Feminism and "Equality"

One of my roles in life at the moment, as I see it, is to introduce people to the incisive, challenging and refreshingly biblical thought of my friend Alastair Roberts, with whom I podcast at Mere Fidelity. Unusually for a writer, he does much of his best work in dialogue with others during the comments sections of other people's blogs, as anyone who reads the discussion below Monday's post will have seen, and he is particularly helpful on issues relating to gender. Here, as another example, is a quite superb critique of some forms of feminism, posted in a response to the claim that complementarians should all be feminists and in favour of "equality" (which, as Alastair points out, is such a popular Shibboleth mainly because it is such an empty concept). In my crass way, I've emphasised a few phrases that I consider to be particularly significant, but if you're interested in contemporary feminism and/or social equality, you should read it all:

The ‘equality’ framing risks making men’s social roles and outcomes the measure of women’s well-being. Yet the social roles for many men have not been all that empowering and, as women are typically more vulnerable and easily exploited than men in many respects, ‘equality’ often hasn’t advanced the interests of many women at all (especially among the most vulnerable). I’m reminded of this recent statement by Germaine Greer (which also unsettles the straightforward alignment of feminism with the pursuit of ‘equality’):

Yes, now, the difficulty is that women are achieving parity in the workforce at a time when the workforce is spectacularly disabled, when it has no combination, it has no corporate power, it is people fighting all the time about workplace agreements, where the worker is always at a disadvantage because he’s dealing with a corporation and the corporation lawyers and everything else. Now, I’m not happy about the fact that women are now being seen to be a biddable, reliable workforce for a capitalist system that is not under any pressure really from the workforce. And it’s happening also in certain professions. Women become dominant in medicine, the prestige of medicine goes down. So it doesn’t really make me happy. I have never argued for equality. Equality with men in the corporate world is misery. It’s a really destructive system.

If women want secure and honoured spaces to live valued and meaningful lives devoting themselves to work that they find worth and purpose within, protected from abuse and destitution, afforded influence and respected agency in the lives of their communities and society, ‘equality’ really might not be the way to get it. In fact, men have often enjoyed these things mentioned in the previous sentence much less than women. Work has typically been a gruelling necessity for most men, not an empowering choice. Also, in many respects men have enjoyed less of a social safety net and protection than women. It is all very well to look at the presence of men in boardrooms, but let’s not forget that men’s social position is also manifested in the population of our prisons and the homeless on our streets. It is this fuller appreciation of what this model of ‘equality’ might entail that might drive the resistance to ‘equality feminism’ among many women. Many women believe that they can secure better lives for themselves and other women by pushing for greater social protection and support, more provision and flexibility for women with young children in society, a healthier and stronger institution of marriage and more stable and committed relationships in general, or even in non-gendered drives for a more economically and politically equitable society (which is not the same as an ‘equal’ society).

It seems to me that there is an implicit class opposition within equality feminism that is seldom adequately addressed. For instance, while abortion may be celebrated as an empowering affirmation of women’s bodily autonomy and choice by many socially privileged feminists, the actual reasons why many women have abortions probably has a lot more to do with the forces that leave them without choices—crippling healthcare costs, unstable relationships, uncommitted, improvident, or abusive partners, low job security and flexibility, social pressure, etc. As Ross Douthat observes, the ideology of social liberalism serves the interests of the higher classes but can prove costly for the rest of the population (for an example of this, next sitcom you watch, imagine how its stories would play out the characters were poor and without a social safety net). Rather than setting off upon a crusade for ‘equality’, many women would be much better served by robust and accessible universal healthcare, better maternity leave and more provision and flexibility for part time workers, equitable wages, secure jobs for their husbands and partners, a strengthening of marriage culture, the deepening and enriching of local community life and its groups and institutions, a society that is more mother and child friendly, action and stigma against domestic abuse and such things as street harassment, etc. Very little of this is about ‘equality’—in fact, much of it is based on the realization that women have distinct needs and require particular social provision and protection that men typically do not—and most of these aims can more easily be pursued under a non-feminist banner.

One of the problems that I have with most feminist positions is with their rather naïve assumptions about the nature of power and their failure to provide an adequate answer to the question of where power comes from. Many seem to speak as if power were a naturally occurring social resource that has been monopolized by men. ‘Patriarchy’ is treated as if it were some vast conspiracy theory. What is less commonly asked is why practically every developed human society has developed its power structures in a broadly patriarchal manner, women’s power typically involving ‘empowerment’ by these more ‘masculine’ structures and institutions. Why do societies tend to gravitate to this ‘unequal’ form of social organization?

Many also speak about power as something that people just ‘have’, rather than something that needs to be created and sustained by certain forms of action and relation. For all of their faults, the lean-in style feminists (Sandberg, Kay and Shipman) may be more alert to this, recognizing that power doesn’t just come to men by virtue of being born with particular chromosomes, but is associated with certain modes of typical masculine acting, thinking, and relating and that, if women want to enjoy the same kind of power, they will need to change their forms of acting, thinking, and relating. I would suggest that the following are some fairly basic forms of behaviour and society that naturally tend to produce power structures and leaders: 1. contexts which are more agonistic, confrontational, combative, and competitive; 2. contexts that are more hierarchical; 3. contexts with shallower, less intimate, and broader networks of relations, where members of a group are more interchangeable; 4. contexts that are externally oriented and less driven by the personal needs and feelings of those within it.

As a number of people have observed (some feminists among them), the entrance of women into new spheres has often led to a weakening of the social power of those spheres, as women are often more vulnerable and easily exploited and less agentic and assertive in their typical modes of behaviour than men. As these social spheres and institutions were typically not designed merely for the empowerment of those within them, but for serving some broader social end and empowering society more generally, the loss of this power is a serious concern: the power structures of a social institution are weakened merely in order to include more women in its upper echelons. This may not serve the interests of women as a class at all. To take an extreme example, making women half of our military may serve an inclusive purpose for the women involved, but it would weaken our nation’s security and international power and wouldn’t necessarily be in the best interests of women as a class, who benefit far more from the security and power of our nation than they do from quotas or tokenism.

This is a question that the Church needs to take seriously. While women bishops, for instance, may be inclusive for some women, is this in the best interests of the Church as a whole? The bishop has the pastoral role of protecting the Church from attack, of effectively symbolizing and enacting the authority of God within the Church, and representing the authoritative voice of the Church to the wider society. In Scripture, this priestly role is often associated not merely with men, but with ‘alpha’ men. The Church is strengthened as a body when it is led by persons with steel backbones, principles, and nerves, persons that can withstand others in more confrontational situations. One of the reasons why the Church is so weak as a social institution has to do with the fact that its leaders seldom conform to this type. In the quest for ‘equality’, we seem to be heading further in this direction, especially as many women are arguing that bringing women into episcopal leadership should entail new modes of leadership (more collaborative, less oppositional, more empathetic, etc.). Given the choice between being members of an increasingly impotent institution within which women enjoy equal leadership or being members of an institution with a strong voice in society, yet with men dominating the top positions—while empowering, listening to, and acting in the interests of women—it is far from immediately obvious to me that the former option best serves the interests of women (99% of whom will never be priests or bishops).