In Our Time - Feminism

Episode Date: January 7, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most important events of the 20th century - the rise of Feminism and the subsequent empowerment of women. What have been the most important and lasting changes for women in the last 100 years and what is there still left to achieve? Are the biological differences between men and women insuperable? Is the feminist movement therefore set on a course it is inevitably bound to lose? Is the ideology of feminism in other words, working against our natural inclinations?If a man were to say “men are by nature more competitive, ambitious, status-conscious, dedicated, single-minded and persevering than women” then you could be forgiven for calling him anti-diluvian, blinkered and worse. But this is the express view of Dr Helena Cronin from the London School of Economics - a philosopher who has concentrated on Darwinian theory which she claims has never seriously been applied to humans. Joining her is Dr Germaine Greer whose book The Female Eunuch is credited with changing the lives of a generation of women. With Dr Helena Cronin, Co-director of the Centre for the Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences, London School of Economics; Dr Germaine Greer, Professor of English and Comparative Studies, Warwick University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, today I'm joined by the academic and feminist writer Jermaine Greer and the Darwinian philosopher Helena Cronin to discuss the rise of feminism

and the subsequent empowerment of women in the 20th century. Are the biological differences between men and women insuperable? Is the feminist movement, therefore, set on a course it's inevitably bound to lose? Dr. Helena Cronin is co-director of the Centre for the Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences at the London School of Economics. She's a philosopher who's concentrated on Darwinian theory. Her books include The Ant and the Peacock, Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today, which won a New York Times Prize.

Dr. Germain Greer is currently a professor of English and comparative studies at Warwick University. Her book, The Female Unique, published almost 30 years ago, is credited with changing the lives of a generation of women, and it was an immediate bestseller worldwide. In 1984, she published sex and destiny, the politics of human fertility. She's published other books, and in March, what's billed as a sequel to the female eunuch to be entitled, The Whole Woman, will be published here. Helena Cronin, you have written, men are by nature, more competitive, ambitious, status-conscious, dedicated, single-minded and persevering than women. You say that this is a two-million-year-old fact and we should accept it. Can you develop that, please? Yes, of course they are. There's quite a large psychological difference between men and women. Natural selection didn't just shape our bodies differently.

It shaped our minds differently as well. Think of it this way. Give a man 50 wives and he can have children galore. Give a woman 50 husbands. No use whatsoever. Over-evolutionary time, natural selection has favoured those men who have competed like mad to get mates. Over-evolutionary time, natural selection has favoured the women

who have been judicious about which mates they've taken. We are all the descendants of the competitive men and of the judicious women. If you take those adjectives one by one that you could say that take competitive, well, very few men have been as competitive as Margaret Thatcher, single-minded, well, George Elliott and hundreds of women I could think of, what, tens of women I could think even personally very single-minded, persevering, think of doctors and teachers and so on.

Do these things apply now in the way that you think they have applied for two million years? They certainly apply now in exactly the way they did in that. genes are still building our minds and bodies in the same way as they have for two million years and there's no difference in the difference in psychology between men and women what's changed now of course is that women have fought and struggled for more opportunities and those women who on average would have performed more like men are now able to but that's the statistical difference one can say statistically that men are taller than women, and it's certainly true that there are some tall women around, but all the tallest people are

men. Similarly, although women are now being given opportunities, and we can find the Margaret Thatcher's and so on that couldn't have existed years ago, statistically, nevertheless, women are on average, far less competitive than men. So let's strip this back to your Darwinism. You say that Darwin has not been really applied to human beings, not thoroughly enough. When you start to apply it, what do you fine then. Can you go, you think that the two million years story, the three million year story, whatever it is still supremely relevant to

men and women today? It's still extremely relevant because we still have the same psychologists as we had over the last half million, two million years. And until we recognize that, until we recognize that the psychology of men and the psychology of women is

different, we're not going to be able to build a fairer society and a society in which men and women can realise their potentials. Jermaine Greer, what's your response to that? I actually think I probably agree that masculinity is very different from femininity. I certainly believe that.

But I also believe that men work very hard at creating masculinisms. They put themselves through extraordinary disciplines. And there's a lot of aspects of the way they behave, which are highly cultural and extremely protein, could change pretty quickly. Well, the sort of Stephen Pinker basic argument is that men's capacity for increased reproductive opportunity leads them into competitive behaviors and so on. I mean, this is the old sociobiological argument. This is certainly true.

