Speaker 1 (00:00:02): Oh, do that. That changes everything. So anyway, it's gonna be an exciting job. Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3, 4. Testing, testing, testing, testing, testing you. Speaker 2 (00:00:19): Um, so we would appreciate your cooperation. Uh, we regret very much that we do not seem to have enough, um, decent seating for all of you here, and we hope that you're not going to be, uh, really uncomfortable. Speaker 1 (00:00:34): And, Speaker 2 (00:00:35): Uh, as a member of the anachronistic college generation of the 1940s, I'm always prompted at this moment and this sort of proceeding to say, Welcome ladies and gentle women. Speaker 2 (00:00:47): I reveal that to you now, not just as a suggestion of personal uncertainty, but to invite your attention to the focus of this meeting, The female as she feels herself identified as feminist and a scholar, uh, exploring new criteria of relevance. And I decline to attempt to make any of these criteria more precise. There lies chaos. Joan Kelly Gaal and Helen Lambert. Uh, our speakers of this morning are better equipped to deal with chaos and I, we are delighted to have you with us today and are extremely grateful to the Helen Rubenstein Foundation, not to speak of Jane Gould, Nancy Miller and Emily Cran for making all of this possible. Someone whose distinctions among the scholarly, the feminist, the academic, the administrative, and the corporate continue to grow in precision and especially in usefulness to the academic and social communities, is Martha Peterson, president of Barnard College, Director of Exxon, and any number of other academic and extra academic enterprises, a seasoned, professional and veteran in every possible way and a prime mover behind the proceedings here today. President Martha Peterson. Speaker 3 (00:02:10): Thank you. Now I am to bring you greetings. I suspect from Barnard College. I got to do this last week for some British historians and, and when I welcomed them to the campus, I reminded them that this was the site of the Battle of Harlem Heights, the first American victory in the American Revolution. The campus at that point was a bwe field. It's changed now, but I think the victory in that battle and the battle itself foreshadowed what was to be the latter day activities on this campus. So welcome to the Battle of Harlem Heights. Speaker 3 (00:02:57): I thought I might try to develop that theme with you a bit in these greetings, but I have not been entirely successful in doing so. The congruence of scholars and feminists with American revolutionary activity seems to fit into a time before the Battle of Harlem Heights. Scholars and feminists perhaps have more kinship to the Jeffersons and the Franklins who were developing hypotheses, articulating arguments, and writing carefully worded statements that made a successful revolution possible. There are similarities between you and those ancestors of ours, but I'll let you develop that. I want to turn just a moment to the concept of scholars and feminists for you have the opportunities and the burdens of both as you well know, you do. As scholars attempt to push back the boundaries of knowledge that old truism, you must as scholars be careful, thorough sound. You bear the burden of scholars in avoiding the trivial, the irrelevant, and the self enhancing. Speaker 3 (00:04:07): And as feminists, and for me, a feminist is someone who is unrelenting and skillful in insisting on equality of opportunity and in diligence in accepting the opportunities of equality. As feminists, you accept the responsibilities, scholars with the added commitment of using feminist feminism as a stimulus for your own scholarly works and efforts and enthusiasms and as a means of attracting and sustaining the efforts and enthusiasms of others. All the while, and I think this is the hard part, all the while avoiding the trap of the current popularity of feminism as a political and attention getting tool, the woman center at Barnard College has sponsored this conference today with the help of the Helena Rubenstein Foundation. Because we believe such an effort may increase the effectiveness of the tensions in being both the scholar and the feminist. We hope there may come that there may come from these sessions, personal support for each of you, but also increase commitment to scholarly activity that does push back the boundaries of knowledge and understanding a fraction of a percent. And through that better understanding of change, both for yourselves and ourselves and for the world. Who knows if you had been there with Franklin and Jefferson in the thinking and the deciding and the writing, the a and the acting, the revolution might have achieved its ends without a battle of Harlem Heights. Welcome to the Battlefield Mayor. Victories be grateful. Speaker 2 (00:05:56): Thank you, you, President Peterson. The two women who are presenting papers today are so well known that they require introductions. You are all surely aware that Joan Kelly Gaal teaches at, uh, City College co-directed the Women's History Program at Sarah Lawrence is a specialist in Renaissance history. I believe her article on Women in the Renaissance is, uh, going to appear momentarily in an anthology entitled, Becoming Visible, and she possesses one of the more stimulating minds among scholars in women's studies. She is a frequent participant on women's studies panels, and I understand that history and the social relation of the sexes is her eighth paper in seven weeks. Joan Kelly Gada. Speaker 4 (00:06:49): I don't know where you've dug up that bit of information. I don't think it's true. Um, no, I don't think so. Um, this paper starts with a dialogue that runs for about a page and a half, and I feel kind of funny about it. It just wouldn't write until the dialogue came out. And I, I simply wrote it because I thought, Well, since the paper won't come until I do it, um, I'd better do it. And then I then I found out after I finished the paper that everything is really in the dialogue. So you can listen to that and turn off on the rest