When Sex Became Gender

Shira Tarrant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136743610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

When Sex Became Gender is a study of post-World War II feminist theory from the viewpoint of intellectual history. The key theme is that ideas about the social construction of gender have its origins in the feminist theorists of the postwar period, and that these early ideas about gender became a key foundational paradigm for both second and third wave feminist thought. These conceptual foundations were created by a cohort of extraordinarily imaginative and bold academic women. While discussing the famous feminist scholars—Simone de Beauvoir, Margaret Mead—the book also hinges on the work of scholars who are lesser known to American audiences—Mirra Komarovsky, Viola Klein, and Ruth Herschberger, The postwar years have been an overlooked period in the development of feminist theory and philosophy and Tarrant makes a compelling case for this era being the turning point in the study of gender.

1

CONFRONTING THE BONDS OF IDEOLOGY

Feminist Theory in the Cold War Years

Common sense tells us it is highly unlikely that a vibrant feminist movement would disappear entirely after suffrage gains were won, only to suddenly resurface with full force, virtually out of nowhere, when political moods changed in the late 1960s.¹ But history is full of myths.

One of these myths is that after winning the right to vote in 1920, American feminists retreated from the political limelight to enjoy the comforts of domesticity. After brief stints in the factory to support the 1940s war effort, the fable continues, women simply returned to their homes, leaving their wartime jobs to pursue more feminine ventures, either by pressure or by choice. Similar stories are told about women in Britain and France despite differences in historical detail and cultural milieu. Today we know that these stories are incorrect.

Alice Rossi noticed this tendency of misunderstanding twentieth-century feminism. She wrote that many historians mistakenly claim that when suffrage movements ended, “the ardent women” who had campaigned so hard to secure the right to vote in national elections “folded away their mementos in their attic trunks—and feminism ‘died.’”² Elizabeth Wilson, who set out to study what happened to British feminism between 1945 and 1968, wrote in her book Only Halfway to Paradise that it “always seemed improbable that a powerful social movement and political crusade, an expression of the aspirations of (potentially) half the population, should suddenly have withered away.”³ Like Wilson argued, it is ridiculous to think that feminism would simply shrivel up and then suddenly reappear, as if out of nowhere, by 1970. Yet this myth was so pervasive that it has become the truth for the collective feminist memory.

But even if feminism did not evaporate after World War II, it is certainly fair to say that it was constrained. One reason for this constraint was due to the impact of conservative ideology and American cold war concerns about security and containment. This unique blend of conservatism and fear reinforced each other and infused the rest of the West throughout the postwar decades.⁴ This combination of viewpoints also encouraged private solutions to social problems, even though this approach ultimately failed to bring about dramatic change. Instead, postwar reconstruction, pronatalist welfare state policies, and domestic ideology combined to form a transnational climate that discouraged overt political activism. Feminists who were actively engaged in working for political causes like equal rights or birth control simply did not know each other or “disagreed over the most basic questions.”⁵ The feminine mystique, combined with the popularity of Freudian psychology and Parsonian structural functionalism, made it easy to dismiss critical feminist insight as a sign of neurosis. In the politically anxious climate of the postwar era, “dissent of any kind required courage.”⁶ The fact was, though, that despite serious political hurdles and formidable ideological constraints, feminist theorizing continued throughout the putative dry spell of the cold war era. Sure, there was Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best. But there was also Adam's Rib and The Second Sex.

Changing Perceptions of Women's Roles

Contrary to popular impressions, the data on women's wage labor indicate that American, British, and French women were actively engaged in the mid-twentieth century workforce. Most of the U.S. women war workers had been in the labor force before the war and either wished to—or did—remain there afterward.⁷ Women's labor rates in France grew throughout the twentieth century, and approximately 50 percent of British mothers worked outside the home before the Second World War. What began to shift during World War II was not only what women were doing but also the perceptions of women's roles. In turn, these changes on the home front due to wartime necessity generated ideological debate about women's proper role in society.⁸

Although domestic ideology glorified and popularized the image of the homemaker, the increasing numbers of women in the workforce competed with simplistic representations of what it meant to be female.⁹ Even Betty Friedan, who portrayed herself as a suburban housewife suffering from the feminine mystique, actually worked throughout her adult life, including several years as a staff reporter for the left-wing Federated Press and the UE News, the newspaper of the United Electrical Workers' Union, the most radical union in postwar America.¹⁰

Women were marrying younger after the war, but the divorce rate was also at a record high in the second half of the 1940s. Women were having more babies, but they were also going to college and earning money. Rather than thinking of the postwar years only as a time when women returned home to cheerfully perfect the domestic arts, this era is better understood as a period filled with more complicated ideas about women's roles in society and images of womanhood that were often contradictory. It was within this context of ambivalence and constraint that feminist theorizing continued. Paying attention to the historical evidence of competing ideologies and the range of postwar women's roles expands our understanding of the rich story of mid-twentieth-century feminism with its ebbs and flows, its activism and nuances.

