'Anonymous' Was a Woman
By Gloria Steinem
In the 1960s, I was living in New York and trying to make it as a journalist. Though I longed to write serious political articles, I was often assigned topics like fashion and food, but over time found ways to inject politics into my writing.
This week, I’m sharing from my archives a review of Born Female: The High Cost of Keeping Women Down by Caroline Bird with Sarah Welles Briller. This review was published in 1968 — a year before I attended an abortion speak-out, the experience I would eventually describe as my feminist “click” moment.
Since I became, at least by the standards of the Internal Revenue Service, a professional writer, people have been asking me on the average of once a week if this sort of work isn’t more difficult for women than for men. And once a week, I have been answering no, of course not; it’s just the same. Equal rights were won by our grandmothers in a necessary but rather quaint revolution, or so I was told in college. Besides, it seemed unfeminine to complain.
Caroline Bird’s very serious and heartfelt book has convinced me that I was wrong to trust self-righteous teachings of the fifties and wrong to dissemble about observations of my own. As for the “unfeminine” theory, she puts that away early in the book with one good quote. “Fearing neuterization,” explains Assistant Secretary of Labor Esther Peterson, “is an old and illogical defense against seeing the discrimination that really exists.”
In fact, women who write, like Negroes who write, are supposed to be specialists on themselves, and little else. Newspapers and magazines are generous with assignments on fashion, beauty and childbirth. (Would men like to write about hunting, shaving and paternity?) But scientific, economic or political stories have a way of gravitating somewhere else.
The rule Henry Luce invented still applies to most of journalism, including electronic: women research, and men write. Even novelists are qualified as “women novelists” and compared only with each other.
If this is true of a democratic occupation like writing, how much more true must it be of hierarchies in business, government and the professions? Born Female is enough to convince anyone literate, from male chauvinist to female Uncle Tom, that the superstition and restrictive prejudices on which our system of work is built are depriving the country of nearly half its talent.
Equality for women is not an easy cause to sell. It isn’t taken seriously in Congress, or the press, or even in the conversation of most women. But Caroline Bird makes good use of a background in economics (her first book, The Invisible Scar, was on the Depression), a knowledge of history, and a lot of personal interviewing. She not only writes down all the things that women think but rarely say; she documents them.
If women “own” this country, for instance, where are all the individually rich and powerful females? The truth is women don’t own the country—not even if you count property nominally owned by women but controlled by men. It isn’t that women should own the country, but that this myth of economic Momism increases resentment, conceals real conditions and keeps American women in a perpetual attitude of apology.
Quite a few popular beliefs get undermined by the author’s statistics and examples:
That women have more manual dexterity for “detail” work. (If it’s poorly paid factory work. Brain surgery is another matter.)
That they don’t get executive jobs because they can’t take the responsibility. (Frequently, women perform those jobs at half the salary, and without the title. In many banks, a female senior teller does the same work as a male vice president. A woman is called a bookkeeper, but a man is an accountant. A woman takes over the job of a male “interviewer” and is called a clerk. Women “write orders,” but men “negotiate contracts.”)
That women employees are poor investments because they quit to get married or have babies. (In fact, they work for less money, stay longer at jobs with little chance of promotion, and finance men’s pensions by getting discouraged enough to leave before retirement time.)
That women are better or more moral than men as influences in society. (They are only less tainted by power.)
That they would “rather be loved than equal.” (Social and economic dependency may look like love from a little distance, but up close, the motives are quite different.)
Miss Bird feels that successful women are accidents of the system, not products. Often, they have inherited their money or position in a socially acceptable way: from a man. In either case, they are constantly subject to the emotional blackmail of being called “unfeminine.” If fear of being thought “unmasculine” has driven men into wars and other pointless dangers for centuries, it isn’t surprising that the same punishment has kept women in the home with artistic handicrafts instead of in museums with great paintings. “Anonymous,” as Virginia Woolf once said mournfully, “was a woman.”
The last chapter, The Case for Equality, is a storehouse of strong opinions and suggested reforms, either original with the author or credited to the proper source and endorsed by her. Probably it should be sent to all the Presidential candidates just to shake up their thinking.
Thus, Miss Bird argues that all laws would be either clearer or fairer if defined by situation and not by sex. Maternity laws would still apply to women without confusion, and rape or paternity laws to men. But both sexes would be equally able to begin work, qualify for duration and kind of employment and retire, all according to individual ability determined by mental and physical tests. Both sexes would be equally liable to military and jury service and equally entitled to exemption. As in Israel, women in the military could relieve men with dependents for whom service is a real hardship.
Marriage laws would be rewritten according to the principle of mutual support. Alimony and child support could be required of either parent, according to his or her earning power. Widowed fathers would be eligible for the same pension and insurance benefits now awarded widows. And, in case of divorce, nonworking wives would be rewarded for their unpaid domestic service according to the duration of the marriage, a Swedish practice that protects wives who aren’t trained for jobs outside the home and protects rich men from fortune-hunting wives.
When will all these changes come about? As Miss Bird says, “Equity speaks softly and wins in the end, but it is expediency, with its loud voice, that sets the time of victory.”
It is true that much of the book is chock-full of dry research, with very little illuminating opinion. Yet for women with the little patience it takes to read through, start to finish, there will be a lot of liberating ideas.
Unlike most books of its kind, Born Female isn’t fed by some subterranean Isostatic Theory that men’s position must go down as women’s goes up. Her proposals for equality are meant to liberate everyone. As she says, “We are all in this life together.”
*This article has been edited and condensed for clarity.