7
Self and Esteem
Everything not forbidden is compulsory. -T. H. White The Once and Future King
Although they emerge from a particular world view, many concepts acquire validity by consensos in a particular culture and appear to its members ro be a matter of common sense. Self-esteem, both what it is and how it manifests itself in women in this society, seemed apparent to me as I began ro write about it. I have certainly spent enough dinical and nonclinical hours listening to women discuss their sense of self and personal value or, more frequently, the mixture of worth and worthlessness they feel toward and. about themselves. Yet beginning a discussion of self-esteem presupposes a particular notion of how the self is constructed and embodied and just what it means to esteem or value that self. Before moving on to consider esteem, let us pause to examine a term we all use repeatedly and who’s meaning most of us take for granted. Just what is "the self"?
Each person's experience is woven of a combination of the complex meanings of the culture and significant influences within it, filtered through personal experience, a degree of choice and chance, and certain biological and genetic aspects and predispositions, such as health, talents, abilíties, and perhaps temperamental disposition (Kagan I984, I989). The ideal self is made up of the most desirable qualities of masculinity without acknowledgment of any bias. That is, the mature and well-developed self is considered to be separate from others, consistent within any context, autonomous, and independent. The notion of the self reflects a Western, and particularly North American, emphasis on the separateness of the individual and on individuality itself. Gordon Allport (I960) and others have noted the Western predilection for defining people on the basis of their separation from their life contexts. That is, a sharp boundary between inner and outer is culturally and psychologically constructed and eventually believed to exist naturally.
This sort of self is neither natural nor innate; it is a relatively recent Euro-American social invention. lts origins can be traced to the High Middle Ages (Berman I988). lt is only since that period that, for example, homicide with malice aforethought has been identified as a criminal act for which one can be held personally responsible by the judicial system. And Western artists, prior to the Renaissance, did not consider it necessary to sigo their works. Even experiences that we consider interna!and personal, such as dreams, were understood differently. "Medieval accounts of dreams . . . are not tied to self-examination, because dreams were regarded as imposed experiences, externa! to the dreamer. The search for self . . . was not an inward search in a twentieth-century existential sense" (Berman I988, p. I82).
As interest in introspection increased, so did themes of personal responsibility and guilt, along with the role, in the Catholic Church, of the priest as confessor. Within Christianity, there also developed growing agreement that the marital contraer was based upon consent rather than coitus. Even the popularity of individual portraiture returned as the sense of inwardness and personal responsibilíty increased.
René Descartes's famous dictum, "I think, therefore I am," emphasizes not only rationality but individuality. There is' a separare I who does the thinking and who can stand alone in verifying its existence. Herein líe the roots of the modero Western self. Later in the seventeenth century, the philosophical viewpoints that were to define the modern self were systematized by Leibnitz, who conceived of individuals as made up of infinitessimally small monads that have no means of communication with each other (May I989). The development of belief in individualism and rationalism reached its apex in the Enlightenment period of the eighteenth century with the ideas of Voltaire, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. "lt is tremendously interesting that the height of the Enlightenment occurred during the decades of the I770's and I780's, at exactly the time when the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, and the other documents crucial for the birth of America were written" (May I989, p. 5I9). The developing belief in individuality clearly influenced the writers of those documents.
The work of Freud was both a move away from this notion of separateness and individuality to the importance of familia relationships in determining individual development and, at the same time, an affirmation of the "self" with its hidden sexual and aggressive aspects (Lowe I982). Alfred Adler went much further in attributing neurosis to the isolation of people from one another, and Harry Stack Sullivan especially emphasized the centrality of interpersonal experience.
Our culture's emphasis on individuality and separateness also includes a strong sense of personal identity and responsibility: one's actions, beliefs, and values are considered to reflect directly on the quality of one's self. Western and particularly American cultural values lead us to believe that we possess, at the core, one true self that should be and, when functioning correctly, is consistent over time and across situations. Our educational system is oriented toward rights and freedom, at least for males, rather than toward obligations and duties, as it is in the East (Hsu I97I). That is, the explicit purpose of Western education is to afford the individual more freedom, opportunity, and mobility and not greater connection to the group. Once having developed a stable self-concept, we labor to keep it by organizing experience in that way. We pick out, for example, what is and isn't characteristic of us as individuals. A particular way of behaving may be considered superficial or merely a social identity, not the "real" identity or self.
