The Tendency to Confuse Difference with Inequality


Alice S. Rossi

...The arguments set forth in this essay may rankle those whose version of sexual equality requires females to model their lives on male patterns, placing great emphasis on work and little emphasis on family and home. But I am no stranger to criticism. In 1964 I wrote an article in the journal Daedalus called "Equality between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal". By later feminist standards my argument for equality was mild indeed, but the reaction of traditionalists in 1964 was not. I was considered by some a monster, an unnatural woman, and unfit mother. My husband, also a sociologist, received an anonymous condolence card lamenting the death of his wife.

My theme was simple enough. For the first time in known history, I wrote, motherhood had become a full-time occupation for adult women and motherhood was not enough. For the psychological and physical health of mother and child, for the sake of the trembling family unit, and for the progress of society, equality between men and women was essential and inevitable.

Older women, who were past career choices, resented my article; younger women felt reprieved. I know for certain that my essay lowered the birth rate by at least 12 children, and increased the number of Ph.Ds accordingly.

Last year I wrote another article for Daedalus, one that represented an evolution of my views. I said that cultural determinism had gone too far. In the effort to debunk the wrong headed beliefs that had debased women for so long, the environmentalists had got themselves into an untenable position. Instead of replacing outdated biological theories with new, accurate knowledge, they were forced to deny that there are any physiological differences between men and women. This view is as foolhardy as the view that sex differences are caused only by physiology.

Once again I found myself being screamed at - this time by the very people whose cause I had supported for nearly two decades. I was accused of selling out, of betraying my commitment to political and economic equality for women, of pandering to conservatives who believe in Man the Aggressor and Woman the Doormat. In this area, as in any research that has serious implications for how we run our lives, commitments are strong and tempers short.

But I believe that contemporary efforts to break up traditional family systems are doomed unless aspects of our biological heritage are acknowledged and then, if we wish, compensated for. The mother-infant relationship will continue to have greater emotional depth than the father-infant relationship because of the mother's physiological experience of pregnancy, birth, and nursing. A society that chooses to overcome the female's greater investment in children must institutionalize a program of compensatory education for boys and men that trains them in infant and child care. (Even then, women may still have the stronger bond with their offspring.) Conversely, any goal that sets women equal to men in the military or in strength-related fields will also require compensatory training for women. Any slackening of such compensatory training - for generations to come - will quickly lead to a regression to the sex-role tradition of our long past, as so many social experiments of this century have shown.

This point of view upsets environmentalists, but we cannot just toss out the physiological equipment that centuries of adaptation have created. We can live with that biological heritage or try to supersede it, but we cannot wish it away. I think we should aim for a society better attuned to its environment, more respectful of natural body processes and of the differences between individuals, more concerned for its children, and committed both to achievement in work and in personal intimacy. This version is more radical, and more human, than one of an equality between the sexes that denies differences...


Excerpted form the article "The Biosocial Side of Parenthood" by Alice S. Rossi, which appeared in the June 1978 issue of Human Nature. The ideas contained in this piece are developed more fully by the author in her article "A Biosocial Perspective on Parenting", Daedalus, Vol. 106, 1977 pp 1-31, and even more thoroughly in a book written by Alice Rossi and Jerome Kagan entitled "The Family" published by W.W. Norton in 1978. Reprinted with kind permission of the author. Alice S. Rossi is professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She took her Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia University in 1957 and has done extensive research on marriage, the family, and sex roles ever since. Her articles include analyses of job discrimination against women (and what women can do about it), barriers to women in the scientific professions, and the issues involved in abortion laws. In 1964, when her three children were still young, she began writing essays on behalf of sex-role equality, including "The Case against Full-time Motherhood", and the infamous Daedalus plea for fair treatment of women. She is also the author of The Feminist Papers: from Adams to de Beauvoir and Academic Women on the Move. Rossi has served as vice president of the American Sociological Association, where she helped organize the Women's Caucus and a division on the sociology of sex roles, and she was a member of the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year.