The personal lives of "rights-conscious" women are often inextricable from our professional and academic lives. We tend to infuse everyday acts with resistance. One friend of mine refuses to learn how to cook because women are expected to know how to cook. Many of my friends hesitate in the face of acts of modern chivalry. My skin crawls everytime I see an ad on TV where a woman is cooking, cleaning or rushing to get a meal on the table. Such banal acts of resistance, which often take on a life and will of their own, can be exhausting because we are never able to let our guard down. We are constantly under seige, if not by external agents then by our own calculations of justice. Our defensive offensiveness also means that we sometimes fail to take advantage of certain situations to foster greater dialogue and understanding between the sexes.
I have often accused generally well-meaning people of sexism and created situations that have yielded less than optimal results. Once, an older relative complimented me on my sense of direction, saying, "Women don't usually have such good sense of direction." I immediately told him such skills vary from person to person and that we should avoid making gender-wide generalizations. The problem is that I wasn't able to deliver my response in a calm and collected manner. Instead, I raised my voice and probably precluded the possibility of any further discussion. My knee-jerk reaction was to associate him with practitioners of centuries-old patriarchy and condemn his statement. If my goal was to make him critically re-evaluate his statement, the fierce emotion in my voice counterproductively deflected attention away from the substance of my response.
Harvey Mansfield's book, Manliness, has achieved notoriety to charicaturial proportions. His book does, however, remind women's rights activists, feminists and would-be feminists that we do need to address how our decisions and our struggles affect the men in our lives, be they friends, co-workers, or family members. It seems that we often feel alone in our struggles with opponents both real and mythical and forget to forge alliances that may be of great benefit to our own struggles.
While this is often because we are up against robust patriarchy, it may also be because we have alienated well-meaning people who could have been our partners in struggle. The benefits of gender equality to men are often less tangible than those to women. It is difficult for a husband to continue to support the struggle for gender equality if he is continuously accused of not doing enough by his wife on the one hand and ridiculed for being hen-pecked by his male friends on the other. Why should a man choose to give up privileges that most societies still bring him up to expect and value? There are many answers to this question, but clearly they have yet to persuade many human beings. Women are not the only victims of patriarchy. Men who support gender equality at the theoretical level can also become its victims when they try to implement it in their own lives. As women, we need more partners, not fewer, and empathetic diplomacy, not ferocity, seems to be the way to go.
Sarah Shehabuddin (Mount Holyoke College '02) is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at Harvard University.
