Much of the literature on gender equity is concerned with the fact that children are often treated differently in school based on their sex. Educators are expected to remedy this situation even though by the time children reach preschool age they have already been socialized to expect, submit to, prefer, and even insist upon disparate treatment. Both male and female children are sure that it is proper and necessary for everyone to have distinguishable names, referential terms, costumes, and modes of action based on what is considered appropriate for their gender roles in our culture. This is difficult and confusing for youngsters, even when they are taught the differences in human genitalia, as they are required to differentiate among clothed adults when the clues, such as pants or skirts, short or long hair, etc., may vary considerably. It also makes it extremely difficult for them to treat others as equals later on in life because their formative years were spent attempting to determine the genital status of strangers in order to apply the correct pronouns when referring to them and to treat them in one of two separate, distinct,and unequal ways based on a determination of their sex.
Early socialization in the home teaches male children that they have rights which they must defend in order to avoid being treated like females, and, inevitably, breeds contempt for females. As females we are taught that being teased, trivialized, disparaged, and scored isn't worth getting upset about because "boys will be boys," "life isn't fair," and we should be proud of our genital status rather than our social status or accomplishments. What early patriarchical socialization actually does is to waive the right of female children to equal treatment,without the knowledge or consent of the children whose rights are being waived, in favor of separate, different, unequal, and therefore discriminatory treatment based on sex.
Those of us who accept our second-class citizenship are considered well-adjusted, while those of us who aspire to justice and equality are not. Patriarchical societies reward those who say that we are already equal or superior to males, despite the fact that we are half the population, do 75% of the world's work, and own only 10% of its resources. Patriarchy speaks of warlike and even genocidal cultures as "civilizations" when nothing could be further from the truth. "Might makes right" and "survival of the fittest" are the laws of the jungle, not the social structures of civilizations. If we are ever to become an ecologically viable, that is, one which controls its population growth in accordance with the resources available, rather than a Malthusian species, we must remember that civilization, like charity, begins at home, and that children who are socialized to inequality and punished for their human aspirations are doubly oppressed when taught to define their oppressors as civilized.1.
We call socialization into inequality the teaching of gender roles. We can gain great insight into what gender roles really are from Kate Millet's account of an event that occurred in a South African prison.2. After a fierce gang war, the winning gang forced the surviving members of the losing gang to assume the female gender role.The losers were called "wifeys" and not only forced to become sex and household slaves, but were also required to mimic the mannerisms of women. In retelling this story Millet incorrectly equates sex with status. Since both gangs were male, it is obvious that gender roles, rather than sex, indicate social status, that the "feminine" or subordinate gender role is imposed by means of violence, and that it can be imposed on anyone who is conquered, regardless of sex.
We can read in the Old Testament of the early days of patriarchy when warlike bands of males raided neighboring villages, killing all the adult males and taking the women and children, as wives and slaves. The difference between a wife and a slave was minimal, as a male slave-raider owned both as property and had absolute power of life and death over both. Citizens of nonpatriarchical societies would have been particularly vulnerable to such raids, as they were likely to have been peace-loving rather than warlike, and their children were apt to be wanted and loved rather than forced on them through rape, social pressures, or economic incentives. Matriarchal mothers would have had the maternal instincts of many mammals to protect their children even if it meant sacrificing themselves.The captured slaves, or wives if you prefer, would only have been permitted to live if they were absolutely obedient, totally subservient, and constantly deferential towards their male captor--exactly the situation of the losers in the prison gang war. This is how our foremothers were forced to "act like women" and forced to discriminate against their own children and teach their female children the submission necessary to survival in captivity. No wonder that early patriarchies,while keeping careful records of their histories, usually denied literacy and access to these records to females.
