10
Rights and Responsibilities
RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES
The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because as an individual she must rely on herself.
The Solitude of Self,
elizabeth cady stanton
But what exactly is it about women’s equality that even its slightest shadow threatens to erase male identity? What is it about the way we frame manhood that, even today, it still depends so on “feminine” dependence for its survival?
The Backlash against Feminism,
susan faludi
There is one white attorney for every 680 whites, but only one black attorney for every 4,000 blacks; one white physician for every 659 whites, but only one black physician for every 5,000 blacks; and one white dentist for every 1,900 whites, but only one black dentist for every 8,400 blacks. Less than 1 percent of all engineers—
or of all practicing chemists—is black. Cruel and uncompassionate injustice created gaps like these. We need creative justice and compassion to help us close them.
Why Blacks Need Affirmative Action,
jesse jackson
A confession, then: I may be as fascinated by guns as my gun-owning and gun-
loving friend in Maine, but were it up to me, I would rid America of its guns. I
would be less verbally self-righteous about gun control than I was in the past, for I
think I have begun to understand those who, like my friend in Maine, have arguments of their own in defense of guns. They are formidable arguments.
A Loaded Question: What Is It about Americans and Guns?,
Leonard Kriegal
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON
The Solitude of Self
Born in 1815, Elizabeth Cady was educated by her parents at home and, later, at the Troy, New York, Female Seminary. As a young woman, she became deeply committed to the antislavery movement, and through this work she met and married Henry Brewster Stanton, who was also an activist in early civil rights actions. While raising their seven children, the Stantons continued to be involved in issues of freedom and equality, including rights for women. In 1851, Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Susan B. Anthony, who for fifty years was to be her collaborator for feminist causes. In 1892, when she was seventy-six years old, Stanton delivered the speech presented here, which is generally considered the strongest statement of her feminist beliefs.
Suggestions for Prereading or Journal Writing
What is your definition or impression of someone who is a “feminist”? What do you understand feminist beliefs to be? Which of these feminist ideas do you strongly believe in? Which feminist ideas do you disagree with?
2.
Complete the following analogy, and then freewrite for ten minutes in order to explain your philosophy of life: “For me, life is like. . . .”
3.
Using examples from your own life (from even today, perhaps), explain the difference between loneliness and solitude.
———
The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul; our Protestant idea, the right of individual conscience and judgment; our republican idea, individual citizenship. In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe, with her woman, Friday, on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.
Secondly, if we consider her as a citizen, as a member of a great nation, she must have the same rights as all other members, according to the fundamental principles of our Government.
Thirdly, viewed as a woman, an equal factor in civilization, her rights and duties are still the same—individual happiness and development.
Fourthly, it is only the incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter, which may involve some special duties and training. . . .
5
The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear—is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself. No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency, they must know something of the laws of navigation. To guide our own craft, we must be captain, pilot, engineer; with chart and compass to stand at the wheel; to watch the winds and waves, and know when to take in the sail, and to read the signs in the firmament over all. It matters not whether the solitary voyager is man or woman; nature, having endowed them equally, leaves them to their own skill and judgment in the hour of danger, and, if not equal to the occasion, alike they perish.
To appreciate the importance of fitting every human soul for independent action, think for a moment of the immeasurable solitude of self. We come into the world alone, unlike all who have gone before us, we leave it alone, under circumstances peculiar to ourselves. No mortal ever has been, no mortal ever will be like the soul just launched on the sea of life. There can never again be just such a combination of prenatal influences; never again just such environments as make up the infancy, youth and manhood of this one. Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another. No one has ever found two blades of ribbon grass alike, and no one will ever find two human beings alike. Seeing, then, that what must be the infinite diversity in human character, we can in a measure appreciate the loss to a nation when any class of the people is uneducated and unrepresented in the government.
We ask for the complete development of every individual, first, for his own benefit and happiness. In fitting out an army, we give each soldier his own knapsack, arms, powder, his blanket, cup, knife, fork and spoon. We provide alike for all their individual necessities; then each man bears his own burden.
Again, we ask complete individual development for the general good; for the consensus of the competent on the whole round of human interests, on all questions of national life; and here each man must bear his share of the general burden. It is sad to see how soon friendless children are left to bear their own burdens, before they can analyze their feelings; before they can even tell their joys and sorrows, they are thrown on their own resources. The great lesson that nature seems to teach us at all ages is self-dependence, self-protection, self-support. . . .