if you want. He says, Why women's history won't the history of mankind do. She you say mankind, but you really mean man, he, we probably have neglected some of the women. I can see that and we should add them to the picture. Speaker 4 (00:07:41): Let's see this Carry nation, She no, I'm a squarely confront Why You have left the women out the table at which they are sitting suddenly splits down the middle. Both sections pull apart from each other. He opening his briefcase with his right hand. He takes out two books. He's written in several articles. He stacks them on his lap. , you don't think it's deliberate, do you? she, I don't mean you've conspired, but there's something you haven't wanted me to see. Maybe you think if you don't look at it yourself, I can't see it. She, Oh, um, excuse me. Yes, he rummaging for his dissertation and placing it on top of the books and articles on his lap. The pile now rises to eye level. What is that? To hide my history is your history. I've always taught that I've done nothing but share with you. Speaker 4 (00:08:43): She, but it's you who decides what to share. Consider the fate of Emily James Putnam, who was Barnard College's first dean. People of her sex were not admitted to higher education until her time. She belonged to BN Moore's first graduating class and was one of the first to benefit from graduate education at Girton College Cambridge, which opened with six women in the class. Emily James Smith taught classics and became dean of the New Barnard College, all of who 50 undergraduates were women. But when, as Emily James Putnam, the dean became pregnant in 1900, his half of the table rapidly recedes from hers. He pulls out his doctoral diploma from his briefcase, unrolls it and drapes it over his head. Speaker 4 (00:09:34): He what has that to do with anything? She, it's history. It's at least half of history. When Emily James Putnam gracefully resigned from Barnard for the next 14 years, she spent some of her non familial time writing a bit of that history, a history of the lady. She saw it as a different history from that of the man, Athenian citizen, Roman senator, futile Barron Bourgeois, all of whom bought and commanded her. He her place was in the home. He made civilization arm man, she resisting the pun. He held the property, he made the laws. He was the judge. He was the army. He holding himself erect so that the unfurled doctorate falls evenly and magily on either side of his head. He rummages with his right hand in his briefcase. He misses his master's essay, but his hand grasps his college diploma. He takes this out and holds it rolled up in his right hand like a septa. That is civilization. Exactly. She, his property made her dependent, His laws made her award, his judgments found against her. His power kept her down. He, she was virtuous. She cared for him and his sons. She virtuous and non-virtuous. She served him and his sons. He she lived through them. Their achievements were her achievements. Their history was hers. She, his ideology put her down. He solemnly nodding his head so that the gold lettering on his diploma catches and glimpse in the sun Scholarship and art the order of nature grasped and objectified. Speaker 4 (00:11:32): According to statistics from the American Council on Education, women held 19.1% of college and university faculty positions. In 1969, after the great push of affirmative action, women held 20% of such positions. Speaker 4 (00:11:54): The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education expects it will take until the year 2000 before women will be proportionately represented in academic life. The issue of women's history is not purely academic. What is there to say for feminist scholarship at the very least that there was a strange silence in every discipline about the situation and condition of one half of humanity until scholars, most of whom were women, had their consciousness raised to the point where they recognized that this was the case and began to speak to and about such issues. The mere fact that there were women who managed to be scholars is itself a reason why feminist scholarship could and did emerge. The statistics on women educators are of interest in this regard. In 1918, 18% of the faculties of co-educational institutions were women and 70% of the faculties of women's colleges, That was 1918. Speaker 4 (00:13:02): I cannot speak for other fields, but in history that first group of professional women's scholars laid a solid base for women's history, as do the library collections formed by many of those feminist librarians. In 1970, after depression war and the feminine mystique women faculty at co-educational colleges had dropped from 18 to 14% and the percentage in women's colleges dropped from above 70 to below 50%. I personally never had a woman teacher beyond high school, never read anything on the history of women in college or graduate school, did not even know the names of any of the historians of women. Although my fields were broad enough, they were many evil renaissance and modern European history. For me, it is evident that my present concern with women's history arises out of a widespread social change as well as a profoundly personal one. I would not have had the professional training in forum for pursuing this study where not for the fact that the 1950s and sixties drew women in greater percentages into the workforce, raised in them the expectation that they would stay there and have careers of their own and made education, scholarship, scholarships, and even educational positions available to them. Speaker 4 (00:14:26): Nor would I find myself today in opposition to my discipline, my training, and many of the results of historical study where it not that this life experience of women of my generation and those who followed finds no adequate reflection in what we have learned and in what most of our colleagues are presently studying and teaching. It was accurate, 1949 for Simon de Bewa to observe that women did not call themselves we, we did not, as she said, authentically assume a subjective