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18. DISMANTLING NOAH'S ARK
JUDITH LORBER
Thou shall come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives with thee. And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring info the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and femaJe.J
"Did she have a boy or a girl?" I asked. "Why do you want to know?" said my 13-year-old.2
It is a paradox of feminist politics that politically, women must act as a group in order to defuse gender as a discriminative status. In the current climate, and no doubt for a long time to come, if women are to gain anything like equal representation in existing institutions, they must push for their rights as women. Another necessary political stance has been the valorization of women's characteristics and special perspectives to counter their devaluation in male-dominated cultures. Hnwever, both strategies have limits that caution us to keep in mind that equal rights for women as a group and the celebration of women are effective only as short-term politics. The permeation of existing institutions with gender inequality makes the long-term goal of equal opportunity within them a sham (Eisenstein 1981). Glorifying womanliness consolidates female unity and power, but when pushed to extremes, it comes dangerously close to reviving the cult of true womanhood and the ideology of separate spheres (Jagger 1983; Stacey 1983a). The long-term goal of feminism must be no less than the eradication of gender as an organizing principle of post-industrial society.
Feminist theory and research have shown us that gender is a linchpin of social order, but they have not seriously envisaged a social order without gender. Examination of the social bases of gender demonstrates that gender is essentially a social construction, and that relations between women and men are essentially social relations. What is socially constructed can be reconstructed, and social relations can be rearranged. A modem social order without gender is possible, and I would like to sketch what it might look like. So that it is clear what I mean when I speak of gender as a set of oppositional relationships that sustain and are sustained by institutionalized patterns of behavior, I begin by analyzing the concept of gender as a social construct.
355
THE SOCIAL BASES OF GENDER
Gender supposedly rests on an obvious physiological and biological dichotomy, but it can be argued that the concept of physiological and biological dimorphism emerges from our firmly held belief in two and only two genders. In everyday life and in scientific research, Kessler | and McKenna (1978) argue, we first attribute sexual dimorphism, and then look for evidence of it in order to have "good reasons" for the original sorting of people into the categories "female" and "male." From the perspective of dialectical materialism, Jagger (1983, pp. 109-12, 125-32) points out, physiological sex differences are socially produced by differences in diet, exercise, work, and selective breeding, and procreation and sexuality are as socially constructed as they are biologically based (see alsoLongino andDoell 1983; Naftolin andButz 1981). • Most human beings produce both androgens and estrogens, and these are chemically converted into each other, so that "the endocrine nature of the human species is hermaphroditic" (Briscoe 1978, p. 31). Physiological sex differences may be quantitative, but the boundaries between "woman" and "man" are socially located and differentiated by what Gayle Rubin calls a "sameness taboo . . . dividing the sexes into two mutually exclusive categories, a taboo which exacerbates biological differences between the sexes and thereby creates gender" (1975, p. 178, her emphasis). ] But what about menstruation, lactation, and pregnancy? Do they not i demarcate women from men? They do not. Some women are pregnant some of the time; some do not have a uterus or ovaries. Some women breastfeed some of the time; some men lactate (Jagger 1983, p. 165fn). Nonetheless, in the United States, all women, whether or not they need a temporary respite from their usual responsibilities, and medical attention because of complications of menstruation or pregnancy, are considered unfit for certain kinds of work, physically fragile, and in potential need of medical attention. The same "protectiveness" is not extended to men, who are as likely to develop prostate troubles < as women are to develop menstrual cramps or complications of pregnancy. Only women's potential for pregnancy is used to determine 1 where they can and cannot work, although recent studies have shown that toxic chemicals and other occupational hazards are equally likely to affect normal sperm production (Wright 1979). Gender makes women's procreative physiology the basis for a separate (and stigmatized) status, not the other way around (Goffman 1963; Schur 1984; Wittig 1981).
Extensive studies on early socialization have demonstrated beyond quarrel the social creation of gender identity and genderized behavior in children (Safilios-Rothschild 1979). Through the example, teaching, rewards, and admonishments of parents, siblings, teachers, and other significant adults, the child learns, first, that there are two genders, second, which gender she or he belongs to (and how to refer to them), and finally, how to be (and not be) a proper member of his or her gender. Gender markings and gender identity are created and maintained for children by parents* choice of names, clothing, adornments, toys and games, and by play, books, and the media. Although prepubescent children vary more significantly by size and by physical, intellectual, and emotional development, gender grouping produces socially dimorphic "boys" and "girls." Children internalize and use these forms of identity in developing their self-concepts and in organizing their own social worlds (Bern 1981). The gender division of parenting deepens the development of feminine and masculine personality structure (Chodorow 1978).
