The War Against Boys
Page 13
These are serious complaints of a type that, in disciplines that respect scholarly standards, have been known to lead to censure or worse. Why has so little notice been taken of the scarcity of Gilligan’s evidence? I see at least two explanations. First of all, in the Harvard School of Education, where Gilligan held her professorship, the standards for acceptable research are very different from those in other Harvard departments. Second, Gilligan writes on “gender theory,” which immediately confers ideological sensitivity on her findings. The political climate makes it very awkward for anyone (especially a man) to criticize her. Apart from the small group of feminist critics who bristled at her suggestion that men and women are different, few academics have dared to suggest that the empress had no clothes.
Gilligan’s defenders will argue that to criticize her for her shortcomings as an empirical psychologist is to miss the point. The true power of In a Different Voice, they say, has little to do with proving this or that claim about male and female behavior. It is groundbreaking research because it advanced the idea that past psychological research was largely a male-centered discipline based on the experiences of only half the human race. Gilligan revolutionized modern psychology by introducing women’s voices into a social science tradition that had systematically ignored them.
There is merit to this argument. Gilligan was not the first to urge that women be studied directly, rather than by way of male models, but she was more effective than anyone at getting that message through to both scholars and the wider public. For this she deserves credit. Moreover, at a time (in the early 1980s) when women’s scholarship was blinkered by the dogma that men and women were cognitively interchangeable, Gilligan’s “difference feminism” was refreshing. But her specific and much-celebrated claim about women’s distinctive moral voice turns out to be nothing more than a seductive hypothesis, without evidential basis.
With the success of In a Different Voice and with the considerable resources available to her at Harvard, Gilligan might have gone on to answer her scholarly critics. She might have refined her thesis about male and female differences in moral reasoning and done the genuine research scholars expected of her. She might have tried to put her purported discoveries on a scientific footing. But that is not what she did. In the years following publication of In a Different Voice, Gilligan’s methods remained anecdotal and impressionistic, with increasingly heavy doses of psychoanalytic theorizing and gender ideology.63 Her research on adolescent girls in Making Connections is a case in point. The gloomy picture of adolescent girls that she presented to Ms., the AAUW, and a concerned public is every bit as distorted as any ever presented by social scientists using (in Gilligan’s words) “androcentric and patriarchal norms.”64
Gilligan is unruffled by scholarly criticism and shows few signs of changing her research methods. She boldly insists that to give in to the demand for conventional evidence would be to give in to the standards of the “dominant culture” she is criticizing. She justifies her lack of scientific proof for her large claims quoting the late poet Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”65
Lorde’s remark is often used to fend off “masculinist” criticism of unscientific feminist methods. One might well ask, especially if one’s research is part of a larger antipatriarchal project aimed at “dismantling the master’s house,” what better way to accomplish that end than by using the master’s own tools? More to the point, Gilligan’s justification for deserting sound scientific method in establishing her claims is deeply anti-intellectual. She seems to be saying, I don’t have to play by the rules; the men wrote them. That rejection of conventional scientific standards simply will not do: if Gilligan feels justified in abandoning the methods of social science, she has to critique them. She should tell us what’s wrong with them and show us a better set of tools.
Conclusion
The New York Times Magazine profile that played so large a role in popularizing Gilligan’s views described her as having a “Darwinian sense of mission to excavate the hidden chambers of a common buried past.”66 Gilligan herself is not averse to the comparison with Darwin. When Education Week asked me what I thought of Gilligan’s work and claims, I said, “I’m not sure what she does has much status as social science.” Education Week reported Gilligan’s response to my remarks: “[I]f quantitative studies are the only kind that qualify as ‘research,’ then Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory, would not be considered a researcher.”67
Gilligan actually sees herself as pursuing a Darwinian method of inquiry. She informs us that when she read Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, she wondered if she “could find some place like the Galapagos Islands” to do her research in developmental psychology.68 And she did: “I went to my own version of the Galapagos Islands with a group of colleagues. . . . We travelled to girls in search of the origins of women’s development.”
Even a casual look at Gilligan’s contributions suggests that she should not be comparing herself to Darwin. Darwin openly presented masses of data and invited criticism. His main thesis has been confirmed by countless observations of the fossil record. By contrast, no one has been able to replicate even the three secret studies that were the basis for Gilligan’s central claims in her most influential work, In a Different Voice. In 2012, the Boston Globe reviewed the history of Gilligan’s “feminist classic.” Its verdict: “Today, In a Different Voice has been the subject of so many rebuttals that it is no longer taken seriously as an academic work.”69
Gilligan’s writings on silenced girls, the limits of “androcentric and patriarchal norms,” and the hazards of Western culture are not science or scholarship. They are, at best, eccentric social criticism. Yet by borrowing the prestige of academic science, her theories persuaded parents, educators, political officials, and women’s activists that girls are being diminished and led them to policies that have indeed diminished boys.
