<i> A look at noteworthy addresses in the Southland.</i>
BIOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE
“The question of biological difference between the sexes has been the focal point of virtually all American discussion of sexual inequality. This focus on biological difference came into being almost immediately after 19th-Century feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony first started pushing to get women the most basic rights of citizenship, like the right to vote, the right to own property, to speak in public, have access to higher education.
(Nineteenth-century) anti-feminists tried to argue against these kinds of proposals by raising the specter of biological difference (with arguments such as:). . . . ‘Women’s brains are smaller than men’s . . . --too small to do any good in higher education,’ . . . ‘Women have so much maternal instinct in them biologically that to give them the vote, they’re going to vote to do things like create welfare programs, feed the poor and house the homeless. If they vote that way . . . the evolution of the fittest will no longer continue.’
Our obsession with the question of biological difference actually died down a little in America after women finally got the vote in 1920. But it exploded onto the scene again after the second major wave of American feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and it’s been with us ever since.”
INSTITUTIONALIZED ANDROCENTRISM
“Our focus on biological difference is misguided and based on a false assumption. The reason that America has become so obsessed with the biology of sexual difference is that for 100 or 150 years now, feminists have been saying . . . that we need to change our culture in order to make women more equal . . . and for that same 100 or 150 years, the culture has been saying back that our biological differences as males and females may not even allow for the kind of equality that feminists like me are always advocating.
Implicit in this response on the part of the culture is a false assumption. That assumption is, that biology is a kind of bedrock beyond which social change is simply not feasible. . . . If cultural invention has now so transformed the situational context of human life that the bodily differences between the sexes are no longer as functionally significant as they once were, then why is it that males and females continue to play such different and unequal roles in even a modern technological society like our own? . . . The . . . answer is that women and men are both politically and economically unequal even in America today because we live in an androcentric or male-centered social structure that continues to invisibly transform what is really just a biological difference . . . into a massive female disadvantage.
We need to accept a certain level of biological difference as a given and then shift the starting point of our whole discussion from difference per se to the fact that American society situates women in a social structure so male-centered that it not only transforms what is really just a male-female difference into female disadvantage, it also disguises what is really just a male standard or norm as gender neutrality.”
Looking Ahead Tuesday: Donald J. Cram, winner of the 1987 Nobel prize for chemistry, will speak at 8 p.m. at Seaver Auditorium at Pomona College. For more information call (714) 621-8448.
Wednesday: Dan Avidan, a journalist for the Israeli newspaper Davar, will speak at 11 a.m. at Occidental College. For more information call (213) 852-7730.
Thursday: Michel Camdessus, managing director, International Monetary Fund, will address Town Hall, at noon at the Biltmore Hotel. For more information call (213) 628-8141
Thursday: Dudley Herschbach, winner of the 1986 Nobel prize for chemistry, will speak at 7 p.m. at Claremont McKenna College. For more information call (714) 621-8099.
Friday, March 6: Philip Dimitrov, prime minister of Bulgaria, will address the Los Angeles World Affairs Council at 12:30 p.m. at the Sheraton Grande. For more information call (213)628-2333.