A gender role consists of exactly the same things used to establish and advertise social status in a theatrical role or a military heiarchy. These include separate, different, and unequal titles, terms of address, pronouns, costumes or dress codes, and permissible actions. None of these things are natural or inherent, and all must be taught and imposed anew with each generation. Patriarchal "science" is so desperate to find justification for discrimination that much publicity was given to a "scientific" study, done by a woman, that found differences in the size of the brain stems of male and female adult cadavers, when though there was no control group. A similar study done without a control group in prerevolutionary China would have found "scientific" evidence of great differences in the size of male and female feet. Unless you have a control group consisting of those who are not brought up in a patriarchical society, which, of course,we do not have, you cannot know if sex differences are inherent or are a result of discriminatory treatment. Just as hormonal balances change in animals as circumstances dictate their social rank, the subjugation of females may induce physiological changes that appear natural so long as there is no comparison group free of the effects of sex-based discrimination.
In order to establish a control group, so valid scientific studies could be carried out, we'd need to raise a statistically significant sample number of children in an egalitarian manner without regard to sex. This would be extremely difficult even if a protected location, adequate finding, and motivated parents were available, as we have no role model for role equity. But we can mention a few of the changes necessary so that children could grow up in an atmosphere not based on sex discrimination.
The first change starts before the child is born, when the parent(s) usually select(s) a name. Instead of saying, "If it's a boy..." and "If it's a girl..." we'd have to select names that are not based on sex. In most cases we would not want to give a male child a traditionally female name because of the inevitable teasing and harassment that would result. Since girls are also subjected to the same teasing and harassment, we would not want to give a female child a traditionally female name either. There is, in fact, a small but growing trend toward giving female children traditionally male names. This is understandable in a patriarchal society where adult women find that traditionally female names are not as useful as traditionally male names. Studies have shown that the same piece of work will be more highly regarded by both males and females if it has a traditionally male name attached to it. As women, we are told to ensure our safety and privacy by using only or first initial on mailboxes and in telephone books, and systems operators have even advised women who complain of computerized harassment to use login names that appear to be male as a way of eliminating the problem without infringing on the free speech rights of males. Small wonder that parents who want to give their child every possible advantage would avoid traditionally female names regardless of the child's sex.
Once we have decided that our children, regardless of sex, will not be saddled with names that denote an inferior social/gender role, the next problem occurs when an infant is born. Patriarchy wants us to dress children differently based on their genital satus. Avoiding this shouldn't be too difficult in the case of infants, since we can eschew pink and blue, and stick to yellow, green, and other neutral colors. We can avoid frilly drisses and hair or scalp bows, along with miniature football or baseball outfits with matching caps, and dress children of both sexes in rompers and asexual playclothes. This would be impossible for parents who belong to patriarchical religions, as they are required to dress infants like tiny brides and grooms for certain rituals, but others should have no problem. Of course when visitors arrive to view the newborn, their first question is likely to be, "Is it a girl or a boy?" The nondiscriminatory response, which will alienate many visitors, is, "Why in the world would you want to know that? My baby's private parts are private." and then refuse to remove the diaper no matter how curious they are. If anyone insists on trying to remove or peek under the baby's diaper, remind them that there are laws against sexually molesting children.
If you should actually try this, you'll find that some people will be outraged. 3. The first thing that they learned in life was that there were two kinds of people and that they were to be carefully distinguished as to genital status and then accorded disparate treatment on that basis. If you deny them access to your infant's genitalia and fail to give them the information they need in order to discriminate, they are likely to become angry or even violent. The best way to handle this is to tell them the child's name, which may lead them to assume the child is male. Since males have the superior heiarchical social/gender role in a patriarchy, this is unlikely to do any permanent damage so long as they do not have extended access to the child without a parent in attendance.
Where the services of a qualified midwife are available, children should be born at home. Many people are not covered by health insurance and cannot afford health care anyway, so home births may happen as a matter of national policy rather than personal choice. When children are born in a hospital physicians will quickly ascertain their sex in order to indicate it on the birth certificate. Although a bureaucrat might attempt to refuse to register a child's birth unless the infant's sex is stated, a court challenge could possibly result in changing this procedure as such information is generally considered potentially discriminatory and therefore optional and confidential.
