Regardless of sex: Mary Daly and the return of ’separate but equal’
One of the areas where feminist
activists deserve credit for genuine improvements in sexual equality is
higher education. Through the first several decades of the 20th century
many elite colleges were simply closed to women while others strictly
limited the courses and disciplines women could enter. Sex discrimination
was the rule rather than the exception. Feminists initiated both legal
and moral challenges that today have effectively eliminated such sexual
discrimination. Now, however, some feminists want to modify this ban on
sex discrimination in academia. The new credo is that sex-based discrimination
is wrong, unless it is directed by feminists against men.
That is the conclusion that
a reasonable observer of the flap over radical feminist Mary Daly’s teaching
practices might conclude. Daly is a tenured professor at Boston College
where she’s taught since 1967. The author of several feminist books, including
Beyond God the Father and Gyn/Ecology, Daly is one of the
few people who make Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin look moderate
in comparison. In Gyn/Ecology, for example, Daly devotes several
pages to the hidden sexually oppressive meaning behind the United States’
decision to name its lunar landing program after the Greek god Apollo
(Daly complains that “while overtly promoting the oppressive ideal
of the nuclear family, this space spectacular subliminally appealed to
erotic fantasies allegedly taboo in heterosexist society.”)
But the subject of the current
controversy is not Daly’s bizarre beliefs but her teaching practices –
she refuses to allow men to enroll in a class she teaches on feminist
ethics. Daly says men are intolerable in her classes because, “what
the women do is become caretakers for the men. In those circumstances,
I decided, and many others have, that there’s a reality called women’s
space. There has to be a separate space for women.”
And of course, by definition,
a separate space for men. In the past Daly has gone so far as to take
a sabbatical for a semester when she suspected a male student might try
to enroll in her class. To be fair to her, Daly is a firm believer in
the principle of separate but equal. She is willing to instruct men outside
the classroom setting in one-on-one sessions, but maintains they are just
too disruptive for the classroom environment.
Daly’s separate but equal
position received support not only from her students, but also from prominent
media pundits and academics. Kate Heekin, a former student of Daly’s,
told CNN she didn’t want men in her feminist ethics classes. “I want
to talk about women,” Heekin said. “I don’t want to teach anyone
about why I feel oppressed, why we live in a patriarchy – I don’t want
to waste my energy on that.” Heekin and 14 other Boston College students
wrote a letter to college administrators asking them to keep the women-only
policy.
Boston Globe columnist
Eileen McNamara wrote a blistering article attacking male students at
Boston College who dared suggest they were being discriminated against
by the women-only policy. “Boys, boys, boys, settle down,” McNamara
began her article. “Mary didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. She knows
you hate being excluded, that you get cranky when you feel left out.”
McNamara went on to complain
about the men “sulking” over not being allowed to enrolled in
the class. As McNamara puts it, the men have it all wrong. “She doesn’t
refuse to teach men; she assigns them to a separate section … The studies
are clear: from grade to graduate school, males dominate the classroom.
They demand more attention and they get it.”
“Given the choice,”
McNamara concludes her remarks, “I’ll stand with Mary Daly.”
McNamara joins Daly’s attack
on the male Boston College students who started the controversy by threatening
to sue the college if denied entry into the class. Daly claims the threatened
lawsuit was part of a broader conspiracy to “assert white male supremacy.”
Aside from being white males, the students’ main offense has been to enlist
the help of the Center for Individual Rights for legal representation.
As McNamara puts it, “Of all the lawyers that might represent an
aggrieved student, isn’t it curious his cause is championed by the Center
for Individual Rights, which has fought affirmative action policies at
universities from Texas to Michigan?”
Harvard Divinity Professor
Harvey Cox echoed the vast right-wing conspiracy angle in an opinion piece
in the Boston Globe. “I cannot believe,” Cox wrote, “that
the real issue here is about a few classes that are open only to women
… After two decades of relentless gender leveling in higher education,
everyone now recognizes that some women (and men) learn certain things
better in gender-specific situations.”
