Delusions of Gender (14 page)

But contrary to this opinion, the female residents actually seemed to be working very hard to, as Hinze suggests, ‘downplay the incidents and view them as a “normal” part of a bruising training experience’ (which indeed it is for men and women alike), and to either ignore it (‘I’m in surgery; I can’t sweat the small stuff’) or see the need for change in
themselves
rather than in those who harassed them. As one resident warned, ‘if you blow up every little comment that somebody makes to you … you’re too sensitive.’ One surgery resident described the experience of discovering in the restrooms an explicit cartoon of herself, bent over, and her mentor engaged in sexual intercourse. Another resident had added an arrow and the comment that he wished he could be in the latter’s position. The woman recalled to Hinze:

I thought, this just really sums up … my position in the department of [name removed] surgery, something I’ve worked for for a lot of years, not my whole life, but a lot of years, and they reduce all my hard work and all my sacrifice and my brains and my technical abilities and everything that I’ve done to this,
you know, like this is how they perceive, you know, me. [R becomes visibly upset, begins crying]

She filed no complaint but looked to herself to adapt to the hostile environment (‘I might as well just get over it’) without any expectation that she should not have to deal with this kind of treatment at work (‘that’s how men are’).
²⁶

This example underscores one benefit to women of ignoring, shrugging off or refusing to identify hostile discrimination. Frankly, it is not kind to the self-esteem of women to be reminded by sexual harassment that ‘they are not equal to men in the workplace, that they are, still, after all their gains, just women’.
²⁷
But also, of course, publicly naming discrimination of any kind is neither easy nor guaranteed to bring about positive change nor something anyone does lightly when career, reputation and (if lawyers get involved) savings are at stake. Even responding to a single instance of sexual harassment is harder than one might think. Imagine if, at an interview for a research assistant job, the male interviewer asked you (a woman) questions like
Do people find you desirable?
and
Do you think it’s important for women to wear bras to work?
How would you respond? Would you refuse to answer? Get up and leave? Report the interviewer? These are all actions far easier to implement in theory than in practice. When women were put in this extraordinary situation for real, not one of the twenty-five women in the study responded in these ways. Mostly, they just smiled politely, and answered the questions.
²⁸

Things have improved since Professor Sedgwick’s prophecy. In 1869, the dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania proudly brought her students to the Saturday teaching clinics in general surgery at the Pennsylvania Hospital. She had, for years, been seeking permission for her female students to be able to attend and benefit from observing the great clinicians at work. At last, the
managers had agreed. But the young women did not receive a hospitable welcome. As reported in the Philadelphia
Evening Bulletin
:

The students of the male colleges, knowing that the ladies would be present, turned out several hundred strong, with the design of expressing their disapproval of the action of the managers of the hospital particularly, and of the admission of women to the medical profession generally.

Ranging themselves in line, these gallant gentlemen assailed the young ladies, as they passed out, with insolent and offensive language, and then followed them into the street, where the whole gang, with the fluency of long practice, joined in insulting them.…

During the last hour missiles of paper, tinfoil, tobacco-quids, etc., were thrown upon the ladies, while some of these men defiled the dresses of the ladies near them with tobacco juice.
²⁹

Needless to say, the working environment for women is far better now than it was a hundred years ago. Equal opportunity law obviates any need for special pleading for women to receive the same educational opportunities as men, and female professionals and workers are commonplace, rather than controversial. And yet, compared with having ones backside repeatedly fondled by a surgeon, feeling obliged to network clients at a strip club, or having one’s clothes masturbated upon, a bit of tinfoil in the hair and tobacco juice on the dress seems almost gentlemanly by comparison. As Michael Selmi notes, the many examples of overt discrimination against women in the workplace might be dismissed as ‘isolated incidents’. Yet he argues that it would be ‘a mistake to dismiss … as aberrational in nature’ these examples of ‘overt acts of hostility and exclusion based on stereotypes regarding women’s proper roles or abilities in the workplace.’
³⁰
Of course, not all mistreatment or harassment is directed at women in traditionally male occupations, or at women, and not all women are harassed. (One
expert estimates that perhaps 35 to 50 percent of women have been sexually harassed at some point in their working lives.)
³¹
But the hostilities, sexism and demeaning indignities faced by some women in the modern workplace suggest that old ideas about the appropriate sphere of women continue to linger in many minds – a theme that continues in the next chapter, when we return home from work.

S. and I have decided to get married next year when we get through medicine … I told him I didn’t know a thing about housekeeping, and he said why should I? That he could see no more reason for a woman’s liking cooking and dishwashing than for a man’s liking them. That since our education has been precisely similar … there would be no justice at all in my having to do all the ‘dirty work’.… So we have decided that one week I shall take over all the duties connected with the running of our house and the next week he will … I was so happy I couldn’t speak … We are going to divide up the care of the children exactly as we divide the housework.

—Dr. Mabel Ulrich, Johns Hopkins graduate (1933)

T
his hopeful arrangement was declared a ‘no go’ after just a few months, as Regina Morantz-Sanchez reports in
Sympathy and Science
. ‘We have given up the 50-50 housekeeping plan. We tried for a month, but by the end of one week I knew S. is a fearful mess as a housekeeper.… Could never remember the laundry.… But then of course he is busy and I am not.’
¹

Dr. Ulrich was, in the first half of the twentieth century, running up against the implacable psychological force of the middle-class marital contract. According to this traditional and highly familiar arrangement, the husband is the breadwinner and works outside the home to provide financial resources for the family. In
return, his wife is responsible for both the emotional and household labour created by the family: keeping everyone happy, the house clean, meals cooked, clothes laundered, and children reared; either by her own hand or by proxy. Because
this
becomes the woman’s job once married, employers were perfectly entitled to fire or refuse to employ married women – a situation that remained perfectly legal in the United States until 1964.

