Women as a Minority Group: Twenty Years Later

More than twenty years ago I wrote a paper called “Women As a Minority Group,” which aroused so much interest that it took almost three years to get it published. Included among the suggestions put forth for revising it by some leading sociologists were that it might be more important to consider the stupid as a minority group; more fruitful to examine women-in-minorities, such as Yankee women, Negro women, Italian, Jewish, Nisei, or French-Canadian women; that the extent to which this concept was utilized by left-wing movements in Europe in the first quarter of the century should be explored. Following its publication in Social Forces in the fall of 1951, I carefully treasured the handful of requests for reprints. Last year, however, when I requested a reversion of copyright from Social Forces, the editors replied that regrettably their financial situation was too precarious to part with the rights to one of their best money-makers.

In the intervening years I wrote my doctoral dissertation (an earlier dissertation proposal, a study of women ministers entitle Petticoats in the Pulpit, had been rejected by Columbia) on attitudes toward working wives which nobody wanted to publish, a few more articles on role conflicts of modern women, a small discourse on men’s problems called “The New Burdens of Masculinity,” tried unsuccessfully to introduce a course on women at both Hunter College and the New School for Social Research, and styled myself a specialist in sex roles. But the general atmosphere seemed to be one of “mostly quiet on the female front.” True, there were conferences on the special problems of educating women, a few anguished cries from suburbia, a dribble of books exhorting women to re-immerse themselves in feminity, a couple of which I reviewed for professional journals, or on how to overcome the difficulties of combining homemaking and a job, mostly part time, and a small band of female emancipators who struggled on without making much of an impression on the consciousness of female college students, who continued to vote overwhelmingly for marriage first when queried on this subject in my family classes. Even Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, did not immediately cause the smoldering in the domestic bushes to leap into flame. Then in 1967 my friend Pauli Murray told me that the National Organization for Women was being formed and suggested that I become a charter member. At the time it impressed me as quite a radical organization, even though it was quite willing to admit men in equal partnership with women. Though I do not wish to minimize NOW’s accomplishments in its formative years, the organization by no means had become a household word by the time I left for India in the late summer of 1969 to be a visiting professor of sociology at Bangalore University.

You can imagine, then, my re-entry shock in the fall of 1970, when I found the woman’s movement in full swing, that I had been drafted to teach a course at Adelphi with the simple title “Women’s Liberation,” in which sweet young things were waxing passionate about women being an oppressed majority. Braless girls in overalls and miners’ boots presented a strange contrast to the demure students in south India, who when asked to say something in class would often just chew on a corner of their saris in a state of complete confusion and embarrassment. I thought of Indian women doctors who at the age of thirty-five would not dream of getting married without the consent of their brothers. I remembered escorting students home who had come to visit me, if they stayed after nightfall, because no respectable Indian woman would walk on the street alone at night. What more, I asked myself—after this long acclimatization to India—can American women want? They have the most freedom, highest prestige, the most equality—if not dominance—in the home of any women in the world. Well, I found out what they wanted. To finish the unfinished revolution that the suffragists had begun, to remake the masculine world from top to bottom. Not since those days has this country seen such organized mass action. Parades, demonstrations, picket lines, sit-ins to desexigate help-wanted ads, to fight discrimination in getting and holding jobs and promotion, to consign the outer trappings of woman as sex object to the trash can, to combat degrading portrayals of women in advertising and the mass media, to give to women the control of their own bodies in striking down abortion laws, to pass the Equal Rights amendment, to rives marriage contracts, to explore alternative family forms. I arrived home just after the August 26, 1970, demonstration, in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment for women’s suffrage, in New York City, in which the euphoria of “sisterhood is powerful” ran high. I remember the trinity of slogans for that day: right to abortion, day care centers, and equal pay for equal work. What had happened to set women in motion?

The sociologist Lewis Coser has written that members of his profession were caught unaware by the rise of black power because of their too great emphasis on a consensus model of society and neglect of the conflict theory of Marxism. I ask myself what deficiencies in my social outlook could account for my surprise at the resurgence of feminism, even though I had predicted it. One difference between the current woman’s liberation movement and that of the suffragists seems to lie in the esprit de corps of the protagonists. My stereotype of the early feminists is that they were lone rebels in youth and joined forces with other women only in their mature years. Later on you will see why I stress the matter of age. The modern movement, in contrast, took off with the revolt of young radical women college students against being relegated to Jimmy Higgins work in the SDS and carrying out the traditional female functions of note-taking, coffee-serving, and sexual relief. They resented not being admitted to positions of power and leadership. “Make policy, not coffee,” “Make war, not love.” Black women too had to do a bit of ego swallowing to accept Stokely Carmichael’s non-missionary admonition that the proper position of women in the black struggled was prone. Perhaps, though, we do not need a special sociological theory to account for the upsurgence of women, but can place it in the general social context of the conflicts of an affluent society riddled with poverty, fighting a disastrous and immoral war, losing faith in a business civilization, impatient at closing the gap between aspiration and achievement—to mention in a most general and oversimplified way the kind of social climate that gave rise to the civil rights movement and black nationalism, student rebellion, hippies, and other counter culturists, the peace movement, the rediscovery of ethnicity. No doubt the present women’s liberation movement is part and parcel of the general upheavals in our society, as well as being sparked by them.