But that is only half the problem. In 1995, Gilligan and her colleagues at the Harvard School of Education inaugurated the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology, Boys’ Development and the Culture of Manhood. Within a year, she announced the discovery of a crisis among boys even worse than the one afflicting girls. “Girls’ psychological development in patriarchy involves a process of eclipse that is even more total for boys.”70 She and her colleagues would soon focus on liberating boys from the mask of masculinity. The war against boys was about to intensify.
5
Gilligan’s Island
In 1996, Carol Gilligan announced the need for a revolution in how we raise boys. The stakes are high, she said. She called for a new pedagogy to free boys from an errant masculinity that is endangering civilization: “After a century of unparalleled violence, at a time when violence has become appalling . . . [w]e understand better the critical importance of emotional intimacy and vulnerability.”1 Gilligan asked us to reflect on these vital questions: “What if the equation of civilization with patriarchy were broken? What if boys did not psychologically disconnect from women and dissociate themselves from vital parts of relationships?”2
But those who followed Gilligan’s earlier claims and campaigns might pose different questions: What if her studies of boys are a travesty of scientific inquiry? What if the programs and policies she recommends do more harm than good? What can be done to protect boys from the trusting educators who faithfully accept Gilligan’s theories?
“Masculinity in a Patriarchal Social Order”
Gilligan claimed to have discovered “a startling asymmetry”—girls undergo social trauma as they enter adolescence. For boys, she says, the period of crisis is early childhood. Boys aged three to seven are pressured to “take into themselves the structure or moral order of a patriarchal civilization: to internalize a patriarchal voice.”3 This masculinizing process, says Gilligan, is psychologically damaging and dehumanizing.
Gilligan’s views on masculine identity built on earlier psychological theories of female and
male development, in particular the theories of feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow, which Gilligan made use of in her 1982 book, In a Different Voice.4 In Chodorow’s 1978 The Reproduction of Mothering, she argued that traditional masculine and feminine roles are rooted not so much in biology as in a self-perpetuating sex/gender system that is universal to human societies: “Hitherto . . . all sex/gender systems have been male-dominated.”5 The sex/gender system, says Chodorow, is the way society has organized sexuality and reproduction to perpetuate the subordination of women. The system keeps women down by permanently assigning to them the primary care of infants and children, while men dominate the public sphere.
Because mothers do most of the nurturing, all children start out life more strongly identified with their mothers than their fathers. That identification and attachment, says Chodorow, have profoundly different consequences for boys and girls. A girl grows up with a “sense of continuity and similarity to the mother.” Boys, on the other hand, learn that to be masculine is to be unlike their caregiver: “Women, as mothers, produce daughters with mothering capacities and the desire to mother. . . . By contrast, women as mothers produce sons whose nurturant capacities and needs have been systematically curtailed and repressed.”6
According to Chodorow, both women and men perpetuate male supremacy by the way they socialize boys: “Women’s mothering in the isolated nuclear family of contemporary capitalist society” shows boys that nurturing is women’s work.7 This “prepares men for participation in a male-dominant family, and society, for their lesser emotional participation in family life, and for their participation in the capitalist world of work.”8 In this way, the social organization of parental roles supports a capitalist/patriarchal system that Chodorow finds exploitative and unfair—especially to women: “It is politically and socially important to confront this organization of parenting. . . . It can be changed.”9
In a Different Voice cites Chodorow’s view that “boys, in defining themselves as masculine, separate their mothers from themselves, thus curtailing their ‘primary love and sense of empathetic tie.’ ”10 Feeling no corresponding need to disconnect themselves from their mothers, “girls emerge with a stronger basis for experiencing another’s needs or feelings as one’s own.”11 These ideas on the different ways girls and boys develop—girls in “continuity” with their female nurturers, boys in forced “separation” from their nurturers—helped Gilligan explain why women and men should have different moral styles, with women having an empathetic morality of care and men having an abstract morality of duty and justice.
Chodorow believed that males and females have the same capacity to nurture. In males this capacity is repressed, largely because male-dominated societies find it expedient to assign the primary nurturing role to girls and women. In Chodorow’s view, this social ordering of parenting not only can but should be changed. Permanent reform will mean a radical change in gender identities; it will require “the conscious organization and activity of men and women who recognize that their interests lie in transforming the social organization of gender.”12
Chodorow’s call for the transformation of the patriarchal sex/gender system and her condemnation of the “capitalist world of work” do not resonate today as they did in the 1970s. Her theories of child development and the construction of gender are dated.13 The female propensity for nurture appears to be more than an artifice of culture. The more we learn about the power of hormones to shape behavior, the harder it becomes to think of sex differences the way Chodorow thought of them.
