Structural Points of Reference

Women and men are not just biological creatures; they are social actors who play, indeed live, many roles connected with the differing groups in which they interact and with which they identify. The patterning of relations between women, men, and children is not fixed by biology; rather, it is socially organized by institutions and roles. Every child has two biological parents, but this does not di-

rectly dictate the social structuring of the relationship among them nor their relationships with other kin. In spite of enormous cross-cultural variations, however, there are some socially constructed regularities in the patterning of reproductive relationships. These regularities are not directly determined by biology; they result from biological cues interacting with socially constructed patterns. I use these structural regularities as points of reference to analyze the developmental events that are involved in the social generation of male dominance.

One structural regularity is women's early caretaking of both male and female children, which means both male and female children's first attachment and identification figure is likely to be a female. Women's mothering gives women power over children of both genders when they are most malleable and the mother-child relationship constitutes the first step in both female and male children's induction into organized social life. In contrast to Chodorow and Dinnerstein, who in somewhat different ways stress the negative aspects of women's power as mothers and its relationship to male dominance, I point out the positive aspects and focus on other developmental factors that are more directly involved in the production of male dominance.

Another regularity, gender segregation of children's play groups, also seems to characterize all societies. This segregation, among other things, serves to support male gender identity and male feelings of difference from and superiority to females. Feminist thinking has not dealt with this aspect of the development of male dominance, partially, I suspect, because of the distinctly antifeminist uses to which discussions of male peer groups have been put. I am thinking particularly of books such as Lionel Tiger's Men in Groups that attempt to explain, and to justify, male dominance on the basis of male bonding. I begin with the argument that males tend to be more concerned than females with preserving gender distinctions and male superiority, and I maintain that these tendencies are more likely to develop in separate male groupings than in any direct early interactions with females.

My focus here, however, is on heterosexual marriage, which is another structural regularity. Marriage makes women into wives and gives adult men (not necessarily the biological or social "fathers" of a woman's child) a measure of control over mothers and

children and over women's early primacy in children's lives. I argue that the structure of the husband-wife relationship, considered apart from other contravening sources of power, tends to define wives as lesser partners in any marriage. From an individual psychological standpoint, this can serve as a defense against the power of women as mothers. From a structural standpoint, marriage institutions tend to be controlled by men and serve to control and organize women's mothering.

Although conservative antifeminists and radical feminists might be willing to countenance these generalizations as true, liberals of various sorts might dispute any transhistorical or cross-cultural generalizations. I too am suspicious of "universals," but these cross-cultural regularities of which I speak are empirically established on a general level. Few anthropologists would dispute that heterosexual marriage and the social assignment of early child care to women are generally found to be normative in all societies. The ubiquitousness of gender segregation in childhood is perhaps less clearly established, but recent work tends to suggest that this too is found to characterize all societies. I use these "universals" not to support any argument about the inevitability of male dominance but merely to provide points of orientation for examining historically and culturally specific situations and their implications for gender asymmetry.

Men's "fathering" as a social role is less of a structural constant than women's mothering and is on a different level than the other three structural regularities I described above. Women "mother" but men do not necessarily "father." Indeed, in this culture "to father" a child means to impregnate a woman and implies nothing about the nature of the social relationship between father and child. Moreover, there is no generally understood social relationship of men to children cross-culturally. In this book, I especially analyze men's fathering as it is now constituted within nuclear families.

Wives versus Mothers

Throughout this book I maintain an analytical distinction between "mother" and "wife," viewed as both a role and an idea. I mean by role the system of expectations shared to some degree within a given

group for the behavior of a person in a particular status. By idea I refer to the cultural image attaching to a certain status. Thus we have images of mothers and notions about what mothers' "roles" are, and we also have images of wives and what the "roles" of wives are.^[6]

The first step is to distinguish between mother and wife social roles, or between the "maternal" and male-dominant "heterosexual" components of "femininity," with femininity itself being viewed as a cultural construct that emphasizes women's weakness as wives and ignores women's strength as mothers. I argue that it is the wife role and not the mother role that organizes women's secondary status. Although both women's mothering and heterosexual marriage are structural universals, they are best seen as constituting separate systems that may be related to each other and to the wider social system in a variety of ways. Using this distinction may help to reconceptualize how women's and men's relations in the world at large might be.

