The Declining Significance of Gender?

7. Opposing Forces: How, Why, and When Will Gender Inequality Disappear?

Chapter 7 Opposing Forces: How, Why, and When Will Gender Inequality Disappear? Robert Max Jackson W hat does the future hold for gender inequality? In the United States and many other countries, women’s status has improved remarkably over the past two centuries. Will we continue to move ever closer to full gender equality? Or could gender relations stagnate where they are or even move backward? That gender remains a crucial aspect of social organization is not in question. In all too many parts of the world women are exposed to humiliations ranging from mockery to rape, from small rituals curtailing their freedom to absolute limitations in what they can do, what they can wear, whom they can marry, and where they can go. Gender is a ruling idea in people’s lives—even where egalitarian ideology is common, as among young, affluent, educated Americans—that defines different expectations for behavior, dress, orientation to children, sexuality, and obligations to provide income. To pose meaningful questions about the possible declining significance of gender is not, therefore, to ask whether gender still matters or even how much it matters . Rather, we want to inquire how the implications of gender for social life have changed. In my work I have sought to show how and why gender inequality has declined over the past two centuries. Here I extend that analysis forward: If the past is a guide to the future, what can we reasonably expect will happen to gender inequality in the future? For millennia, women everywhere were subordinate to men under the most diverse economic, political, and cultural conditions. But in recent centuries, an extraordinary process has emerged, developed, and diffused across the world, eroding gender inequality, elevating women’s status, and transforming modern society. If a young woman from the early nineteenth century could be whisked into our own time, she would surely be stunned by the improvements in women’s status. / 215 Women voting, holding political office, attending college, taking jobs, owning businesses, living on their own, traveling by themselves. Extraordinary! How these images contrast with the society described by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s (1835/1966, 601): “In America, more than anywhere else in the world, care has been taken constantly to trace clearly distinct spheres of action for the two sexes. . . . You will never find American women in charge of the external relations of the family, managing a business, or interfering in politics. ” Contemporary young women often see present conditions differently. Why are so few women in positions of power, they ask? Why are women expected to bear the burden of caring for children or others needing care? Why do women earn less money than men? Why should women have to live with the anxiety about sexual harassment in their offices and still fear attack as they walk down the street? We have two contrasting visions of women’s status. Compared to the restrictions that faced women two centuries ago, the degree to which gender inequality has declined seems remarkable. When weighed against an imagined state of full and unimpeded equality, the continued shortcomings in women’s status seem inexplicable and remarkably frustrating. These visions are complementary, not inconsistent . The degree of current gender inequality can only be assessed by means of comparison, to the past or to an imagined future. Therefore, before asking if, how, or to what degree the significance of gender inequality will continue to decline , we need to choose a perspective from which we will make our assessments. The historical perspective I use focuses on long-term social processes that have determined and will continue to determine the trajectory of gender inequality. I argue that the driving force behind gender inequality’s decline over the past two centuries—the why—is a redistribution of power and interests that has come about as a result of modern economic and political organization interacting with women’s continuous resentment of and resistance to subordination. Thus, the why is not a shift in moral sentiments or a series of disconnected historical developments (although these were part of the historical unfolding) but a series of structural shifts. The actions that drove gender inequality’s decline—the how—were widely dispersed, involved both women and men, were executed by both ordinary and powerful people, represented both individual and organizational efforts, and were largely motivated by immediate self-interests, not concerns about gender inequality. When women will gain equality is indeterminate. I argue that...