The article discusses the feminist ideal of a gender-free or androgynous society, where basic rights and duties are not assigned based on biological sex. It explores two forms of androgyny: one advocating a universal ideal combining traditionally masculine and feminine traits, and the other promoting a variety of gender expressions, all equally available regardless of sex. The article argues that these forms are complementary, with the first applying to virtues and the second to personal preferences.
From Equality to Feminism
The ideal of androgyny is defended through principles of equality, such as equal opportunity (from welfare liberalism) and equal self-development (from socialism). The article emphasizes that achieving this ideal requires radical societal changes, particularly in family structures, economic power distribution, and addressing overt violence against women.
- Family Restructuring: The article highlights the need for equal upbringing for children and equal opportunities for parents, but notes challenges like inadequate childcare and inflexible work schedules, which hinder gender equality in parenting.
- Economic Power: Despite women’s increased participation in the workforce, gender pay gaps persist. The article calls for affirmative action and comparable worth programs to address systemic inequalities and ensure equal pay for equal or comparable work.
- Violence Against Women: The article condemns the prevalence of rape, domestic violence, and sexual abuse, advocating for societal changes to eliminate such violence. It also critiques the role of hard-core pornography in perpetuating gender-based violence.
- Sexual Harassment: The article critiques the legal standards for proving sexual harassment, arguing that the burden of proof should shift to employers and that workplace environments should be free from intimidation and hostility. It calls for a reasonable victim standard to better address women’s experiences.
The Ideal of a Gender-Free or Androgynous Society
Now a welfare liberal conception of justice, in virtue of its right to equal opportunity, has been appealed to by contemporary feminists in support of a conception of feminist justice that accords with the ideal of a gender-free or androgynous society. But how is this ideal of a gender-free or androgynous society to be interpreted? It is a society where basic rights and duties are not assigned on the basis of a person’s biological sex. Being male or female is not the grounds for determining what basic rights and duties a person has in a gender-free society. But this is to characterize the feminist ideal only negatively. It tells us what we need to get rid of, not what we need to put in its place. A more positive characterisation is provided by the ideal of androgyny. Putting the ideal of feminist justice more positively in terms of the ideal of androgyny also helps to bring out why men should be attracted to feminist justice.
Two Forms of Androgyny
In a well-known article, Joyce Trebilcot distinguishes two forms of androgyny. The first postulates the same ideal for everyone. According to this form of androgyny, the ideal person “combines characteristics usually attributed to men with characteristics usually attributed to women. Thus we should expect both nurturance and mastery, openness and objectivity, compassion and competitiveness, from each and every person who has the capacities for these traits.
By contrast, the second form of androgyny does not advocate the same ideal for everyone, but rather a variety of options from “pure” femininity to “pure” masculinity. As Trebilcot points out, this form of androgyny shares with the first the view that biological sex should not be the basis for determining the appropriateness of gender characterization. It differs in that it holds that “all alternatives with respect to gender should be equally available to and equally approved for everyone, regardless of sex.”
It would be a mistake, however, to distinguish sharply between these two forms of androgyny. Properly understood, they are simply two different facets of a single ideal. For, as Mary Anne Warren has argued, the second form of androgyny is appropriate only “with respect to feminine and masculine traits which are largely matters of personal style and preference and which have little direct moral significance. However, when we consider so-called feminine and masculine virtues, it is the first form of androgyny that is required, because then, other things being equal, the same virtues are appropriate for everyone.
Abstract Formulation of Androgyny
We can even formulate the ideal of androgyny more abstractly so that it is no longer specified in terms of so-called feminine and masculine traits. We can specify the ideal as requiring no more than that the traits that are truly desirable in society be equally open to both women and men or, in the case of virtues, equally expected of both women and men, other things being equal.
Defenses of Androgyny
Most contemporary defenses of the ideal of androgyny attempt to derive it from various conceptions of equality. Some feminists have tried to derive the ideal from a welfare liberal conception of equal opportunity, and others from a socialist conception of equal self-development. Let me briefly consider each of these defenses in turn.
Obviously, a right to equal opportunity could be interpreted, minimally, as providing people only with the same legal rights of access to all advantaged positions in society for which they are qualified. But this is not the interpretation that should be given this right, either by welfare liberals or by libertarians. Rather, it was argued that a right to equal opportunity should be interpreted as a right not to be discriminated against in filling the roles and positions in society, and it is this right to equal opportunity that feminists have tended to focus on in attempting to justify the ideal of androgyny. The point feminists have been making is simply that failure to achieve the ideal of androgyny translates into a failure to guarantee equal opportunity to both women and men.