Hard, but not impossible. Having read Chodorow in the 1970s, Gilligan appears to have been convinced that her views on the harms inflicted on children by the culture were profoundly right. Gilligan would repackage them, giving them the powerful support of her beguiling metaphorical prose. She was especially impressed with Chodorow’s idea that patriarchy dictates styles of child rearing that are responsible for developmental deformations in both males and females.
Following Chodorow, Gilligan claims that boys get the message that in order to be “male”—to become “one of the boys”—they must suppress those parts of themselves that are most like their mothers. Gilligan speaks of a “relational crisis” that very young boys undergo as part of their initiation into the patriarchy. In effect, says Gilligan, boys are forced to “hide [their] humanity” and submerge their best qualit[y]—their sensitivity.”14 Though this diminishes boys psychologically and morally, it does offer them the advantage of feeling superior to girls. But the male culture that enthrones the boy is dangerously aggressive and competitive. Boys cannot opt out of it without paying a terrible price, writes Gilligan: “If boys in early childhood resist the break between the inner and outer worlds, they are resisting an initiation into masculinity or manhood as it is defined and established in cultures that value or valorize heroism, honor, war, competition—the culture of the warrior, the economy of capitalism.”15 At the same time, the process of masculine acculturation in the “patriarchal social order” is psychologically devastating: “To be a real boy or man in such a culture means to be able to hurt without feeling hurt, to separate without feeling sadness or loss, and then to inflict hurt and separation on others.”16
In 1997, the New York Times Magazine ran another admiring piece on Gilligan, an interview entitled “From Carol Gilligan’s Chair.” “Can we talk about your new work—your research on boys?” asked the interviewer. Gilligan described a boy she had observed the day before: “His face was very still. It didn’t register a lot of emotion. He was around 6, when boys want to become ‘one of the boys.’ They feel they have to separate from women. And they are not allowed to feel that separation as a real loss.”17 To this, her interviewer remarked, “Sounds as if you’re trying to discover in boys the reasons men feel compelled to adopt certain models of what it means to be a man—models that many men feel to be enslaving.”
“That’s exactly it,” Gilligan replied. She then explained that this must be changed: “We have to build a culture that does not reward that separation from the person who raised them.” She said she hopes to develop a research method, in particular a way of relating to her boy subjects, that “will free boys’ voices, to create conditions that allow boys to say what they know,”18 and allow her to learn what the boys are suppressing. Through her earlier studies she claims to have learned how to liberate the repressed voices of adolescent girls; now she hopes to repeat that feat with boys. The aim is to devise a new kind of socialization for boys that will make their aggressiveness and need for dominance things of the past. Gilligan envisions a new era in which boys will not be forced into a stereotypical masculinity that separates them from their nurtures but will be allowed to remain “relationally connected” to those close to them. Once boys are freed of oppressive gender roles, far fewer will suffer the early trauma that leads to so many disorders: “We might be close to a time similar to the Reformation, where the fundamental structure of authority is about to change.”
Gilligan’s theory about boys’ development includes three claims: (1) Boys are being psychically deformed and made sick by a traumatic, forced separation from their mothers. (2) Seemingly healthy boys are cut off from their own feelings and damaged in their capacity to develop healthy relationships. (3) The well-being of society may depend on freeing boys from the culture of warriors and capitalism. Let us consider each proposition in turn.
Boys and Their Mothers
According to Gilligan, boys are at special risk in early childhood: they suffer “more stuttering, more bedwetting, more learning problems . . . when cultural norms pressure them to separate from their mother.”19 (Sometimes she adds allergies, attention deficit disorder, and attempted suicide to the list.20) She does not cite any pediatric research that supports her theories about the origin of these early-childhood disorders. Is there a single study, for example, that shows that young males who remain intimately bonded with their mothers are less likely to develop allergies or wet their beds?
But are boys aggressive and violent because they are psychically separated from their mothers? Thirty years of research suggest that it is the absence of the male parent that is more often the problem. The boys who are most at risk for juvenile delinquency and violence are boys who are literally separated from their fathers. The US Bureau of Census reports that in 1960, 5.1 million children lived with only their mothers; by 1996, the number was more than 16 million.21 (Today it is 24 million.22) As far back as 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan called attention to the social dangers of raising boys without the benefit of paternal presence. “A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos.”23
Elaine Kamarck of the Harvard Kennedy School, and William Galston of the University of Maryland and Brookings Institution, agree with Moynihan. Writing for the Progressive Policy Institute in 1990, they say, “The relationship [between crime and one-parent families, which are typically fatherless families] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature.”24