But then if you actually look at our society, you realize that you've got that sex has become practically virtual, that there is an enormous industry of sexual fantasy, that masturbation, which men used to struggle against in the first half of the century, is now practically a duty to yourself like cleaning your teeth and you're supposed to do it whenever you feel like it and if you have difficulty in doing it, you're supposed to feed your fantasy with any one of a trillion dollars' worth of cultural products that would produce in you a completely factitious state of arousal.

I mean, this is a huge phenomenon. It's massive. It's the biggest aspect of our culture. It's what people in other galaxies will comment on this extraordinary cybernetic virtual... Do you mean this is not against biology? This fits absolutely... perfectly perfectly with Darwinian biology.

Things can not fit with biology, Helena. That's obvious. But the point is that culture then does its own thing with biology. It could have done any one of a number of other things that would be equally expectable. Everywhere universally, males and females have different sexual fantasies. And everywhere universally, female sexual fantasies are the same and male sexual fantasies are the same. And they are predictable on Darwinian grounds. So, for example, male sexual fantasies involve.

multiple partners, female sexual fantasies, involve partners that the woman knows, male sexual fantasies. I'm not sure that's true. I look at you like that because Nancy Friday's book about women's fantasies, one of the commonest ones, was it was being, having sex with a number of men at a football ground at the time of the scoring of a goal so that all the applause was for you. I mean, exhibitionism is also an important part of women's sexual fantasies. They're not all about romance and constancy. You're giving me one woman's novel. No, it's not a novel, it's a study. It's a study of women's fantasy. It's not terribly scientific, but neither is this conversation.

I'm sorry, I'm talking about a scientific study of the content of sexual fantasies, and this turns out to be... Alan, let Helen are finished, you mean? I'm talking about a scientific study of the content of sexual fantasies, and this turns out to be universally different from men and women, and universally different in exactly the ways that natural selection would predict. You're almost setting up a clash between the war. way that Darwinism operates through human beings, and the recent arrival in the last century

or two or three of the culture of feminism, which is increasing cultural acceleration, particularly over the last 50 years, you think that that is simply not so much a blip, but a small thing, I'm not diminishing what I say, a small thing on the great power of two million years of the Darwinian fact of the differences, which is still implacably there. That's what you're saying, isn't it? No. I think that's what you're saying from what you said now. Please disabuse me of this mistake.

I think it's very important to disabuse you because the 2 million years of our history have landed us with a particular bodies and a particular psychology. From that, it doesn't tell us what sorts of societies we ought to have. Science doesn't teach us morality. We've got to decide what kind of society we want

and we've got to go for it, given what we know scientifically about the kinds of minds and bodies that is our inheritance. I'm going to hold to my point for a second because what you're fine, but you're dodging what you actually say because what you are saying, again and again, I've got quotes all over the place,

is that women go towards the average, men can excel and also be the worst, that women are like this and men are like that. Men and women are different. You're assuming that that is in some way in mimical to feminism. No, I'm asking, no, to a certain extent it is. No, that's where I strongly discon. agree with you then. But hang on. If that's your misunderstanding, it's not my

misunderstanding. But let's just a second. Can I explain? Let me explain, Melbourne, just for a second. There's always been a tension and feminism between whether you're going to demand equality or privilege difference. And these two things move up and down all the time. So there is, you can't have a sensible notion of equality if you haven't got some concept of sameness. If you over-apply the concept of sameness, because you think differences have been exaggerated, you then begin to oppress people who feel strongly that there are differences. I think the way the pendulum is it's now becoming time to ask for the privileging of difference. There is certainly a contrast between men and women, but I would say it is probably more correct

to describe it as chromosomal and genetic. And this is one of the things that we understand the least. It does seem to me to persist a little, Helen, I'm sorry, is that what you say posits an argument between Darwinianism and feminism in the sense that your Darwinianism is saying men and women are different in ways which are essential and as far as we can tell, permanent. And feminism is saying, for one thing,

is that the culture of women has been determined by patriarchy and by the conditioning imposed by men. Now that is a cultural and not a natural thing. And what I'm pointing out is that there's a contradiction there, which you yourself acknowledge, and I just wanted to expand on that. I don't think that's misinterpreting what you say at all. Right.

Feminism has two aspects to it. One is the demand for fairness and equality for women, and that's a political demand. And another is the theories that go behind it to back that up. And there are a lot of false theories and factoids and fantasies behind a lot of current feminist thinking, and it would do better to sweep all of that away and to put some good Darwinian science in its place.