Both the breadwinner and the caregiver roles are, of course, necessary. Without the breadwinner there is no money for food. But without the caregiver, the food is not cooked; there is no clean plate on which to place it; and the children are living naked, filthy, and wild in the garden, communicating by way of a primitive system of grunts. The ‘separate spheres’ of men and women – his public, hers private – were seen as complementary and equal, but in an
Animal Farm
-ish some-spheres-are-more-equal-than-others sort of way. When I say ‘head of the household’, you immediately know to which spouse I refer (and it’s not ‘Mrs. John Smith’). That his was the final word was enshrined in law until surprisingly recently. Not until 1974 did US legislation require that married women be able to apply for credit in their own names. And it was only in 1994 that it became possible in the eyes of the law for a British husband to rape his wife. I mention these points not to lower the mood, but simply to highlight the asymmetry of power and status in the traditional marriage contract.

Contemporary women seem to be barely more successful than Mabel Ulrich in persuading their partners to step into the traditionally female private sphere. My husband and I can both enthusiastically attest to the difficulties inherent in attempting an egalitarian marriage – particularly when children are involved. You have heard, no doubt, the saying that the personal is the political. Based on his own experiences within a marriage in which we struggle against convention to split things equally, my husband has developed his own, expanded version of this motto. As he would state it, ‘The school drop-off is the political, the staying home when the kids are sick is the political, the writing of the shopping
list is the political, the buying of the birthday presents is the political, the arranging of the baby-sitter is the political, the packing of the lunch boxes is the political, the thinking about what to have for supper is the political, the remembering of the need to cut the children’s toenails is the political, the asking of the location of the butter dish is the political …’ You get the idea. Some day, I must ask him what it’s like to be married to someone who, eyes narrowed in thought, peers at him over the tops of sociology articles with titles like
Who Gets the Best Deal from Marriage: Women or Men?
We’ve had our disagreements, of course. When, for example, are a few dirty cups a symbol of the exertion of male privilege, and when are they merely unwashed dishes? But however predisposed the research for this book has made me to see inequality where perhaps there is only a cluttered sink, my beleaguered husband can at least take comfort in knowing that, thanks to that very same research, I know just what a rare jewel he is.

In families with children in which both spouses work fulltime, women do about twice as much child care and housework as men – the notorious ‘second shift’ described by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in her classic book of that name.
²
You might think that, even if this isn’t quite fair, it’s nonetheless rational. When one person earns more than the other then he (most likely) enjoys greater bargaining power at the trade union negotiations that, for some, become their marriage. Certainly, in line with this unromantic logic, as a woman’s financial contribution approaches that of her husband’s, her housework decreases. It doesn’t actually become
equitable
, you understand. Just less unequal. But only up to the point at which her earnings equal his. After that – when she starts to earn more than him – something very curious starts to happen. The more she earns, the more housework she does.
³
In what sociologist Sampson Lee Blair has described as the ‘sadly comic data’ from his research, ‘where she has a job and he doesn’t … even then you find the wife doing the majority of the housework.’
⁴

What on earth could be behind this extraordinary injustice in
which she returns home from a hard day at work to run the vacuum cleaner under his well-rested legs? A few popular writers have made some creative suggestions. John Gray, author of the
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
books, has recently made a valiant stab at arguing that performing routine housework chores is actually selectively beneficial to women, including – if not especially – those with demanding jobs. His idea (which to my knowledge has not been empirically tested) is that because the modern working woman has removed herself from her traditional home sphere with its babies, children and friends on whom to call with a pot roast, she has dangerously low levels of oxytocin coursing through her blood. (Oxytocin is a mammalian hormone associated with social bonding and social interactions.) Thankfully, however, ‘nurturing oxytocin-producing domestic routine duties like laundry, shopping, cooking, and cleaning’ are available in plentiful supply. Phew! Such chores, however, have a very ill effect on men. For them, the priority is ‘testosterone-producing’ tasks – for without the stimulating rush of that sex hormone, men become little better than limp rags (and not even ones that then wipe themselves along the countertops). Thus, ‘putting things back together after a flood or disaster’ is testosterone-producing, but ‘[t]o expect him to join in and share each day in her daily routines as a helper would eventually exhaust him.’ It’s hard not to be a little cynical when Gray argues that it is in deference to his male neuroendocrinological status that when he helps with the dishes it should fall to ‘others [to] bring plates over, put things away, and clean tabletops’. As he explains, ‘[h]aving to ask your partner each time whether this food should be kept, and remembering where she wants things to be put away, can be a bit exhausting for a man’.
⁵
One can only hope that Mrs. Gray finds it gratifyingly oxytocin producing to have to remind her husband where the plates are kept.

Or, there is the neuroscientific explanation offered by ‘social philosopher’ Michael Gurian in his popular book
What Could He Be Thinking?
In the chapter entitled ‘The Male Brain at Home’ we learn that because ‘[t] he female brain takes in more sensory data’, a
woman is more likely to ‘neurally register the bit of paper, the dog hair, the children’s toy shoved into the couch’. The ‘female brain’ is also ‘more likely to sense the book that is awry on the coffee table, the dust on the end table, the bed not made as she’d like it’.
⁶