If one looks at concrete relationships, one may not always find husband dominance, but at an analytical level, holding constant other cross-cutting relationships, husbands are expected to be dominant over wives. Worry in our own society over hen-pecked husbands, battleaxes, and castrating bitches reinforces the point that husband-dominated marriages are the norm that these epithets help enforce. Some may argue that egalitarian marriages are the norm, but language usage tends to belie this. There are expressions suggesting that husbands may abuse their power and that wives may exert power, but the underlying assumption is that a husband should have the edge over his wife. To say a wife "puts in her two cents' worth" is common. We rarely hear this said of husbands, since two cents is not worth very much.

Some mothers are not wives, some wives are not mothers, some women are neither wives nor mothers, often women are both. I make this analytical distinction to show that heterosexual marriage can be viewed as a system separate from women's mothering and that the husband-wife relationship is male-dominated. This is a major theme underlying every chapter in the book.

In my view, male dominance cannot be totally explained by or reduced to material, economic, or demographic factors. By male dominance I mean the tendency in societies to assign the highest value to roles played or skills exercised by men. Although the con-

tent of the roles assigned to women and men varies considerably from society to society, whatever roles carry the most prestige are felt to be something that only males are able to do, or that males do better than females. Male dominance is also reflected in the tendency for males to hold more positions of overriding authority in a society. Women are not necessarily less powerful than men, but men tend to hold the kind of power that is considered legitimate, or by Max Weber's definition, "authority." Male dominance is also expressed in expectations that in a marriage the husband should exercise authority over his wife. Assumptions of male dominance underlie and explain why we perceive the same acts and positions differently depending on whether we are judging wife or husband. For example, the structure of marriage itself helps explain why women in the labor force outside the home do not insist that their husbands take greater responsibility for household work. Acting as a wife and assuming her duties is seen as demeaning for a man, while "wearing the pants" does not demean a woman in the same way. Thus when a husband acts as a housewife, he requires compensation, special appreciation, and praise; otherwise, his superiority is endangered. Against this backdrop the wife prefers to do the extra work herself rather than to be further beholden to her already "superior" husband.^[7]

Husband-wife relationships are clearly not the only place male dominance shows up—indeed for some, marriage provides an oasis from this dominance—but, even though marriage provides women a measure of protection from other forms of exploitation by men, the relationship is expected to be male-dominant. Women are constrained to marry to avoid greater problems. Moreover, all males are not dominant over all females. Class and race privilege can overcome gender disadvantage in some instances, but heterosexual marriage is located in every class and race group. Perhaps this is another way of saying that marriage organizes gender relations in ways that are connected to but cannot be deduced from economic or political relations.

In the United States in spite of our lip service to egalitarian marriage, our psychological constructs as well as the organization of work and the male provider role push women to both need and want their husbands to be superior to them. Thus women are constrained to "choose" an asymmetrical relationship, which in fact re-

inforces the societal expectation that husbands be dominant. Many feminist analyses leave marriage ties unexamined, yet the marriage relationship is a fundamental organizer of gender relations and of women's mothering itself. This unequal marriage situation has implications for any serious analysis of the "equal parenting solution" to male dominance that many feminists advocate. In this society equal parenting will solve nothing; indeed it will reinforce male dominance unless husband and wife are more truly equal.

Fathers versus Mothers

My view differs from those who argue that male misogyny and male dominance are a result of men's absence from early child care. Although the initial impulse behind these arguments was to move us away from Freud's phallocentric vision, the practical result has been to lay the blame for male dominance at the feet of mothers. Making the distinction between mothers and wives avoids this implication and allows us to see that although male dominance is contradicted in the relationship between mothers and sons, it is clearly expressed and even exaggerated in the relationship between fathers and daughters. It is this latter relationship that trains daughters to be wives who are expected to be secondary to their husbands.