This construction of a separate and individual self directly reflects the masculinist predilection to make invisible the context and interconnections between people and allliving things. This is the same perspective that leads to perceiving concepts as universal rather than as contextually bound. Similarly, psychological models that concern themselves with the core construct of a self typically approach itas something that is universally applicable. That is, not only the self but the particular kind of self that is valued and taught to Western children is considered the universally desirable self.
And insofar as our culture encourages development of and belief in an autonomous self, most of its members labor to construct such a self. If they fail, they feel a lesser sense of worth. Only in Western cultures ís the sense of a separate self so highly revered and so vigorously pursued, from striving to be one's "own man" (never one's "own woman") ora "self-made man" to our legal and ethical notions of personal responsibility. Justice, like Oedipus, is blind.
In contrast to thís world view, Eastern cultures, such as those of China, India, and Japan, view people as interrelated, and nature as something to be intimately experienced and lived in rather than to be observed, analyzed, and exploited for man's needs. Eastern societíes tend to teach becoming part of the group so that no one's individuality stands out (Kojima I984). In the West, space is considered to be neutral and mathematical, while in Asia space connects the earth with the divine (Eliade I959); it is never empty, eitht;r physically or psychologically. While much Eastern art is concerned wíth nature and the physical world, Western art is frequently ínvolved with "the Self and its dilemmas" (Berman I989, p. 337). Often the task in Eastern art is to stay within a genre rather than having to inventa new one, the hallmark of the Western artistic genius.
"The individual's self-concept is not actively developed in Japan to the extent that it is in the Uníted States. There is no show-and-tell in Japanese schools. Children aren't encouraged to have a personal opinion" (BellI989, p. 50). Many Eastern cultures view infants as too independent, in need of training in dependence and connectedness. Since selflessness is highly valued, the experience, definition, and expression of the self may be quite different from that in our culture (Yang and Chiu I988). African researchers have also indicated that "in traditional African life, an individual did not and could not stand alone" (Olowu I988). The greater independence Western children are typícally taught and allowed comes to be seen as natural. The turmoil of the adolescent search for self and identity is a direct outgrowth of this teaching. I am not advocating one or the other of these world views, but simply pointing out that both are socially constructed and historically grounded, and that each varíes according to gender.
lt is, no doubt, apparent that women in our culture stand somewhere between these two sets of values. They are viewed as having obligations to and responsibilíty for others that often override, or at least supplement, those to themselves. Female identity is situated in the "in between." The ideal for women is different from that for people in general, and both cannot be achieved at the same time by any one woman. Each woman must fail even as she succeeds.
Although the use of the word self conveys a single, definite thing, rather than a set of multiple and complex interacting processes or constellations, various aspects of oneself actually become salient in different situations and at different times, depending upon a multitude of factors. Sorne theorists describe this as our having different selves, but this too isolates and fragments rather than considering the complex organization of feelings and thoughts. lt is these constellations that may emerge at any particular moment.
In a witty novel called The Mind-Body Problem (I983), Rebecca Gold-stein puts forth the notion that everyone has a "mattering map," on which are located, either centrally or peripherally, those things that have meaning or that matter to the person. Such a map would have to be multidimensional and elastic, and would have to accommodate not only beliefs and values but feelings, behaviors, and thoughts-all manner of experience. Clearly, any person's experience is too complex and multiply determined to be able to be mapped completely by any one method, or even by several overlapping methods; it is both stable and in flux.
For example, a woman could enter a culture that considers the epítome of feminine beauty to be the possession of earlobes hanging to her shoulders. If,for any variety of reasons, she were to value and give meaning to that culture and its standards, she might try to stretch her earlobes or else evaluate herself as not measuring up. In the second case, she might apply to herself the abstract principie that she doesn't fit the prevailing standard of beauty; otherwise she might just be bemused by it. In an unresolved Antigone state, a woman sees the way oedipal society or individual Oedipuses see. His experience and meanings are hers and would fall at the center of her mattering map.
The Self in Psychology
Western culture has been strongly influenced by psychological perspectives such as the Freudian and neo-Freudian (object relations and self-psychology), so that most of us consider the self, if we purposefully consider it at all, to be formed in early childhood through interaction primarily or exclusively with one's mother. Most people, both within and outside the psychological disciplines, believe that by middle childhood a self crystallizes; the person has become who she or he is and essentially will be throughout life. Sorne of the qualities of this self are considered inborn, others learned, and many a mixture of the two.
