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The intellectuals among today's feminists have as hard a task as Mrs. Stanton, for they must challenge Freud, one of the most influential sexists the world has ever known, as well as platoons of psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists, all of whom insist, in one way or another, that "anatomy is destiny."
Harvard Psychologist Erik Erikson, for example, has written that the determinant of a woman's identity is her "inner space, destined to bear the offspring of chosen men." He has observed little boys building "high towers" and "façades with protrusions," while little girls build "interior" scenes with "low walls," often "intruded by animals or dangerous men." There must be a connection, he says, between such play spaces, genital differences, and the unique functions and personalities of the sexes.
Such observations have set many a feminist off on fanciful speculations of her own. Author Mary Ellmann, for instance, has noted that "each month the ovum undertakes an extraordinary expedition from the ovary through the Fallopian tubes to the uterus, an unseen equivalent of going down the Mississippi on a raft or over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Ordinarily, too, the ovum travels singly, like Lewis or Clark, in the kind of existential loneliness which Norman Mailer usually admires. One might say that the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa, which move in jostling masses, swarming out on signal like a crowd of commuters from the 5:15." From this, one can only conclude that women must be the more daring, individualistic and imaginative sex.
However adventurous their ova, women themselves do not, in truth, have a record of soaring achievement. (One handicap mentioned by many career women is simply that they don't have wives.) The explanation offered by Darwin among others is that the male is more variable than the female. According to this reasoning, female intelligences cluster at the center of the range, while male intelligences extend to the further reaches of genius—and imbecility as well.
A more obvious explanation is that society discourages women. Boys are asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Girls are seldom encouraged to think of themselves as anything but creatures who will one day substitute babies for their dolls. To change such patterns and the resultant personalities is a formidable goal, but the feminists believe that it can be achieved. Says Dr. Alice Rossi, a sociologist at Goucher College: "If you changed rearing practices and stopped punishing people who depart from the accepted patterns, you'd have very minimal sex differences." No one can tell which psychological differences are immutable until social expectations are equal.
The Machismo Backlash