Sex does not belong on birth certificates, drivers' licenses, federal promotion forms, or any other documents where it realistically cannot be kept confidential. A person's sex will be known to health care workers, but they should be reminded to respect their obligation to protect their patients' confidentiality and privacy. If our private parts aren't private, what's private? But be sure you have a good team of feminist attorneys who can insist on the court providing a valid, nondiscriminatory reason for such information on a form that may have to be shown to various persons and institutions that cannot guarantee privacy and confidentiality. There being no nondiscriminatory reason, it is unlikely that the court can provide one. One possible reason is for purposes of marriage, but since not every one marries, not everyone needs that information on their birth certificate, and, indeed, it is a simple matter for a person to present medical evidence of their sex if and when needed. Since courts have accepted medical evidence of surgical gender role changes (incorrectly called sex changes, as there is no surgery that can enable a female mammal to produce sperm or a male mammal to produce eggs), an indication of sex on a birth certificate can be ignored by a court later on in life, and is therefore unnecessary and meaningless.
Customs of unequal distribution of inheritances based on sex should also prove unConstitutional if challenged, and as for school, the court should be assured that the child will be homeschooled as this is necessary to a nondiscriminatory upbringing anyway. Should you succeed in keeping the child's sex off the birth certificate, keep a copy of the court proceedings and check the records at regular intervals, so that if some clerk notices that the information is missing and "helpfully" fills it in based on the child's name, you have have it removed.
Now we come to the biggest problem of all. How do you refer to a child without referring to its genitals? In English we have separate, sex-based honorifics and pronouns, so that we normally cannot refer to a person without indicating their genital status. Words like "Mr.," "he," "him," etc., usually mean, "that person wiyh the penis," while words like "Ms.," "she," and "her," etc., usually mean, "that person with the vagina." Shere Hite4. calls this the "caste system" of patriarchy, which equates the individual with their genital and reproductive organs.
There is actually a very simple, logical solution to this problem. Traditionally, the masculine pronouns have also been considered to be inclusive. Of course we know that our default assumption for inclusive terms, since we live in a patriarchy, is male, and that the so-called inclusive terms really weren't used in a truly inclusive way. In the '70s feminists rejected purportedly inclusive terms and insisted on adding exclusive terms to indicate that females were also present and existed in the general populace. Since the feminine pronouns are sex-based, exclusive, and divisive, this was an illogical, if necessary, ploy.
Some feminists have compared words like "he" and "him" to the sort of demeaning epithets that bigots use to refer to minorities. But the comparison fails as bigots don't use such epithets to refer to themselves. For women andor minorities to insist that white males use exclusive, divisive, and usually demeaning or diminishing terms is not productive. A more promising strategy is to simply change our default assumption for inclusive terms from male to female, as we do in this newsletter. Although we may use the same terms when referring to males, they cannot claim to be made invisible, as we are careful to mention their sex explicitly in such cases, but since female is our new default, there is no need to mention the sex of females. For example, if a sentence in this publication says, "He is a professor," you may be absolutely certain that he is female because if he were not we would have to say, "He is a male professor." In a patriarchy the normal default is male, but a feminist publication or organization has every right to change the default to female so that it is more convenient.
When a person has a unisex or ambiguous name, others will attempt to determine that individual's genital status in order to determine their social status and treat them accordingly. The founders of the United States of America abolished titles of nobility precisely because they are indicators of inequality. No U.S. citizen has to refer to another as "your highness," or "my lord." Unfortunately, rather than rendering us all equal, this merely resulted in all U.S. males, rather than just Knights of the British Realm, being referred to as "Sir," while U.S. females, as if we all ran brothels, are referred to as "Madam." If we really want to eliminate sexual discrimination, we must eliminate all titles of social status, including pronouns based on sex. The use of inclusive pronouns to refer to females may seem strange to us at first, but children who are raised from birth to refer to others inclusively, without regard to sex, will think it natural and find it a lot easier than our current system.
In a patriarchy males own the default, but in a more democratic culture the default, just as in a computer program, is a variable. The advantage of possessing the default is that it does not require any special effort or invite disparate treatment. For males to use inclusive pronouns exclusively to refer to themselves is selfish, grammatically incorrect, and ultimately futile. Sooner or later we will all insist upon equal terms. Some traditionalists may complain about using traditionally inclusive pronouns in their traditional sense, but it is always heartening to progressives when traditionalists rail against tradition.