But the first point, the aim of fairness and equality for women, is in no way undermined by a Darwinian view. In fact, I think a Darwinian view can only help it. Yes, I agree with that, and you make that clear too, but you also set up this contradiction. I mean, you've just said it in the early part of your statement, that there are these factoids that get in the way of understanding. There's a recent accretion of utter nonsense around feminism,

including postmodernism, structuralism, and all sorts of utter baldered. There's absolutely no reason that I should be considered less of a feminist because I prefer decent Darwinian science to any of that sort of clap trap. And yet Darwinian science in your own essays is challenging a lot of the accepted notions of feminism. One of the fundamental is that women can do everything men can do, women can be equal and can be equal. You say, no, they cannot. I'm saying that women are very, very unlikely to do exactly the same things as men do.

if they are all just put in the same situations. If we want women to do the same things as men do, and we have to think carefully about whether we want everybody to do the same, if we want women to do the same things as men do, then the best way we can achieve that is to understand the differences between men and women, to know what kinds of environments we need to set up under which we'll get the same outcomes for men and for women.

And we won't know those environments unless we understand the psychology and how it's triggered under different environments. environments. I shut up after this, because you may once again, but I'm going to go back to the original quotation with which I started this, provision in which I started this program, you are making what seems to me to be unequivocally fundamental claims for differences by saying men are by nature, I'm quoting you, by nature, more competitive, ambitious, status conscious, dedicated, single-minded and persevering women. That's all these, all these characteristics are to do with success, achievement, what the world looks to. And these,

men are by nature more of that. So that's that, as far as you're concerned. That's that. A closed door. It's not a closed door. It's an open psychology. In other words, if you then want a woman and a man to succeed with the same outcomes, you obviously have to set up a different situation, a different environment for her than for him.

Right. But you can only get the outcomes that you want. By changing the nature of women? No. On the contrary. Maybe you have to change the nature of men. No, I must state this. This is important because you misunderstand.

You can only get the outcomes you want if you understand the evolved psychology that is situated in those environments and the differences between men and women. Only then will you understand sensitively and relevantly how to change the environments. Jamangra. Well, it depends. You see, we're talking here about success. Success is one sort of outcome.

but there's another outcome which is survival. And I would argue that women are programmed for survival. They're good at that. They're good at extended effort rather than intense effort over short periods. And I don't know that competitiveness is such a good thing, especially when it's enhanced by technology. I would have hoped that the fact that we had so many women in the Houses of Parliament would have meant that we wouldn't have gone headfirst into a thoroughly anthropoid confrontation

with Saddam Hussein, which was hominid behavior. I mean, it was fantastic in that respect. And most of it was actually symbolic and display, and I thought it was inexcusable. But the women were silent, and the frightening thing is that under the rhetoric of equality, you put women in situations where they're going to be ineffective. And then you can turn around and say, well, look, you were ineffective.

Exactly. And so I would agree with that basic argument. There are differences. But I would put much more stress on the way. that we culturally exaggerate those differences until they become practically lethal and even, I would say, maladaptive. The failure of women to enter fully into the powers

that computers can give them is one of the most amazing things about the late 20th century. You would think of it as the great equalizer, but it was the great unequalizer. They don't own cyberspace. Why is that that, that hell out of crime? That men have taken over computer power.

And I think it's something... Just like they've taken over, you give a list of things. Very funny. Alcoholism. Murder. Murder. And being anirac. All that sort of... The extremes of almost anything, you'll find the men there at both ends of the extremes.

With computers, it's an interesting one. I think it's something to do with male perseverance and single-mindedness. The typical computer anorak type sitting there day after day, hour after hour, being able to concentrate on that and nothing else is very much more typical of male. and female psychology.

Except I would call it a nastier name. I would call it obsessiveness. And I would say... Men are far more obsessive than women. And also I think that the interesting... I'm fascinated by things about women that I didn't know how to value when I was younger. I think of women's life career

as fundamentally transformational. They go through tremendous upheavals. They live in different ways at different phases in their lives. Man near to a certain extent as well. To a certain extent, but nowhere near as much because a man, for example, is fertile all his life. He's usually in a career.