As it turns out, support for the ideal of androgyny provided by a socialist conception of equal self-development is as direct as that provided by a welfare liberal conception of equal opportunity. Just as the ideal of androgyny can be seen to be required by a welfare liberal or libertarian right to equal opportunity, so too can it be seen to be required by a socialist right of equal self-development. In fact, once the socialist right to equal self-development is correctly understood to be an equal right to the provision of resources for self-development, it can be seen to be equivalent to the welfare liberal’s right to equal opportunity. What remains distinctive about the socialist defense of androgyny, however, is its claim that in contemporary capitalist societies, the ideal of androgyny is best achieved by socializing the means of production, which is to say that a cure for capitalist exploitation will also be a cure for women’s oppression.
Restructuring the Family
Now one locus for the radical restructuring required by the ideal of a gender-free or androgynous society is the family. Here two fundamental changes are needed. First, all children, irrespective of their sex, must be given the same type of upbringing consistent with their native capabilities. Second, normally mothers and fathers must also have the same opportunities for education and employment consistent with their native capabilities.
Yet, at least in the United States, this need radically to modify traditional family structures to guarantee equal opportunity confronts a serious problem. Given that a significant proportion of the available jobs are at least 9 to 5, families with preschool children require day-care facilities if their adult members are to pursue their careers. Unfortunately, for many families such facilities are simply unavailable. In New York City, for example, more than 144,000 children under the age of six are competing for 46,000 full-time slots in day-care centers. In Seattle, there is licensed day-care space for 8,800 of the 23,000 children who need it. In Los Angeles, there is no licensed childcare available for 135,000 children who need such programs. In Miami, two children, three and four years old, were left unattended at home while their parent worked. They climbed into a clothes dryer while the timer was on, closed the door, and burned to death.
Moreover, even the available day-care facilities are frequently inadequate, either because their staffs are poorly trained or because the child/adult ratio in such facilities is too high. At best, many such facilities provide little more than custodial care; at worst, they actually retard the development of those children under their care. What this suggests is that at least under present conditions, if preschool children are to be adequately cared for, frequently one of the adult members of the family has to remain at home to provide that care. But because most jobs are at least 9 to 5, this requires that the adult members who stay at home temporarily give up pursuing a career. However, such sacrifice appears to conflict with the equal opportunity requirement of feminist justice.
Families might try to meet this equal opportunity requirement by having one parent relinquish a career for a certain period of time and the other give up pursuing a career for a subsequent (equal) period of time. But there are problems here too. Some careers are difficult to interrupt for any significant period of time, while others never adequately reward latecomers. In addition, given the high rate of divorce and the inadequacies of most legally mandated child support, those who first sacrifice their careers may find themselves later faced with the impossible task of trying to begin or revive them while continuing to be the primary caretaker of their children. Furthermore, there is considerable evidence that children will benefit more from equal rearing from both parents. So the option of having just one parent doing the child rearing for any length of time is, other things being equal, not optimal.
It would seem therefore, that to truly share child-rearing within the family what is needed are flexible (typically part-time) work schedules that allow both parents to be together with their children for a significant period every day. Some flexible work schedules have already been tried by various corporations. But if equal opportunity is to be a reality in our society, the option of flexible work schedules must be guaranteed to all those with preschool children. A recent estimate shows that married full-time career women still do almost as much of the housework chores—70%—as the average full-time housewife, who does 83% of the housework. Obviously this will have to change if we are to achieve the ideal of a gender-free or androgynous society.
Economic Power and Gender Equality
A second locus of change required by the ideal of a gender-free or androgynous society is the distribution of economic power in the society. In the United States, the percentage of women in the labor force has risen steadily for three decades, from 35% (of those aged sixteen or more) in 1960 to 59% in 1995. Roughly 70% of women with children at home were employed in 1995, including more than 63% of mothers with children under the age of six and 59% of mothers with children under the age of one.
Yet in 1995 women employed full-time still earned 0.72forevery1 men earned, up from the 0.60forevery1 that held from the 1960s through the 1980s. Earnings do increase with education for all workers, but all women, as well as men of color, earn less than white men at every level of education. For example, women with four years of college education earn less on average than men who have not completed high school.
