5
Relationships: His and Hers
Tong Chuang Yi Meng. ("Same bed, different dreams.") -Chinese saying
Recent feminist psychological literature has viewed women in this society as more relational, empathic, and interpersonally connected, while men are considered to be more independent and separare from others. This difference has been attributed ro our current parenting arrangements and their consequences for object relations in fe- male and male children. Represented by the clinical theories of Nancy Chodorow I978) and Dorothy Dinnerstein (I976) and by the research of Carol Gilligan (I982), this viewpoint considers men to be more involved with abstraer principies in decision making than with the interpersonal concerns expressed by women. Along with an analysis of the crucial role of mothering by women. in producing these gender-related differences, these theorists propase a solution to this problem of differentially distributed attributes: more equally shared parenting by mothers and fathers, which would then presumably result in a more balanced development of these attributes in children of both genders.
There are several points in this analysis that must be questioned, the first involving its basic premise or question, since that is where epistemology begins. What is relatedness? Second, do women and men actually differ in relatedness in the ways described? Does such a gender difference hold as a function of women mothering, and wherever women mother, or even just in our own society when women mother? Finally, we must consider carefully the propasa! to introduce fathers into the parenting equation as a factor equal to the mother. If they were to spend equal time caring for children, would fathers equal mothers so that a hoy could come to equal a girl in relational capacity? Or would girls become more like boys? Would these changes occur in predictable and desirable (to whom?) ways?
WOMEN'S AND MEN'S RELATEDNESS
While men and women, as psychosocially created groups, may appear to differ in relational capacities and emphasis, it is imperative to view this and any attribute contextually and not just narrowly. As masculinist psycho-therapeutic approaches have used masculine models of human functioning, such as business hierarchies (structural family therapy) or cybernetic systems (family systems therapy), this particular feminist model is based upon a familiar feminine situation, the mother- child relationship. Thus, we seem to be asking whether boys grow up to be relational in the way that mothers are with their children. Epistemologically, the answer is certainly built into the question. The answer to the question "Who behaves like mothers?" is highly likely to be "Mothers." If we define being relational as feeling responsible for, and defining, one's self-worth by the success or failure of one's relationships and by being sensitive to the expressed and unexpressed emotional needs of others, then it would appear that women, in general, are more relational than are men, in general. However, if we consider that men's independence and separateness viewed contextually emerge as emotional and physical dependence upon women-wives, lovers, secretaries, graduare assistants, nurses, and so on-then men are certainly as relational as women, if not more so. If we consider that competition depends on a relationship as muchas does nurturance, that even domination is a complex interpersonal act, one facet of which is extreme dependency, then it becomes evident that compared to women, men are not less, but differently, relational in different situations.
The mother-child relationship is taken as the model for being relation-ally oriented and interpersonally connected, and it is girls who turn into women who turn into mothers. Traditionally, many, but not all, women are taught to be relationally oriented in the way that mothers are, but men are also relational in ways that strongly resemble the manner of the cared-for child, with the obvious exception that they come to exercise power in the relationship with the caretaker, in place of the man or men who did so when they were children. The traditional role of the wife includes being mother to her husband (as was Jocasta) and her children by caring for their emotional and physical needs. That of the husband is often sorne combination of head of household and special child (Oedipus). Clinically, it has been consistently noted that fathers are jealous of their own children and the attention and care they receive from the mother/wife. In this sense, both girls and boys in oedipal society grow up to repeat the mother-child rela- tionship. Women grow up to mother, and they learn to mother both children and meo. Chodorow's (I978) explanation of how this happens begins by acknowledging various complex socioevaluative influences on parenting and on the developing child, but she fails to integrare them into her developmental model. As a result, it becomes a model of only a thin slice of the experience of female and male children in the postindustrial, white, middle-class, nuclear family, functioning in an optimal or "idealized" manner.
In this ideal (from a white, middle-class, masculine perspective), but no longer normative and far from representative, case, girls and boys are raised primarily by one heterosexual female parent, with one heterosexual male parent secondarily involved. Girls in these families, according to Chodorow, develop an uninterrupted sense of connectedness and a greater potentia!for empathy and relatedness. In fact, it is in the nuclear family arrangement that women are most isolated from other women, but connectedness between women is made invisible from this viewpoint.
