The Undivided Past (24 page)

In the antebellum United States, an additional case was made for the innate equality between men and women that, despite the teaching of
Genesis, was based on
religious rather than
secular enlightenment. For while the
Christian church taught that women were by their nature inferior, it also proclaimed that all souls, regardless of their sex, were spiritual equals in the sight of
God. Although
Saint Paul urged wives to “submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord,” he also insisted that “there is neither
Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in
Christ Jesus.”
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This sense that
human beings were “all one” in the sight of God could be taken as implying that they should enjoy a moral equality here on earth, and this belief in shared humanity justified both the campaign against slavery and the active participation of American women in it. Yet the argument against slavery on the basis of the moral equality of all human beings, whether white or
black, could clearly be extended to claim that men and women were moral equals too, for just as equality trumped the biological difference of skin color on the outside, so too did it override the difference in reproductive mechanisms within. “This regulation of duty,” the abolitionist and suffrage campaigner
Angelina Grimké wrote, “by the mere circumstance of sex, rather than by the fundamental principle of moral being, has led to that multifarious train of evils flowing out of the anti-Christian doctrine of masculine and feminine virtues.” Her sister Sarah took the same view: “men and women,” she observed in her
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes
, dissenting from Genesis, “were created equal. They are both moral and accountable beings, and whatever is right for man to do, is right for a woman.”
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In 1848, and partly inspired by the revolutionary events in Europe, the first women’s rights convention ever held in the United States took place at
Seneca Falls, New York, at which these
two American traditions, the rationalist and the religious, were interwoven in a new
Declaration of Independence, which began by overturning the “false universalism” that had characterized the original document of 1776, replacing it with more appropriately inclusive language that recognized the existence and equivalence of the other “half” of
humanity: “we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women were created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” and “that woman is man’s equal—was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such.”
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But recognition of this innate equality had not yet come, and the Declaration continued with a list of grievances at the
legal,
educational, financial, professional, political, and customary constraints under which all women labored. It was men who were responsible for this state of affairs, usurping “the prerogative of Jehovah himself” in claiming the right to assign to women “a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to
God.” Here was a commitment to the moral equality, universal rights, and common humanity of men and women, and to their shared identity, anticipating the UN Declaration 120 years later.
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Such writing about the intrinsic equivalence between men and women was not confined to the
United States. In 1869,
John Stuart Mill, son of
James Mill, took a very different line from his father in his essay
The Subjection of Women
, arguing for the equality of the sexes and deploring the fact that half of the population was held in a state of subjugation by a mixture of bribery, intimidation, and legal sanctions.
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Ten years later,
Henrik Ibsen addressed similar issues in his play
A Doll’s House
, which ends as Nora walks out on her beloved children, and also on the husband who adores but infantilizes her. “I’ve been your doll-wife here,” she tells him, “just as at home I was papa’s doll-child.” Facing her husband’s entreaty to stay, on the grounds that she is indeed a wife and mother before all else, Nora refuses: “I don’t believe that any longer,” she tells him. “I believe that before everything else I’m a human being—just as much as you are.… At any rate I shall try to become one.”
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A few years later, in the aftermath of
Marx’s death,
Friedrich Engels turned to an exploration of the
relations between the sexes, and concluded that the differences and inequalities between men and women were neither biological nor perpetual. On the contrary, “the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage” was a specific phase in
human history, resulting from the advent of private property,
capitalism, and bourgeois society. In the modern family, the husband was the bourgeois and the wife the proletarian, which meant that “true equality between men and women,” which Engels claimed had existed in precapitalist times, could be restored only “when the exploitation of both by capital has been abolished, and private work in the home been transformed into a public industry.”
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Engels naturally believed that such “true equality between men and women” could only be brought about by a proletarian
revolution, but during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more moderate arguments were advanced on both sides of the Atlantic that the essential sameness and equality of the sexes would be most effectively proclaimed by giving women the
vote: women, like men, were fully human, and so it was intrinsically unjust to deny them the
political and constitutional rights that had already been granted to men.
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These arguments gathered strength during the
First World War, as millions of men went off to fight and women successfully took over much of their work back home, thereby demonstrating their equality in more practical and often in physical ways. For President
Woodrow Wilson, this was a compelling case, as he explained to Congress when advocating the extension of the
franchise to women in 1918: “The least tribute we can pay them is to make them the equals of men in political rights as they have proved themselves their equals in every field of practical work they have entered.”
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By this time, there were feminists who were insisting that equal partnerships between men and women would achieve the one single, all-encompassing “human sex,” which was only incidentally divided into male and female. In the land of the “human sex,” the differences and inequalities between men and women would finally dissolve, and the result, according to the Russian-born anarchist
Emma Goldman, would be a “true companionship and oneness.”
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“True companionship and oneness” was what
Simone de Beauvoir later believed she had found with
Jean-Paul Sartre: a relationship of equality based on their shared sense of common humanity. But in
The Second Sex
, she argued that most women had been denied the achievement of their full humanity—meaning the right to create, to invent, to go beyond mere living to find a meaning for life in activities of ever-widening scope—by male-centered men, who treated women as the “other,” and dominated them as the
inferior sex. Man was the absolute human type, with reference to whom woman was defined and differentiated; she was merely the afterthought. Yet, Beauvoir insisted, and in opposition to the
Bible as well as Western writers from
Aristotle to
Freud, anatomy did not have to be destiny: “one is not born,” she famously observed, “but rather one becomes, a woman; no biological, psychological or
economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society.”
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Anatomy was less important than
social arrangements and cultural conditioning, and unlike biology, society and culture could be changed. This insight of Beauvoir’s, which harked back via
Wollstonecraft to
Plato, that the biologically constituted sex of womanhood was less significant than the culturally constructed
gender of being female, would be crucial for a later generation of feminists.
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Yet cultural arrangements and social conditioning have turned out to be vexed matters, as in the case of the sudden differentiation between men and women into
separate spheres that allegedly took place during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
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To begin with, such a view exaggerates the extent to which the two sexes had lived together on terms of
equality in some “lost egalitarian
Eden”: there had always been some degree of separation between the sexes, and it was not uniquely the product of
capitalist and/or
industrial societies. It also exaggerates the pace of economic and social transformation during the Industrial Revolution: then, as before, changes in the relations between men and women, and in patterns of male and female
work, seem to have occurred at a very slow rate—across the centuries rather than the decades.
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The “separate spheres” interpretation also attached itself to a
Marxist narrative of class
formation and class
consciousness that has long since become outmoded.
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Moreover, the claims that domesticity was uniquely associated with the middle class ignores the fact that many workers and aristocrats embraced it too, while much of the material cited in support of the doctrine of “separate spheres” was essentially prescriptive and didactic, rather than descriptive and evidence-based. It also seems clear that the coincidental reassertion of the difference between male and female bodies was less sudden and less significant: once again, the argument for such a linear transformation rested on a narrow basis of published texts, which were an imperfect guide to the realities of human behavior.
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Far from being passive victims who were subdued, marginalized, and trapped in their homes, many British and American women from many different backgrounds were assertive, spirited, and capable beings. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they actively engaged with the gradually industrializing economy as property owners and as producers, and they were also involved in many public causes, of which the campaigns against the slave trade in the United Kingdom and
slavery in the United States were merely the most conspicuous.
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This makes it difficult to explain the first stirrings of female consciousness and
feminist mobilization as the effort by women to break out from the isolation, frustration, and confinement embodied in the ideology and the practice of “separate spheres.” On the contrary, it seems more likely that the reason some relatively well-off and well-
educated women began to campaign for equal rights was partly because they came from an established tradition of female participation in the public realm, but also because their own circumstances were in many ways
already
improving, so that for the first time the ideal of equality between the two sexes seemed worth the struggle, and perhaps even within reach.
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Thus regarded, equal-rights feminism in the Anglophone world was not because the Industrial Revolution had made things worse for women by confining their circumstances and diminishing their expectations; rather, it was because the Industrial Revolution gave women who already believed they were intrinsically the same as men the rising expectation and the plausible hope that they might soon be accepted as the equals of men.