Sometimes women and men working in the same job category have different incomes. For example, while female clerical workers earned a median wage of 384perweekin1995,themedianwageformaleclericalworkerswas489. More frequently, however, women and men tend to be employed in different job categories that are paid differently. According to one study done a few years ago in the state of Washington, women employed as clerk-typists earned less than men employed as truck drivers or warehouse workers. In another study done in Denver, women employed as nurses earned less than men employed as tree cutters. While in each of these cases the women earned about 20% less than the men, the women’s jobs, when evaluated in terms of skill, responsibility, effort, and working conditions, were given equal or higher scores than the men’s jobs with which they were compared. Clearly, denying women the opportunity to earn the same as men do for equal or comparable work is a basic injustice in our society, and it will be a very costly one to correct.
To remedy these inequalities suffered by women in the economic sphere will require programs of affirmative action and comparable worth. Affirmative action is needed to place qualified women in positions they deserve to occupy because of past discrimination. Without affirmative action, the structural violence of past discrimination will not be rectified. Only with affirmative action can the competition for desirable jobs and positions be made fair again, given our past history of discrimination. There are even cases where affirmative action candidates are clearly the most qualified, but where those in charge of hiring, because of their prejudice, can only see the candidates as simply qualified but not as the most qualified candidates.
Comparable worth is also needed because, without it, women will not receive the salaries they deserve. They will do work that is judged equal or comparable to the work that men are doing in male-dominated occupations, but without comparable worth they will be paid less than the men. Paying for comparable worth programs will not be easy, but it can be done. The state of Washington spent $115 million over seven years on a comparable worth program, and the state of Iowa spent almost 9% of its payroll over a three-year period to achieve comparable worth.
Overt Violence Against Women
A third locus of change required by the ideal of a gender-free or androgynous society is the overt violence perpetrated against women in our society. According to former Surgeon General Antonia Novello, “The home is actually a more dangerous place for the American woman than the city streets. One-third of the women slain in the U.S.,” she continues, “die at the hands of husbands and boyfriends.”
In addition, women in the United States live in fear of rape. Twenty percent of women are raped at some time during their lives, according to one national study; 44% of women are subjected either to rape or attempted rape at some point during their lives, according to another study done in the San Francisco area, and almost 50% of male college students say they would commit rape if they were certain that they could get away with it. Not infrequently, women are beaten by their own husbands and lovers (between one quarter and one third of women are battered in their homes by husbands and lovers). One third of all women who require emergency-room hospital treatment are there as a result of domestic violence.
Thirty-eight percent of little girls are sexually molested inside or outside the family. Since most of these crimes are minimally prosecuted in our society, women in our society can be raped, battered, or sexually abused as children, and little, if anything, will be done about it. What this shows is that the condition of women in our society is actually that of being subordinate to men by force.
Feminist justice demands that we put an end to the overt violence against women, which takes the distinctive form of rape, battery, and sexual abuse. This overt violence is in every way as destructive as the other forms of violence we oppose, so we cannot in consistency fail to oppose it. According to one cross-cultural study of ninety-five societies, 47% of them were free of rape. This shows that it is possible to eliminate, or at least drastically reduce, overt violence against women.
One way to help bring about this result is to ban hard-core pornography that celebrates and legitimizes rape, battery, and the sexual abuse of children, as the Supreme Court of Canada has recently done. Catharine MacKinnon has argued that pornography of this sort goes beyond mere speech in constituting a practice of sex discrimination that is a violation of women’s civil rights. According to MacKinnon, men who participate in the practice learn through the pleasures of masturbation to enjoy the forceful subordination of women, and they seek to find ways to impose that same subordination on the women who come into their lives. Because of the severity of these impositions, MacKinnon and other anti-pornography feminists claim that the practice of hard-core pornography violates women’s civil rights by denying their equal status as citizens.
Sexual Harassment
Another locus of change required by the ideal of a gender-free or androgynous society overlaps the previous two. It is rooted in the distribution of economic power in society and it frequently takes the form of overt violence against women. It is the problem of sexual harassment. Actually, sexual harassment was not recognized as an offense by US trial courts until the late 1970s, and it was only affirmed by the US Supreme Court as an offense in the 1980s. The term “sexual harassment” was not even coined until the 1970s. So the moral problem of sexual harassment is one that many people have only recently come to recognize. The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Anita Hill’s charge that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her obviously heightened people’s awareness of this problem.
