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Neither Different nor Equal
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20317 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1992 |
3,416 Words |
| Author
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Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese directs the Institute for Women's
Studies at Emory University and has recently published
Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism
(University of North Carolina Press, 1991). |
THE MISMEASURE OF WOMAN
Carol Tavris
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992
352 pp., $23.00
The last few decades have produced dramatic changes in women's opportunities, responsibilities, and political and professional activity, but not in the public perception of women's nature. In The Mismeasure of Woman, psychologist Carol Tavris argues that perceptions of woman as "the other" have not changed much, if at all, since Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949. Woman, Tavris insists, has remained "the other" because man has remained the norm. In this book, she explores "the consequences for us all, male and female, when only some few of us set the standards of normalcy and universality" with the intention of expanding "our vision of normalcy."
Tavris focuses on the tension between difference and equality that dominates so much current feminist thought, especially attacking uncritical acceptance of difference in our perceptions of gender. The emphasis on difference, she insists, inevitably leads to polarity and to the recognition of one gender, normally male, as the norm for all humanity. The myth of the "universal male" has taken three principal forms: (1) since men are normal, women, as the opposite, must be deficient; (2) yes, men are normal and woman are their opposite, but women are superior; (3) since men are normal, women are, or should aspire to be, like them. Each of these assumptions has "done serious harm to men's feelings about themselves, to their relationships, and to their position in society."
Tavris devotes her first three chapters respectively to demonstrating why women are not inferior to men, why women are not superior to men, and why women are not the same as men. The next three chapters investigate specific ways in which cultural perceptions of women have resulted in the misdiagnosis of women's physical, mental, and sexual natures. In the seventh chapter, Tavris focuses on the ways in which women have been imprisoned by their purportedly special responsibility for love. And in the final chapter she blasts the current predilection for reducing all of women's difficulties to personal problems at the expense of social context.
Her main premise is that "there is nothing essential--that is, universal and unvarying--in the natures of women and men." Women, like men, are capable of the entire range of human emotions and motivations, including the most noble and the most
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