attitude, but we do now and this consciousness of selfhood accounts. I believe for the most fundamental challenge posed by feminist scholarship to the traditional wisdom, it makes us aware of our invisibility in traditional scholarship and we reject it as an ideological reflection and reinforcement of a former condition of otherness. Out of such awareness, women's history has emerged. It has a dual goal as I see it, to restore women to history and to restore our history to women. Speaker 4 (00:15:41): In just a few years, it has stimulated a remarkable amount of research, a remarkable number of conferences and courses on the activity status and views of and about women. All vital historical work which is enriched by the interdisciplinary character of our concern with women. But there is another aspect of women's history, which is the one I'd like to talk about today, which is it's theoretical significance, it's implications for historical study in general and seeking to add women to the fund of historical knowledge. Women's history has revitalized theory for it has shaken the conceptual foundations of historical study. It is done this by making problematic three of the basic concerns of historical thought. They are periodization the categories of social analysis and theories of social change. And I wanna talk about all three of those. All these issues are informant, so the most I can do here it is describe what the problems are and suggest how they may be fruitfully posed. But in so doing, what I'd like to show is how the conception of these problems arises out of an ocean which is basic to feminist consciousness. Namely that the relation between the sexes is a social and not a natural one. I believe that this perception which we owe to feminism is the core idea that has upset traditional thinking in all three cases. Speaker 4 (00:17:26): So periodization, once we look to history for an understanding of woman's situation, we are of course already assuming that woman's situation is a social matter, But history as we first came to it, did not seem to confirm that awareness throughout historical time women have been largely excluded from making war wealth laws, governments, art and science, and men functioning in their capacity as historians considered exactly those activities. Constitutive of civilization, hence diplomatic history, economic history, constitutional history, political and cultural history. Women figured chiefly as exceptions. Those who were said to be as ruthless as or wrote like or had the brains of Speaker 4 (00:18:22): Women's history. In redressing this neglect recognized from the start that what we call compensatory history is not enough. This was not to be a history of exceptional women, although they too need to be restored to their rightful places, nor could it be another subgroup of historical thought, a history of women to place alongside of the list of diplomatic history, economic history, and so forth for all these other developments impinge on the history of women, hence feminist scholarship in history, as in anthropology, came to focus primarily upon the status of women in historical terms. This means to look at major ages and movements in terms of their liberation or repression of women's potential, their import for the advancement of women's humanity. But as virtually all feminist historians came to appreciate the period or set of events with which we deal takes on a wholly different character or meaning from the normally accepted one when viewed from the vantage point of women. Speaker 4 (00:19:37): Since this discovery has already been discussed at a number of conferences, I'm not going to go into it in any great detail, uh, I'll be brief here, but let me say that the fundamental ideas are this. If we take fouriers dictum that the general emancipation of an age can be measured by the emancipation of women, then our notions of such progressive developments as Greek civilization renaissance. The French revolution, uh, undergo a startling reevaluation, concubinage and confinement of wives in the . In one case, domestication of the renaissance bourgeois wife and prosecution of witches in the other deliberate exclusion of women from the liberty, equality and fraternity of the revolution. Suddenly we see these ages with a new double vision and each eye sees a different picture. Speaker 4 (00:20:47): Only one of these views has been represented by history up to now, regardless of how these periods have been assessed, they've been assessed from the vantage point of men and liberal historiography in particular, which considers all three periods as stages in the progressive realization of an individualistic social and cultural order, expressly maintains that women shared these universal advances with men and Renaissance scholarship. For example, almost all historians have situated women exactly where Jacob Boco did an 1860, as he said, on a footing of perfect equality with men for a period that respected neither the hierarchy of social classes nor the hierarchy of religious values in its restoration of classical, uh, secular culture. There was also they claim, quote, no question of women's rights or female emancipation simply because the thing itself was a matter. Of course. Now while it's true that a couple of dozen women can be assimilated to the standard of culture, which the Renaissance imposed upon itself, what is remarkable to me is that only a couple of dozen can to pursue this problem is to become aware of the fact that there was no renaissance for women, or at least not during the Renaissance , that there was on the contrary a marked restriction of the scope and powers of women, and that this restriction is a consequence of the very developments for which the age is noted. Speaker 4 (00:22:31): What feminist historiography has done is unsettle all such accepted evaluations of historical periods. It is disabused us of the notion, and I think for all time that the history of women is the same as the history of men. That significant turning points in history have the same impact for one sex