path which has got a very clear hierarchical system. Not anymore. Well, he's disappearing from the workplace as a result. As the workplace becomes feminized, it's used in a completely different way. And it's interesting that the feminized workforce, regardless of whether it's male or female, cannot exert the kind of power that actually shakes out higher wages and better conditions. You're a Darwinian and you're a scientist, Helena, and you're very, very clear about what you say and suggest about the difference between men and women. Is the intense culturalisation of society,

intense, I say, because there's more information around, so and so forth, is that going to be a strong enough force to change the biology so that Germain's idea that society has a huge impact can become more relevant than your biological notion? I think it's a mistake to regard it as biology versus culture, in quite that way. What we will always have that will persist through human history is male-female differences

and what we have to do is take our culture and shape the society in the way that we want it. If we want to be able to exaggerate differences between males and females in various ways, we've now got the technical means to do it as never before. If we want to give women opportunities in the public sphere, which is typically where women haven't shone until now, we have opportunities to do it as never before. It's up to us to use our technology and to use our culture

to get to the kinds of aims that we want, but we'll never do that if we consider it as working against our biology because we'll always have our evolved dispositions that will come to the fore, and there'll always be different in men from women. Would you say, Helena, that in your view, insofar as feminism has encouraged women to aid, men. I can use the ape men. Insofar as it has done, it's been going down the wrong route. Yes, I do think that. I think, for example, the notion that we should look for women who were the great writers in the past and the great painters in the past and so on.

And that Einstein's wife did his maths for it. Exactly. Exactly. Those are downright pernicious. They're pernicious in two ways. One, because all you're going to turn up, given our part, when women didn't, the women who might have been capable of these feats weren't able to express them, you're only going to find the poorest of products, and women are going to look very impoverished because of that. And second, I think it sets the wrong goals for women. It actually is the case that there's more variation in males than there is in females. So there are a few adults among women, but there are also fewer geniuses. This is a biological fact that you find for almost any trait

on which there is variation. And so it's actually very unlikely that there's ever going to be 50-50 Nobel Prize winners, for example. And to set that up for women as a goal, I think, is a mistake. This kind of very, very extreme end of the curve production of cultural artifacts is not something that women are probably going to do best at. and I think it's much better if we choose what are the glittering prizes in our own way.

Jane Austen and George Elliott might contradict you in the area of the novel alone, but I'll go across to Germany. No, could I just say, let me not let you get away with that, because we are talking here statistically. Yes. And I always think it's the opposite way around, that as soon as you are naming two women who are novelists... Three Bronte, isn't that makes you fly even...

As soon as you're giving me names, then you've already lost your argument, because with men, you don't need to give names to say that they have been scientists, novelist, painters, architects, sculptures and so on. I'm not losing or winning arguments. I'm trying to provoke them. Germain. I don't know which branch of feminism it is that does this, actually. Feminism is now enormous as an intellectual discipline. There are cultural feminists, anthropological feminists, historical feminists, lit-crit feminists and so on. And they disagree with each other about as much as they disagree with the kind of traditional discourses around them. And I wouldn't outlaw any of their lines of inquiry.

I mean, I spent an awful lot of time digging up poetry by women. I have never argued that it's better than Shakespeare because that would be foolish. And it would also disqualify me for my own chosen task. That doesn't mean I'm not fascinated to look at the way that women trying to write poetry, which I regard as a form of male display in any case, are actually making acts of homage towards the male cultural establishment. and are living in a very painful and oblique relationship to it. They're being exploited usually as young muses

and then dumped when they reach the age of unattractiveness, which happens sooner and sooner as we get closer and closer to our own time. Talking about enabling women to realize their own potential and about their need to do this in order to live decent lives is not the same as saying that the Nobel Prize should be awarded according to some unisex criterion that it should be one year a man and one year a woman. Or indeed, I'm not particularly in favour of forced twinning of men and women in political races and so on. This seems to me to be going in the wrong direction.

Except that our society is now so much in the grip of runaway technology, so competitive, so crazy, there are so few winners in the world system as the media have now set it up, as our information systems have set it up, that you do need a corrective of ordinariness, if you like, or of the norm, which would probably be a better way of putting it. So I would like to see more of a female presence and more common sensicality and less brilliance. You know, Bill Gates needs to be counterbalanced

by a woman of great humanity and vision who is not desperately ambitious and does not have dreams of empire. Dreams of empire are very, very dangerous. Helena. Jermaine, it's more. It's more fundamental than that. You rightly pointed out that we increasingly live in many ways in a winner-take-all society, as it's been called.

