Rebels in White Gloves (23 page)

The currently dominant biological account of woman’s nature was well summarized in Robert Wright’s 1994 best-seller on evolutionary psychology,
The Moral Animal
. The underlying principle of evolutionary psychology is this: that the same Darwinian mechanisms of natural and sexual selection that shaped our physiology over the course of 2 million years of evolution also shaped our minds. Adaptive yearnings and behaviors—those that maximize the survival of genes by enhancing the survival and reproductive success of their host individual and its offspring—endure, while maladaptive urges are gradually diluted out of the species. Biologist Richard Dawkins has put it most bluntly, calling human beings “robot vehicles that are blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”

Wright reiterates several standard descriptions of female nature. The theory of the “coy female,” first proposed by Darwin, holds that in most
species the female is less sexually eager than the male because she can reproduce only a limited number of times and at high cost. She must therefore be far more selective about her mates, securing not only good genes, but also a long-term commitment of his resources to the survival of her young. A male, conversely, improves his chances of passing on his genes by having sex with as many partners as possible, even if he invests heavily in the survival of only some of his progeny. Wright chides feminists who have supported divorce for failing to see that it licenses men to act on their promiscuous carnal desires and robs women of the long-term claim on paternal resources that is allegedly their chief desire. He cites anthropological research as proof of the asymmetry of desire. “Can anyone find a single culture,” he asks, “in which women with unrestrained sexual appetites aren’t viewed as more aberrant than comparably libidinous men?”

The second argument Wright recycles is that competition and dominance are far less important for a female, because status does not determine her capacity to get sex as it does for a male, who if powerful gets lots of mates but if weak risks being shut out of the reproductive game. Females may be underrepresented in high-paying jobs not as a result of discrimination, he concludes, but because they lack the genetic predisposition to seek power.

Two kinds of evidence are summoned to support such hypotheses. Studies of animal behavior, especially primates, are used to illuminate human evolutionary antecedents; studies of human culture seek universal attributes across cultural and historic lines, focusing particularly on hunter-gatherer societies, the dominant form of social organization throughout most of the period in which human beings evolved. The evidence, that is, comes from both the archaeological record (and modern anthropology in relic hunter-gatherer societies) and from biology.

The myth of Pandora’s box gave Ellen Reeder the central insight for her exhibition on women in antiquity. Though the Greek Pandora was the mother of the human race, she was not, like the Judeo-Christian Eve, a gift to cure man’s loneliness but rather a punishment for Prometheus’s theft of fire. Before Pandora, men dined with the gods and suffered neither sickness nor sorrow; without women, they were not born and did not die. Only when the defiant and devious Pandora opened her “box”—the jar that is also her body, her womb, her genitals—were all the miseries released into the world.

With her collaborators on the exhibition (including her former professor, Wellesley classicist Mary Lefkowitz), Reeder reconsidered the central Greek stories of divine and mortal women as told visually in classical vase paintings and sculpture. What Reeder found was an ancient conception of female nature as far from the “coy female” as one could imagine. Woman was, in the judgment of the Greeks, insatiable and indiscriminate in her carnal appetites. More animal than human, ruled by instinct and not reason, she was a danger to civilization, a “hungry mouth” devouring man’s strength and menacing the social order. Like Pandora, she was adept at concealing secrets, a weaver of disguises and entrapping webs. She was the Medusa, with her snaky locks like pubic hair and her paralyzing gaze; Circe on her all-female island making a consort of Odysseus and impotent pigs of his men; Omphale, buying Heracles for her sex slave; Phaedra lusting for her stepson; Helen and Clytemnestra, whose adultery brought the heroic age to an end. Man is not sexual predator, in this conception, but prey. Tiresias the seer, who spent part of his youth as a girl, testified that a woman derives nine times as much pleasure from sex as a man. She may mask her lust with love, but only men grow truly lovesick and need to be cured.

The artifacts Reeder assembled were designed to alert the men of Athens to the dangers of an ungoverned woman, but also to demonstrate that her sexuality could be brought under male control. In the end, in these illustrated morality plays, the Greek heroes slay the she-monsters, break the spells, exact revenge for women’s sins. The defeat by a male hero (Heracles, Theseus, Achilles) of the Amazons—those fierce female archers who refuse to marry, have sex when it suits them, slay their enemies, and rear their children without men—is a favorite tale, ending as it does with the proper restoration of male domain.