As children develop pubescent physical characteristics, their behavior is further dichotomized and organized around gender-appropriate sexual scripts, which vary from society to society and within societies by class, race, religion, and ethnic group (Gagnon and Simon 1973). Anatomical secondary sex characteristics are of less importance as gender markings than the extensive display signals Birdwhistell (1970, pp. 39-46) calls "tertiary sexual characteristics." These create an elaborate communication code of masculinity as contrasted with femininity, that, Birdwhistell says, is made necessary by the relative unimorphism of human beings.
Although physiological distinctions have seemed to be a natural starting place for the social construction of gender, anthropological studies suggest that the division of duties pertaining to food production and child rearing is more central to gender as a socially organizing principle than dichotomous procreative biology.
Gender probably emerged as part of a more efficient division of labor for food production and distribution, for child care, and for teaching survival skills. Gender assumed importance only with the invention of projectile human hunting and the use of fire for food production, Leibowitz (1983) argues. The necessity of teaching these more elaborate skills encouraged a division of labor that increased food supply (Leibowitz 1983; Marwell 1975). Because of the need for women to be both food producers and nurturers, women's work developed certain characteristics (Brown 1970). It is likely to be relatively repetitious and interruptible so that small children can be watched as women work; it
IL k t---'     L--f     HP       ' 'KM »*        . n
is likely to be done where children can be carried along; and it.must be relatively safe, so as not to jeopardize the precious societal resources of mothers and surviving children. Men (and adolescents of both genders) do the work that is dangerous, that requires distant travel, and that needs close attention (Freidl 1975).
The division of labor by the requirements of subsistence technology and the need for the group to reproduce itself fits the work women and men do in gathering and hunting societies, in societies based on hoe cultivation (women's work) and plow agriculture (men's work). It also affects the relative status of women and men. When the subsistence technology is compatible with child minding, women contribute significantly to the economic resources of the societal group, and their status tends to be equal to that of men, as in gathering and hunting and horticultural societies (Blumberg 1978; Leacock 1978). When the subsistence technology is not compatible with the care of small children, women tend to be less valued as producers and their consequent social status is low, as in patriarchal agricultural societies based on plow farming and herding. In these societies, women are valued as secondary producers, but the primary production is controlled by landowning men.
Interwoven with the gendered division of labor are kinship systems that allocate responsibilities for the socialization and social placement of older children, for the care of the elderly, and for the bonding ties between families through out-marriage on the basis of gender. In non-industrial societies, the resources embedded in food distribution, mate choice, and rights to the services and marriage portions of children are ascribed by gender and proliferated into gender-based systems of property ownership and political dominance (Cucchiari 1981; Rubin 1975), The ideological justifications and supports for these arrangements are found in oral and written histories, myths, and religious symbols and rituals (Sanday 1981). In short, in non-industrial societies, gender organizes the social order through kinship and the division of labor.
The shift to industrial capitalism weakened kinship as an organizing principle of society but ironically built gender into the new economic institutions (Blaxall and Reagan 1976; Matthaei 1982; Pinchbeck [1930] 1969). Working-class women were hired, along with their children, as part of a family unit of wage workers headed by the husband (Acker 1988; Hartmann 1976). Married women who remained in the work force continued to be considered secondary workers, and this designation carried over to all women workers, who were systematically paid less than men, and to occupations dominated by women,
which consistently have wage structures below that of comparable male-dominated occupations (Milkman 1980; Treiman and Roos 1983).
In today's capitalist economies, women who alternate between work in the home and work in the marketplace provide the necessary reserve army of labor that can be called on during economic expansion and dismissed during recessions. Married women who do not work in the marketplace are also vital to capitalism, for, without pay, they organize consumption and philanthropy, socialize the next generation of male workers and managers, and prepare their daughters to be housewives, mothers, part-time workers, and occupants of the perpetually gender-segregated work force (Glazer 1984; Ostrander 1984; Safilios-Roihschild 1976; Sokoloff 1980; Zaretsky 1976). Socialist economies, despite an ideological commitment to equality for women and high rates of life-long female labor-force participation, also have dual labor markets divided on gender lines, male-female income differentials, and a concentration of women workers at the lower ends of work hierarchies (Dalsimerand Nisonoff 1984; Lapidus 1976, 1978; Loi 1981; Nazzari 1983; Swafford 1978).