My work has been about gender development in the nuclear family (a type of family that is by no means universal), especially the ways that fathers, or children's images of fathers, affect children's personality orientations. In this book I contend that although girls and boys get mothering capacities and their general human orientation from their mothers, girls learn to be wives, to look up to men, from their fathers, especially in a nuclear family. This phenomenon is related to husbands' dominance over wives and to husbands serving as a link between the domestic unit and the "outside world." Boys encounter male dominance in connection with their fathers, whose stance toward their sons is partly that of a caretaker mother and partly that of a representative of the adult male peer group. As representatives of the latter, fathers, not mothers, have been the focus of "sex typing" in the sense of fostering a male-oriented dependence in girls and a male-oriented independence in boys. Chodorow and Dinnerstein and any number of other feminists concerned with the psychological aspects of gender inequality

have contended that male misogyny and male dominance might be ended if males contributed equally to childcare.^[8] In my view, this "solution" is premature and may prevent us from taking a closer look at male dominance within marriage and how it tends to reproduce orientations conducive to male dominance in children.

Male-defined Sexuality versus Gender

I also argue that in order to understand male and female parenting and the impact of men's fathering, it is necessary to distinguish between gender and sexuality. Our society (and Freud) tends to define men as sexually active and women as sexually passive or as objects of male sexuality. In my view both women and men are sexual creatures, capable of sexual pleasure and of playing an active or a passive role in sexual encounters. I disagree with those who assume that the difference between men and women is one of "sexuality." I use gender to remove connotations of superior and inferior, active and passive, more sexual and less sexual from the differences between females and males. These kinds of distinctions reproduce male dominance in a narrowly sexual context, using a paradigm of sexual intercourse in the missionary position to depict the "proper"—or worse, the "true"—relation between "the sexes." The whole arena of sexuality has become permeated with male dominance, thus erasing the active sexuality of women. Empirically, gender difference would seem to rest less on sexual activity, in which both men and women participate, than on gestation and lactation, which are functions of women only. Women's biological connection with childbearing, or any other biological fact, does not in itself, however, explain gender inequality, which in the last analysis is a social and cultural phenomenon, or, under modern conditions, partially a political decision.

Feminists, especially middle-class white liberal feminists, have been far more likely to criticize the mother role than the wife role. I argue, however, that it is not women's mothering but the constraint on women in this society to define themselves in terms of their relationship to men that lies more directly behind male dominance as manifested in this society. By definition, now, women as wives are not of comparable worth to their husbands. This is not necessarily "normal" in heterosexual relationships, but heterosex-

ual relationships have been socially constructed to be this way. "Giving up on men," in my view, offers no large-scale solution for women; however, women are not going to be empowered so long as they are culturally defined and define themselves primarily as wives.

The overarching process in contemporary society is individualism, which has deep ideological roots in America. This individualism is the basis for the feminist claim that a persons gender should not be allowed to limit who and what a person can be. Although this trend is on the whole desirable, in practice it has often worked to the detriment of women as mothers. Rather than arguing that women cannot achieve equality until they give up "mothering" or until child care is shared equally with men, I argue that we should accept the facts that women are going to have babies and that women will tend to be more responsible for early child care than men, and, by deliberate social policy, we should keep these facts from being the impediment to women's equality that they have been made to be in this society.

This book, however, should not be taken as a recommendation for any specific policy or set of policies. Decisions concerning specific political stances involve a myriad of narrowly political and strategic considerations that cannot be dealt with "in general," and my analysis is general. My aim in writing this book is political only in the broadest sense; that is, I hope to bring into balance and perspective two concerns within feminism: the desire for greater equality and the desire that values more associated with maternal attitudes should govern the behavior of both women and men.