as for the other. Indeed, some historians now go so far as to maintain that because of women's particular connection with the function of reproduction, history could and women's history should be rewritten and periodized from this point of view according to major turning points affecting childbirth, sexuality, family patterns and so forth. In this regard, I noticed that Juliet Mitchell refers to modern contraception as a world historic event, although the logic of her thought and my own protests against a periodization that's primarily geared to reproduction, my own thinking is that criteria such as these threaten to detach psychosexual developments and family patterns from changes in, in the general social order or to utterly reverse the causal sequence. Speaker 4 (00:23:50): Hence I see in this attempt of potential isolation of women's history from what has hit the tube been considered the mainstream of social change. To my mind, what is more promising about the way periodization has begun to function in women's history is that it is relational. What I mean by that is that it relates the history of women to the history of men the way angles did in the origin of the family by seeing in common social developments institutional reasons for the advance of one sex and the oppression of another handled in this way, periodizing concepts, uh, traditional periodizing concepts may well be retained and I believe that they ought to insofar as they refer to major structural changes in society, but it's in the evaluation of such changes that we need to consider their effects upon women as distinct from the effects upon men. We expect by now that these effects may be so different as to be opposed, and that such opposition will be socially explicable when women are excluded from the benefits of the economic, political and cultural advances made by certain periods which gives women a different social experience and hence a different history. It's to those very advances that we need to look in order to find the reasons for that separation of separation of the social experience of women from that of men and the history of women from that of men. Speaker 4 (00:25:41): Um, I turned now to my second, uh, category or my second point, which is sex as a social category at work in this deepening of our sense of historical periods is a conviction that women do form a distinctive social group and that the invisibility of this group in history is not to be ascribed to female nature. These notions, which clearly arise at a feminist consciousness affect another related change in the conceptual foundations of history. By introducing sex as a category of social thought, feminism made it evident that just being a woman meant having a particular kind of social and he historical experience, but exactly what it means to be a woman in this social and historical sense is problematic. That's a difficult, uh, issue to deal with. The Red Stockings manifesto of 1969 maintained that women are in oppressed class and suggested that relations between men and women are class relations and that sexual politics were the politics of class domination. Speaker 4 (00:27:07): There have been a number of fruitful consequences of this conception of women as a social class chief, of which to my mind is the extension of class analysis to women by Marxist feminists such as Margaret Benson and Sheila Rowbotham. They've traced the roots of women's secondary status in history to economics in as much as women have a distinctive relation to production, which we apparently do, not only in our own societies, but in all societies. The personal and psychological consequences of secondary status can be seen to flow from this special relation that women have to work as Robotham and Benson themselves made clear. However, it's one thing to extend the tools of class analysis to women. It's quite another to maintain that women are a class, women belong to social classes and the new women's history and histories of feminism have born this out. They've demonstrated, for example, how class divisions disrupted and shattered the first wave of the feminist movement in non socialist countries and how feminism was expressly subordinated to the class struggle in socialist feminism. Speaker 4 (00:28:32): On the other hand, although women may adopt the interests in ideology of men, of their class, women as a group cuts through all class male class systems. Now I quarrel with the notion that women of all classes in all cultures and at all times are recorded secondary status, but there's certainly sufficient evidence that this is generally, if not universally the case from the advent of civilization and hence in history proper as distinct from pre-history, the social order has been patriarchal. Does this then make women a cast a hereditary inferior order? This notion too has its uses, as does the related one drawn chiefly from American black experience, which regards women as a minority group. The sense of otherness, which both these ideas convey is essential to a historical awareness of women as an oppressed social group. And these ideas help us appreciate how femininity is socially formed as an internalization of ascribed inferiority and at the same time as a way of manipulating those who have the authority that women lack as explanatory concepts. Speaker 4 (00:29:57): However, as distinguished from descriptive ones, notions of cast and minority group are not productive when applied to women. Why should this majority be a minority? Why is it that members of this particular cast, unlike all other casts, are not of the same rank throughout society? Clearly the minority psychology of women like our cast status and quasi class oppression has to be traced to the universally distinguishing feature of all women, namely are sex. Any effort to understand women in terms of social categories that obscure this fundamental fact has to fail, but only to make more appropriate concepts available. It was gda learner, I think, who appropriately laid all such notions to rest. Uh, as she put it, quote, all analogies, class