Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (26 page)

Meanwhile, education had begun to make its mark. Marie Curie had won
two
Nobel Prizes in science (physics 1903, chemistry 1911), a feat not matched by a man until 1972. Jeannette Rankin became the first woman to serve in Congress, before women had the vote in most states. Julia Morgan was a leading architect who designed buildings for the University of California at Berkeley, among other major projects. At the start of the twentieth century, just fifty years from Elizabeth Blackwell’s triumph, there were about seven thousand women doctors in the United States, 5 percent of the physician workforce. By 1920 women had been admitted to more than one hundred law schools; about 2 percent of practicing attorneys were women, and women were almost half of all college students.

In perhaps the most important achievement, Margaret Sanger launched a distinguished career advocating, teaching, and popularizing birth control. The Victorians had debated family planning and ridiculed it: one postcard showed a woman beating the stork off with an umbrella, oblivious to the babe dangling in a sling from the bird’s neck. The main method was periodic abstinence, so Sanger and her sister were in uncharted territory when they opened their clinic in Brooklyn in 1916, advocating diaphragms, sponges, and other forms of contraception they had studied in Europe. The basic information they gave out was illegal, so they were arrested. The judge ruled that women did not have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.” Sanger refused to cut a deal by promising to refrain from repeat offenses, so she spent thirty days in a workhouse. But a later appeal allowed doctors to prescribe birth control, and a new era began.

Giving women this kind of control over their own uteruses undermined male privilege in a way unprecedented in human and
prehuman history. The separation of sex from reproduction even a little meant the dawn of a new biology. Now women did not just have the model of Lysistrata, who in Aristophanes’ play persuaded the women of Greece to withhold sex until men stopped an ongoing war. They had a new model that did not involve giving up sex, just giving up or, more often, postponing and limiting babies. In evolutionary thinking, neither sex theoretically should want this, but many of both did. However, the impact on women’s lives was far greater, and this was only the beginning.

Consider the entry of women into the (paid) labor force. The working woman and working mother are older than our species. But hunter-gatherers, gardeners, herders, and farmers did not have paid labor, just women who worked hard every day. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, craft guilds were almost all male, and with the Industrial Revolution few women at first obtained paid factory work; wage labor was in the public sphere, and women belonged at home. This was especially true of married women, whose heavy labor had to do with maintaining households and bearing and raising children.

How could women once again become the influential working mothers they’d been during the hunting-gathering era? Those women had fewer children because of prolonged frequent nursing, in turn made possible by the compatibility of gathering with baby and child care, along with cooperative breeding. The mobility that came with industrialization took nuclear families and, worse, single-mother families out of their kinship context, making work outside the home less accessible than ever. Nevertheless, change occurred.

Unmarried women were in the labor force, but almost all married and stopped working when they wed. This makes
married
women’s paid labor a key barometer of women’s participation. As economist Raquel Fernández summarized it in her 2013 study, “white married women’s labor force participation was at around 2 percent in 1880 and increased very slowly to 1920, averaging 1 percentage point per
decade. It grew somewhat more rapidly between 1920 and 1950 (on average 4.9 percentage points per decade), and then took off between 1950 and 1990, increasing on average 12.9 percentage points per decade. Since then, it has stayed relatively constant.” Today more than seven in ten married women are in the labor force; unemployment among men exceeded that among women in 2013, as it had for several years.

This doesn’t mean that equality has arrived—far from it—but change has been exponential. Consider
all
women’s paid labor. Economist Dora Costa noted that in 1900 only 20 percent of women and less than 6 percent of married women worked for pay.

In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the “factory girl” set the stage for the unmarried “office girl.” [She] paved the way for the entry of married women into the labor force in the late 1950s, even though this entry was primarily in dead-end jobs in the clerical sector. [This] paved the way for the rise of the modern career woman, doing work that requires a lengthy period of training and that offers genuine opportunities for promotion.

