Are Women "Male Clones"?

By John Leo

Betty Friedan is getting hostile phone calls from feminists, and Rosalind Rosenberg, a professor at Barnard College, is getting icy treatment from her fellow feminist historians. Both stand accused of deviating from orthodoxy on critical issues of women's employment: Friedan for opposing the National Organization for Women on a maternity-leave lawsuit, and Rosenberg for putting feminist scholarship at the service of Sears in a sex-discrimination case. Friedan is "under enormous pressure" to change her position, and Rosenberg has been denounced for "betrayal" and her "immoral act."

In March, Friedan joined a coalition that supported a 1978 California law requiring employers to grant as much as four months of unpaid leave to women who are disabled by pregnancy or childbirth. The law may sound innocuous, but it is a red flag to the many feminists and civil libertarians who say that singling out women for special benefits is discriminatory and dangerous. For this reason, NOW and the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union are in effect supporting a legal challenge to the California law brought by a Los Angeles bank. Friedan says it is "outrageous" for feminists to align themselves with an employer who is trying to evade offering important benefits to women. NOW and the A.C.L.U. say they do not support the bank and simply want the law's benefits for women extended to men. Says Joan Bertin, associate director of the A.C.L.U. women's group: "The question is, Should a woman with a pregnancy disability get her job back when other employees with disabilities get fired? You undermine your argument unless you say everyone is equally entitled to this benefit." The U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case this fall.

The opposition, including Friedan, 9 to 5, labor unions and an ad hoc group called the Coalition for Reproductive Equality in the Workplace, offers an equality argument with a different twist: under the California law, women are made equal to men in the sense that both can now exercise their reproductive rights without risking their jobs. In fact, however, these advocates are proposing women-only benefits, like those routinely offered to working mothers in other industrialized countries. Says Christine Littleton, co-founder of CREW and an acting professor of law at UCLA: "Sometimes equal treatment is what is necessary for long-term equality. Sometimes it is not."

The problem is that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act seems to prohibit special benefits to either sex. Friedan, who has drawn most of the heat in a fairly calm debate, surprised many feminists by repudiating the equal-rights stance that the women's movement has taken for years. "The time has come to acknowledge that women are different from men," she says. "There has to be a concept of equality that takes into account that women are the ones who have the babies."

West Coast feminists have generally sided with CREW. Even the A.C.L.U. of Southern California supported the California law. In a Supreme Court case, the national A.C.L.U. pre-empts any position taken by an affiliate, so Gayle Binion, the regional executive director, joined CREW.

The debate has a few overtones of a familiar split in feminism: strongly pro- family women vs. women who sometimes speak of childbearing as a major obstacle to achieving feminist goals. Bertin, the mother of two, once referred to pregnancy and hernias as two temporary disabilities that ought to be covered. She says the CREW brief has "more of a flavor of a desire to glorify / pregnancy," while the NOW and A.C.L.U. briefs have "more of a flavor to make pregnancy not the thing around which women are defined." Says Friedan: "Some people are still busy reversing the feminine mystique, saying, 'I won't marry, I won't have children.' This reactive feeling is still implied in the thinking that went into this suit."

Rosenberg, author of Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism, is more embattled than Friedan. In the twelve-year case against Sears, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charged that the retailer discriminated against women in high-paying commission-sales jobs. Sears argued that women showed little interest in these jobs and seemed to find noncommission work more enjoyable. Rosenberg testified that women are underrepresented in many jobs because they have "different interests" and have historically settled for less in the workplace because of competing demands of home and family. "It is naive," she said, "to believe that the natural effect of these differences is evidence of discrimination by Sears." The judge cited Rosenberg's testimony in ruling Sears not guilty. The EEOC will appeal.

Many feminists were furious that Rosenberg gave aid and comfort to a company accused of sex discrimination. Rosenberg maintains that the case against Sears was weak and that she merely told the truth about the preferences of some women. Says she: "I was responding to the question: Are there factors other than discrimination that can account for statistical disparities in the work force? And I said yes, and those factors include governmental policies, socialization, family responsibilities, and so forth." The EEOC case was built almost entirely on statistics. It produced no women who said they had been denied high-paying jobs.

For months, a cadre of feminist historians has conducted a running attack on Rosenberg, much of it in academic journals. Historian Alice Kessler-Harris of Hofstra University, who testified against Sears, argues that Rosenberg is not a labor historian, that she overgeneralized, misused the work of other scholars, and in effect supported the idea that women are to blame when they fail to get good jobs. Says Kessler-Harris, author of Out to Work: A History of WageEarning Women in the United States: "The historical record demonstrates that women have taken advantage of opportunity when it has been made available to them."

The feeling among women workers that good jobs conflict with family ! responsibilities, she maintains, is a rationalization many women have used when they knew the jobs would go to men anyway. Was Rosenberg letting women down by testifying for Sears? "Yes, she was," says Kessler-Harris. "Not because she chose to testify but because the argument she made in court suggested that women's differences could account for their unequal position in the labor force. That argument omits the role of employers in structuring the labor market."

Amid bitter debate, a committee of feminist historians passed a grim resolution saying that "as feminist scholars we have a responsibility not to allow our scholarship to be used against the interests of women struggling for equity in our society." That wording would seem to say that truth must take a backseat to feminist interests, but supporters deny this interpretation. They point to an accompanying resolution that reads, "We believe that as scholars we may have many differing interpretations of the sources in women's history, and we reject the claims of anyone to be representing a 'true interpretation' of women's history." The president of the American Historical Association, Carl Degler of Stanford, defends Rosenberg: "She had an argument to make, and she ought not to be called into question."

Though the Sears and California cases are obviously very different, both turn on the same question: Should feminists admit significant differences between the sexes? Traditionally, mainstream feminism has downplayed the importance of biological differences and has insisted that men and women be treated exactly alike by the law. Friedan and her allies deride this view, with its strained argument that hernias and pregnancies are somehow similar. Asks Friedan: "Why should the law treat us like male clones?" Similarly, Rosenberg argues that her feminist opponents minimize all the significant male-female differences and cultural influences that might explain the preponderance of men in high- pressure sales jobs, including women's greater distaste for cutthroat competition and their greater attention to the pull of home and family.

Like many women, Rosenberg admits to great ambivalence on the issue. "If women as a group are allowed special benefits, you open up the group to charges that it is inferior. But if we deny all differences, as the women's movement has so often done, you deflect attention from the disadvantages women labor under." Either way, she says, women can lose: "I'm a historian, and I know the disadvantages of both sides."

With reporting by Val Castronovo/New York and William Hackman/Los Angeles