We ask no sympathy from others in the anxiety and agony of a broken friendship or shattered love. When death sunders our nearest ties, alone we sit in the shadow of our affliction. Alike amid the greatest triumphs and darkest tragedies of life, we walk alone. On the divine heights of human attainment, eulogized and worshipped as a hero or saint, we stand alone. In ignorance, poverty and vice, as a pauper or criminal, alone we starve or steal; alone we suffer the sneers and rebuffs of our fellows; alone we are hunted and hounded through dark courts and alleys, in by-ways and high-ways; alone we stand in the judgment seat; alone in the prison cell we lament our crimes and misfortunes; alone we expiate them on the gallows. In hours like these we realize the awful solitude of individual life, its pains, its penalties, its responsibilities, hours in which the youngest and most helpless are thrown on their own resources for guidance and consolation. Seeing, then, that life must ever be a march and a battle that each soldier must be equipped for his own protection, it is the height of cruelty to rob the individual of a single natural right.
To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes; to deny the rights of poverty is like cutting off the hands. To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work, of a voice in choosing those who make and administer the law, a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment. [Think of] . . . woman’s position! Robbed of her natural rights, handicapped by law and custom at every turn, yet compelled to fight her own battles, and in the emergencies of life to fall back on herself for protection. . . .
The young wife and mother, at the head of some establishment, with a kind husband to shield her from the adverse winds of life, with wealth, fortune and position, has a certain harbor of safety, secure against the ordinary ills of life. But to manage a household, have a desirable influence in society, keep her friends and the affections of her husband, train her children and servants well, she must have rare common sense, wisdom, diplomacy, and a knowledge of human nature. To do all this, she needs the cardinal virtues and the strong points of character that the most successful statesman possesses. An uneducated woman trained to dependence, with no resources in herself, must make a failure of any position in life. But society says women do not need a knowledge of the world, the liberal training that experience in public life must give, all the advantages of collegiate education; but when for the lack of all this, the woman’s happiness is wrecked, alone she bears her humiliation; and the solitude of the weak and ignorant is indeed pitiable. In the wild chase for the prizes of life, they are ground to powder.
In age, when the pleasures of youth are passed, children grown up, married and gone, the hurry and bustle of life in a measure over, when the hands are weary of active service, when the old arm chair and the fireside are the chosen resorts, then men and women alike must fall back on their own resources. If they cannot find companionship in books, if they have no interest in the vital questions of the hour, no interest in watching the consummation of reforms with which they might have been identified, they soon pass into their dotage. The more fully the faculties of the mind are developed and kept in use, the longer the period of vigor and active interests in all around us continues. If, from a life-long participation in public affairs, a woman feels responsible for the laws regulating our system of education, the discipline of our jails and prisons, the sanitary condition of our private homes, public building and thoroughfares, an interest in commerce, finance, our foreign relations, in any or all these questions, her solitude will at least be respectable, and she will not be driven to gossip or scandal for entertainment.
The chief reason for opening to every soul the doors to the whole round of human duties and pleasures is the individual development thus attained, the resources thus provided under all circumstances to mitigate the solitude that at times must come to everyone. . . .
Inasmuch, then, as woman shares equally the joys and sorrows of time and eternity, is it not the height of presumption in man to propose to represent her at the ballot box and the throne of grace, to do her voting in the state, her praying in the church, and to assume the position of high priest at the family altar?
15
Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one’s self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded—a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance, wealth, family and position. Conceding, then, that the responsibilities of life rest equally on man and woman, that their destiny is the same, they need the same preparation for time and eternity. The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of the compass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, and to conquer. Such are the facts in human experience, the responsibilities of individual sovereignty. Rich and poor, intelligent and ignorant, wise and foolish, virtuous and vicious, man and woman; it is ever the same, each soul must depend wholly on itself.
Whatever the theories may be of woman’s dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life, he cannot bear her burdens. Alone she goes to the gates of death to give life to every man that is born into the world; no one can share her fears, no one can mitigate her pangs; and if her sorrow is greater than she can bear, alone she passes beyond the gates into the vast unknown. . . .