The overt expression of dissenting politics was subdued after the war, but it was not eradicated. Surely, compared to later political upheavals like the student protest movement, women's liberation, and the civil rights activism of the 1960s, the earlier postwar decades lack the sort of widespread, radical action we might expect to see from people who were fed up with their social and political conditions. But even though the organized political components associated today with feminism were sedated during the postwar years, feminist theorizing never stopped entirely. Instead, functionalism, Freud, and a conservative postwar impulse structured the boundaries of feminist and political thought, while at the margins, critical theorists kept alive the flame of intellectual engagement and the spirit of public debate.

Looking Forward, Looking Back: Documenting Postwar Feminism

By the late 1960s, the political discontent that had been simmering beneath the surface rose dramatically to the forefront of public attention. Formation of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) marked the inception of second-wave feminism in France, while politically minded groups simultaneously formed in the United States and Britain to raise feminist consciousness, to counter women's subordination, and to fight against inequalities in the law. By 1972, the women of Britain, France, and the United States had fully embarked on the journey into second-wave feminism. The writings of Kate Millett (1969), Shulamith Firestone (1970), Germaine Greer (1970), and Juliet Mitchell (1971), now among the classics of modern feminist theory, were in wide circulation by this time. Several years prior to the upheavals of this new era, Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, and the findings of President John F. Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women, published in 1965, marked a point of demarcation between the postwar years and the more tumultuous Sixties.

Between passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the onset of the Women's Liberation Movement, women's experience had largely been academic terra mythologica. The American Woman (1972), William Chafe's book on the social, political, and economic status of U.S. women during the mid-twentieth century, makes clear that not all women unquestioningly embraced the mantle of domesticity.¹¹ Until the 1980s so little was written about postwar women and postwar feminist theory that Chafe's was an isolated voice in the academic wilderness. More recently, others have joined him in taking note of women's accomplishments and feminist activity in the postwar decades. In Beyond Separate Spheres, Rosalind Rosenberg's research on the intellectual roots of pre-1960s modern feminism (one of the few works on the theoretical dynamics of feminism from this era), the author comments on finding that the principal concern of early twentieth-century feminist-minded intellectuals centered on an understanding of human nature, not political strategy. To Rosenberg, the writings of these scholars revealed “how the very basis of women's understanding of themselves was changing.”¹²

Rosenberg's Changing the Subject describes how the women at Columbia University shaped our theories and politics of gender and sexuality. Although this book spans beyond the post#x2014;World War II decades, it highlights the contributions of Margaret Mead and Mirra Komarovsky to these feminist debates. Lois Banner's Intertwined Lives and Dolores Janiewski and Banner's Reading Benedict/Reading Mead are accounts of the ideas and relations of Mead and Ruth Benedict. A 2005 issue of the journal Women's Studies Quarterly features what is described as the cutting-edge theme of gender and culture in the 1950s.¹³ The renaissance of interest in Simone de Beauvoir includes books documenting the biographical and intellectual features of the philosopher's life, including Emily Grosholz's edited collection of essays on Beauvoir's legacy, Elizabeth Fallaize's critical reader, and important work by Deirdre Bair, Toril Moi, and Margaret Simons.¹⁴ Komarovsky's 1953 Women in the Modern World is recently reprinted as a classic in gender studies, with a new introduction by Michael Kimmel.¹⁵ To date, the feminist writings of Ruth Herschberger and Viola Klein have received comparatively little attention, but it is only a matter of time until this changes.

In Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor's definitive study of the postsuffrage era, the authors surmise that feminism managed to survive the “doldrum years” mainly as an elite-sustained, academic enterprise. Analyzing postwar feminist organizational strategies by focusing on social movement theory and resource mobilization, Rupp and Taylor conclude that although the organizational character of American postwar feminism lacked the intensity of the suffrage movement, the feminist tradition never disappeared completely. According to Rupp and Taylor, feminist politics continued with the contributions of an educated intelligentsia whose activities were propelled largely by the agenda set by the National Woman's Party (NWP).¹⁶ Kate Weigand, on the other hand, hails working- class efforts and the role of Old Left Communist Party members in maintaining a feminist legacy they then passed on to the second wave through their books and Red-diaper babies. Weigand writes that communist women's “opposition to sexism, their interest in personal transformation, and their efforts to create a progressive culture through which they could live out their politics suggests that the late 1940s and 1950s were not nearly as distinct from the 1960s as people have assumed.”¹⁷ The postwar decades were instead what Jacqueline Jones describes as “seedtime years for the modern civil rights and women's liberation movement.”¹⁸

Postwar Feminists: Some of the Others

It is interesting that postwar investigations into the social meanings of sex roles sprung up simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. Although this book highlights Mead, Komarovsky, Klein, Beauvoir, and Herschberger, there were certainly others doing similar work.

At roughly the same time Betty Friedan was questioning educated-yet-unhappy American housewives for The Feminine Mystique, Hannah Gavron was collecting information for The Captive Wife: Conflicts of Housebound Mothers (1966), a book concerned with women's condition in English society. Oxford-trained historian Vera Brittain was arguing in Lady into Woman: A History of Women from Victoria to Elizabeth II (1953) and The Woman at Oxford: A Fragment of History (1960) that women's advancement required the autonomy to think, act, and be heard. Brittain believed that changing women's political position would require broad changes in human attitudes including—but not limited to—new concepts of marriage, advancement to professional and economic equality, improved social services for women, radical developments in ideas about sexual morality, and new understandings of women's psychology and capacities.

In Woman as Force in History (1946) and The Force of Women in Japanese History (1953), historian Mary Ritter Beard proposed that women had been powerful yet overlooked contributors to social development. Beard argued that political scientists and historians, more so than psychologists and sociologists, uncritically and carelessly accepted the idea of women's subjection throughout history. Ignoring or minimizing women's productive activities rendered women intellectually inferior in the ideological imagination. For the most part, Beard's work met with "/>considerable resistance until decades after her death in 1958, when the reviving women's movement viewed her books more favorably. One notable exception was Marguerite Fisher's 1954 review of The Force of Women in Japanese History in the Journal of Politics. “Perhaps what Mrs. Beard's book proves,” wrote Fisher, “is that even in a patriarchally dominated and rigid society, some women will have the persistence and determination to rise to positions of influence in areas normally closed to their sex.”¹⁹

Noted historian Eleanor Flexner's groundbreaking Century of Struggle (1959) was the first scholarly history of U.S. women's rights. This comprehensive account charted the competing political claims of American feminism up to 1920. Flexner contributed important new insights by including material on white working-class and black women throughout her book. Flexner simultaneously uncovered the deepening white racism in the suffrage movement and the separate activist and political organizational traditions among black women. Flexner's model for analysis became the gender—race—class intersection so crucial for today's feminist theory. As Ellen DuBois notes, Flexner's work challenged white suffragists' simple confidence that when they said woman they spoke for the entire sex. “And because black women were de facto disfranchised after 1920, including them in her history challenged the notion that women's emancipation had bee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Some Recent Titles from the Perspectives on Gender Series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: TENDING THE EMBERS
• CHAPTER 1 CONFRONTING THE BONDS OF IDEOLOGY: FEMINIST THEORY IN THE COLD WAR YEARS
• CHAPTER 2 THE SETTING: POSTWAR POLITICS IN BRITAIN, FRANCE, AND THE UNITED STATES
• CHAPTER 3 ON THE PATH TO GENDER: MARGARET MEAD, SOCIALIZATION, AND SEX ROLE IDEOLOGY
• CHAPTER 4 MIRRA KOMAROVSKY: FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS AND THE POIGNANT SIGNS OF DISCONTENT
• CHAPTER 5 VIOLA KLEIN: SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE SO-CALLED FEMININE CHARACTER
• CHAPTER 6 SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR AND THE SECOND SEX
• CHAPTER 7 NO WOMAN IS AN ISLAND: RUTH HERSCH BERGER AND POSTWAR POLLINATION
• CHAPTER 8 WHEN SEX BECAME GENDER
• ENDNOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX