New York Times reporter Penelope Green filed an ostensible news story that read more like an earnest undergraduate paper (full of lines sure to mortify when read again years later, including the headline) celebrating “second-wave” feminist Carol Gilligan (pictured): “Healing a Rupture That Spawns Patriarchy -- Carol Gilligan talks about male privilege, women’s silence, listening and lifting new voices.”
On the last day of January, more than 100 people poured into the Rare Book Room at the Strand bookstore to hear Carol Gilligan, a veteran of second wave feminism, and Naomi Snider, a former student of Dr. Gilligan’s at New York University, talk about patriarchy, and what to do about it. Though the crowd on that chilly night was not quite as large as that which had turned out a few weeks earlier to see the tidying guru, Marie Kondo, at the 92nd Street Y, the crush showed that the dominance of men continues to be a societal bugbear. (Incidentally, the “cleaning house” that Ms. Kondo teaches is exactly what many want to do with the patriarchy.)
In her story on the front of the Thursday Styles section, Green credited Trump for feminism’s comeback.
But then Trump was elected, and a year later, the #MeToo movement took wing. It wasn’t long before the line “Smash the patriarchy” was getting vigorously hashtagged on social media and printed (in one version or another) on T-shirts, posters and book jackets. It was 1971 all over again.
Green's subject, the veteran feminist Gilligan, saw sinister sexism in the latest government budget fights.
“If you want to elevate one group of people over another,” Dr. Gilligan said, “you have to undercut our relational capacities as human beings. You have to stop the person at the top from feeling empathy for the people at the bottom. We saw this during the government shutdown.”
Federal government workers are hardly “the people at the bottom!"
This is familiar territory for Dr. Gilligan, who has been examining the developmental differences between boys and girls, and how those differences can both support and subvert their relationships, ever since her first book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, published in 1982, made her an academic celebrity.
Green posed Gilligan as a kinder, gentler feminist voice, but Gilligan has an odd obsession about the male sex across a range of species.
“I was the only woman in my house,” she said. “The dog was male. The cat was male. Everybody at Harvard was male. It was sink or swim. You could say I was in a situation where the issue was heightened....
While other academics and conservative thinkers were tying themselves in knots over Dr. Gilligan’s work, Harvard anointed her as its first gender studies professor. “When I got there,” she said, “I thought gender was something you did in Latin.” She went on to study young girls and young boys, noting the heartbreaking ways in which both began to lose voice, as she put it, and pioneer resilience programs for both genders. By 1994, the new Gender Equity and Education Act banned gender discrimination in classrooms; two years later, Time magazine celebrated her as one of the country’s 25 most influential people.
Yet at the turn of the millennium, she was again pilloried. In May of 2000, Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, accused her in The Atlantic magazine of conducting a war against boys, arguing, falsely, that there were no studies to back up Dr. Gilligan and others who claimed that girls were suffering a crisis of confidence at adolescence.
Green seemed to think that literal accidents of birth provide Gilligan some kind of shield against being accuse of anti-male sentiments.
Dr. Gilligan found the whole thing particularly irritating and risible because she not only has three sons, she has four grandsons.
“I think part of what makes Carol’s work interesting right now has to do with the emerging understanding of gender as a spectrum, and the discussion of what is socially constructed and what is intrinsic,” said Peggy Orenstein, the feminist writer and journalist whose 1994 book Schoolgirls explored, with meticulous research, the confidence gap that girls of different American cultures faced at adolescence, and who was also pummeled by Ms. Sommers....
Again? What did the conservative academic Sommers ever do to Penelope Green?
It’s no surprise that Gilligan is a big fan of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “Like my 10- and 11-year-old girl resisters: speaking directly, asking her queries, no equivocation, no apology.”
Comparing Ocasio-Cortez to a 10-year-old? Hey, she said it, we didn’t.
The Times’ Maya Salam chose the same subject and took a bizarre Hollywood angle in “How the Patriarchy Got in Our Heads -- In their new book, ‘Why Does Patriarchy Persist,’ Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider explore the psychology that keeps men in positions of power.”
Remember in “Terminator 2” how the bad terminator kept getting smashed and shattered and ripped apart, but it didn’t matter? He just kept re-emerging, rising from the ashes, as an unstoppable force. Now imagine that terminator is a vessel to keep power, wealth and status in the hands of men -- that’s the patriarchy. It can feel indestructible, coming back ever stronger despite seemingly endless efforts to smash it.