The marriage rite was, for the Greeks, the most important symbolic enactment of the taming by man of the female will. Performed at the onset of puberty, when a girl awakened sexually, the ceremony culminated in the groom’s grasping the bride’s wrist in a gesture of abduction while she, trained by older women to show submission, disarmed her most potent weapon by dropping her gaze. Through the transformative power of art, the female predator is thus made prey. Her reproductive powers were also ritually usurped: After each birth, the child’s father decided whether the infant would be reared or abandoned in the woods to die, overriding the power of her womb with his legal authority.

Over the course of the century traced by Reeder’s show, the advance of Greek culture brings a refinement of this triumph by civilization over the natural sexual order. Archaic period vase paintings of Odysseus’s encounter with Circe focus on her power to seduce him, while later classical vases capture the moment he makes her submit to his will. The myth of Pygmalion marks man’s ultimate triumph through culture over female nature: The sculptor who despises real women carves of ivory a perfect female, entirely subject to his control.

Whether or not Reeder’s work provides a convincing rebuke to Darwinian theories of coy females, it does suggest that claims to document universal qualities of female nature by resort to history and anthropology require more subtlety of interpretation than the evolutionists sometimes bring. A vase painting of a husband abducting a wife is not, as Reeder shows, a historical account of “natural” fifth-century
B.C.
sexual behavior—proof of the coy female who must be forcibly taken—but an example of the central function of art and ritual: to assert man’s will
against
the state of nature, to school the minds of the public to accept civilization and its discontents. Wright misses that distinction when he claims that the view across cultures of libidinous women as aberrant is proof that a powerful female libido
is
abnormal. Surely it is equally possible, as Freud suggested, that a culture’s definition of female lasciviousness as aberrant, its need to impose a taboo, suggests not the absence of a natural impulse but the reverse, an impulse so powerful and dangerous as to demand social control.

Reeder’s work illuminates other careless uses of the archaeological record. The dependence of females on male resources in hunter-gatherer society is assumed in most “nature” arguments about her sexual selectivity, but such dependence was not always the case. Massive climactic and technological changes during the last 2 million years more than once radically altered the human economy and women’s place in it. Bronze Age women, Reeder points out, produced most textiles and therefore controlled an important segment of economic life. And though during ice ages women and children did depend heavily on what men could hunt, much recent archaeology suggests that for most of prehistory, female gatherers were the primary “breadwinners.” The evidence that women had a crucial provider’s role was long overlooked, says Reeder, because of academics’ bias: She recalls digs on which senior
archaeologists simply tossed aside Neolithic female figurines as uninteresting. Women’s place in Greek society was similarly obscured, she says, because of a scholarly preoccupation with politics and war, both activities reserved for men. The record of sexual behavior has been particularly distorted by archaeological bias; until recently, “obscene” artifacts were frequently destroyed.

Of course, selective interpretations of cultural history are not the exclusive province of biased males. Mary Lefkowitz has written an entire book aimed at undoing reductionist accounts by feminists of antiquity, including efforts by acolytes of the goddess movement to make cartoon heroines of the complex women of Greek myth and tragedy. Her scoldings earned her the distinction of being cast in one of Wellesley alumna Carolyn Heilbrun’s Amanda Cross mysteries as that “damn classics prig” who disparages the Amazons and Antigone.

Martha McClintock was just twenty years old when, perched at the edge of a room full of the world’s top biologists, she broke into their conversation with an observation that would become the basis for a study of major scientific importance. It was the summer after her junior year at Wellesley, and Martha was invited, with a handful of other students, to attend a conference at Jackson Laboratory in Maine. The scientists were discussing pheromones—chemical messages that pass between organisms without their conscious knowledge—and how they cause female mice to ovulate all at the same time. McClintock recalled the event for
Chicago
magazine: “Driven by curiosity despite my self-consciousness, I mention that the same thing happens in humans. Didn’t they know that? All of them being male, they didn’t. In fact, I got the impression that they thought it was ridiculous. But they had the courtesy to frame their skepticism as a scientific question: ‘What is your proof?’ I said it was what happened in my dormitory. And they said unless you address it scientifically, that evidence is worthless.”

