Are women inherently peaceful and men violent? Is there a basic difference between the natures of women and men so that men are the cause of wars and destruction and women are caring and nurturing?
Many people argue that this is the case, not just at the level of individual personality, but that there is an in-built tendency that divides the sexes and explains the ills and benefits of social life. If this were so, we would have to alter the basic nature of the human species if we wanted to attain a society that is sustainable, diverse and peaceful. Social change would have to rest on a genetic or biological shift.
Yet if we look at the range of behaviours and the social situations in which they occur, we find instances where women are violent and men cooperative and peaceful. It is the social context which defines whether violence or cooperation is appropriate. It's quite all right for women to castigate their children. In the past, the same right was unchallenged for men over their wives.
We find that explanations about "human nature" are applied to so many diverse and contradictory experiences. The only reason that allows us to make sense of the persistence of such an explanation is that it is ideological rather than biological.
The theory of essential difference is a central part of the ideology that has promoted the discrimination and exploitation faced by women over the ages. It serves the same purpose today — to confuse and divide.
Explanations of natural difference are not only used by right-wing forces — religious fundamentalists of whichever stripe, be they the Fred Niles or the Mary Whitehouses of this world. They have also been raised in many progressive movements. Looking at some historical examples demonstrates this clearly.
During the first wave of feminism, the suffrage movement, the ideology of a natural divide between men and women promoted the idea of separate and different natures.
This rested on two different and often contradictory views. The natural rights doctrine emphasised a common humanity between the sexes as well as difference based on the notions of separate but complementary spheres of activity of the sexes. The "separate spheres" notion was based on the view that women in their maternal role were the guardians of the home and the setters of standards of moral purity for society.
However, the ideology of maternalism and social purity could serve quite opposing views in political struggles. In Australia, the ideology of separate spheres and true womanhood took on new meanings in the context of World War I and the debate over conscription.
While war was conceived as male aggression and women's nature was seen as essentially peace-loving, maternity and sacrifice were the catchcries of patriotism and empire and used to rally men to enlist and fight. Yet equally, the pacifist as well as the anti-conscription struggle emphasised womanly nature and maternalism as the mothers and defenders of the value of human life to oppose and argue against participation in the war.
These views also impacted on sexuality and reproduction. Social purity feminists stressed the asexual nature of women and the uncontrolled sexuality of men in their various struggles against the sexual double standard and the victimisation of prostitutes or "white slave" trade.
The civilising moral influence of women aimed to constrain men's control over their animal nature and thus sex was seen as firmly linked to reproduction in marriage. Contraception was therefore opposed as encouraging sexuality and increasing the sexual abuse of women. It was argued that fewer children should be the result of restraint and planning, not technological fixes like contraception which would let men off the hook of having to learn to control their violent sexuality.
Maternalism has been used to bolster race and class differences and provided a basis for eugenic policies. In England and the US between World War I and World War II, middle- and upper-class women were exhorted to breed to maintain the white race. This meant controlling the birth rate of the working class and the poor.
The Australian experience differed. The expression of ideas was tied to Australia's geographic location — the white nation among a sea of racially inferior people and facing imminent invasion, as well as a chronic need to increase the tiny white population.
The birth rate in Australia declined from an average of seven children per family in 1881 to four in 1911. Contraception was seen as "race suicide" and the main factor in the decline. Middle-class women were accused of selfishness in limiting their families. By the 1930s, even though contraception was viewed more favourably, there were still no birth control clinics in Australia.
Feminists were split in their views on contraceptive use. There were those who took a social purity position and, for example, successfully agitated for the restricted sale of contraceptives in Western Australia in 1939 or, for example, supported eugenics in advocating family planning centres in working-class areas. During WWII, similar differences based on maternalism occurred but were expressed in terms of the needs of the "race war" in the Pacific.
The argument about women's essential nature supported at different times peace, war, racism, sexual and reproductive oppression. Such a useful ideology! Just sound the alarm when it gets trotted out.
BY PAT BREWER
From Green Left Weekly, December 12, 2001.
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