Republicans in the U.S. Senate voted this month to allow employers to refuse health care, such as contraception, to employees if it violated their personal moral beliefs. Republicans in state legislatures across the country voted to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood and women’s health care services. Republicans in at least twenty states voted to require women to have sonograms, even transvaginal probes, in order to exercise their legal right to an abortion. Republicans, again in the U.S. Senate, oppose renewing the Violence Against Women Act, a law passing with broad bipartisan support in 1994, 2000, and 2005. Republican leader and pundit Rush Limbaugh viciously attacked a law student for challenging the practice of many Catholic institutions of denying contraceptive coverage in employee health care plans. These are just a few examples of Republican activity which have led many, including me, to ask the question: Why does the Right hate women?
There are many possible answers to this question -- psychological, sociological, religious, gendered, etc. In 1991, in her book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Susan Faludi addressed this phenomenon, suggesting that backlashes arise intermittently throughout American history; and that they correspond to the fear that women are making breakthroughs and progress in gaining equality. Faludi suggests that this fear is not generated necessarily by actual attainment of equality (we can agree that this has not occurred), but is the fear that women might be able to attain equality. And one might point today to changes that suggest women’s position has improved; for example, a woman ran for the highest office in the country and came close to attaining it; a woman held the third highest office for four years and proved highly successful in it (contrast Pelosi’s successes and Boehner’s dismal failures); another woman was selected for the U.S. Supreme Court; the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was enacted in 2009. Of course there have been many defeats and set-backs as well -- but a few high profile examples might make it appear that women are “winning” the “gender war,” thereby provoking the onslaught of Republican attacks (just as Obama’s victory made many claim that we are a post-racial society, regardless of the ample evidence against that).
In 1928 Virginia Woolf wrote, in A Room of One’s Own, about the anger of what she called The Professors, i.e., men who held power but were fearful of losing their dominance over women. Reminscent of the question many ask today, she asks, “How explain the anger of the professors? Why were they so angry?” She notes the absurdity of this anger of the powerful -- but then suggests that it lies with the fear of losing this superiority. Women, she suggests, have acted as mirrors, reflecting the image of men but at twice their natural size. This has given men the confidence to go out into the world, to discover new territories, to use and enhance their power, to act on the political stage. Women’s role as looking glass has depended on their inferiority. Woolf says, “For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgment ... making laws, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself ... at least twice the size he really is?”
And, of course, part of Woolf’s point is that no one acts as the looking glass to bolster women for the roles they must undertake. Women’s jobs have had risks and dangers as well -- along with the same risks that men have faced, women also face possibilities of sexual harassment, humiliation, structural institutional obstacles, low pay, boredom, etc. However, these often have not been recognized as risks and dangers, and often have been invisible to society.
This would suggest that the position of men, insofar as it is defined in terms of superiority, is dependent on the position of women remaining inferior. Women have borne the burdens which have enabled men to do the things they have done. Limitations on women have freed and bolstered men for the activities meaningful to their lives. To the extent that women refuse or neglect to reflect men and raise their confidence, men will react. Of course, they will react differently. Some will be happy to share the world with women. Some will be willing to share the burdens of the human condition so long borne by women. However, some will be fearful of losing the protections that have guaranteed to them the benefits of society’s largess and power. Some will be vengeful against those they blame for stealing structural advantages that no one should expect to have at the expense of others. And some will unleash a backlash against women’s supposed progress, attempting to bring back the “good old days.” For the latter, someone must be blamed for their loss of confidence and security and opportunity. But, rather than look to the global economic situation, errors made in national economic policy, and possible remedies for the future, it is easier to find a scapegoat. And that scapegoat, not surprisingly, too often has been women.