In 1986, the US Supreme Court, in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, ruled that there could be two types of sexual harassment: harassment that conditions concrete employment benefits on granting sexual favors (often called the quid pro quo type), and harassment that creates a hostile or offensive work environment without affecting economic benefits (the hostile environment type).
Nevertheless, the Supreme Court made it difficult for a plaintiff to establish that either of these types of sexual harassment had occurred. For example, a polite verbal “no” does not suffice to show that sexual advances are unwelcome; a woman’s entire conduct both inside and outside the workplace is subject to appraisal in order to determine whether or not she welcomed the advances. For example, in the Vinson case, there was “voluminous testimony regarding Vinson’s dress and personal fantasies,” and in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, Anita Hill was not able to prevent intensive examination of her private life, although Clarence Thomas was able to declare key areas of his private life as off-limits, such as his practice of viewing and discussing pornographic films.
The Supreme Court also made it difficult to classify work environments as hostile to women unless the harassment is sufficiently severe or pervasive. Applying the Supreme Court’s standard, a lower court, in Christoforou v. Ryder Truck Rental, judged a supervisor’s actions of fondling a plaintiff’s rear end and breasts, propositioning her, and trying to force a kiss at a Christmas party, to be too sporadic and innocuous to support a finding of a hostile work environment. Similarly, in Rabidue v. Osceola Refining Co., a workplace where pictures of nude and scantily clad women abounded (including one, which hung on a wall for eight years, of a woman with a golf ball on her breasts and a man with his golf club standing over her and yelling “Fore!”) and where a co-worker, never disciplined despite repeated complaints, routinely referred to women as “whores,” “cunts,” “pussies,” and “tits,” was judged by a lower court not to be a sufficiently hostile environment to constitute sexual harassment.
Notice, by contrast, that the Senate Arms Services Committee, in its recent hearings, regarded an environment in which known homosexuals are simply doing their duty in the military to be too hostile an environment in which to ask male heterosexuals to serve.
Yet why should we accept the Supreme Court’s characterization of sexual harassment, especially given its unwelcomeness and pervasiveness requirements? As the Supreme Court interprets sexual harassment, a person’s behavior must be unwelcome in a fairly strong sense before it constitutes sexual harassment. But why should a woman have to prove that the offer “If you don’t sleep with me, you will be fired” is unwelcome before it constitutes sexual harassment? Isn’t such an offer objectively unwelcome? Isn’t it just the kind of offer that those in positions of power should not be making to their subordinates, an offer that purports to make their continuing employment conditional upon providing sexual favors? Surely, unless we are dealing with some form of legalized prostitution, and maybe not even then, such offers are objectively unwelcome. Given, then, that such offers are objectively unwelcome, why is there any need to show that they are also subjectively unwelcome before regarding them as violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act? The requirement of subjective unwelcomeness is simply a gratuitous obstacle that makes the plaintiff’s case far more difficult to prove than it should be.
Burden of Proof in Workplace Sexual Harassment
In addition, if the plaintiff is fired after refusing such an offer, the Supreme Court requires her to prove that the firing occurred because the offer was refused, which is very difficult to do unless one is a perfect employee. Wouldn’t it be fairer to require the employer to prove that the plaintiff would have been fired even if she had said ‘yes’ to the offer? Of course, employers could avoid this burden of proof simply by not making any such offers in the first place. But when they do make objectively unwelcome offers, why shouldn’t the burden of proof be on them to show that any subsequent firing was clearly unrelated to the plaintiff’s refusal of the offer? Fairness is particularly relevant in this context because we are committed to equal opportunity in the workplace, which requires employing women and men on equal terms. Accordingly, we must guard against imposing special burdens on women in the workplace, when there are no comparable burdens imposed on men. Feminist justice, with its ideal of a gender-free or androgynous society, will be satisfied with nothing less.