Chodorow has clearly attempted to develop a universal argument with all the consequent problems and inconsistencies. The fact that this family structure is of historically recent origin, is even now very much in the minority in this country, is not functioning optimally at all, and has never characterized the family structure of many people of color or non-Western families, however, vastly reduces the model's generalizability. In addition, it is weakened by the absence of an integrated analysis of the particular effects of the patriarchal nature of this kind of family or of its current decline. lt further lacks a sociocultural analysis of the nature of mothering and fathering, as well as an analysis of how women and meo are differently valued and treated, and all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which these differences are communicated to girls and boys inside and outside the family. Could it be that none of this matters, that as long as women mother, how and why they do so is irrelevant? Of course not.
This approach searches for the roots of personality and gender differences not just in the nuclear family but more specifically in the parenting arrangements within nuclear families. The traditional, middle-class, nuclear family, as depicted by Chodorow, accounts for fewer than I0 percent of all American households (Wattenberg and Reinhardt I98I). Many children spend most of their day away from Mother, who is as "absent" as is Father. We must then ask whether these daughters have less potential for empathy and relatedness and whether the sons have less need to define themselves as "not mother."
There are currently several other viable child-rearing arrangements, including joint custody, single motherhood, single fatherhood, and blended, extended, lesbian, and gay households. The majority of children growing up in these settings are developing psychologically, and, in particular, with regard to gender, muchas do those who still grow up in traditional nuclear families. Of course, this question must be the subject of longitudinal study as these children mature, but thus far there is no evidence of consistently different relational orientations in the female and male children of these families. They differ not as a function of the parenting arrangements per se, but of how well their needs for caring, acceptance, and respect are met. They do not differ, as a group, in gender-related attributes from those raised in traditional nuclear families. Instead the differences occur within groups as a function of the meanings attributed to them. The crucial variable, the power of meta-messages about females and males, of the invisible context as communicated by adult socializing agents of either gender, along with peers, teachers, and the larger societal context, remains unchanged. That is, children learn how to be females or males in a particular society with its particular attributions, expectations, and meanings about the myriad of human characteristics that become organized according to the dualistic gender system.
In colonial times in the United States, child rearing was mainly the job of the father (Hollon I974). Only beginning in the early I800s did women begin to devote themselves on a full-time basis to the role of mother and homemaker (Lingeman I980). Among the! Kung and a variety of other hunting, gathering, and agricultura! Societies, older children and men also assume primary roles in the care and socialization of young children (Lee I979). In situations of poverty both inside and outside the United States, children are typically raised by slightly older children. (United Nations data indicare that, on a globallevel, the average child is raised by an eight-yearold child.)
Even if the relational difference were true for middle-dass white women and men in the United States, which is doubtful, it has not been shown to hold for other groups. For example, poor black men and women seem to converge more in their "vocabulary of rights, morality and the social good" (Stack I986, p. 323). Perhaps oppressed groups have to develop an interpersonal sensitivity, since they cannot afford the luxury of abstract, decontextualized morality and selves. It is not whether women mother and men don't, but how both women and men (and sometimes other children) parent that determines what female and male children initially learn about becoming women and men and about focusing on the well-being of relationships.
Chodorow certainly indicates that she is fully aware of the importance of the patriarchal context in which mothering occurs. But then she proceeds as if this were not so, failing to incorporare this aspect of experience in her model. Instead she presents a rather idealistic, almost platonic image of life in the family. She fails to consider, even for those who have grown up in intact nuclear families, the full implication or meaning thereof. For example, within the patriarchal nuclear family, approximately 38 percent of girls and I0 percent of boys are sexually assaulted (Russell I983). Battery of women occurs in approximately 50 percent of homes (Finkelhor et al. I986). And these statistics do not include psychological abuse. In addition, it is here that traditional gender roles are first learned, in particular from the father, when he is present.
Much as Freud did, Chodorow and others who follow her approach fail to look closely at what actually happens to girls and women in the nuclear family' which is, in itself, a reflection of and preparation for what happens to women in a patriarchal society: they are often hurt, violated, derogated, and even terrorized. They are even more often limited and constrained by the dictates of traditional femininity. In proclaiming women's embeddedness in relationship a virtue, one fails to consider fully the source of this relatedness, which is not simply the mothering arrangement. The very experiences of danger, constriction, and limitation that are part and paree! of what girls learn in childhood may lead women to attend to interpersonal cues and to the relative (or illusion of) safety of relationship, particularly when the main value imparted to women still remains in the relational realm, in relationship with men and children, that is. Such a reductionist argument fails to consider the complexity of what girls and boys actually learn from parents. lt also fails to consider the influence of parents beyond the first few years of childhood and the many other influences on the development of gender-related characteristics through the adolescent and even the adult years. Any approach that fails to integrate these data and this crucial aspect of women's experience is, at best, myopic.
lt is imperative to consider the actual behaviors of real mothers and fathers or other socializing persons toward real children within the context of patriarchal culture. In fact, what is constant for women is not a childhood in the kind of family constellation that Chodorow discusses, but a life within a culture that attributes certain meanings and evaluations to females and males. Inclusion and analysis of society's meta-evaluations is a sine qua non for understanding the commonalities of female experience, as are specifics for understanding the diversity. For example, the very relatedness of which Chodorow, Gilligan, and others have spoken, along with the various other aspects of female development, is, as they are certainly aware, far from an evaluatively neutral experience.