The persistence of gender segregation and stratification in the economies of all industrialized countries has ensured that most women would also be barred from significant political participation because of their limited power-base resources (Bengelsdorf and Hageman 1979; Eisenstein 1981; Hartsock 1983; Lapidus 1978; Nelson 1984; Stacey 1983b). As Virginia Woolf succinctly put it in Three Guineas (1938, , p. 22), "What real influence can we bring to bear upon law or business,
religion or politics—we to whom many doors are still locked, or at best ajar, we who have neither capital nor force behind us?" But even those women to whom doors have been opened—professional women, and women with financial and political capital—have, except for a few well-known, male-oriented prime ministers, been kept from the inner circles of power by covert denigration of their competence and legitimacy as leaders (Amundsen 1977; Epstein 1970; Fennel I et al. 1978; Lipman-Blumen 1976; Lorber 1984; Martin and Osmond 1982; Reskin 1978; Wolf and Fligstein 1979).
Given the embeddedness of gender in all social structures that make up modern society, would not the erosion of gender boundaries result in social chaos and individual normlessness? In actuality, the solidity of gender as an organizing principle of society has already been eroded by feminist challenges of its petty absurdities and exploitative functions. But no feminist perspective has kept cieariy in focus the revolutionary aim of restructuring social institutions without a division of
human beings into the social groups called "men" and "women*" Liberal feminists have concentrated on espousing equality between the two groups, but noc eliminating them as significant social categories. Radical feminists have emphasized the positive aspects of women's traditional qualities, and so have polarized women and men. Marxist feminists have suggested industrializing domestic work, but have not suggested how to get men to share in it. Socialist feminism has come closest to envisaging "a society in which maleness and femaleness are socially irrelevant, in which men and women, as we know them, will no longer exist" (Jagger 1983, p. 330), but their program has tended to concentrate on promulgating democratically run, communally organized workplaces without specifying how to build in genderlessness. They also have tended to pay less attention to restructuring sexuality, friendship, and parenting so as to eliminate gender as an organizing principle of intimate relationships.
What follows is not an attempt to provide a complete prescription for revolution, nor a Utopian description of a society without gender, which Gilman (1979), Piercy (1976), and LeGuin (1969) have done so well. Rather, 1 want to take forward tendencies and policies already familiar to us to show how, if carried through, they could go a long way toward a genderless restructuring of post-industrial society.
SOCIAL STRUCTURES WITHOUT GENDER
In many societies there have been people who moved from one gender to another temporarily or permanently—transvestites, berdaches, manly hearted women, kijras, actors, impersonators, and in our time, transsexuals. While they challenge the fixedness of gender boundaries and the sex-gender overlap, they do not challenge gender itself. Indeed, cross-dressing, impersonation, transsexualily, male wives and female husbands, and butch-femme homosexuality in many ways strengthen gender, since without a notion of gender differences there is no rationale for crossing over (Altman 1982; Billings and Urban 1982; Blackwood 1984; Raymond 1979).
No more challenging to gender are unisex styles, which may be as simple as a neutrally colored jump suit, as ubiquitous as the polo shirts, jeans, and sneakers seen across the Western world, or as the stylish androgyny recently described in the New York Times as follows:
Seen from the back, a young person, radiating a certain sense of style, may be wearing an oversize man's jacket, tight pegged pants, crushed
down boots. Slung over the shoulder is a big, soft pouchy bag. The hair will be worn short with some fluff on top. If there is a bit of pierced earring visible, it is probably a woman. Then again, it could also be a young man. (Donovan 1983, p. 108)
To be more than a passing fashion, non-gendered dressing would have to start early, be consistent, and include dress-up as well as play clothes. The unisex style described above is not consistent—men wear earrings in one ear, women in both. Dress makes personal and social statements. As long as gender categories are socially significant, dress will reflect difference and signal gender identification. We cannot erode gender from the skin out.
Similar problems arise with attempts to teach children about biological dimorphism without a cultural overlay (Bern 1983; Money and Ehihardt 1972; Morgan and Ayim 1984). The significance of genitalia, procreative capacities, and sexuality arise from the social construction of gender and its evaluations and power relations. There is no way to discuss sex and procreation neutrally, that is, free of social and cultural meanings. If we could, the evidence of diverse sexual persuasions throughout history would long ago have made it clear that sexuality is not neatly dichotomous. An increasingly sophisticated procreative technology of artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, egg and sperm donations, and embryo transplants boggles the mind with combinations and permutations of biological parentage, but the innovations are contained in the conventional structures of heterosexual, two-parent families (Lorber 1987; Rothman 1984, 1989).