The issue of the development and organization of the self has been considered by virtually every major theorist of Western psychology, from Freud and his contemporaries, such as Jung, Horney, and Adler, to contemporary neo-Freudian object-relations psychologists extending the work of Melanie Klein, including D. W. Winnicott I960, I964, I965, I969), Heinz Kohut I97I, I977), James Masterson (I985), and Alice Miller I98I). Masterson has written extensively about the "real self," while Winnicott, Miller, and other object-relations theorists speak of the "true self" and the "false self." The former ís considered to be authentic and at the hidden core of the self. At an outer, more accessible layer ís the false self, developed as a protection and adaptation to a damaging psychological environment early in life. These theorists consider it to arise as a result of failures in early maternal nurturance. All these approaches have in common the assumption that there is a true and independent self which, for optimal healthy functioning, should develop in a way that leads to greater cohesion, stability, separation, and individuation. Object-relations thought, from Klein's good and bad breast-a concrete, embodied, and mother-centered representation of the good/bad dichotomy-to the true and false self, avails itself of the dualistic modes that are characteristic of Western thought, in lieu of considering multiple processes or even gradations of categories. These theories see people, indeed life itself, as black or white, true or false, masculine or feminine.
The notion of the good and bad breast divides the experience of the mother's body, each breast being considered apart from the other. The existence of one hill does not allow for a valley, much less for a complex, varied terrain. It is assumed that the infant lacks peripheral vision and thinks in the separare, bínary categories and terms of adult masculinist thought. Each infant is a little Descartes: "I suck, therefore I am."
Psychoanalytic-existential contributions include those of Ernest Becker (I97I, I973), who considered the self an abstraction based upon physical and interpersonal experience. The humanistic branch of existentíal thought has been represented in American psychology by Abraham Maslow, who offered a model of self-actualization of the "separare and autonomous individual" (Maslow I970, p. I96), and by Carl Rogers, whose concern with the self was also manifested in a particular model of individual growth and development. Any person lacking a sharp delineation of self is considered to be the product of, depending on perspective, a lower level of hierarchical development Maslow), dependency problems (psychodynamic), symbiosis (family systems), splitting, or just plain defective boundaries (object relations). Constant striving to become an individualized entity and to develop a separate identity is at the core of selfness in our culture.
In a recent study (de Rivera I989), Americans reported that their sense of self changes only 5 to I0 percent in different situations, while Japanese subjects reported a 95 to 99 percent change. Since Americans subscribe culturally and personally to a belief in a consistent and unchanging core self, to be changeable is to be psychologically unstable.
Although the self and self-esteem are commonly located within the individual and considered to be personal attributes, the recent theoretical work of Joseph Veroff (I983), Walter Mischel (I984), and Patricia Gurin (I985), among others, has highlighted the impossibility of isolating any stable personality characteristic out of a particular context. For example, it has been demonstrated in a variety of sociological and psychological studies (Latane and Darley I970) that whether a person will help someone in distress depends on the particulars of the situation, including such determi- nants as whether others are watching.
Feminist theorists such as Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum, and the Stone Center theorists, including Jean Baker Miller (I984), Judith Jordan, and Janet Surrey (I986), have spoken of the female relational self or self-in- relation-the concept that women and men appear to differ consistently in certain situations and certain kinds of relatedness. The definition of self I want to propose here extends the model I have developed in the previous chapters to a self-incontext. That is, the self is an abstract concept by means of which meaning and consistency are attributed to a person in context. The very sense of self is a metaphor, an organizing concept. Rather than speaking of the individual as having or being a self, it may be more accurate to speak of a sense of self, which includes the physical, affective, and cognitive experiences associated with this metaphor. The emerging sense of self is a set of abstract symbols and, at the same time, an embodiment of the abstract. The sense of self weaves together self-concept and self-esteem in a skein of meaning. Only by keeping the context in view can the developing sense of self and of self-esteem be understood.
For example, a woman interacting with her husband, children, lawyer, clients, professor, or students may draw upon different qualities and behaviors when with these different people. Are sorne qualities and behaviors more real, more consistent, more at the core, than others? Different aspects of the context call up different behaviors and experiences within a certain range of consistency. I don't mean to suggest that they are merely a function of situations and other people, but that the demands of a situation, as interpreted by the people in it, evoke certain ways of behaving/feeling/thinking. For example, in two studies I conducted with a colleague in the United States (Kaschak and Sharratt, I989) and in Costa Rica (Kaschak and Sharratt I989), males and females reported that they behaved in more stereotypically masculine or feminine ways depending upon the gender of the people they were with. Both genders in both countries behaved most stereotypically in the presence of males.