Conflict Between Equal Opportunity and Pervasiveness Requirement
The demand for equal opportunity in the workplace also appears to conflict with the Supreme Court’s pervasiveness requirement for establishing a hostile environment. Citing a lower court, the Supreme Court contends that, to be actionable, sexual harassment ‘must be sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the victim’s employment and create an abusive working environment.’ But as this standard has been interpreted by lower courts, the pervasiveness of certain forms of harassment in the workplace has become grounds for tolerating them. In Rabidue, the majority argued:
‘It cannot seriously be disputed that in some work environments, humor and language are rough hewn and vulgar. Sexual jokes, sexual conversations and girlie magazines abound. Title VII was not meant to or can change this. Title VII is the federal court mainstay in the struggle for equal employment opportunity for the female workers of America. But it is quite different to claim that Title VII was designed to bring about a magical transformation in the social mores of American workers.’
The Supreme Court itself seems to sound a similar theme by emphasizing the application of Title VII to only extreme cases of sexual harassment as found in Vinson.
EEOC’s Broader Interpretation of Title VII
“However, as the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) interprets Title VII, the law has a broader scope. It affords employees the right to work in an environment free from discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult. According to the EEOC, sexual harassment violates Title VII where conduct creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment or where it unreasonably interferes with work performance.
But how are we to determine what unreasonably interferes with work performance? In Rabidue, the majority looked to prevailing standards in the workplace to determine what was reasonable or unreasonable. Yet Justice Keith, in dissent, questioned this endorsement of the status quo, arguing that just as a Jewish employee can rightfully demand a change in her working environment if her employer maintains an anti-Semitic workforce and tolerates a workplace in which ‘hike’ jokes, displays of Nazi literature, and anti-Jewish conversation ‘may abound,’ surely women can rightfully demand a change in the sexist practices that prevail in their working environments.”
Analogies Between Sexual Harassment and Racial Harassment
In Henson v. Dundee, the majority also drew an analogy between sexual harassment and racial harassment:
Sexual harassment which creates a hostile or offensive environment for members of one sex is every bit the arbitrary barrier to sexual equality at the workplace that racial harassment is to racial equality. Surely, a requirement that a man or woman run a gauntlet of sexual abuse in return for the privilege of being allowed to work and make a living can be a demeaning and disconcerting as the harshest of racial epithets.
This passage is also quoted approvingly by the Supreme Court in Vinson.
Reasonable Victim Standard vs. Reasonable Person Standard
Moved by such arguments, the majority in Ellison v. Brady proposed that, rather than looking to prevailing standards to determine what is reasonable, we should look to the standard of a reasonable victim—or, given that most victims of sexual harassment are women, the standard of a reasonable woman. They contend that this standard may be different from the standard of a ‘reasonable man.’ For example, what male superiors may think is ‘harmless social interaction’ may be experienced by female subordinates as offensive and threatening.
Nevertheless, if we are concerned to establish the equal opportunity in the workplace that feminist justice, with its ideal of a gender-free or androgynous society, demands, there should be no question about what standard of reasonableness to use here. It is not that of a reasonable woman, nor that of a reasonable man for that matter, but the standard of what is reasonable for everyone to accept. For equal opportunity is a moral requirement, and moral requirements are those which are reasonable for everyone to accept. This assumes that apparent conflicts over what is reasonable to accept—for example, conflicts between the standard of a reasonable woman and that of a reasonable man—are conflicts that can and should be resolved by showing that one of these perspectives is more reasonable than the other, or that some still other perspective is even more reasonable. However, at least in the context of sexual harassment, this standard of what is reasonable for everyone to accept will accord closely with the standard of a reasonable woman, given that once women’s perspectives are adequately taken into account, the contrasting perspective of a reasonable man will be seen as not so reasonable after all.
Feminist Justice and Workplace Equality
In sum, the achievement of feminist justice requires a number of important changes in our society. It requires changes in traditional family structures so that children, irrespective of their sex, will have the same type of upbringing, and mothers and fathers have the same opportunities for education and employment. It requires changes in the distribution of economic power in our society through programs of affirmative action and equal pay for comparable work that remove the structural violence against women. It requires the changes that are necessary to put an end to overt violence against women in the form of rape, battery, and sexual abuse. Last, it requires changes to implement new programs against sexual harassment in the workplace in order to achieve the equal opportunity that feminist justice promises to everyone. All of these changes, and more, are required by feminist justice’s ideal of a gender-free or androgynous society.
In conclusion, the article argues that achieving a gender-free or androgynous society requires transformative changes in family structures, economic systems, and societal attitudes toward violence and harassment. These changes are essential to realizing the feminist ideal of equal opportunity and justice for all.