Children are raised with thousands of repeated injunctions and examples of who they should become. For example, in a study of preschool children (Chasen I974), the majority of girls already named "mommy" as a projected adult identity, while not one of the boys chose "daddy" as something they would be when they grew up. Women tend to be defined by others and by themselves in terms of their relationships, men in terms of their occupational roles. These are not parallel or symmetrical categories. Whether the relationship of importance in a particular society is mother or wife or sister or daughter or sorne combination depends, in part, on how women are exchanged in that society. In the Western, white, middle-class group, the role of wife has been most salient for women. In formal religious ceremonies, fathers give their daughters away to other mento become their wives.
Among African-Americans or Latín Americans, the status of mother is more primary. White, middle-dass culture may be changing toward that pattern with the proliferation of single parenting among heterosexual and lesbian women and, to a lesser extent, among heterosexual and homosexual men. One of the many adult manifestations of this relational emphasis for women is the adult male-female difference in "parenting permanence": the number of women who abandon the parenting role is minute in comparison with the number of desertions or failure to pay alimony by fathers (Ehren- saft I984).
Only a minority of children are socialization failures. If motheríng by women were a sufficient condition to produce such personalíty constellations, how would the failures be accounted for? For certainly not all women are more empathic and relationally oriented than all men. Not all women grow up to mother, or want to. Not all those who do want to. The complex meanings of gender and experiences in different situations exercise an important influence.
For example, girls are taught that their self-esteem is based upon their success in relationships. Boys' sense of self-worth will come primarily from the kind of public work they do. The female child is led to develop a greater sense of herself as embedded in relationships in a society that values in-dividuality-but not for women. Her choice, then, is greater relatedness in a society that values individuality above all, or a striving to overcome her training only to achieve greater individuality (individuation- separation) in a society that values greater relatedness for women. She is caught in a dilemma in which either choice includes damage to the self. This results psychologically in a characteristic anxiety and ambivalence which makes its way into the self-concept. In the beginning, the parents or other caretakers/socializers are the child's whole world. This is so in a psychological, as well as a physical and social- valuing, sense. The caretakers are not only responsible for meeting or frustrating all the child's physical needs but are the child's physical/ psychological world:as they are, so is the world. The young child's primary goal is to please these people, to love them unquestioningly, and to receive in return unquestioning love and devotion to his or her physical/psychological needs. The child is unformed and open t9learning physically, emotionally, cognitively, and socially from them. Embedded within the parents' or other caretakers' responses in these areas is always an evaluative component, a conveyance of multiple meanings about the child's behavior, the relationship between these adults and among the adults, younger caretakers, and the child, the parents' behavior, the nature of the child's world, and, by extension, the rest of the world. Most essentially there are metastatements about the value of that little person and how she or he ought to behave to be valued and loved and to feel worthwhile. Included promi- nently are literally thousands of messages about how to behave as a girl or a hoy. As these are conveyed, they are embedded within the physical, the cognitive, the emotional, both conscious and unconscious, preverbal and verbal, sense of self.
According to Chodorow I978), gender is not salient to the child during early development. It is perhaps possible to assume that verbal messages-from the first question, "Is it a boy or a girl?" to all the ensuing comments based upon that answer- are lost on the preverbal child. There are, however, no grounds for assuming that more physically based behaviors, from the immediate choice of color and kinds of clothing, to the way the chíld is held, touched, and allowed to explore, to the tone of voice used in speaking to and about her or him, all of which vary with female and male babies, are lost to the young child. On the contrary, they become firmly embedded within the physical and unconscious, if not verbal and conscious, experience of every human being. Gender assignment and training become a basic organizing principie of the developing child's identity and, as prevíously noted, appear to be fully organized by twelve to eighteen monrhs of age (Person and Ovesey I983).