Change at the professional level has recently been equally dramatic:

As late as 1970, only 14 percent of all doctoral degrees were awarded to women, only 8 percent of all students enrolled in law schools were women, and only 8 percent of all medical school graduates were women. By the end of the 1990s, women earned 40 percent of all doctoral degrees and represented over 40 percent of all graduates from medical and law schools.

Let’s look more closely at what women’s work meant. In the 1800s nonwhite women had higher levels of wage labor than whites, immigrants higher than native-born. Many were servants, seamstresses, or sex
workers, but the rise of mill towns, beginning in the early part of the century, drew many young women away from farms into mills. By the end of the century, factory and clerical work dominated women’s paid labor, although the jobs dead-ended at marriage.

Conditions were horrendous, and women fought to improve them. Some unions, like the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, were made up mostly of women. Strikes were the weapon in the struggle for more pay, shorter hours—a forty-nine- versus a fifty-three-hour workweek, for instance—and safer working conditions. A massive strike in the fall of 1909 involved twenty thousand blouse makers, mostly young women. A young reporter watched the picket line, where teenage Clara Lemlich, a Yiddish-speaking firebrand, led girls and women.

[They] began singing Italian and Russian working-class songs as they paced in twos before the factory door. Of a sudden, around the corner came a dozen tough-looking customers, for whom the union label “gorillas” seemed well-chosen.

“Stand fast, girls,” called Clara, and then the thugs rushed the line, knocking Clara to her knees, striking at the pickets, opening the way for a group of frightened scabs to slip through the broken line. Fancy ladies from the Allen Street red-light district climbed out of cabs to cheer on the gorillas. There was a confused melee of scratching, screaming girls and fist-swinging men and then a patrol wagon arrived. The thugs ran off as the cops pushed Clara and two other badly beaten girls into the wagon.

The reporter followed other picketers to the union hall, “where one bottle of milk and a loaf of bread were given to strikers with small children in their families. There, for the first time in my comfortably sheltered, upper West Side life, I saw real hunger on the faces of my fellow Americans in the richest city in the world.”

The strike lasted from November to February and improved working conditions. “In the
immigrant world, the shirtwaist makers had created indescribable excitement: these were our daughters.” They inspired the male-dominated cloak-makers union to strike too.

A turning point came after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911. A blouse-making factory in New York City went up in flames, killing 146 workers, mostly Italian and Jewish women, in less than twenty minutes. Most burned to death, but a few found another path:

[A] young man helped a girl to the window sill on the ninth floor. Then he held her out deliberately, away from the building, and let her drop. He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop. He held out a third girl. . . . They were all as unresisting as if he were helping them into a street car instead of into eternity. He saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames and his was only a terrible chivalry. He brought around another girl to the window. I saw her put her arms around him and kiss him. Then he held her into space—and dropped her. Quick as a flash, he was on the windowsill himself. His coat fluttered upwards—the air filled his trouser legs as he came down. I could see he wore tan shoes.

Here were young women working their lives away in low-wage, dangerous jobs as hard as any done by men, and yet at the moment that those very jobs killed them, they accepted the courtly gestures of a gracious, equally doomed man who offered to help them die.

In World War II, when the male work force was drafted, women took factory jobs not open to them before. “Rosie the Riveter” flooded the workplace with women who now had half the nation’s survival on their shoulders. The 1950s saw a return to the prewar status quo, and a population boom to go with it; women were once again thought more crucial in the home than in the world. But on the whole, the twentieth century lumbered in one direction, and as the first baby boomers entered their late teens they made a cultural revolution.

Part of it was a sexual revolution triggered by oral contraception. Part of it was disgust with war, the draft, and nuclear brinksmanship. Part of it was an intense, noble quest for racial equality. Part of it was just rock and roll, with its relentless challenge to tradition and propriety. And part of it, the most far-reaching and important perhaps, was a growing realization that half the human species had been held back long enough.