minority group cast approximate the position of women but fail to define it adequately. Women are a category unto themselves. An adequate analysis of their position in society demands new conceptual tools. Speaker 4 (00:31:16): In short, women have to be defined as women as the social opposite not of a class A cast or the opposite of a majority since we are a majority, but the opposite of a sex men and categorization by sex now no longer entails a mothering role and a relation of subordination to men, except as a social role and relation recognized as such. A good part of the initial excitement in women's studies consisted of just this discovery that what had been taken as natural was in fact manmade and in two ways, both as social order and as male description of that order as if it were natural, natural knowledge about the natural order. But my point is that they knew what that natural order was and history just tended to confirm it. Brian's dictionary of painters in a gravers of 1904 says of the Renaissance artist Peria Rossi, a lady of Bologna best known as a sculptor in car, but who also engraved on copper and learned drawing and design from Mark Antonio. Speaker 4 (00:32:34): She has said to have been remarkable for her beauty virtues and talents and to have died at an early age in 1530 in consequence of unrequited love . Her last work was a bar relief of Joseph and Potter FARs wife. An exclamation mark ends the entry like a poke in the ribs, signifying that the lady, which is not a class designation in this instance, who was beautiful and unhappy in love, was naturally absorbed by just that historians really knew why there were no great women artists. That's why it was not a historical problem until the feminist art historian Linda Nalin posed it as such by inquiring into the institutional factors rather than the native gifts that sustain artistic activity. When the issue of woman's place did come out in the open and men historians such as HD kiddo rose to defend their society, Greek society, in his case, the natural order of things again, came to the rescue. Speaker 4 (00:33:42): If Athenian wives were not permitted to go about it, will weren't they too delicate for the strain that travel imposed in those days if they played no role in political life, the activity that was the source of human dignity to the Greek, wasn't it? Because government covered quote matters which inescapably only men could judge from their own experience and execute by their own exertions. Quote, If girls were not being schooled, weren't they being instructed by mother in the arts of the female citizen? If we say housework, kiddo admits it sounds degrading, but if we say domestic science, it sounds eminently respectable, but kiddo's major argument was reserved for the family. Its religious and social importance in Athenian society. To us, his reasoning on this point sounds like an incomplete sentence. What about it? The extinction of a family, That extinction of a family or dissipation of its property was regarded as a disaster. Speaker 4 (00:34:40): But for kiddo, this fact is an argument for his assumption is that it is woman's natural place to serve that family and continue it by raising legitimate heirs through whom to pass on its property and its rituals. If under the conditions of Greek society that task should require confinement to the household and its rounds that justifies the legal disabilities of wives. As for the other orders of women, Athenian society demanded and regulated by law. Concubines are not mentioned and head or I are adventurous, who had said no to the serious business of life of of course they amused men. But my dear fellow one doesn't marry a woman like that. Speaker 4 (00:35:27): Kiddo wrote his history in 1951. If our understanding of the Greek contribution to social life and consciousness now demands an adequate representation of the life experience of women, so to the sexual order as shaped by the institutions of family and state is a matter we now regard as not merely worthy of historical inquiry, but central to it. This I think is the second major contribution to women that women's history has made to the theory and practice of history in general, we have made of sex. A category is fundamental to our analysis of the social order as other classifications such as class and race. And we consider the relation of the sexes as those of class and race to be socially rather than naturally constituted to have its own development varying with changes in social organization embedded in and shaped by the social order. The relation of the sexes must be integral to any study of it. Speaker 4 (00:36:35): The assessment of historical change from the vantage point of women as well as men is what our new sense of periodization reflects what our use of sex as a social category means, is that our conception of historical change itself as change in the social order is broadened to include changes in the relation of the sexes. Uh, I have, um, a number of examples here of how this idea of the social relation of the sexes has ended and affected almost all feminist scholarship, but I'll, uh, drop them and pass on to my third point, which is theories of social change. Speaker 4 (00:37:20): Um, what I am suggesting here taking the idea of the relation of the sexes as fundamental to historical thought as the relation of classes is that to deal with this, we should consider any significant changes in the respective roles of men and women in the light of fundamental changes in the mode of production. Now, I'm not proposing a simple socioeconomic scheme by this. A theory of social change that incorporates the relation of the sexes requires, as I see it, a complex structure. It has to consider how general changes in production affect and shape production in the family and thereby the respective roles of men and women. And it has to consider as well the flow in the opposite direction, namely the impact of family life and the relation of the sexes upon psychosocial formations. It's a very new study study of changes in the social relation