Her Wellesley faculty adviser, Patricia Sampson, encouraged Martha to take up the challenge, and the 135 women in her dorm agreed to participate. Each woman recorded the dates of her menstruation and also how often she spent time with men. The data confirmed that the cycles of roommates and friends became synchronous, and that women who had little contact with men (“You could only do this study at Wellesley,”
Martha jokes) had longer cycles, suggesting that ovulation was not taking place and was perhaps influenced, as in mice, by casual contact with males. She wrote up her results as her senior thesis and the next year, in graduate school at Harvard, was urged by E. O. Wilson, the sociobiologist famous for his studies of chemical signaling among ants, to submit her findings to
Nature
magazine. Published in 1971, when Martha was twenty-three, the paper was the first scientific evidence ever presented of the functioning of human pheromones.

Though she now works in a $12 million laboratory built by the University of Chicago to house her research, Martha McClintock has for three decades continued to pursue the question first posed in the Wellesley study: How do social interactions and environment affect female reproductive physiology? And, more broadly, how does the mind work on the body? Her top-down, outside-in approach inverts the usual link explored by scientists between biology and behavior, and complicates the notion of biology as destiny. “A common bias among biologists is to approach reproduction from the bottom up. Someone interested in the timing of ovulation begins with the hypothalamus, then individual neurons in the hypothalamus, then proteins that regulate one calcium channel in each neuron,” McClintock explains. But as demonstrated in the Wellesley study, a woman’s social behavior also affects the neuroendocrine mechanisms that regulate the timing of ovulation. Though “the molecular level of analysis is important, so are higher levels.”

The notion of mind over body is a favorite of the New Age but one rarely studied with the scientific rigor that McClintock brings. In 1995 she was invited to join the MacArthur Foundation’s Mind-Body Network, which sponsors collaborative studies among specialists in psychophysiology, endocrinology, and immunology of how states of mind affect health. With psychiatrist David Spiegel of Stanford University, McClintock has built on her lifelong interest in the protective function of strong social relationships by studying the effects of group therapy on women with metastatic breast cancer. The studies have shown that terminal patients who clearly voiced their needs and discussed their fears of death lived twice as long after the study began as those who did not, results comparable to those patients who take tamoxifen, a drug made to slow tumor growth. “It wasn’t Norman Cousins, ‘Will away your cancer, envision yourself cured,’ ” says Martha. “If it suggested anything, it was that denial is toxic.”

From the outset, McClintock’s interest in the effects of environment on biology has required her to invent unconventional experimental strategies. At the University of Pennsylvania, where she did her Ph.D. (and was also a resident in psychiatry), she decided not to study the specially bred rats used by every lab in the world, hypothesizing that their behaviors did not mimic that of rats in the wild. She asked a “kindly Mr. Herbert,” who supervised the Philadelphia public health patrol, if he could live-trap twelve rats for her from the sewer. He delivered them dead, not believing that anyone could want his vermin alive.

Mr. Herbert was finally persuaded to deliver live rats to McClintock, which presented a second problem: how to house the creatures, which can bite through quarter-inch steel, in something resembling their natural habitat. The daughter of an engineer, McClintock contrived for her rats a home built of sticks, rocks, and wire mesh, with trails and places to nest and hide, all monitored by cameras so that even while the rats scurried through heaps of litter and nooks and tubes, they could be constantly surveilled. Tagging the rats posed another problem, since the marker used on the typically albino domestic strains of rats was invisible in the wild ones’ gloomy fur. McClintock tried bleaching fur patches with Clairol Nice ’n Easy, but nothing happened. “In such a case, scientists consult an expert,” she told
Chicago
. “So I called Bonwit Teller’s hair salon. I said, ‘I’m working with animals, how do you bleach their’—I didn’t want to say it was rats, so I used the word
pelts.”
They transferred her to their colorist, Mr. Andre, who advised shampoo, followed by peroxide and then dye. “He said, ‘Why don’t you bring the animals in, so I could help?’ I had fun thinking of taking sewer rats to the salon, but said, ‘Thank you. I couldn’t possibly.’ ”