Such have been the two versions of conventional wisdom regarding what
William Thompson called the male and the female “halves” of the human population. The first prioritizes
biological unlikeness, and recognizes the reinforcing importance of cultural dissimilarity, validating the superiority of one sex over the other. The second downplays biological difference, emphasizing inherent sameness, and urges
equality of males and females, but it recognizes that the cultural construction of gender differences and hierarchies prevents true equality between the sexes. But both these views of men and women have always been deeply confused and contradictory.
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Consider, in this regard, the issue of the biological determinants of maleness and femaleness. Are the anatomical differences between men and women seriously significant?
John Gray claims they are, but it has alternatively been argued that these “small sex differences” are “matters of degree not dichotomy”: men and women are not separate species from different parts of the universe, but come from the same planet, namely earth.
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Does the human
brain also come in distinct male and female versions?
Simon Baron-Cohen has stressed the “fundamental biological differences,” but others have argued that this is another facile dichotomy, because these “essential differences” are far less significant than the “essential similarities.”
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In terms of what has been thought, written, and said about male and female bodies and brains, and about their likeness and dissimilarity, there is not now and never has been any agreement on any of these questions.

These unsettling interrogatives lead on to other questions no less disconcerting. There is, for example, no consensus about the relative significance of sex (biology) and of culture (gender) in determining and defining what some insist are the deep differences between men and women, and these matters are still much debated across a wide variety of academic disciplines. How is the undeniable anatomical division between men and women based on “raw biological sex” either denied in the name of religious and/or moral equality or extended and elaborated into an even more significant cultural division and inequality between them based
on “social
gender”?
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Even
Simone de Beauvoir seemed confused about the relationship between biology and culture. To be sure, she insisted that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” which meant that “no biological, psychological or economic fate determines the figure that the
human female presents in society,” because culture and conditioning were all. But elsewhere she stated that women “are women in virtue of their anatomy and physiology” and that “the division of the sexes is a biological fact,” and she spent a great deal of time dwelling on the many unpleasant aspects of female anatomy and bodily function. In truth, it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between “sex difference” and
“gender difference” in explaining how and why men and women are unalike, and this has led the psychologist
Melissa Hines to suggest that the “distinction between biological and social/cultural causes” is a “false” one.
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