Even if men were to parent children for precisely equal time intervals and in equivalent situations as do women, two crucial differences remain: (I) men parent differently in many important ways, and (2) a man is a differently valued person than is a woman, even if he behaves identically. Fathers are not male mothers any more than women are a dass of men. If equal parenting were magically to occur, what would really happen to girls? Would they be abused more, or less? Would they develop the "normal" hatred for men that boys develop for women? Or would they become more independent and separare, while being empathic and intimately related to important others in their lives? Would everyone live happily (empathically and sensitively, yet interdependently and autonomously) ever after in the bosom of the middle-dass, heterosexual, nuclear family?
In previous chapters, differences in male and female parenting have been considered. Let us now consider sorne additional differences. Both fathers and mothers still prefer sons, fathers to a greater degree (Hoffman I977). Fathers tend to spend more time playing with their children rather than caring for them, and playing more roughly than do mothers (Belsky I979; Clarke-Stewart I978; Kotelchuck I976; Lamb I976, I977). Fathers also tend to interact and spend more time with their baby boys than with their daughters (Lewis and Weintraub I98I; Lamb I976). They are both more active (Lamb I977; Weinraub and Frankel I977) and more affectionate (Belsky I979) with their sons, more interested in their sons' development, and more punitive (Radin I98I). Fathers issue more commands to their children than do mothers, and more to their sons than to their daughters (Gleason I987). Fathers' ambitions for their sons center on achievement, for their daughters on submissiveness and pleasing others (Alberle and Naegele I952). Fathers are more likely to comfort daughters than sons and to try to protect daughters from failure (Osofsky and O'Connell I972). In general, fathers seem to enforce sex role-stereotyped behavior and conformity more than do mothers (Langlois and Downs I980; Biller I98I). They often think of their children in terms of their own fantasies about what kind of adults they would become, which for boys translates into careers and for girls into romance and appeal (Burlingham I973).
The propensity for women to become relationally oriented in a particular way is generally exacerbated, rather than eliminated, by parenting arrangements in which the father is more prominent or central. I have worked with severa!female clients for whom the father was the only parent, beginning at different ages-nine months, live years, and ten years of age. All of these women were even more interpersonally sensitive and carefully attuned to the needs of their fathers and, as a result, of men and children in general. All of them had been dealt with by their fathers in a highly sexualized (normal, not abusive) manner, as is characteristic of fathers' relationships with their daughters in oedipal society (Chodorow I978; Westcott I986). They had been raised as a complement to their fathers and had developed a hypersensitivity to them and to their needs. Fathers consistently tend to reinforce more traditionally feminine and masculine behavior in their children. In the absence of mothering, these girls developed even more extremely the qualities that Chodorow attributes to the relationship with "the generic mother." Does this mean that it is fathering, not mothering, that is responsible for daughters developing these traits? I do not want to slice up experience in this way, but instead to consider sorne of the particular details of mothering and of fathering, along with their interaction, as they are performed in, and supported by other agents of, society.
In many of the empirieal studies of single fathers and their children, experience is sliced very thinly by the use of esoteric self-report instruments and measures of very narrow aspects of family life. The perspective is almost universally that of the fathers alone. lt has not yet been considered relevant by adult researchers to understand these relationships from the perspective of the children. lt is difficult to find work that attempts to tease out the physical, intrapsychic, and interpersonal details of what actually occurs between parents and their children in single-parent families, or in the even rarer families where fathers are the primary caretakers.
In one study of intact nuclear families in which fathers were the primary caregivers, the author (Radio I982) reports with almost palpable relief that the fathers in these families were not more "effeminate" than traditional fathers. She interprets her results as suggesting that individuals whose gender-role identities are stable and secure can most easily deviate from traditional roles, and also notes with relief that the children's sex-role orientations did not differ from the expected. Direct teaching was greater with sons, and children had expectations of greater punitiveness and stereotyped behavior from these fathers. Yet the author concludes that there are only advantages to this arrangement.
This is not the place for an elaborate critique of this study or the literature in this area, in general, except to note that it is replete with methodological problems and buried epistemological biases, so that little is added to our knowledge of what actually occurs in these family constellations. Such arrangements are not common enough nor of sufficient longevity to have permitted careful longitudinal studies. Yet there are multiple suggestions that fathers support traditional gender behaviors that maintain the status quo. If the argument of Chodorow and others follows, then in families where men are the sole or primary caretakers, not only should male children be more relational and empathic but females should have more need to separare and should be more hostile toward men. There is absolutely no indication that this is happening. lt seems dear that women's and men's parenting per se is not itself the crucial variable here, but that the context of values and meaning, the symbolic system within which women mother and men father, must be considered. What are children taught about what it means to be a girl ora boy in Western, or any other, society?