So it ever must be in the conflicting scenes of life, in the long, weary march, each one walks alone. We may have many friends, love, kindness, sympathy and charity, to smooth our pathway in everyday life, but in the tragedies and triumphs of human experience, each mortal stands alone. . . . Women are already the equals of men in the whole realm of thought, in art, science, literature and government. . . . The poetry and novels of the century are theirs, and they have touched the keynote of reform, in religion, politics and social life. They fill the editor’s and professor’s chair, plead at the bar of justice, walk the wards of the hospital, speak from the pulpit and the platform. Such is the type of womanhood that an enlightened public sentiment welcomes today, and such the triumph of the facts of life over the false theories of the past.
Is it, then, consistent to hold the developed woman of this day within the same narrow political limits as the dame with the spinning wheel and knitting needles occupied in the past? No, no! Machinery has taken the labors of woman as well as man on its tireless shoulders; the loom and the spinning wheel are but dreams of the past; the pen, the brush, the easel, the chisel, have taken their places, while the hopes and ambitions of women are essentially changed.
20
We see reason sufficient in the outer conditions of human beings for individual liberty and development, but when we consider the self-dependence of every human soul, we see the need of courage, judgment and the exercise of every faculty of mind and body, strengthened and developed by use, in woman as well as man.
Whatever may be said of man’s protecting power in ordinary conditions, amid all the terrible disasters by land and sea, in the supreme moments of danger, alone woman must ever meet the horrors of the situation. The Angel of Death even makes no royal pathway for her. Man’s love and sympathy enter only into the sunshine of our lives. In that solemn solitude of self, that links us with the immeasurable and the eternal, each soul lives alone forever. . . .
And yet, there is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced. It is more hidden than the caves of the gnome; the sacred adytum of the oracle; the hidden chamber of Eleusinian mystery, for to it only omniscience is permitted to enter.
Such is individual life. Who, I ask you, can take, dare take on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?
Suggestions for Writing and Discussion
1.
From reading this essay, what portrait would you create of Elizabeth Cady Stanton? What gestures might she make? What would be the expression on her face? Where would she be? Who, if anyone, would be with her? What might she be doing?
On what single basic belief does Stanton base this entire argument? Is this a belief that most people today would support? Explain.
In this piece, Stanton appeals to reason, to moral beliefs, and to emotions. Find examples from the text that appeal to the audience’s sense of logic, sense of right, and sense of feeling. What appeal does she primarily use in this piece? Why does she emphasize this appeal?
4.
From this piece, can you tell whether or not Stanton is a devout believer in God? In America? Do you think these issues would have made any difference to her audience at the time?
5.
In your own words, write a sentence for each category listed, explaining the benefits Stanton believes each derives from a woman’s right to be educated and to be free.
a.
The individual woman
b.
The family
c.
The community
d.
The country
6.
Throughout this speech, Stanton compares women to two occupations traditionally held by men. What are these occupations, and what does Stanton gain by using these specific comparisons?
7.
In one sentence and in your own words, state what you believe Stanton’s philosophy of life might be.
<sum>Suggestions for Extended Thinking and Writing
Research several sources (primary, if possible) to discover a good picture of what America was like in 1892. What were the dominant issues? What were the new inventions? What conflicts were taking place? After doing this research, analyze how various groups of Americans you have read about might have reacted to Stanton’s speech.
Research one other American woman from this same era who worked for women’s right to vote. Find one of her speeches or a piece of her writing, and analyze this piece in comparison with Stanton’s.
SUSAN FALUDI
The Backlash against Feminism
Born in 1958, Susan Faludi currently works as a reporter for the San Francisco bureau of the Wall Street Journal. In 1991, Faludi, who had already won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, published Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women, from which this excerpt is taken. In this book, she examines reactions against the achievements of the women’s movement of the 1970s and expresses especially deep concern about the role of the media in this backlash.
Suggestions for Prereading and Journal Writing
Freewrite about the women in your family and what you perceive to be their hopes, dreams, values, and contributions to your family.
Write a “portrait” of what you consider to be a typical feminist: describe physical attributes, career choices, values, issues, and lifestyle.
<prl3.
In your journal, explore what “feminine” means.
And when women do not need to live through their husbands and children, men will not fear the love and strength of women, nor need another’s weakness to prove their own masculinity.