There are still lessons, perhaps new ones, in some very old stories. Samson was the superhero of the Hebrew Bible and its people, able to do great deeds with his pure male strength. But in exchange for superhuman powers, he had pledged not to cut his hair. While he dallied with the seductive and cunning Delilah, she wheedled his secret out of him. She promptly cut his hair and his heroic career short. Her countrymen captured him, put out his eyes, and imprisoned him, although he did (with God’s help) make a suicidal comeback, bringing his Philistine enemies’ temple down on their heads.

Achilles, the Greek superhero of the Trojan War, was also uncannily strong, and he was almost invulnerable. His mother, herself the immortal daughter of a sea god, had taken the expedient of dipping her infant son in the River Styx, the stream that separates earth from the underworld, life from death. This made him impervious to harm, with an exception: his mom held him by the heel as she dunked him. He would be killed near the end of the war by the very man who had started it by stealing Helen—a crowning irony for the matchless warrior, who took the adulterer’s fatal arrow in his naked, undipped heel.

Both tales deal with the limits of male strength. Both reveal the dependence of even superheroes on women—mothers and lovers. Both teach us that the man—and it has always been a man—who lives by strength and violence alone will die by them, often because of something to do with sex. And both foretell an end to the hubris of unbridled, simplistic, classic masculinity. Physical strength matters little in today’s
world, and martial prowess is less and less admired as a solution to human problems. For our two superheroes, the end came in their lifetimes. For us as a civilization, it is just ahead; yet unlike with Samson and Achilles, it will not mean a tragic end for men, just a triumph for women. But before we try to characterize the future, we must return to our biological starting point and delve more deeply into the different natures of women and men.

Chapter 8

♦

The Trouble with Men

C
hange comes because it resonates with the nature of women and men, the impossibility and undesirability of continuing the tragic millennial tale of extreme masculinity, known euphemistically as virtue. Virtue is being redefined, and the old version, closely tied to male political and martial ambition, is being consigned to the trash heap of history. The word comes from the Sanskrit
vira
through the Latin
virtus,
“vir” being also the root of “virile” and “virility.” Once, you could not be virtuous without being strong in a primarily manly sense, and that meant treating your enemies in a way we would now deem unvirtuous. For Machiavelli, virtue demanded pretense and treachery and was inseparable from political skill and physical strength. It was also implicitly male.

So part of our story is the feminization of virtue, the lightening of its darker shades, because at their worst they are self-destructive and stupid. It’s not that we’re free of enemies and the need to outsmart them. It’s that the path to victory has changed, and with it the structure of all societies in conflict. We will not win merely by being good, but we will no longer win mainly by scheming,
physical bravery, and violence. Before we look at that future, though, we must first see how girls and boys become women and men; then we can turn to leveling the playing field.

If I succeeded in
chapter 1
, you will agree that the notion of psychosexual neutrality at birth was wrong; very few serious scientists believe it anymore. Some of the behavioral and psychological differences between women and men are the result of hormones acting both in the embryo and at puberty and beyond. But of course there is such a thing as gender socialization. Every culture so far in history has tried to make girls and boys grow up differently, exaggerating the biological differences. As for the latter, we should be celebrating, not minimizing, them or belittling women because of them, and I will show you why. But first, what do we know about how gender socialization works?

In Freud’s quaint theory, fear of castration for boys and penis envy for girls were central to gender identity. Anthropologically, there seemed more evidence and logic in Margaret Mead’s concept of womb envy; bearing and bringing forth new life is more enviable than having a penis, and in some cultures, like many South American ones, this is formalized in the
couvade:
a man fakes going through childbirth while his wife is really doing it. So cultures differ in gender appraisals. But behavioral sex differences—in aggressiveness, nurturance, toy preference, voluntary sex segregation, and other measures—exist independently of culture and ideology. In fact, as I and many other modern liberal parents have learned the hard way, young children resist efforts to make girls and boys the same.