However, the separation of sexuality and procreation, and biological and social parenting, if carried through into new family and kinship structures, might help to dislodge gender from its central place in recreational sex, child rearing, and intimate emotional relationships. The components of dimorphic sex would then clearly belong to the biological needs of procreation. As Chodorow says:
We cannot know what children would make of their bodies in a nongender or nomexually organized social world, what kind of sexual structuration or gender identities would develop. But it is not obvious that there would be major significance to biological sex differences, to gender difference, or to different sexualities. There might be a multiplicity of sexual organizations, identities, practices, perhaps even of genders themselves. Particular bodily attributes would not necessarily be so determining of who we are, what we do, how we are perceived, who are our sexual partners. (1979, p. 66fn)
Nan-Gendered Families
In post-industrial society, kinship is no longer socially necessary to allocate reciprocal rights and responsibilities for economic cooperation, child rearing, and care of dependents. Without interlocked networks of blood relations and in-laws, women do not have to be exchanged so that men can gain brothers-in-law, and mothers do not have to be socially suppressed so that men can lay claim to children (Paige and Paige 1981; Rubin 1975). Therefore, we can envisage responsible intimate relations and economic cooperation among adults, and between adults and children, that do not depend on gender.
For adults, each must be treated as a single unit for purposes of income, taxation, and all legal rights and responsibilities. Whatever permanent linkages or household arrangements or personal economic exchanges are made in a person's lifetime will then be a matter of formal or informal contracts among consenting adults. Competent adults must take responsibility for children, the frail elderly, the sick, and the mentally incompetent either through state-financed and publicly administered organizations, or personalty, through a kind of kinship system, or through a mixture. In an earlier attempt to think through non-gendered parenting arrangements, I suggested that every adult might take legal responsibility for at least one child, and for the parent-child line to become the kinship line for purposes of legal responsibility and emotional sustenance (Lorber 1975). A basic dependent support allowance from the state and well-financed public caretaking, nursing, medical, and educational services would help significantly in smoothing out the differentials in adult resources in these vertical families. If single parenting is felt to be too hermetically intense, several adults could commit themselves to legal responsibility for several dependents as an identifiable family, as Hooks (1984, pp. 133-46) recommends for single mothers.
Non-Gendered Sexuality
Incest taboos, which have always been designations of whom one can and cannot marry, could apply to sexual relationships within the kin groups to protect the dependent from sexual demands from those responsible for them. Other limits to sexual behavior are likely to emerge from community norms, ethics, values, and social priorities. Like other social relations, non-gendered sexual relationships are likely to involve interpersonal manipulation, if not power and exploitation. But if interpersonal and institutional power is not gendered, then the norms and laws governing intimate personal relationships, including the sexual,
cannot be oppressive to women or to men, for these will not be significant social categories.
Non-Gendered Procreation
The common presumption has been that without reinforced hetero-sexuality and displays of masculinity and femininity, no children would be born. While it is highly unlikely that in a random, polymorphous sorting, no heterosexual coupling would take place, no conceptions would occur, no pregnancies would be sustained, and no children born, societies that value procreation are likely to encourage it. As in the present society, pro-natalist and anti-natalist policies in a non-gendered society can be expected to be political decisions. But these procreation decisions would not be made by the men in power for all women, nor would all women be categorized as potential child bearers and child rearers, nor would mothers alone be expected to bear all the burdens of creating and raising the next generation.
There would be social categories of parenting other than "mother" and "father"—child bearers and child rearers, professional caretakers and educators, sperm and egg donors and gestators, legal kin, and emotional supporters. These would not be based on dichotomous differentiations, attached to central social statuses, or designations of ownership. In short, the social roles of mother and father in a non-gendered society would not be indicative of the connection between "parent" and "child." What would be needed are terms of reference more specific to the variety of relationships between responsible adults and dependent children (Rothman 1989).