—betty friedan, The Feminine Mystique
This stirring proclamation, offered in the final page of Friedan’s classic work, is one prediction that never came to pass. Feminists have always optimistically figured that once they demonstrated the merits of their cause, male hostility to women’s rights would evaporate. They have always been disappointed. “I am sure the emancipated man is a myth sprung from our hope and eternal aspiration,” feminist Doris Stevens wrote wearily in the early 1900s (qtd. in Cott 45). “There has been much accomplishment,” Margaret Culkin Banning wrote of women’s rights in 1935, “. . . and more than a few years have passed. But the resentment of men has not disappeared. Quietly it has grown and deepened” (358).
When author Anthony Astrachan completed his seven-year study of American male attitudes in the 1980s, he found that no more than 5 to 10 percent of the men he surveyed “genuinely support women’s demands for independence and equality” (402). In 1988, the American Male Opinion Index, a poll of three thousand men conducted for Gentlemen’s Quarterly, found that less than one fourth of men supported the women’s movement, while the majority favored traditional roles for women. Sixty percent said wives with small children should stay home (1:2). Other studies examining male attitudes toward the women’s movement—of which, regrettably, there are few—suggest that the most substantial share of the growth in men’s support for feminism may have occurred in the first half of the ’70s, in that brief period when women’s “lib” was fashionable, and slowed since. As the American Male Opinion Index observed, while men in the ’80s continued to give lip service to such abstract matters of “fair play” as the right to equal pay, “when the issues change from social justice to personal applications, the consensus crumbles” (1:26). By the ’80s, as the poll results made evident, men were interpreting small advances in women’s rights as big, and complete, ones; they believed women had made major progress toward equality—while women believed the struggle was just beginning. This his-and-hers experience of the equal rights campaign would soon generate a gulf between the sexes.
At the same time that men were losing interest in feminist concerns, women were gaining and deepening theirs. During much of the ’70s, there had been little divergence between men and women in polling questions about changing sex roles, and men had even given slightly more support than women to such issues as the Equal Rights Amendment. But as women began to challenge their own internalized views of a woman’s proper place, their desire and demand for equal status and free choice began to grow exponentially. By the ’80s, as the polls showed, they outpaced men in their support for virtually every feminist position.
The pressures of the backlash only served to reinforce and broaden the divide. As basic rights and opportunities for women became increasingly threatened, especially for female heads of households, the ranks of women favoring not just a feminist but a social-justice agenda swelled. Whether the question was affirmative action, the military buildup, or federal aid for health care, women were becoming more radical, men more conservative. This was especially apparent among younger women and men; it was younger men who gave the most support to Reagan. (Contrary to conventional wisdom, the rise of “the conservative youth” in the early ’80s was largely a one-gender phenomenon.) Even in the most liberal baby-boom populations, male and female attitudes were polarizing dramatically. A national survey of “progressive” baby boomers (defined as the 12 million who support social-change groups) found 60 percent of the women called themselves “radical” to “very liberal,” while 60 percent of the men titled themselves “moderate” to “conservative.” The pollsters identified one prime cause for this chasm: The majority of women surveyed said they felt the ’80s had been a “bad decade” for them (while the majority of men disagreed)—and they feared the next decade would be even worse (Craver).
The divergence in men’s and women’s attitudes passed several benchmarks in 1980. For the first time in American history, a gender voting gap emerged over women’s rights issues (Klein 6). For the first time, polls found men less likely than women to support equal roles for the sexes in business and government, less likely to support the Equal Rights Amendment—and more likely to say they preferred the “traditional” family where the wife stayed home (Klein 158–159; Walsh 60). Moreover, some signs began to surface that men’s support for women’s rights issues was not only lagging but might actually be eroding. A national poll found that men who “strongly agreed” that the family should be “traditional”—with the man as the breadwinner and the woman as the housewife—suddenly jumped four percentage points between 1986 and 1988, the first rise in nearly a decade (Niemi, et al.). (The same year, it fell for women.) The American Male Opinion Index found that the proportion of men who fell into the group opposing changes in sex roles and other feminist objectives had risen from 48 percent in 1988 to 60 percent in 1990—and the group willing to adapt to these changes had shrunk from 52 percent to 40 percent (2:5).
By the end of the decade, the National Opinion Research poll was finding that nearly twice the proportion of women as men thought a working mother could be just as good a parent as a mother who stayed home. In 1989, while a majority of women in the New York Times poll believed American society had not changed enough to grant women equality, only a minority of men agreed. A majority of the men were saying, however, that the women’s movement had “made things harder for men at home” (Belkin A1). Just as in previous backlashes, American men’s discomfort with the feminist cause in the last decade has endured—and even “quietly grown and deepened.”