There is not one certain kind of self for all women. Instead there are differences as a function of race and dass, differences between women in these groups as a result of unique combinations of experience and unique meanings made of those experiences. And the differences withín a woman in different situations depend upon the meanings they evoke for her. Work by Jerome Kagan (I984) in Guatemala and in the New York Longitudinal Study (Thomas et al. I963; Thomas and Chess I977), among others, sug- gests that personality is not set in place indelibly in early childhood, but changes, often accordíng to social position and life experiences. This ís not to say that there is not great consistency, but not to exaggerate it into stasis so that it obscures complexity.
Each person is both like and unlike any other.
One way to find consistency is by lookíng for it and drawing a boundary around it. In the United States, in fact, people usually insist upon doing so. For example, in a couples session Iconducted, one partner repeatedly and . paradoxically told the other that something she did was "uncharacteristic" of her. How many times would she have had todo something befare the boundary could shift enough for that behavior to become characteristic of her, or even characteristíc of her in certain circumstances? A change that is visible and understood must occur in the meaning of the behavior and not just in the behavior itself. A dogged belief in consistency obscures one's vísion.
Like the self, self-esteem has also been defined with masculinity as the norm and without a view of context. Stanley Coopersmith has defined self-esteem as "the evaluation which the individual makes and customarily maintains with regard to himsel: it expresses an attitude of approval or disapproval, and indicares the extent to which the individual believes himself to be capable, significant, successful, and worthy. In short, self-esteem is a personal judgment of worthiness" (I967, pp. 4-5; italics added). This definition also reflects and reinforces society's emphasis on individuality. Although we tend to use self-concept to refer to the set of beliefs one has about the self, and self-esteem to refer to the feelings about or evaluation of these beliefs, i suggest that they are not separable any more than the cognitive is ever separable from the affective, or either is from the evaluative: one cannot be expressed without expressing the other. I propose, then, to use the term self-esteem in a less divided way, to include the cognitive, affective, and evaluative aspects of the attributions one makes about one's identity and communicates to oneself and others in a multitude of ways. I consider self-concept to be interchangeable with, rather than additive to or different from, self-esteem-especially for women, since virtually everything about women is evaluated. How women look, talk, eat, study, and behave at work, in the family, and in the role of parent are all evaluated differently than they are for men. In fact, men are not typically evaluated at all on many of these dimensions.
That the self is always gendered is by now a given, and I will soon show how self- esteem is also gendered. Attention to the full context in which the meanings of self- esteem are made and maintained for women lead to the two questions I will address in the following section: (I) For women, what judgments of what qualities in what situations enter into self-esteem? (2) How does self-esteem differ in the abstraer and in practice for males and for females?
The Paradox of Women's Self-Esteem
Every so-called personal attribute is filtered through the gender system, and studies suggest that more than half the words commonly used in the English language have evaluative connotations (Osgood, Suci, and Tanenbaum I957). So one can't really say much of anything about oneself that is not both gendered and evaluated. Try it. "I am ...tall, short, fat, thin, smart, stupid, kind, timid." Each quality matters differently for a female and a male, as well as for particular females or males in particular situations and interactions. This is one way that the meaningful context is incorporated into the sense of self.
Although sorne girls and women these days can participare in careers, athletic competition, and other previously exclusively male domains, there abound subtle and not-so-subtle messages about the likelihood of engaging in these activities and remaining feminine. A female gymnast is cute. A six-foot-tall female basketball player is not so cute, and may in fact be the butt of jokes. On a recently televised women's basketball game, the commentator rhetorically asked of the audience, obviously assumed to be generically male, "How would you like to be on a date with her? One false move and she'd be able to deck you."
Women's development and identity are characterized by no one trait more than paradox. Within any positive choice is embedded the negative: no aspect is purely positive, and any positive aspect will often be followed by an equally intense negative with which it is intertwined. Women's seIfesteem is located at the interstices of the positive and the negative. A woman who just works, just parents, or does both is open to both praise and criticism. lt is impossible to imagine how she could attain untarnished praise and purely positive self-esteem, no matter what she chose. Not surprising, then, that Linda Carli (I990) finds that women, from homemakers to executives, who speak assertively and confidently are listened to less by male audiences than those who speak hesitantly and deferentially. Among the adolescent girls she studied, Donna Eder (I990) found that those in the popular group were inevitably disliked by the other girls, who branded them as "stuck up."
