Women's Nature

Yesterday I read this post about women bullying. While it is important to call attention to bullying, whether among school children or in the workplace, I find it interesting the shock or dismay expressed that women are bullies too. In this case, the original post suggests that there has to be a cause, and that it has something to do with women modeling male behavior in the workplace to be successful and accepted. This seems to the be the "classic" idea that women must act like men to be considered equal to them. This makes me think of the plethora of movies from the 1980s and early 1990s where female characters assumed male traits becoming the bitch or sexual predator, which is ultimate terrifying to men.

What is missing from this discussion, however, is the limiting characterization of women as better than men. Women's bad behavior is upsetting, because women are supposed to be better than that. They, if freed from the oppressive male-dominated atmosphere of work, would be kindlier, gentler bosses. They would help other women. It would be Utopia! Historically, society placed women* on pedestals in the nineteenth century, limiting their full equality in society. They had power, but it was in how they influenced men and their children. Ideal women created a safe haven for men within the home. Women began to participate in moral and public reform efforts because they were more pious, nurturing. They were the natural candidates to save sinful men. Jump ahead to the Woman Suffrage Movement and one rationale** for women getting the vote in 1920 was that women were morally superior to men. Their vote would make the world a better place. In this case and in the previous instance, men's morality was dependent upon the love of a good woman. Men, and their baser natures, will sink into Hell without the constant vigilance of women. The often mythologized 1950s in America reasserted the ideal womanhood of the nineteenth century. It was just dressed up in Donna Reed's pearls and high heels. Second-wave feminism was supposed to take care of all this cultural oppression which boxed women into limiting categories for family and work. Gender, feminists argued in the late 1960s and 1970s, was socially constructed. Biology did not, or should not, determine what men and women do, nor how we are valued in society.

Now, today, we have a different language to describe men and women's nature. Men and women are "equal." But, have things changed that much? About fifteen years ago, I was definitely of the opinion that gender was, except for a few outliers, a social construction. Today, how do I feel about it? Are men and women (and how we assign value to masculinity and femininity) different because of their nature, or because of nurture? I may give a bit more to biology, but not much. My intellect, my anger, my impatience, my bossiness, my desire to compete and win, my cruelty, my pettiness, my inability to sit like a lady at all times does not make me less of a woman (or fail to be a "good" woman). This list of poor qualities are supposedly more in keeping with men's nature, particularly in the workforce. I do not want to erase nature, but I do not want women (or men for that matter) to be excused from responsibility because of it.

*In this case, "women" means white, elite women. The nineteenth century cult of domesticity promoted an idealized view of womanhood centered around the white, Protestant, middle class woman. When we consider race, class, and religion in this context, this idealized view of womanhood is even more constricting.

**There were other reasons articulated as to why women should have the vote, the least of which was equality as citizens.