A major irony in the attacks
on the male students seeking to take her classes is that Daly owes her
position in part to male students. In 1969 Boston College decided to terminate
Daly’s contract due to her virulent anti-Catholicism (after returning
from Rome for the Second Vatican Council, for example, Daly urged feminists
to “laugh out loud at their [the Catholic Church’s] pompous penile
processions.”) At the time Boston College was a male-only school,
but more than 1,500 students turned out to protest the administrations
decision to sack Daly. Eventually the college reversed its decision. Given
the choice, the male students at Boston College decided that academic
freedom should apply to professors of both sexes. Daly, unfortunately,
choose not to reciprocate this gender-blind approach.
The reader can easily imagine
the reaction to this controversy were the roles to be reversed. Imagine
an engineering professor at a major American college refusing to allow
women to enroll in his classes because, he says, study after study demonstrates
women’s inferior mathematical abilities. After explaining how he can’t
slow his classes down to accommodate the women, who will surely demand
far more attention than the men, the sexist professor might offer to teach
women one-on-one where he can meet their special needs without disrupting
his classes.
A female student might decide
this violated numerous federal laws and perhaps contact a leading civil
rights organization to sue the offending college to end its practice.
But, some astute columnist at the local paper might ask, isn’t that a
lesbian lawyer representing the plaintiffs? And isn’t she the same lawyer
who has been trying to push the homosexual agenda down people’s throats
by bringing hate crimes lawsuits? Clearly the only possible conclusion
would be that this is a well-coordinated attack by “feminazis”
on everything true and good – after all, nobody in her right might could
oppose sexual discrimination in public institutions simply because it
is wrong.
Daly’s behavior and McNamara’s
impassioned defense of sexual discrimination highlight how far contemporary
feminism has wandered off the path of sexual equality. Where once feminists
bravely stood up for the principle of genuine equality between men and
women today many feminists in academia and the media have merely reversed
the ages-old conservative stereotypes of women, defining them as the norm
and men as something less (or as “The Other” to use the faddish
postmodern term).
Feminists did an excellent
job in showing the hypocrisy of paternalists who kept women from pursing
higher education and effectively mocked those who argued women simply
couldn’t handle intellectually weight classes or might prove too much
of a disruption in the classroom. In fact, feminists relied heavily on
such ideas of sexual equality to force male-only schools such as The Citadel
to open their doors to women rather than set up separate programs for
women which, feminists argued, would be inherently inferior. Today, however,
all too many feminists openly accept and defend the view that sexual stereotypes
and discrimination are to be tolerated, if not encouraged, provided they
are created by feminists and used against men.
The claim that some topics
were simply too intellectually challenging for women or that women would
disrupt the learning process at universities were extremely harmful myths,
and their near-eradication by the feminist movement a good thing. But
in their place some feminists have begun to construct new myths about
gender that are equally odious. Although it is no longer politically correct
(nor should it be) to suggest that women don’t belong in certain classes
or universities, numerous Women’s Studies textbooks, journal articles
and other materials repeat claims that men’s participation in classes
is wholly negative and disruptive (so much for the oft-mentioned goal
of diversity in the classroom).
Women’s Studies professors
Marcia Bedard and Beth Hartung write in an essay that male (but not female)
students who “stat[e] the exception to every generalization”
that a professor makes are guilty of harassment. When several male students
in Magda Lewis’ feminist theory class dared to suggest that violence was
a human problem, rather than exclusively a male problem, Lewis included
the incident in a Harvard Education Review article as an example of the
sort of oppression women experience on a daily basis.
So long as so many feminists
continue to agree with ultra-conservatives that men and women are fundamentally
different and must be treated fundamentally differently in similar social
contexts, a world of true equality will always remain elusive, much to
the detriment of humanity regardless of sex.
The Regardless of sex: Mary Daly and the return of ’separate but equal’ by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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