It is not my purpose here, though, to explain the new feminism as a social movement, or to answer the question of what women really want. Rather I would like to talk about some ways in which my old paper would have to be revised in the light of contemporary happenings and to tell you about some changes in my own thinking on the woman question.

As some of you may recall, my article “Women as a Minority Group” built upon the familiar analogy between women and blacks, and despite the dramatic changes in both groups and Betty Friedan’s rejection of this comparison, the parallels remain. Now some twenty years ago I did not say that women were a minority group, but that they had, from the viewpoint of a believer in the democratic creed, a minority-group status—that is, that although they suffered discrimination, most women were accommodated to their subordinate status. One might say that prior to emancipation Negroes too constituted an oppressed rather than a minority group. There is no need to dwell on the heightening of black consciousness, the search for ethnic roots, and the growth into a subculture, the return on a different level to the “separate but equal” slogan. The Negro’s morale has soared since Arnold Rose’s book of that tile appeared in 1949. Although I discussed the question of social distance between men and women and the kind of homo-sociality that flowed from segregated sex roles, my main emphasis was that women, unlike other minority groups, were “together but unequal” in that they lived with the master race. Far from having a sense of group identification or wanting to sever their ties with men, most women were engaged in a continual competition with each other for the favorable attention of men. Of course, in the early years of the century some women were willing to sacrifice marriage in the interests of a career and felt there was an inherent conflict, in the trite phrase, between being a person and being a woman. But in the process they renounced their sexuality. Their decision to escape the domestic trap was facilitated by the Victorian view that celibacy was not a particularly deprived state for women. As William O’Neill says in his book The Woman Movement, “Even if a woman was denied children, she was also spared the coarse and panful means by which they came into being—processes especially repugnant to women of taste and sensibility.” Radical feminists in the nineteenth century may have espoused free love as a way of breaking domestic fetters, but orthodox feminists rejected this view, feeling that emphasis on women’s sexual role forged the chain that bound them to home and family—and indeed the increased awareness of female sexuality that developed in the s1920s resulted in the teenage marriages and the baby boom of the 1940’s and 1950s, O’Neill continues.

Women who worked, according to Ruth Hartley, viewed their jobs as helping the family, an extension of the wife and mother role. The Adlerian feminine protest of the working wife was that even if I work like a man, I am still a woman—and of course a desirable sex object. Now, following the black lead, we seem to have come full circle. Radical feminists, like Ti-Grace Atkinson, say women have no need of men. If sex becomes too pressing, turn to self-help. Can we expect the emergence of a female nationalism calling for the creation of an Amazon state within our borders? Even if there can be no back-to-Africa movement for women, if we can credit Elizabeth Gould Davis, author of The First Sex, women might bend their efforts to raising submerged Atlantis where a superior female civilization once held sway. At any rate this new separatist movement, like its black counterpart, may represent only a transitional phase pending integration on an equal basis. In the meantime these radicals do not see the problem today as how to modify family institutions to fit in with economic ones, not how both men and women may be enabled to combine home and family with a job, but instead call for the abolition of the family and the virtual elimination of parenthood.

For the time being many women want a place of refuge, if not from men, at least from marriage, while seeking their feminine identities. What kind of definition will come from female studies and the rewriting of history from a feminine point of view? This may involve the recasting of evolutionary theory to account for the distinctive features of Femina sapiens in terms of reproductive needs in the first Aquarian age (vide Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman), the excavation of her as (feminine form of hero) long buried by masculine prejudice, the identification of mute, inglorious feminine Miltons and guiltless Cromwells whose talents were never fostered, the glorification of female contributions that were not of the sort to leave any record, or the rehabilitation of lost matriarchies. Will such an immersion lead to an authentic female ethnicity or clarify the goals of the woman’s struggle? It is not likely that these women in pursuit of what is unique about themselves will discover that it is the womb. Whether the future holds any distinctive life styles for men and women or any complementarity of the sexes remains to be seen.

