Destined for Equality: The Inevitable Rise of Women's Status.
Allen, Judith A.
Destined for Equality: The Inevitable Rise of Women's Status, by Robert Max Jackson. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1998.316 pp. $35.00.
Sociologist Robert Max Jackson advances a powerful theoretical model accounting for the "disembedding of gender inequality," across the past 150 years, exposing inadequacies in previous explanations. Especially relevant to historians, he argues that feminists, probing present obstacles to future gender inequality, ignore the rapid escalation of gender equality disclosed by examining the past. He interrogates reduced gender inequality, predicting its elimination.
Synthesizing a vast literature addressing laws, employment, education, and political rights, as well as feminism, meritocracy, and individualism, his theory recasts the historical significance of feminism, women's suffrage, and women's movements. Far from initiating gender equality, feminism has merely accelerated change imposed by structural factors. Indeed, feminism emerges as logical, modernizing, rationalizing, and synchronized with the modern polity, state, and economy. Alternatively, defenders of gender inequality are deluded reactionaries pathetically seeking historical reversals, in shallow, brief backlash.
Why has gender inequality declined, in developments like Married Woman's Property Acts, female enfranchisement, women's higher education, affirmative action, and pre-eminently, wives' increased labour force participation? Contrary to existing accounts attributing increasing gender equality to multiple, unco-ordinated, or serendipitous factors -- for instance labour saving devices or birth control -- or, to the power and agency of feminist resistance to patriarchal dominance, Jackson offers different suspects. The rise of remote, bureaucratized economic/political formations, altered the interests of "powerful men," undermining their commitment to the gender inequalities benefiting "ordinary men." Increasingly independent and abstract state and economic institutions evolved meritocractic and individualistic criteria for standards, performance, and assimilation into their activities -- criteria ultimately indifferent to gender. Jackson's theory, then, is one of men and interests, particularly, the lack of cross-class solidarity among men to preserve gender inequality, once its benefits to some groups of men receded. Reduced gender inequality is, for Jackson, fundamentally a story of male agency, decision-making, and calculation. Rarely has gender equality been the objective of those whose actions, nonetheless, facilitated it. Above all, in his theory, gender equality is a side-effect, an unintended consequence, but for all that, irreversible.
The book-jacket has Arlie Hochschild saying of Jackson, "I hope he is right. I think he is," while Michael Kimmel hails the book as bridging political economy and gender studies, and is "destined to re-frame the discussion of women's equality and provoke a rich and fruitful debate." It is worth specifying some of the debatable areas.
Jackson's theory is relentlessly economistic, deliberately narrow, and thereby its persuasiveness limited. While conceding significant changes in women's "access to divorce, women's sexuality, and cultural images of gender," during three eras through which he periodizes his study (conventionally enough, 1840-1890, 1890-1940, 1940 to the present), he accords the changes no "central role." While they may signal women's status, "they are derivative rather than formative" (p. 6). A base-superstructure model pervades, with equal workforce participation the analytically privileged domain. Paradoxically, this mortgages Jackson's analysis, perhaps unintentionally, to an updated public/private split.
Since 1850, feminists and their allies have targeted masculine demands, customs, practices, prerogatives, and structures, including: prostitution, rape, pornography, domestic violence, beauty, compulsory heterosexuality, the double standard, divorce, the birthrate, orgasm-less coitus, abortion, obstetrics and gynaecology, and militarism. These matters concern the sexed body, masculinity, femininity, sexuality, and reproduction. Yet they are ignored, passingly mentioned, or unanalyzed as secondary, derivative, and falling outside the narrative's drama of powerful (white) men accidentally halting gender inequality -- admittedly, based on United States data, but, Jackson believes, generalizable to other modern societies.
These historically critical zones prove not merely derivative, however, for Jackson's explanations. Women's determined reduction of child-bearing, for instance, was partly accomplished in the context of a faulty theory of ovulation (until 1928) and, until the pill of the 1960s, with barrier contraceptive methods, withdrawal, or abortion, manifest in all races and classes. Reduced birthrates amounted to a massive structural, demographic, but equally, cultural transformation of the meaning of adult heterosexual womanhood. This change was a prerequisite for women becoming the assimilees of Jackson's bureaucratic, meritocractic economy and polity (still without childcare), and combatting inequality. His concept of culture and its salience for the very changes mapped here seems impoverished, unaware, and finally rather antique.
I too hope that Jackson is right. It would be easier to "think he is," had his theory proved more ample and inclusive, addressing the mutual interplay of culture, polity, and economy in the 150 years since Seneca Falls. It is for scholars elsewhere to decide whether his version of the U.S. historical evidence applies to their culture's gender history.
Judith A. Allen Indiana University
