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By Root 529 0

life in the rest of Israel. People have returned to stereotype. Men politick while women tend the home; boys study physics and become engineers while girls study sociology and become teachers and nurses. Women manage the morale, health and education of the kibbutz while men manage the finances, security and business. To some this is easily explicable: people have simply rebelled against the eccentric pattern set by their parents. Yet that explanation is more condescending than one which treats them as agents in their own choice, choosing according to their natures. Women clean house in a kibbutz because, like women everywhere, they complain that men would not do it properly. Men do not clean house in kibbutz because, like men everywhere, they complain that if they did, their wives would say it had not been properly done.23

Nor are the kibbutzim unique. Even in liberated Scandinavia, it is women who feed the family, wash the clothes and care for the children. Even where women go to work, some professions remain male bastions (for instance, garage mechanic, air traffic controller, driving test examiner, architect) while others have become female bastions (for example, bank teller, elementary school teacher, secretary, interpreter). It is getting gradually more implausible to maintain that in the most egalitarian western societies women are prevented by social prejudice from becoming garage mechanics. Women rarely want to become garage mechanics. They do not want to become garage mechanics because the world of the garage mechanic is an uninviting ‘man’s world’ in which they would feel unwelcome. But why is it a man’s world? Because it is a job that men have moulded to suit their personalities, and male personalities are different from female ones.

Feminism and Determinism

The bizarre thing about this assertion of different natures is that it is a thoroughly feminist assertion. There is a contradiction at the heart of feminism, one that few feminists have acknowledged. You cannot say, first, that men and women are equally suited to all jobs and, second, that if jobs were done by women they would be done differently. So feminism itself is anything but egalitarian. Feminists argue explicitly that if more women were in charge, more caring values would prevail. They begin from the presumption that women are by nature different beings. If women ran the world, there would be no war. When women run companies, cooperation, not competition, is the watchword. These are all explicit and firm assertions of sexism: that women have different personalities and natures from men. If women have different personalities, is it not likely that they will prove better or worse at certain jobs than men? Differences cannot be appealed to when they suit and denied when they do not.

Nor does it help to appeal to social pressure as the source of personality differences. For if social pressure is as powerful as social scientists would have us believe then a person’s nature is irrelevant; only his or her background counts. So a man from a broken home who has led a life of crime is the product of that experience and there is no spark of decent ‘nature’ in his soul to redeem. Of course, we scoff at such nonsense. We recognize him to be a product of both his background and his nature. It is the same with sex differences. To say that western women do not enter politics in the same numbers as men because they have been conditioned to think of it as a man’s career is to patronize women. Politics is all about status-seeking ambition, which many women have a healthy cynicism about. Women have their own minds. They are capable of deciding to enter politics if they want to, whatever society says (and western society, if anything, now affirms that they should). One of the things that makes a political career uninviting may well be the sexism of those around them, but it is absurd to assume it is the only thing.

I have argued that men and women are different and that some of these differences stem from an evolutionary past in which men hunted and women gathered.