The radical separatist theme is a relatively minor motif in the current orchestration of the woman’s movement. Most liberationist groups are content to call for a modification of traditional roles rather than a complete breaking off of relationships with men. They seek to move the minds of the majority of American women who have no wish to be liberated. It is indeed understandable that older women whose lives have followed the traditional pattern of domesticity have little or nothing to gain from the liberation movement, but rather are threatened by a devaluation of their status as homemakers and mothers. (Indeed zero population growth may have disastrous psychological consequences for women.) At this point in their lives attractive options are not open to them. Similarly, unless one is stirred by a spark of divine discontent, it is difficult to resist the enormous appeal of being given social approval for a dependent, secure status protected from competition. (Even though women may have been unable to monopolize any significant sectors of industry, they have had the monopoly of their homes and families.) The child in all of us enjoys being lazy and slothful, savoring the present moment, and being treasured for ourselves rather than having to pit our achievements against those of others. And when one considers the deep and pervasive programming women by all the socializing agents of parents, peers, counselors, mass media, etc., it is not surprising that the mass of American women is not un-ambivalently for a radical change in sex roles.

But the point I want to make here is that this outlook is shared by professional and business women. Indeed, it has been remarked that some of the most successful women executives and writers are unfriendly to the women’s liberation movement. Most notorious are the members of the Pussycat League, founded by an attorney, advertising consultant, and a rich housewife, who believe that “looking, cooking, and smelling good for men are our major responsibilities and result in more than equal rights for us.”

We need not, however, go to the self-proclaimed opponents of woman’s liberation to find women who may be suspected of having mixed feelings about extending educational and economic opportunities to all women; they may even be harbored within the movement. This matter of vested interest is the second theme in the continuation of the class-caste parallels between women and blacks. In his article “Human, All Too Human,” which appeared in the January 1947 issue of Survey Graphic, the noted black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier describes the stake that middle- and upper-class Negroes have in segregated institutions that protect them from floundering in the wide sea of white competition. Negros had reason to fear white competition because past discrimination had resulted in their being educated in inferior schools. Although Frazier acknowledges the dependences of a tiny Negro upper class on the black masses who serve as their clients, customers, and servants, he feels that only the short-run interests of Negro professional and business persons lie in segregation. Full integration of blacks into American life and provision of equal opportunity would free their successors from this fear. Frazier, though, focuses on white competition. When the walls of segregation come tumbling down, more blacks would be able to compete effectively with those blacks already at the top. Similarly, it can be said that equal rights will increase the competition that achievement-oriented women will have to face from other women. They may well lose their privileged position. Even those women who have renounced sexual competition with women may now have to suffer economic and social defeat as well. Such women may have succumbed to the male flattery of being told that they think like a man, are free from feminine emotionalism and illogicality, are one of the few women acceptable in otherwise all-male gatherings, much like the “understanding” woman at a male homosexual party. It is standard in the blue-collar class and a feature of middle-class dinner parties for guests to break up into homo-social groups. A recent article in the New York Times recounts the resentment expressed by female guests to some Washington hostesses about this practice. The men apparently are less eager to join the ladies for their after-dinner liquors. The professional woman particularly often disdains joining the distaff wide where the talk presumable centers on children, servants, fashions, recipes, and other traditionally feminine topics and goes with the men to talk business, politics, professional gossips, developments in their common field, etc. Her sex gives her a special piquancy and status in the men’s group. Especially at university functions do women professors speak scornfully of faculty wives, while enjoying the kind of deference they may get from them. If in the future the number of women who are “just a housewife” dwindles, no special cachet will attach to the intellectual woman vis-à-vis both men and women. When tokenism ends, women too will then founder in the sea of female competition. Middle-aged women who have struggled to a modest success may feel resentful of younger women for whom the path has been smoothed.

Although the ambivalence of a few favored women is understandable, they must also realize that they are still kept at a competitive disadvantage with men, and can attain equality only if, to paraphrase Debs, they choose to rise not above their sex, but with it. In their own self-interest they must strive to kick their sisters out of the doll’s house. “Equal pay for equal work” is a slogan to which almost everyone give lip service. The fact is, though, that women can never achieve equality with men as long as there are any differences in the social expectation for the two sexes, as long as any protected or sheltered role is open to women, but not to man. Or, in terms of the obligatory aspects of the wife-mother role, women cannot realize equality if they continue to bear by themselves the main responsibility for the care of home and children. If the work role remains an additional option for women, and equal sharing in homemaking and child care is not required of men, the present sexual division of labor will not be seriously challenged. So long as women’s acceptance in the world of work is predicated upon their having discharged their primary obligation in regard to home and children, their emancipation remains conditional. They will continue to grow up looking to marriage rather than an occupation as their livelihood. With the husband-father regarded as the main source of support, men will receive higher wages than women for the same work. Although economic theory may postulate a marginal productivity basis for wages, sentimental factors have always entered into their determination, and particularly for men a concealed needs principle reflecting their role as family provider. Differential wages for men and women are further justified in the employer’s eyes by special costs associated with female employees, stemming from the primacy of their homemaking and child-guardian role, such as higher turnover, higher absenteeism, lower ambitions, etc.