While pollsters can try to gauge the level of male resistance, they can’t explain it. And unfortunately our social investigators have not tackled “the man question” with one-tenth the enterprise that they have always applied to “the woman problem.” The works on masculinity would barely fill a bookshelf. We might deduce from the lack of literature that manhood is less complex and burdensome, and that it requires less maintenance than femininity. But the studies that are available on the male condition offer no such assurance. Quite the contrary, they find masculinity a fragile flower—a hothouse orchid in constant need of trellising and nourishment. “Violating sex roles has more severe consequences for males than females,” social researcher Joseph Pleck concluded (9). “[M]aleness in America,” as Margaret Mead wrote, “is not absolutely defined; it has to be kept and reearned every day, and one essential element in the definition is beating women in every game that both sexes play” (318). Nothing seems to crush the masculine petals more than a bit of feminist rain—a few drops are perceived as a downpour. “Men view even small losses of deference, advantages, or opportunities as large threats,” wrote William Goode, one of many sociologists to puzzle over the peculiarly hyperbolic male reaction to minuscule improvements in women’s rights (137).
“Women have become so powerful that our independence has been lost in our own homes and is now being trampled and stamped underfoot in public.” So Cato wailed in 195 b.c., after a few Roman women sought to repeal a law that forbade their sex from riding in chariots and wearing multicolored dresses. In the 16th century, just the possibility that two royal women might occupy thrones in Europe at the same time provoked John Knox to issue his famous diatribe, “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.”
By the 19th century, the spokesmen of male fears had mostly learned to hide their anxiety over female independence behind masks of paternalism and pity. As Edward Bok, the legendary Victorian editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal and guardian of women’s morals, explained it to his many female readers, the weaker sex must not venture beyond the family sphere because their “rebellious nerves instantly and rightly cry out, ‘Thus far shalt thou go, but no farther”’ (qtd. in Kinnard 308). But it wasn’t female nerves that were rebelling against feminist efforts, not then and not now.
A “crisis of masculinity” has erupted in every period of backlash in the last century, a faithful quiet companion to the loudly voiced call for a “return to femininity.” In the late 1800s, a blizzard of literature decrying the “soft male” rolled off the presses. “The whole generation is womanized,” Henry James’s protagonist Basil Ransom lamented in The Bostonians. “The masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age. . . . The masculine character . . . that is what I want to preserve, or rather, as I may say, to recover; and I must tell you that I don’t in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the attempt!” (290). Child-rearing manuals urged parents to toughen up their sons with hard mattresses and vigorous athletic regimens. Billy Sunday led the clerical attack on “feminized” religion, promoting a “muscular Christianity” and a Jesus who was “no dough-faced, lickspittle-proposition” but “the greatest scrapper that ever lived” (qtd. in Douglas 397). Theodore Roosevelt warned of the national peril of losing the “fiber of vigorous hardiness and masculinity” and hardened his own fiber with the Rough Riders (Kimmel 243). Martial swaggering prevailed on the political platform; indeed, as sociologist Theodore Roszak writes of the “compulsive masculinity” era that culminated in World War I, “The period leading up to 1914 reads in the history books like one long drunken stag party” (92).
The masculinity crisis would return with each backlash. The fledgling Boy Scouts of America claimed one-fifth of all American boys by 1920; its founder’s explicit aim was to staunch the feminization of the American male by removing young men from the too powerful female orbit. Chief Scout Ernest Thompson Seton feared that boys were degenerating into “a lot of flat-chested cigarette-smokers, with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality” (qtd. in Hantover 294). Again, in the years following World War II, male commentators and literary figures were panicking over reduced masculine powers. At home, “momism” was siphoning virile juices. Philip Wylie’s best-selling Generation of Vipers advised, “We must face the dynasty of the dames at once, deprive them of our pocketbooks,” before the American man degenerated into “the Abdicating Male” (qtd. in Lynn 60). In what was supposed to be a special issue on “The American Woman,” Life magazine fixated on the weak-kneed American man. Because women had failed to live up to their feminine duties, the 1956 article charged, “the emerging American man tends to be passive and irresponsible” (qtd. in Lynn 72). In the business world, the Wall Street Journal warned in 1949 that “women are taking over” (qtd. in Chafe 182). Look decried the rise of “female dominance”: First, women had grabbed control of the stock market, the magazine complained, and now they were advancing on “authority-wielding executive jobs” (qtd. in Ehrenreich, Hearts 37).