A basic aspect of the gender system, whereby it is enforced and reinforced, is through shame or humiliation. It is repugnant for boys to be thought of as being like girls, and common for young boys to ridicule girls and to note that certain activities are beneath them or "for girls." Boys commonly ridicule one another and girls for behaving "like girls." Implicit in this attitude, of course, for both masculinity and feminity, is that being "like a girl" is shameful.
High school football coaches can shame their players into being tougher and playing harder by calling them "girls." No well-socialized boy or man wants to be called a girl or a woman. In a I990 legal case, Kenneth R. Slate was arrested on Christmas Eve trying to entera closed store in Indianapolis. He had mistakenly bought a pink radio as a Christmas gift for bis boss, a construction worker. He preferred to be arrested, which he was, rather than face the humiliation of giving his boss a gift in a color that was associated with females. Other examples are all too easy to come by.
If children grew up in a world where women· were unambivalently admired and respected, but where women still mothered, would these notions still prevail? What if it were said that women must care for men's physical and emotional needs as if they were children because men are more dependent and helpless than women, and that is it women who are strong and can be relied upon? How would these different meanings affect the sense of self-worth of girls? Of boys? Misogynist meanings bolster a young boy's sense of self-worth; the young girl's is weakened or turned to defiance.
Such learning is firmly embedded in all aspects of society and cannot be meaningfully reduced to one source. Much as same-sex peers enforce the emphasis on physical attractiveness for girls, so do boys enforce the derogadon of girls among boys. In both cases, nothing less than a basic sense of self-worth is at stake.
One of the repeated injunctions to young boys is not to pay much attention to others' feelings and needs, not to be empathic, not to be concerned with feelings or relationships-those domains are for girls. Instead boys should be active, externally oriented, and exploratory. Boys will (should be boys. On the other hand, girls are taught in a variety of ways to be physically restrictive and to focus on interpersonal situations, on feelings, on safety, to play with dolls and to play "house." Newly marketed games, such as Date Line, Heart Throb, and Sweet Valley High, for the early adolescent girl, center on choosing a date or a boy with whom to go steady. For her own self-esteem, she must be concerned with and responsible for relationships to men and children.
These parameters widen only when the shaming meta-evaluations are reduced or removed. For example, it is somewhat more possible at this time in this society for men to be interpersonally sensitive and women to be assertive and externally oriented. The evaluating context has changed; women and men may behave in these ways without risking ridicule, at least in certain circles. This has not occurred as a function of any change in patterns of male and female parenting, but through the cultural work of feminists who have made changes at the level of meaning attributed societally and individually to these activities.
In addidon to the need to gain positive self-esteem and to avoid shame, the development of a greater propensity for relatedness in the female child is based upon the need for safety. A girl turns to relationships not justas a result of being reared by the same-sex parent, but through direct and indirect, explicit and implicit, injunctions from both parents concerning limitations that apply to her but not to her brothers. The world is, in fact, a much more dangerous place for the female child, so she is taught that to be more relational is also to be safer, to be protected.
Even before she can be taught this lesson in words, parents tend to keep female children physically closer to them and to protect them more, as do teachers as early as in preschool. Dolores Gold, Gail Crombie, and Sally Noble (I987) have shown that teachers tend to evaluare the academic competence of preschool boys based upon their age and IQs, that of girls based upon age and compliance to teachers, less compliant girls being viewed as less competent. Teachers also tend to respond more to boys when they behave aggressively, and to girls when they behave dependently and are more physically proximal (Serbin et al. I973). Severa studies have indicated that teachers display a preference for boys (Clarricoates I978, I980; Stanworth I98I) and give them more attention than girls in learning tasks in the dassroom (Galton, Simon, and Croll I980).
lt is clear that women are actively directed and guided toward a life of relatedness and caring, and not only as a result of being mothered in a nuclear family. Women in this society are driven to relatedness by the messages of the culture, which include the demand to be unconscious of the masculine context and of the danger and derision it affords women. The Relatíonshíps: His and Hers particulars of any woman's situation are intertwined with her racial and class membership, as well as with individual experiences and meanings, but I would argue that sensing the presence of danger is ubiquitous. As hatred of women is a "natural" part of masculinity, sois fear of men a "natural" part of femininity. How many adult women have never directly experienced male violence, either physically or verbally? How many have never witnessed it in person or via the media? Many adult women are not at all conscious of this fear, nor is it necessarily consciously present at all times in all situations for any woman. Yet even when women remain unaware, it is contained unconsciously in their bodies, movements, use of space, even their dreams, which are frequently filled with violent images of males. Tellingly, violence in men's dreams is also typically perpetrated by other men (Lauter and Rupprecht I985).
SENSITIVITY TO THE AGGRE