Essay on the debate on sex and gender within feminism

Introduction

The sex and gender distinction is at the centre of one of the sharpest debates in feminist thought. The syllabus lists reading on gender as part of Unit IV. This essay explains the distinction, sets out how different feminist strands treat it, and offers an assessment.

The debate on sex and gender

The distinction. Sex is the biological difference between men and women; gender is the set of roles that society assigns them. Feminists use the distinction to show that the pregnancy of women does not oblige only women to rear children, and that much of the inequality between the sexes is produced by society rather than nature. Patriarchy depends on treating the two as the same, so that a supposed natural difference justifies unequal positions. The distinction serves the central question of feminist political theory, why men are powerful and privileged over women in any given society, and it widens the idea of what is political to take in women's concerns.

The positions in the debate.

1. Liberal feminists accept the distinction and want the law to remove sex-based barriers, treating men and women as alike in capacities; critics say this makes women imitate men.
2. Marxist and socialist feminists explain the content of gender roles by class, the division of labour in the family and capitalist reproduction of labour.
3. Radical feminists at first wished to do away with gender as a meaningful category, seeing it as a contrived hierarchy, and called for a society that treats the sexes as equals.
4. Cultural feminists reverse the stance: they preserve gender distinctions and value female qualities (care, nurturance, equality), and some treat male violence as rooted in male biology. Essentialism of this sort risks reinforcing the stereotypes feminists object to.
5. Postmodern feminists go furthest. For Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble (1990), even the distinction between biological sex and socially constructed gender is open to question: gender is performative, woman is a category formed by class, race, ethnicity and sexuality, and bodies cannot be separated from social norms and language. It follows that no single factor explains the subordination of women, and queer and transgender identities are important to the politics of identity.

Assessment. The distinction has had large political value because it dismantles arguments that biology is destiny. Its weakness is that it can treat sex as fixed and untouched by society, which the postmodern critique exposes. A balanced position holds that most inequalities of status, work and power linked with sex are socially made and so can be changed, while recognising that categories of sex themselves are understood through social meanings.

Patriarchy

Patriarchy is the name feminists give to an order, social, economic and cultural at once, in which men are valued above women and hold power over them. Its most visible work is a division of labour. Home and family are treated as women's concern and the public world of paid work as men's, even though most women in fact also earn outside the home; they are left with the whole of the housework as well, a "double burden", as feminists call it, while having little or no voice in public decisions. The order is defended as natural: men and women are said to differ by nature, and the difference is said to justify their unequal places. Feminists answer by separating sex, a biological fact, from gender, the roles a society assigns, and by showing that most of the inequality is made by society, not by nature.

Feminist accounts. Carol Hanisch's second-wave slogan, the personal is political, treated the private lives of women as an image of the power structures of a patriarchal society; with the writings of Germaine Greer and Kate Millett, feminism moved beyond women's political rights to the personal, psychological and sexual sides of their oppression. Sexual politics in this sense means the domination of men over women or the attempt to change it. Radical feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s stressed the material basis of patriarchy, and they held that oppression need not be institutional: it can be personal. Being male does not by itself make a man an oppressor, in their view; he becomes one when he claims superiority over women on the ground that he was born a man. Marxist feminists see it as bound up with the family and with capitalism, since Engels, in the passage the unit quotes, calls the confinement of women to reproduction within the family the "final defeat" of the female sex. Socialist feminists treat patriarchy and capitalism as two systems that reinforce each other, and so women get lower wages and face sexual harassment. Postmodern feminists warn that women's subordination has many sources and no single cause.

Forms. It acts through the division of labour, which leaves housework to women even when they also work outside the home; through lower wages and sexual harassment at work; and through sexuality, child care and household work, which is why radical feminists called for housework and the care of children to be shared equally and for abortion to be made legal. Indian feminism has its own early roots: a women's body founded in Madras in 1917, the Indian Women's Association, pressed for the right to divorce, a larger franchise for women and fairer laws of inheritance.

Ending it. Feminists hold that the public/private distinction and all gender inequality can and should be removed: through equal legal rights and education, access to employment and political office, shared domestic work and change in culture.

Conclusion

The debate on sex and gender has moved from the view that gender is socially made while sex is natural to the question of whether the distinction itself holds. Whichever position is taken, the common point is that natural difference cannot justify unequal status, which is the heart of the feminist case against patriarchy.