Women tend to be more nurturing than men, but not all of them are, and they vary widely in how nurturing they are; likewise, many men are more nurturing than others, and some may be more nurturing than most women. Nurturing is partly a learned pattern of behavior, for females no less than males, requiring active practice as well as a modeled example. Every man has been nurtured, so he has some idea of what it entails, and he can learn to do it. It ain't rocket science. But while sex/gender reactionaries are very solicitous of people refusing to learn skills not stereotypical of their sex, they have no objection to forcing people to do what is expected of their gender. One of the simplest examples of what I mean is "Boys don't cry." If boys didn't cry, it wouldn't be necessary to tell them not to. "Boys don't cry" is a normative demand pretending to be a description.
Second, notice "Personality differences between men and women are the largest and most robust in the more prosperous, egalitarian, and educated societies." That undermines Sommers' assumption that personality differences between men and women are innate and immutable -- unless she wants to claim that the differences between "more prosperous, egalitarian, and educated societies" are innate, biologically based, and immutable. She's careful not to say so, so I gather she accepts that economic change can influence gender quite powerfully -- and if that's so, then her position collapses.
People are probably not totally malleable: we're made of flesh, after all, not light or electrons. But women have accomplished many things that, fifty and a hundred years ago, gender reactionaries were certain they couldn't do. A commenter named Brandt wrote under Sommers's post:
Isn't it possible that these "cultural constructs" are rooted in the immutable characteristics of males and females? Might there be something in the biological makeup of boys that steers them away from "fetishizing" princes and towards cowboys and GI Joes? I think you need to open your mind to the idea that "culture" isn't just a simple patriarchal construct...Oh, there might be "something in the biological makeup of boys that steers them away from 'fetishing' princes and towards cowboys." Almost anything is possible. But without actual evidence to support that claim, Brandt is just blowing smoke. There is evidence about the ways in which people are pressured and induced to perform in gendered ways, however.