Non-Gendered Wage Work
Ideally, all work should be equally valued and all wage workers should receive equal compensation for their labor, which is a radical socialist solution to pay inequities. The liberal solution has been to concentrate on the historical discriminatory practices built into the present wage structure and, using the theory of comparable worth, attempt to create a wage structure based on the characteristics of the work itself and the worth of that work to the employer (Feldberg 1984; Treiman and Hartmann 1981). As applied to gender inequities in wages, comparable worth would place women workers on an equal footing with men workers, and thus eliminate much of the basis for women's economic dependence. Ideologically, it would remove the justification of low wages for women as secondary wage earners, eliminate the concept of a higher male family wage, and thus support
the erosion of the family division of labor (Feldberg 1984). Indeed, without a restructuring of the compensation for women's work to bring it up to the level of compensation for comparable men's work, treating everyone as an individual legally would exacerbate women's subordinate status and disadvantage those who are legally dependent on them.
If the trend toward single-parent families is to be encouraged so as to break down the gendered pattern of kinship, then a corollary tactic must be to support the fight for a gender-neutral wage structure. In turn, a gender-neutral wage structure would help dismantle the gendered division of labor within the family because it would make women economically self-sufficient. Without superior wages, men would not be able to claim women's domestic services in exchange for primary economic support. Since the two cornerstones of the gendered division of labor—in the family and in the marketplace—are intertwined in industrial societies, they must be dismantled at the same time.
If all competent adults are to have roughly equal responsibility for those who are dependent, they must be compensated equally in one or more ways: a basic public support allowance, payment for their services, payment for wage work other than caretaking. To ensure that care of dependents does not continue to devolve on one group—women (with the cultural justification that they alone have the appropriate skills and temperament)—all adults should get a support allowance for themselves and their dependents. Professional caretaking must be compensated according to its real skill level (Phillips and Taylor 1980), and wages should be based on the content of the work, not the social status of the workers (Acker 1989; Bose and Spitze 1987).
Gender-Neutral Authority and Political Power
Whether authority and political power are seen to derive from membership in strategically placed inner circles of elites or from ownership and control of the means of production, women have been an excluded class, except through their connection with powerful men. Without at this point arguing for a non-hierarchical state or for more democratic ownership of the means of production, both of which are goals feminists might wish to achieve as feminists or as socialists, I would like to consider the strategies for, and possible effects of, gender-neutral access to positions of authority and political power.
Non-gendered access to capital resources and to positions of significant policy-making and authority are dependent on the erosion of gendered kinship and work. Such a structural and ideological shift would drastically alter social relations. Without gendered kinship, gendered
inheritance of capital and businesses should disappear. Without a gendered wage structure, men's monopoly of leadership positions in work hierarchies should also diminish, since the underpinnings of male domination in a gender-segregated and gender-stratified occupational structure would be gone.
The converse view, that significant numbers of women in positions of leadership and in control of economic resources can make a difference in social values and in allocations of those resources, is dependent on the maximalization of gender differences and the assumption that women in power will act in the interests of other women (Lorbcr 1981). But the same purported gender differences and woman-oriented outlook are, in my view, what blocks women from access to those positions and resources. To the extent that women and men are seen as different, dominant men will not trust even women of their own class, religion, race, and training as colleagues, will not sponsor them for entry into elite inner circles of power, nor allow them control of important areas of the economy. The carefully chosen women who do make it to the top do so because they have demonstrated their loyalty to male values, and so, without jeoparding their positions, they cannot act in the interests of women (Laws 1975). Men will no longer see women as essentially different when gender loses its salience as a social category. For this to happen, significant areas of the social order must first be restructured on a non-gendered basis.
GENDER EQUALITY AND THE EROSION OF GENDER
For categories of people to be equal, a social order must be structured for equality of outcome. Equality is a political goal that can encompass equality of gender, but the history of liberal political philosophy demonstrates that women are usually excluded when ascribed statuses are no longer the basts for full-fledged citizenship (Okin 1979). If gender is removed as a qualification for equal treatment under the law, as the Equal Rights Amendment would have done, women and men would have legal equality, but not necessarily social equality. To achieve social equality, we would need scrupulous equality of women and men in care of dependents, allocation of work, wage structure, control of resources, and societal decisions (Chafetz 1984).
In my mind, gender equality is too limited a goal. Unless women and men are seen as socially interchangeable, gender equality does not challenge the concept of differences that leads to separate spheres in the family and marketplace division of labor, which in turn results in women's lesser access to control of valued resources and positions of
power. Scrupulous equality of categories of people considered essentially different needs constant monitoring. I would question the very concept of gender itself, and ask why, if women and men are social equals in all ways, there need to be two encompassing social statuses at all.
NOTES
1. King James Version, Book of Genesis.
2, Conversation between author and child in 1982.
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