That is, for a few people at the top, the prizes are enormous, and for everybody else, it's somewhere between failure and just jogging along. I think that if we don't recognise that in a winner-take-all society, it's going to tend always to be the men who are the winners because of their competitiveness, because of their single-mindedness, because of the kinds of different dispositions they have, that women aren't going to achieve in ways that they might want to. Maybe what we have to do is to change the winner-take-all society

rather than try to put a few women at the top. How would you go about that? That is an enormous political program. This thing called socialism. It used to be an idea that people understood. And I think women are intrinsically socialist. They're sororal communities. You can find throughout nature,

you'll find examples of systems. rearing young and so on, collaboratively, you won't find that. They may not in nature, nowhere near so much. You get the young, the males who are outside the herd. I think we're in a nebulous area. They're generally fight. I don't think there's a sex difference in socialism actually, but there certainly is a sex difference.

Well, socialism didn't do much of women where it was most enforced in various parts. That's not true. You should see women in China. I mean, they're having a terrible time, but boy, they're equal to. Really? Fantastic, yes. I was most impressed by them. I'd like to bring us to close by asking one specific thing,

because I'm still interested in the basic thing is can culture change biology? It seems, it's just we're talking scenes here. Women, especially younger women, as it were, competing with men in social behaviour, saying if they can drink, we can drink, if they can be promiscuous. If they can behave badly, we can behave badly. If they can be promiscuous, we can be promiscuous. That issue of promiscuity, with which you almost started this discussion, do you think that will change in any way?

that seems to be socially central to identity, doesn't it? I think it's one of the unfortunate strands that Scott exaggerated in certain feminist thinking that the way to be liberated is to behave like men and promiscuity was one of those points that was taken up. Actually, promiscuity means very, very different things to men and to women. And we are psychologically built for it to mean different things to us. and it's a terrible mistake for women to think that being promiscuous for them

is the same joy and the same advantage as it is to men. Think of it this way. On the whole, men go for quantity and women go for quality. It pays a man to go for numbers of partners, whereas women have to be extremely judicious about which partners they will accept. Remember that the greatest change that's been made in the last couple of decades for women is contraception.

and that has freed women in a way that they've never been freed before, and that's enabled them to be promiscuous. But the psychological disposition that takes them into the sexual relationship is the same as a psychological disposition that was built over 2 million years lacking contraception when they had to be very much more judicious than men did about deciding whether to go into a sexual relationship, and that is what they still carry with them. Jemaine, is this somehow, in any way, seminal to your new book?

What women's right to promiscuity. The interesting thing to me is that this whole argument is predicated on reproductive opportunity. And I'm not sure that men actually seek reproductive opportunity. Men seat sex. Quite, I agree with you. But I think that women... That's natural selection's way of encouraging reproductive opportunity in men. Natural selection didn't go about putting the notion of reproductive opportunity into men's heads.

It put into their heads seek sex. Helena, I know this. There's no need to explain the blindingly obvious in the context of this discussion. We're not all reading this from the same primer. What concerns me about this is women's continuing commitment to reproduction, which is actually being discouraged by social pressures in our society. Women are being penalised for being mothers. And this has been happening for quite a long time.

There's a catastrophic decline in their quality of life when they become mothers. And they are still motivated to do it. I know we've got two million years of psychology, et cetera, and so forth. Let's take that as red, whatever it means, which is another question. We do also know that the highest achieving women reproduce the least, and we also know that delaying childbearing is proving to be extremely costly in terms of survival rates and the health status of the children and the whole IVF jamboree horribility.

And I'm wondering how long that particular commitment of women to reproduction will survive the kind of cultural pressures that are battering it at the moment. There are signs, I mean, we've got in the highest evolved populations, we've dropped below reproduction rate, and we now have a serious problem. Witness, for example, the cost of the flu problem at the moment. This is all elderly people living alone, can't be sent home, and so forth. Actually, looking after this long-lived society with such a low birth rate may be the strong that breaks the back of our enormously rich societies.

We are in, we have come, I think, to some sort of a cul-de-sac. We're going to have to think quite creatively how to get out of it. And we won't do that without women's intelligence and women's commitment to survival. My big word, not success, but survival. I have to stop. I wish I didn't, but I have to stop. Thank you very much, Helena Cronin, and Jermaine Greer. There's a lot more to talk about, and I hope we talk about it again

with both of you soon. Next week I'll be joined by Brian Appleyard and Graham Bullitt. field and we're talking about cloning and brave new worlds. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at bbc.co.uk forward slash radio 4.