Perhaps the most basic paradox here is that the gendered self develops based on the need for )ove and approval and the consequent self-esteem it is hoped they will bring. These motívate the child and the adult to conform to society's gender prescriptions, to the expectations and demands of significant others. To seek approval and safety, to avoid humiliation and danger, most people deveIop the gendered selves they are exp'ected to develop. But as women elicit approval for developing an appropriately gendered self, so do they lose approval and self-esteem because women and femininity are devalued and denigrated. Only women are, for example, unequivocally praised for eating less or even starving themselves, for taking up less space, for putting others' needs before their own. Would a roan proudly tell of having consumed only five hundred calories all day? Only under highly unusual circumstances. Would he serve food to his family and eat only when they have finished, as is the custom in many Third World famílies as well as in many in the United States?
In our society, displaying appropriately feminine behavior (such as good mothering) ís no accomplishment, as the counterpart might be viewed for a roan, but simply doing what is expected. Women are encouraged to develop less autonomous and individual selves, but if they do so, they are judged immature or even pathologícal. If women develop more autonomously, they are then judged as inappropriately masculine. For example, women who put their own needs before those of their children are judged harshly, while men are expected to do so. Fathers who remain actively involved with their children after a divorce or who seek custody are applauded, while mothers are expected to do so and judged harshly if they do not.
Whether a woman develops in the direction of interpersonal sensitivity and connectedness or separateness, assertiveness or passivity, or more likely sorne combination, how these qualities are valued by her and by others obviously depends on what the larger oedipal culture values for women. Although there are ideal qualities that are valued in the abstract, in the particular gendered situation, the very same qualities, including self-esteem, are judged differently for females and for males. A timid and fearful man is evaluated differently from a timid and fearful woman, as is an assertive or competent man versus an assertive or competent woman. Competence tends to be seen as inappropriate for women (Nieva I98I). Women who behave competently can be discounted, disliked, or exduded (Hagan and Kahn I975), or at least their behavior itself can be discounted (Deaux and Emswiller I974; Nieva I98I). An active sense of humor is also considered inappropriate for women only. lt has been observed in many settíngs that it is usually men who tell jokes; women's joke-telling attempts are often ignored. Their sense of humor is expected to be responsive appreciation rather than active participation.
There is an entire literature in social psychology dealing with attribution, a segment of which concerns what attributions are made to people when all known informatic;m about them is equivalent or held constant with the exception of gender. In such situations, men and work believed to be done by men are typically evaluated more favorably than are women and their work (Goldberg I968; MischelI974). Even in situations where members of both gender groups have achieved outstanding success, as in the case of award-winning professors, women and men may be finally rated as equally competent but their success is attributed to different and predictably stereo– typed qualities: the men's to their power and competence, the women's to their sense of concern and likeableness (Kaschak I978, I98I).
Women have been observed to smile more than men when talking in same-gender (La France and Carmen I980; Frances I979) or mixed-gender pairs (Ickes and Turner I983; Pilkonis I977), when photographed (Ragan I982),when greetingstrangers (Henley I977;MackeyI976),andevenwhen criticizing children (Bugental, Love, and Gianetto I97I). A study by Francine Deutsch, Dorothy LeBaron, and Maury Fryer (I987), based on these observations, suggested that women are judged more harshly than men when they fail to perform warm and expressive nonverbal behaviors.
Supposedly neutral empirical research has both reflected and perpetuated the bias of the researchers in particular and of the society in which they/we live in general. In the service of maintaining an androcentric perspective on and definition of self-esteem, basic methodological principies have been violated and the gendered self has been built into theories and models of self-esteem. One of the major researchers and writers in the empírica) psychology of self-esteem, Stanley Coopersmith (I967), conducted the bulk of his research on male samples, from which he then claimed to extraer gender-neutral models and scales of self-esteem. As a result, women must respond as must the males in these samples in order to achieve a good measure of self-esteem. However, part of the reason these samples were comprised only of males is the very fact·that females do respond differently. The data on females that do not match those of the male subjects are eliminated or exduded from the start. According to this irrational methodology, girls and women are excluded from the development of the measure of self-esteem to which they will subsequently be held. Predictably, physical attractiveness was nota salient factor in Coop