Can Progressive and Conservative Women End the Gender Wars—Together?

January 8, 2020

As a young girl growing up in 1970’s Pittsburgh, I had two preoccupations: Becoming a wide-receiver in the NFL, and quietly observing the dynamics of gender as the feminist movement took root. 

The feminist goal at the time, as far as I could figure it, was to prove that women could do anything that men could do.  I found this odd.  First of all, I already knew that women could do anything that men could do (I was going to play in the NFL one day, after all).  And it seemed backward to me.  As I watched my homemaker mother raise four children while coaxing miracles out of my father’s public school teacher salary, I thought “Why are women fighting so hard to show that they can do what men do? Why aren’t men fighting to show that they can do what women do?”  “Why,” I wondered, “don’t we value the things that women do?”

Conservative icon Mona Charen has apparently been wondering the same thing.  Her recent book, Sex Matters, takes on the critical issues for women today—the damaging oversexualization of our children, the devaluing of motherhood, and the need to embrace, rather than deny, gender differences.

I should say at the outset that these arguments are wrapped in a somewhat silly premise: Charen apparently believes that 1970’s feminists, all by themselves, have destroyed American culture.  So I can’t say we’re entirely on the same page, but I do believe that there’s an urge shared by progressive and conservative women alike to reclaim “femaleness.”

Charen argues that the sexual revolution has betrayed women and especially girls, and has led to an impersonal, unthinking promiscuity that damages us all.  I agree wholeheartedly.  I also agree with her charge that women’s fight to gain access to public and professional realms has led unnecessarily to a degrading of the mothering role.  (Her encounter with a woman who describes herself as “just a mom” is all too familiar, and sad.)  

And I agree with Charen’s central argument—that men and women are different in ways that we should acknowledge and embrace.  Her claim is that “equality between the sexes” has been oversimplified to mean “sameness of the sexes.”  Right on. 

But from here we diverge.

Charen wants to turn back to a 1950’s era idea of family (a time when women really truly were happy, according to the research she quotes).  That would be a mistake.  We must move forward, and here’s why:

The fight for women’s equality in this country started with the desire to have the same rights as men under the law (to vote, for example).  Today, the idea is that women should also want to do whatever men do (from flying military aircraft to running companies to having quick, anonymous sex) because men run the world.  If we can just be like them, the thinking goes, maybe we can run the world someday, too.  

But this entire premise is based on the assumption that the world will always be “male”—that it can only be as men have made it.  And in fact, if women ape men’s behaviors, what we’ll get is a world that looks much like it looks today. This premise lacks imagination—the kind of imagination that can envision a world where femaleness, and not maleness, takes the lead—not just at home, but in public realms.

Women’s differences are the key to a new world for all of us.  War, poverty, and more have always been with us, so do I really think these things would change if women were taking the lead?  Yes, I do.  (And research supports it.  When women enter elected bodies, for example, more legislation having to do with children and families and other community-oriented interests is introduced.)

Women must grasp decision-making roles at the highest levels of business, politics, and other realms—not for the sake of getting to the top, but so that we can use our female instincts to start reshaping a world that is endlessly on the brink of one man-made disaster or another.

Can we really do this?  And can conservative and progressive women come together around the need for female leadership?  I think so—by agreeing that our female gifts are needed not only by our own families but by the entire family of humankind.