of the sexes. Speaker 4 (00:38:34): Even if we, we trace it as far back as Bach, Hoen, Morgan and Engels, um, I have a section on Eng angles in which my point is that he solidly established the social character of the relation of man to woman, though he was concerned with only one, although the major change, namely the transition from, uh, to a patriarchal order as society moved from primitive communism to civilization and hence the end of that patriarchal order. With the advent of socialism, uh, I find that his ideas did not affect historical thought. In general. It affected such thinkers as Emily James Putnam. But uh, except for the historians of women and socialist theories, the idea that the relation of the sexes is a social relation simply did not take hold until the present. And what is happening in the present, I believe, is that much of the concrete, the particular studies undertaken by anthropologists and historians are confirming Engel's general view. Speaker 4 (00:39:50): Um, I find for example, that one anthropologist says woman's social position has not always everywhere or in most respects been subordinate to that of men. Uh, I quote here from an anthropologist because the historical case for anything other than a patriarchal sexual order is considerably weaker. The dominant causal feature that emerges from anthropological studies of the sexual order in that really superb collection of, uh, feminist anthropologists, uh, rosado and lymph fair is whether and to what extent the domestic and the public spheres of activity are separated from each other. Although what constitutes domestic and what public varies from culture to culture and the lines of demarcation get differently drawn. A consistent pattern emerges when societies are placed on a scale where at one end domestic and public activities are fairly merged and at the other end, domestic and public activities are sharply differentiated from each other. Speaker 4 (00:41:00): Where domestic activities coincide with public or social ones, the status of women is comparable or even superior to that of men. This pattern is very much in agreement with Engel's ideas because in such situations, the means of subsistence in production are commonly, commonly held, and a communal household is the focal point of both domestic and social life. Hence, it is to traditional agrarian societies where production for exchange is slight, where private property and class inequality are not developed, that sex inequalities are least evident. Women's roles are as varied as men's, although there are sex role differences, authority and power are shared by women and men rather than vested in a hierarchy of males. Women are highly evaluated by the culture and women and men have comparable sexual rights. Speaker 4 (00:42:03): Um, as we move in the other direction on the scale to the situation where domestic and public activities pull apart from each other, which is the case in, uh, most civilized situations, which I'll speak about the differences in a few minutes. It's evident as we move in this direction that we move into a patriarchal situation and that sexual inequalities can clearly be seen to be bound to property. It's interesting to note that in several societies, class inequalities are even expressed in sexual terms so that women who have property in livestock, for example, may use it for bride wealth to purchase wives who serve them. This example, which seems to confound sex in class, I think actually indicates how sex and class relations differ. Although property is establishing a class inequality among such women, it's nonetheless wives that is women as a group who are constituting a property less serving order attached to a domestic kind of work, including horticulture. Speaker 4 (00:43:19): How does this attachment to domestic work develop and what forms does it take? I suggest that we continue to look to property relations as the basic social determinant of the sexual division of labor, end of the sexual order, and the more domestic and public domains separate out the more work. And hence, property is of two clearly distinct kinds. There is production for subsistence and production for exchange. Now, however, the productive system of a society is organized. It operates as Mark's pointed out as a continuous process which reproduces itself, that is it reproduces its material means, and instruments its people, and the social relations between them looked at as a continuous process. The productive work of society thus includes procreation and the socialization of children who must find their places in the social order. I suggest that what shapes the social relation of the sexes is the way this work of procreation and socialization is organized in relation to the organization of work that issues in articles for subsistence and or exchange. Speaker 4 (00:44:45): In some, what I think patriarchy means as a general social order is that women function as the property of men in the production of new members of the social order. That these relations of production are worked out in the organization of kin and family and that other forms of work such as production of goods and services for immediate work, uh, for immediate use that is domestic work are generally although not always attached to these procreative and socializing functions. Now, that means that in qualities of sex as well as those of class are traced to property relations and forms of work, but there are evident differences between the two in the public domain, by which I mean the social order that springs from the organization of the general wealth and labor of society. Class inequalities are paramount for the relation of the sexes control or lack of control of the property that separates people into owners and workers is not significant. Speaker 4 (00:45:57): What is significant in the public domain is whether women of either class have equal relations to work or property with men of their class in the household or family. On the other hand, situation is just turned around in the household or the family where ownership