Destined for Equality: The Inevitable Rise of Women's Status (review)

No one can contest the conclusion that women have gained more equality in American society since the 19th century. In Destined for Equality: The Inevitable Rise of Women’s Status, the sociologist Robert Max Jackson attempts to tackle a provocative, but not totally original question related to this truism: Why and how have women made gains in a society dominated and controlled by men and male interests?

Jackson ultimately argues that women’s rising status has not resulted as much from social movements as from the modernizing of society. He maintains that: “Gender inequality has been fated for extinction since the emergence of modern economic and political organization.” Jackson contests feminist scholars’ interpretations that the state has served to preserve male advantages and that it was women’s daily and organized struggles which resulted in greater gender equality. While not dismissing the importance of activism, Jackson challenges its centrality as the major engine of change. Changes benefiting women did not always result from political protest, but occurred in other realms as well, including the state and business. If this was the case, then there had to be another overarching explanation.

In chapters 2 through 4, Jackson provides evidence for his modernization argument by examining the progress in women’s status over a 150-year period in three arenas. He focuses on citizenship rights such as suffrage, property rights, and anti-discrimination legislation; employment; and institutional individualism, which opened up, for instance, educational opportunities for women. Modernizing trends such as the separation of home and work and the growth of businesses and government organizations, which Jackson claims lacked interest in “gender inequality’s persistence,” set the stage for its gradual decline.

The fact that gender inequality was incompatible with modern organization, according to Jackson, did not mean, however, that men necessarily promoted gender equality. Bureaucratic rationalization and the needs of the powerful in the legal and economic realms required changes in behavior. What resulted were gender-neutral policies that furthered women’s interests and improved their status. Women gained property rights and access to jobs because men were trying to protect their own financial interests in the capitalist marketplace. These findings are not new to the historian. What is new is Jackson’s explanation that such advancements in women’s status stemmed from the development of modern society and its attendant conditions such as bureaucracy, rationalization and individualism and that these advancements serve as markers of women’s “unprecedented and apparently irreversible progress toward complete gender equality.”

Jackson should be commended for situating events within the broader political economy and recognizing that the self-serving decisions of those in power produced unintended consequences that benefited women. However, he tends to minimize the forms of inequality that occurred simultaneously or even as potential by-products of modernization. Jackson labels legislation and economic practices gender-neutral even as he acknowledges they were far from unbiased. For instance, during both world wars, women began working in industrial jobs formerly closed to them, but they usually only had access to low-wage, unskilled or semi-skilled jobs. In addition, poor wages not only offset women’s increased access to the job market, but occupational segregation, as a result of women’s access, helped to lower the status of certain jobs and create pink-collar ghettos.

Jackson seems throughout to assume women’s mere access to traditionally male jobs, greater educational opportunities and their possession of legal and political rights necessarily meant the demise of patriarchy. The fact that women and men eventually could hold the same types of jobs reflects only one measure of equality. But there remain issues concerning the treatment of women by their employers and co-workers and constraints on promotional opportunities.

While Jackson notes the difference between legal and substantive equality, the book tends to draw on formal measures of equality as evidence for its argument without also analyzing the social reality of continued historical discrimination, the institutionalization of difference, and even threats...