This requires intentionality and vigilance in terms of policies, practices, and priorities rather than something that we as a society "back up" into. For this, we need pubic school curriculum this is critical together with pedagogical practices that are inclusive and equity-based. This is what an Ethnic Studies curriculum should offer although it should be threaded throughout the curriculum.
The late Brazilian educator Paolo Freire stated that we should put learning at the service of social justice. This should challenge us as educators and forever guide our teaching and curriculum as this an ethic that optimally rests at the heart of all educational endeavors.
-Angela Valenzuela
America Is Still a Patriarchy
Male dominance may be weakening, but it's not gone.
In this election, women were the majority of voters, and the majority of them voted for Obama. The weaker sex clearly was men, contributing less than half the vote, the majority of whom preferred the loser. This is not new. As with Obama, men and whites also failed to unseat Bill Clinton in his reelection after voting for him the first time.
This story tests my ability to think systematically about
power and inequality. How is it possible to understand an unprecedented
transformation in women's relative status while also acknowledging men's
continued dominance? Must we just list data points, always just
including an "on the other hand" caveat to our real
narrative?
I have been described as
part of a "feminist academic establishment" that insists on taking
the glass-half-empty view—as someone who likes to engage in "data wars"
over the details of gender inequality. But what I actually try to do is keep
the change in perspective.
In our academic research on
gender inequality, my colleagues and I study variation and change. That means
figuring out why women's
employment increased so rapidly, why some labor markets
have smaller gender gaps, why some workplaces
are less segregated, why couples in some countries share
housework more, why women in some ethnic groups have higher
employment rates, and so on.
The patterns of variation
and change help us understand how gender inequality works. Systemic inequality
doesn't just happen. People (in the aggregate) get up in the morning and do it
every day. To understand how it works, we need to see how it varies (for
example, some people resist equality and some people dedicate their lives to
it). Someone who studies inequality but doesn't care about change and variation
is not a social scientist.
Patriarchy
"It's easy to find references to patriarchs, patriarchy or
patriarchal attitudes in reporting on other countries," writes Nancy Folbre:
Yet these terms seem
largely absent from discussions of current economic and political debates in
the United States. Perhaps they are no longer applicable. Or perhaps we
mistakenly assume their irrelevance.
In fact—my interpretation of the facts—the United States, like
every society in the world, remains a patriarchy: they are ruled by men. That
is not just because every country (except Rwanda) has a
majority-male national parliament, and it is despite the handful of countries with women heads of
state. It is a systemic characteristic that combines dynamics at the level of
the family, the economy, the culture and the political arena.
Top political and economic leaders are the low-hanging fruit
of patriarchy statistics. But they probably are in the end the most
important—the telling pattern is that the higher you look, the maler it gets.
If a society really had a stable, female-dominated power structure for an
extended period of time even I would eventually question whether it was really
still a patriarchy.
In my own area of research things are messier, because families
and workplaces differ so much and power is usually jointly held. But I'm
confident in describing American families as mostly patriarchal.
Maybe
the most basic indicator is the apparently quaint custom of wives assuming
their husbands' names. This hasn't generated much feminist controversy lately.
But to an anthropologist from another planet, this patrilineality would be a
major signal that American families are male-dominated.
Among
U.S.-born married women, only 6 percent had a surname that differed from their husband's in 2004 (it was not until
the 1970s that married women could even function legally using their
"maiden" names). Among the youngest women the rate is higher, so
there is a clear pattern of change—but no end to the tradition in sight.
Of course, the proportion of people getting married has fallen, and the
number of children born to non-married parents has risen. Single parenthood—and
the fact that this usually means single motherhood—reflects both women's
growing independence and the burdens of care that fall on them (another
piece of the patriarchal puzzle). This is one of many very important changes.
But they don't add up to a non-patriarchal society.
Differences that matter
The social critic Barbara Ehrenreich—in a 1976 essay she might or might not like to
be reminded of—urged feminists to acknowledge distinctions that matter rather
than tar everything with the simplistic brush of "patriarchy." Using
China as an example, she wrote:
There is a difference
between a society in which sexism is expressed in the form of female
infanticide and a society in which sexism takes the form of unequal
representation on the Central Committee. And the difference is worth dying for.
China presents an extreme case, with an extremely harsh patriarchy
that was fundamentally transformed—into a different sort of patriarchy. By the
late 1970s female infanticide (as well as footbinding)
had indeed been all but eradicated, which represented a tremendous improvement
for women, saving millions of lives. Since the advent of the one-child policy
in the 1980s, however, female infanticide has given way to sex-selective
abortion (and female representation on the ruling committees
has dropped), representing an important transformation. Calling China a
"patriarchy" is true, but by itself doesn't much help explain the
pattern of and prospects for change.
Like Ehrenreich, I think we need to look at the variations to
understand the systemic features of our society. Men losing out to women in
national elections is an important one. Given the choice between two
male-dominated parties with platforms that don't differ fundamentally on the
biggest economic issues despite wide differences in social policy, women voters
(along with blacks, Latinos and the poor) bested men and got their way. I
wouldn't minimize that (more than I just did), or ignore the scale and
direction of change. The American patriarchy has weakened.
I expect some readers will go right to their favorite statistics
or personal experiences in order to challenge my description of our society as
patriarchal. In that tit-for-tat, men leading the vast majority of the most
powerful institutions, and that American families usually follow the male line,
become just another couple of data points. But they shouldn't be, because some
facts are more important than others.
We want to hear what you think about
this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to
letters@theatlantic.com.
PHILIP COHEN is a professor of sociology at the
University of Maryland in College Park.
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