of all property resides in historic societies, which are characterized by private property, sex inequalities are paramount and these cut through class lines. What is significant for the domestic relation in the family is that women like surfs in feudal Europe can both have and be property, um, regardless of class and regardless of whether women own property in the family. Although both of these issues modify the situation, women have generally functioned as the property of men in the pro procreative and socializing aspect of the productive work of their society. Patriarchy and short is at home. At home, the private family is its proper domain, but the historic forms that patriarchy takes, like it's very origin are to be traced to the society's mode of production. Speaker 4 (00:47:25): The sexual order varies with the general organization of property and work because this is what shapes both family and public domains and determines how they will approach or recede from each other. Uh, I had a little section illustrating this, which I think I had better cut out, which simply indicates how, um, you get strange juxtapositions in history looked at from the vantage point of women because of this. For example, feudal noble women and contemporary women in advanced capitalist societies are comparable to each other precisely because the domestic and the public domains are, uh, being merged. Uh, or at least you don't have the sharp differentiation of them, whereas the, um, renaissance, uh, early modern European situation and that of the Athenian uh, woman, these are utterly comparable, in fact almost imitative of each other precisely because domestic and public activities or so separate from each other. Um, Speaker 4 (00:48:41): I would just like to conclude saying, um, I really don't wanna conclude I have, uh, I have more, but I think I had better that I began this talk with the indebtedness of women's history to feminism and I would like to conclude by indicating a couple of ways in which that debt can be paid. That is my general thesis is that women's history, which really makes us rethink or theories of social change, are I ideas of our categories of analysis, a whole sense of periodization that this emerges out of feminist consciousness in the sense that the idea that the relation of the sexes is social. That idea is what has generated all of this, um, but surely one dominant reason for studying historically, the social relation of the sexes is in turn political to understand the interests, aside from the personal interests of individual men that are served by retention of an unequal sexual order is itself liberating. Speaker 4 (00:49:47): It detaches an age old injustice from the blind operation of social forces and places it in the realm of choice. This is why we look to the organization of the productive forces of society to understand the shape and structure of the domestic order to which women have been primarily attached. But women's history also opens up the other half of history viewing it as agency, as productive and social force. I think that the most novel and exciting task of the study, of the social relation of the sexes still lies before us, and that is to appreciate how we are all women and men initially humanized turned into social creatures by the agency of that domestic order to which women have been primarily attached its character. The structure of its relations orders are consciousness, and it is through this consciousness that we first view and construe the world. This task to understand the historical impact of women family and the relation of the sexes upon society serves a less evident political end, but it seems to me a more strictly feminist one for if the historical conception of civilization can be shown to include the psychosocial significance of the family, then with that understanding we can insist that any reconstruction of society along just lines in incorporate reconstruction of the family, all kinds of collective and private families, and all of them functioning not as property relations, but as personal ones. Speaker 5 (00:51:36): Thank, Speaker 2 (00:51:56): Thank you Joan, for once again a very stimulating paper. Um, our next speaker, Helen Lambert, as many of you know, has acquired her academic credentials in the Northeast. Despite having been born in Baton Rouge, Wellesley in the University of New Hampshire moved her toward reproductive physiology, endocrinology, and the biological aspects of sex differences, which she will speak to us about today. She teaches at Northeastern University and is a serious scientist. Helen also has two children whom with characteristic thoroughness, she has divided evenly between Thess , Helen Lang. Speaker 3 (00:52:41): Thank you very much. Um, I will bigg, uh, your pardon because I'm gonna have to do some on stand editing as well, I think. So if I, um, am not quite coherent, it will be because I am leaving out whole paragraphs and pages. Um, am I correct in thinking that I should plan on being finished by a quarter of all right? Speaker 2 (00:53:01): I think perhaps you could have a little more. Speaker 3 (00:53:03): Well, let's see how it goes. Um, okay. Um, I am struck with how many threads I want to pick up on, uh, on what John said, but I think I'll let that go and, uh, for later, um, and stick to my own, uh, bewick as it were, uh, which is the biological basis of observed sex differences. Um, the, just that phrase, in fact, um, is I think, uh, brought up often in both feminist and anti-feminist writing. And it, um, it, uh, the concept that there is a biological basis generates a lot of heat on both sides. And thinking about this, uh, from both sides, it seems to me that it generates a lot of heat because there are two assumptions which are very basic, but are often not stated about biological, about sex differences and their biological basis. The first is that the biological factor is an inevitable one. Speaker 3 (00:53:58): That is that we can't change it. The second assumption is, uh, mother nature is always right. That is, we wouldn't wanna