In the ’80s, male nerves rebelled once more, as “a decline in American manhood” became the obsession of male clergy, writers, politicians, and scholars all along the political spectrum, from the right-wing Reverend Jerry Falwell to the leftist poet and lecturer Robert Bly. Antiabortion leaders such as Randall Terry rallied thousands of men with their visions of a Christ who was a muscle-bound “soldier,” not a girlish “sheep.” A new “men’s movement” drew tens of thousands of followers to all-male retreats, where they rooted out “feminized” tendencies and roused “the wild man within.” In the press, male columnists bemoaned the rise of the “sensitive man.” Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham advocated all-male clubs to tone sagging masculinity: “Let the lines of balanced tension go slack and the structure dissolves into the ooze of androgyny,” he predicted (qtd. in Kimmel). In films and television, all-male macho action shows so swamped the screen and set that the number of female roles in this era markedly declined. In fiction, violent macho action books were flying off the shelves, in a renaissance for this genre that Bantam Books’ male-action-adventure editor equated with the “blood-and-thunder pulp dime novels of the nineteenth century” (Mehren). In apparel, the masculinity crisis was the one bright spot in this otherwise depressed industry: sales boomed in safari outfits, combat gear, and the other varieties of what Newsweek aptly dubbed “predatory fashion” (Conant). In national politics, the ’88 presidential campaign turned into a testosterone contest. “I’m not squishy soft,” Michael Dukakis fretted, and leapt into a tank. “I’m very tough” (qtd. in McManus and Drogin). George Bush, whose “wimpiness” preoccupied the press, announced, “I’m the pitbull of SDI.” He stocked his wardrobe with enough rugged togs to adorn an infantry, and turned jogging into a daily photo opportunity. Two years into his presidency, George Bush’s metaphorical martial bravado had taken a literal and bloody turn as his administration took the nation to war; it might be said that Bush began by boasting about “kicking a little ass” in his debate with Geraldine Ferraro and ended by, as he himself put it, “kicking ass” in the Persian Gulf (Warren).
Under this backlash, like its predecessors, an often ludicrous overreaction to women’s modest progress has prevailed. “The women are taking over” is again a refrain many working women heard from their male colleagues—after one or two women are promoted at their company, but while top management is still solidly male. In newsrooms, white male reporters routinely complain that only women and minorities can get jobs—often at publications where women’s and minorities’ numbers are actually shrinking. “At Columbia,” literature professor Carolyn Heilbrun has observed, “I have heard men say, with perfect sincerity, that a few women seeking equal pay are trying to overturn the university, to ruin it” (203). At Boston University, president John Silber fumed that his English department had turned into a “damn matriarchy”—when only six of its twenty faculty members were women (“Tenure”). Feminists have “complete control” of the Pentagon, a brigadier general complained (qtd. in Falwell)—when women, much less feminists, represented barely 10 percent of the armed services and were mostly relegated to the forces’ lowest levels.
But what exactly is it about women’s equality that even its slightest shadow threatens to erase male identity? What is it about the way we frame manhood that, even today, it still depends so on “feminine” dependence for its survival? A little-noted finding by the Yankelovich Monitor survey, a large nationwide poll that has tracked social attitudes for the last two decades, takes us a good way toward a possible answer. For twenty years, the Monitor’s pollsters have asked its subjects to define masculinity. And for twenty years, the leading definition, ahead by a huge margin, has never changed. It isn’t being a leader, athlete, lothario, decision-maker, or even just being “born male.” It is simply this: being a “good provider for his family” (Hayward).
If establishing masculinity depends most of all on succeeding as the prime breadwinner, then it is hard to imagine a force more directly threatening to fragile American manhood than the feminist drive for economic equality. And if supporting a family epitomizes what it means to be a man, then it is little wonder that the backlash erupted when it did—against the backdrop of the ’80s economy. In this period, the “traditional” man’s real wages shrank dramatically (a 22 percent free-fall in households where white men were the sole breadwinners), and the traditional male breadwinner himself became an endangered species (representing less than 8 percent of all households) (Phillips 18). That the ruling definition of masculinity remains so economically based helps to explain, too, why the backlash has been voiced most bitt...
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