The same principle we use with pronouns applies to most other aspects of raising children equally. Whatever is natural, easiest, takes the least fuss and bother, is most comfortable and practical, etc., is usually considered male rather than natural or the default. In computer programs defaults are built in and don't have to be thought about unless the user wishes some less common value. Faces without cosmetics are the human default. They're not specific to one sex or the other. In the same way, short, neat hairstyles, simple, functional clothes, and natural, unconstrained tones and manners are all considered masculine rather than default choices. As females growing up under patriarchy we are told that our primary identity is our sex and that in order to "be ourselves" we have to waive our Constitutional right to equality, and act and dress in a special or different way so as to indicate a preference for special and different, i.e., nondefault or discriminatory, treatment based on sex. The tension that arises from wanting equality but not being able to command or defend it without giving up our primary identity is then dismissed as "women's problems." Males, of course, don't have to wear stage makeup, fussy costumes, or act in unnatural or constrained ways in order to be male--they own the default and all they have to do to be themselves is avoid the special and different things that females do.
If children do not have different types of names, referential terms, dress codes, and permissible behaviors based on sex, it will be unnecessary for males to feel or show contempt for females or for females to feel or show deference to males. But in order for this to occur, it is also necessary that children be homeschooled in order to avoid the group bathrooms in public and private schools. Instead, we should have single user bathrooms where individuals can have personal privacy.
Our language, customs, and traditions, perpetuated through thousands of years of patriarchy, have left many of us confused about the difference between biological sex and socially imposed gender roles. Some of us cling to our shackles of gender role socialization and pass them on to our children, not because they offer any advantage or are suitable to our nature, but because they are the only identities we know. To the extent that we are unable to raise our children as equals without regard to sex, it is we, as women, as mothers, and often as feminists, who collaborate in perpetuating patriarchy at the same time that we seek to resist it.5.
Gerda Lerner wrote that in order to subjugate an entire class of people, it is necessary for them to be readily identifiable.6. A recent court ruling maintained that gays and lesbians were not a class because they were not always recognizable as such. But we have instances when people were rendered visible specifically so that they could be discriminated against as a class. German Jews, for example, who were sometimes indistinguishable from other Germans, were forced to wear the yellow star in Nazi Germany, while homosexuals, political dissidents, and others who were not otherwise distinguishable from the general populace, were also made to wear identifying patches on their clothes. When patriarchy wishes to discriminate against a group as a class, it renders them visible if they are not already distinguishable by physical characteristics. Infant humans, for example, unless they are always undiapered, which would be much too messy for patriarchy to tolerate, are not readily distinguishable by sex. Patriarchy has ensured that females are readily identifiable for purposes of discrimination through the sort of disparate treatment we've discussed. If we are to establish a more egalitarian society, we must recognize the words and uniforms that mark us for discrimination.
This is not to say that people should not wear traditionally female clothing. Everyone, male or female, should have the right to wear whatever clothing they wish. But we must recognize that in a patriarchy there are uniforms that correlate with status, and that there is a big difference between a law officer's uniform and a clown suit. When you appear dressed as an officer and demand respect, you'll probably get it. But if you are wearing the clown suit and make the same demand, it will be treated as a joke and the most you can hope for is that your request will be humored. When adult males wear traditionally female clothing, it is usually either to attract sexual attention or as a joke. In either case they know what to expect from others. But females are dressed in what patriarchy considers to be sexual, sensuous clothing from infancy, and then have to deal with males who view such clothing either as a sexual enticement or as a uniform worn only by social inferiors.
Raising our children on equal terms is very simple. We must not do anything to children of one sex that we would not do to children of the other sex. Schools do not socialize children into inequality because they do not get children until they're five years old. Those are some of the longest years of a child's life, their formative years, when they learn the most, and it is up to us as parents, whether they learn sex-based discrimination or gender role equity. It is this Foundation's purpose to advance the cause of equity.
1. The Hite Report on the Family, Shere Hite, Grove Press, 1994.
5. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, Gerda Lerner, Oxford University Press, 1993.
6. The Creation of Patriarchy, Gerda Lerner, Oxford University Press, 1987.