change it anyway. Both of these assumptions should be examined very critically, and obviously unless they're stated, we can't do that. The first one that is the inevitability of difference is one that can be investigated by science. The second, the desirability of difference may not be susceptible to scientific investigation. My thesis today is that the development of many sex differences in the human species is a continuum from genetic determinism to social conditioning, and that we need to know more about this continuum as feminists. We shall, in any case, ask whether society should reinforce or minimize a particular biological difference where it exists. Social science has given us convincing data on the differential socialization of the sexes, which begins at very early ages. Biology, psychology, and medicine offer us some evidence about the biological mechanisms involved in the pre and postnatal development of sex differences. Speaker 3 (00:55:07): But this evidence may be very hard to interpret and it isn't helped very much by the charged atmosphere in which such interpretation often takes place in spite of all these shortcomings, uh, pitfalls and so on. I believe that the study of sex differences is important. As a biologist, I'm vastly prejudiced. I'm fascinated by, uh, the kinds of interactions between genetics and hormones and environment that we find in the development of sex differences. But beyond that, I believe that an understanding of the biological factor in observed sex differences is important to feminism, both for the formation of individual attitudes and for the design of social policy. Biological determinist assumptions may restrict freedom of choice for both sexes in subtle as well as overt ways. On the other hand, unmitigated environmental environmentalism is not realistic. There are real differences between men and women, but I believe that feminists don't need to be afraid of biology. The fact of difference, per se, does not imply female inferiority unless one accepts the male as the standard version of the species Speaker 6 (00:56:14): . Speaker 3 (00:56:17): If feminism is about a woman's right to be herself, then it seems relevant to learn as much as possible about what herself is from scientific as well as humanistic perspectives. I cannot agree with some of my feminist friends and colleagues who seriously maintain that research on sex differences really shouldn't be done because it might be misinterpreted and used by anti feminists. In fact, I think there are so many misconceptions in the public mind about sex differences, that any objective, uh, data is an improvement. We should welcome such research, in fact, and especially try and keep its interpretation to the public accurate. It does not follow from this position. I might add that social reforms with respect to equal opportunities should a way to complete understanding of the biological and social mechanisms involved in sex differences. For one thing, for most human, and by that I mean importantly, human attributes, the between sex differences smaller than the within sex variation, even with differential socialization of a sexist and for many sex differences, definitive statements about biological causation will have to await very radical changes in society. Speaker 3 (00:57:24): As John Stewart Mill pointed out a long time ago, males and females, uh, of the human species differ on the average in many aspects of anatomy, body chemistry, and behavior. Uh, biologists have a way of talking about this as dimorphism, which obviously means two forms. And to me anyway, that implies a bi two hump distribution with no overlap in between. For most differences, of course, this is not the case. We have a bimodal distribution with a lot of overlap in the middle. Um, many of the observed differences do not have a demonstrated relationship to male and female reproductive roles. Although it's very tempting to try and invent one. Biologists can't help wondering how such differences came about unless they contributed to the sex success of the species. In some way, much has been written about the po possible evolutionary value of sex differences. It's not clear how much of this theorizing has anything to do to the pre to do with the present as human situation, because cultural evolution has, of course, outpaced biological or genetic evolution for at least the last 10,000 years. And maybe more, um, I'm going to discuss for the most part, sex differences, which are easily quantifiable and for which the evidence, uh, for biological causations good enough to be taken seriously. I hope to summarize for you what we do know about how sex differences, uh, and their biological causation, um, develop. But at the same time, I want to impress on you how much we don't know. Uh, with both messages, I hope to make you somewhat critical of many interpretations which appear in our scholarly journals, as well as in the New York Times Magazine section. Speaker 3 (00:59:01): The, uh, primary sex difference in human species is of course, chromosomal. Uh, the father of the child, uh, normally contributes either an X or a y sex chromosome, and the mother always contributes an X. This initial asymmetry is limited to mammals, uh, in birds. The mother determines the sex of the child. Um, however, uh, one consequence of the human female possessing not one but two x chromosomes, is that she is more likely to be protected against the effects of recessive genes which occur on this sex. Uh, the X chromosome, uh, hemophilia is one of the most famous historical examples of this, um, kind of sex linked inheritance. If a male has one of these defective genes, he's got the condition. Whereas a female, uh, if she has one, is apt to have a good gene on her other X chromosome and therefore is not, uh, hemophilia. Um, the alternative x protection of females is probably involved in the, uh, greater male mortality, which is seen not only, um, in middle and advanced age due to heart disease, but uh, also, uh, begins very early in life. In fact, probably prenatally, uh, the male mortality is higher.