Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1971 argued: “the pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage.”
I wondered whether Justice Ginsberg read the book by my graduate school classmate at Columbia University.
Aileen Kraditor, in her appropriately titled, Up From the Pedestal (1968) amply demonstrated how and why male-dominated societies used their defined view of feminine “attributes” to place females at a location from which it was almost impossible to ascend, but from which, “bad” girls would have a precipitous fall.
The “pedestal” long involved four cardinal virtues of “true womanhood:”
1. piety.
2. purity.
3. domesticity.
4. submissiveness.
Females were depicted as of “finer clay” than men, both more delicate and more virtuous.
Feminists (women, supported by a growing number of men) have been striving for a level field of gender equality.
However, that goal is only a generation or two old, as Iris Carmon emphasizes in a page one essay of the New York Times Sunday Review (Dec. 11).
What can be considered reasonable progress during a few decades, especially when patriarchy reined with all manners of “social control” for centuries?
Carmon, who is the co-author of “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” offers a perspective that is increasingly advanced by feminists.
Just as there was a pervasive “feminine mystique” (which many women were socialized to accept as normative), there has also been a “masculine mystique.”
Male sex-roles, like those of females, have not only limited and harmed their particular gender, but they have negative ripple effects for the other sex and for society as well.
It is not without cause that Carmon entitles her article, “Low Expectations for Husbands and Presidents.”
[“Spoiler Alert”]: Donald Trump is cited as a continuing, bad male role model.
Carmon cites Trump’s frequent statements that women are “better than men.”
Yet, these are “pedestal” words that are meant to define and limit rather than to offer better paths forward for both genders.
Not cited by Carmon was Trump’s comment at his regular self-celebratory rallies that who else but he could have been Time magazine “Person of the Year.”
Trump quickly asked his crowd whether the magazine should go back to “Man of the Year?”
The Associated Press reported: “Gauging the boisterous response, he declared the answer was yes.”
Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s adept spokesperson (some contend that he should make her an instant billionaire because of her unqualified defense of him), would probably say that this is just Trump “humor.”
Freud advised that there is often camouflaged hostility in jokes, to be noted because words and language have consequences, especially when they are sustained by a person many (professionals and citizens) consider to be a narcissist. Carmon’s strongest complaint about Trump and others who speak (often insincerely) about female “superiority,” is the implication that men are “irredeemable,” or at least less amenable to genuine partnership. (Hey, just a bunch of “locker room guys”)
She says this view lets men “off the hook” for improvement — and the result continues to be a society of losers, both male and female.
Many women that Carmon spoke to about the presidential election told her that they voted for Trump even though they disliked him and considered him a narcissist.
They did not like Clinton for various reasons.
They saw Trump as the lesser of the evils; he was similar to other men they know, including their husbands — for whom they also had low expectations.
“Men: they’re no damn good,” asserted a feminist (who will remain anonymous here).
Carmon has some hope.
She praises Barack Obama for “retrospectively” recognizing he could have been better at gender equity. “Men taking responsibility,” she argues is the critical step “for us to believe another world is possible.”
Her essay has these lines in the concluding paragraph: “As a woman marrying a man next year, I have to believe that such a world could exist.”
Yet, in her final sentence, she laments: “If I thought all men were like Mr. Trump, or would be if they had the chance, who knows what I would do.”
Ms. Carmon can find some encouragement in (slowly) developing equity trends in our society.
In “Masculine/Feminine,” Betty Roszak looks at the depths of socialization stereotypes and examines how men and women can move beyond them.
In her brilliant take-off on Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” Eve Merriam’s After Nora Slammed the Door offers thoughtful paths to a “double-unification” for males and females.
Out of Left Field: Women: ‘Up from the pedestal’