When we look at the feminine role in terms of privileges rather than obligations, this argument implies that women can no longer enjoy the luxury of choice. The dominant liberal ideology here and abroad continues to call for two roles for women, but not for men. Day care centers, special educational programs, and collective services to lighten domestic burdens are viewed as measures to help women, but not men, add a work life to their home life. Those who espouse a libertarian, pluralistic Weltanschauung may be tempted to endorse the possibility of at least one sex’s having two strings to its bow. The exemption from success in the occupational world, however, no longer conduces to psychological comfort in a society in which achievement values are dominant, but may rather lead to vacillation, insecurity, and regret. The woman’s problem of not knowing which way to jump may be more stressful than the man’s problem of seeing how far he can jump. The lower level of aspiration, which is a frequent outcome of woman’s minuet between home and job, partially justifies and reinforces the discriminations they encounter in the opportunity structure. Thus a vicious circle is formed, similar to Myrdal’s theory with regard to Negros in our society. Women do not prepare for certain vocations because they know they will have to be much better than a man to succeed in them, and because of their lack of dedication and commitment, they are given even less of a chance. The vicious circle can be converted into a benign one only when the key function of a husband is no longer that of provider and that of the wife to be homemaker and mother.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, it must be insisted that no direct assault on discrimination against women, whether it be legislative, stricter law enforcement, court action, persuasion both gentle and violent, can succeed so long as men appear to represent a better investment than women and the probability remains that a man’s salary is more likely to pay for the spouse’s domestic services than a woman’s This position represents a change in my own thinking. Years ago at Hunter College when I used to present a ten-point plan for the reconstruction of family life, I would plead for social arrangements to implement the wife’s option to work—or, as Alva Myrdal put it, the right of the working woman to marry and have children. My first plan stated: “Men and women, according to individual preference and mutual agreement, will work full-time in the home, full-time in a profession, or some division of time between the two.” The catch here is that if most couples elected follow the traditional pattern, fundamental change in discriminatory attitudes toward women could not be anticipated. If women are ever to achieve equality with men—and the “if” calls attention to the fact that the function of the sociologist is not to impose values, but only to expose inconsistencies among values and between means and ends—work must become as mandatory for women as it is for men, or, conversely, it will be socially acceptable for some men not to work. My objection is not to the possibility that one spouse will make the living while the other makes the life, but only to the cultural assumption that the stay-at-home person or secondary breadwinner will be the wife. The role of housewife must be abolished, unless the role of househusband can gain equal favor.

The alternative of such reversals of traditional roles is not considered even by seemingly sophisticated analysts of the “woman question.” Morton Hunt, for example, writing in Playboy magazine in 1970, acknowledges the frustrations and unfairness of the disrupted second-rate career pattern associated with women’s “two roles,” but goes only so far as to consider the possibility of husband and wife sharing equally in all things, a solution he rejects as denying career advancement to both spouses and resulting in inefficient performance of household tasks.

The sharing of roles by husband and wife, however, as the way to free women for work outside the home is the method congenial to advanced, democratic capitalist societies, such as Sweden. Marxist ideology prefers the transfer of domestic tasks to outside agencies, but so far this method has not been successful. Owing to military and economic exigencies, the Soviet Union has had to default on the creation of social services, and, since Russian men resist participating in the maintenance of the home, Russian women carry a double burden. Although women in the kibbutzim in Israel were largely relieved of cooking, cleaning, and child care for their own families, they wound up being relegated to these activities for the settlement as a whole.

Perhaps some compromise between the socialist and capitalist methods can be followed in the United States. That is, redefinitions of marital roles will break down the sexual division of labor within the home. At the same time, the personnel involved in providing collective services for those families that wish to take advantage of them will be recruited from both sexes. For families preferring to have one parent stay at home, the cost of child care can be shared by the community in the form of child allowances and other stipends.

Thus we have reviewed three currents in the woman’s movement which to some degree have their black counterparts. First, female separatism is even less viable than black nationalism. Second, the vested interests of privileged women in the status quo must be recognized and overcome. Third, the kind of feminine self-image that lowers aspiration and permits the acceptance of a dependent status, similar to the defeatists attitudes of other minority groups, must be countered directly by changing the ideological messages that women receive, and indirectly by creating the social conditions that enable women to avail themselves of their quality. Concurrently, men too can be relieved of some burdens of masculinity. Certainly the emotional re-education of men and women will have to go hand in hand with social engineering in enlarging the repertory of life styles open to members of both sexes.