Making a Difference: Psychology and the Construction of Gender.

TWO NEW anthologies from Yale University Press reveal a feminism that has achieved academic respectability only to begin choking on its own contradictions.

The longer and more ambitious of the books, edited by Deborah Rhode, brings together 21 feminist academics, many of them very well known, such as Alison Jaggar and Catherine MacKinnon. The shorter and more narrowly focused book, edited by Rachel T. Hare-Mustin and Jeanne Maracek, presents five writers concerned with feminism and psychology. Between them, these two books provide an unusually good overview of state-of-the-art feminist philosophy, circa 1990.

Both volumes focus on "the question of difference," which, as their editors observe, has emerged as a major issue for feminist theory. To what extent are men and women different, to what extent are they the same, and should we even be asking these questions at all? Several contributors to these volumes call for an outright end to the study of sex differences, on the ground that such study inherently perpetuates sexual inequality. More specifically, "the question of difference" brings under its rubric the four most recent challenges to feminist theory.

The first of these challenges is the increasingly sophisticated body of knowledge on inherent sex differences, whether these are rooted in biology, universal social necessity, or both. This subject is of vital concern to feminists, for if men and women are inherently different, then traditional society, in its broad lines, is natural. The claim that women are oppressed evaporates, and feminism stands revealed as an absurdity. The response to this challenge in these two volumes, while possibly successful from a propaganda standpoint, is a striking failure from an intellectual one. Like sophists since the days of ancient Greece, the authors reject the idea that there is such a thing as "human nature." They rest this position on such dubious authorities as Margaret Mead, the Marxist academics Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin, and the feminist philosopher Sandra Harding, without mentioning the devastating critiques of these writers' theories by, respectively, anthropologist Derek Freeman, sociologist Steven Goldberg, and philosopher Margarita Levin.

Similarly, when they discuss biology and gender, the contributors to Theoretical Perspectives and Making a Difference consistently describe reproductive-system differences as the only known biological differences between men and women, resting their arguments for "the social construction of gender" on this claim. They uniformly ignore the voluminous evidence that has accumulated since the 1950s concerning the role of the male hormone testosterone in aggression, the role of the female hormones oxytocin and prolactin in nurturant behavior, and the more recent discoveries of major differences in brain structure between men and women. Indeed, the variety and conclusiveness of such findings, along with their explosive accumulation across dozens of different disciplines, may well underlie the repeated demand in these books for an end to the study of sex differences altogether.

But unisexism is only one side of feminism. At the same time that feminists proclaim the sameness of men and women, they adhere with equal insistence to a conflicting doctrine: that women are different from men and better than they. In reality, feminism cannot do without either view. Feminism needs unisexism because if men and women are inherently different, then traditional society is natural. It also needs female chauvinism, because if women are oppressed, then men are oppressors. Yet both doctrines cannot simultaneously be true. None of the contributors to these volumes appears to have grasped the necessary philosophical connection between unisexism and female chauvinism in the feminist perspective. Many of them, however, are keenly aware of the historical persistence of these conflicting points of view in feminist thought. They sense well enough that the continued viability of feminism requires some basis for coexistence between the two. But since unisexism and female chauvinism cannot simultaneously be true, the only effective way to reconcile them is to reject reason itself. The rejection of reason in turn reduces intellectual activity to a contest of wills, a means to power. In such a framework, truth is a function of expediency. Thus, in the penultimate essay of the Rhode volume, Alison Jaggar, chairman of the prestigious American Philosophical Association's Committee on the Status of Women, argues that feminists should insist on having it both ways." "[F]eminists," says Miss Jaggar, "should embrace both horns of this dilemma.... They should use the rhetoric of equality in situations where women's interests clearly are being damaged by their being treated either differently from or identically with men.... Sometimes equality in outcome may be served best by sex-blindness, sometimes by sex-responsiveness." Thus, any pretense of intellectual consistency is abandoned -but this is seen as no great loss: it is preferable, in Miss Jaggaes view, "to live daily with contradictions."

Miss Jaggar's repudiation of reason, though a necessary move, does not solve a third and equally important challenge facing feminism: what are the "women's interests" to which she refers? A recurrent theme of these works, especially the Rhode volume, is that "women's interests are diverse." At times this view is carried to the brink of repudiating feminism altogether. Thus, one of the black contributors to the Rhode volume, Julianne Malveaux, argues: "In many ways, feminism has, at its core, ignored and distorted the status of Black communities.... When education, family planning, pension reform, social-service provision, and a host of related issues are seen as women's issues,' it undermines the interest that Black men (as well as other men) have in them." This focus on diversity," when extended, as it is by several contributors, to issues of race, class, ethnicity, and so forth, threatens to call into question another fundamental assumption of feminism: that women represent a determinate interest group.

This brings us to the most troubling question of all for feminists today: Do women exist? Here feminism meets deconstructionism and the other modern forms of sophism-collectively referred to in these volumes, with considerable optimism, as "post-modernism." For feminists, the post-modernist challenge consists in this: on the one hand, sophisticated feminists now understand that feminism, because of its radically conflicted internal structure, requires irrationalism; on the other hand, if irrationalism is adopted, the concept of "woman" dissolves along with all other essences. If, as most of the contributors to the present volumes have come to believe, "context is all," then it is impossible to sustain the idea of a determinate entity woman.

The only possible solution, once one has gone so far, is to re-absolutize the concept of woman, and hence that of woman's oppression, by an arbitrary assertion of their continued validity. Thus, several contributors, after noting how postmodernist insights undermine the concept of woman and of feminism along with it, assert that, nonetheless, we can "affirm" feminism, as a perspective of continuing relevance. But-and this is all too glaringly apparent-they offer no arguments for this assertion.

Miss Hare-Mustin and Miss Marecek jump-a little too quickly-at the obvious rejoinder: "To assert that postmodern approaches are the correct way of viewing the world would violate the associated assumptions of postmodernism itself. Such an assertion would involve context stripping, holding that a single best approach existed for all questions, circumstances, and knowers." In short, if nothing is true, then it is always possible that something is true-so why not feminism? To which the no less obvious postmodernist reply is that feminism may be true, but there is no basis for thinking it is truer than anything else except feminists' desire that it be so. Thus, to defend feminism in postmodernist terms exacts a price: feminism survives by reducing its former claim of real, universal aggrievement to an arbitrary choice, which can no longer be justified on any ground stronger than personal volition or, more precisely, whim.

This allows us to make a prediction concerning the future of feminism: feminism will endure as one component of the intellectual Left, but its prestige will be visibly reduced, because it will be seen as one specific application of postmodernism-the more general, and therefore superior, case being reserved to deconstructionists, Rortian pragmatists, and the like.

One consequence of this is that male leftists, after years of obligatory deference to the feminists in their midst, now have ground (of a sort) to stand on. The results of this change are already visible in the mainstream media: thus, after years of uncritical support for feminism, the New York Times Book Review has begun to feature articles, often by male postmodernists, that express muted but unmistakable contempt for feminism, which, in the relentless shifting of leftist fashion, is increasingly seen as "simplistic."

For conservatives, therefore, these two volumes, and the developments that they represent, offer a spectacle of piquant irony, as feminism deconstructs itself.