dave@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Sherman) (10/13/83)
Guy: your message got chopped up on the way, and only the
last part arrived. But I gather you were flaming at me for
saying that women are better and nurturing/mothering etc.
What about the example from nature? Look at other mammals. It's
the mother who protects the young, nurses, nurtures, and so on.
Look at what happens in human society - ANY human society,
including remote tribes who have no contact with the outside
world. It seems to me that mothers end up with certain roles
as a matter of nature.
Note that I am not trying to "put down" women. On the other hand,
I do not think that men and women are equal. They are different,
and that is a fact of nature. They deserve to be treated equally
by society; but they are, quite simply, different physical animals
with different physical and psychological characteristics. Why
psychological, you say? My answer is, why not? There are undeniable
physical differences; until you prove otherwise, it's just as reasonable
to assume there are natural psychological differences too as it is
to think otherwise.
We are living it a society which is doing its best to cover up
the differences between men and women, in many ways. For the most
part I agree entirely with such efforts. Women who want to work
should have exactly the same opportunity as men. But there are
still many women who are happy raising a family. There should be
no implication that such women are somehow less complete persons.
I consider that such women are fulfilling a natural role, and are
putting their *natural* mothering/nursing/nurturing/sympathizing
talents to best use.
[i can see the flames coming already...]
Dave Sherman
Toronto
--
{cornell,decvax,ihnp4,linus,utzoo,uw-beaver}!utcsrgv!lsuc!davemason@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Mason) (10/13/83)
Quoting (more or less) from Dave Sherman...
"...[DS] approve of women who stay home and raise families. They are
using their *natural* talent for mothering/nuturing/caring/sympathizing."
..As opposed, I suppose, to their *unnatural* [*freak*?] talent for
deciding/thinking/advising/estimating that they do in
the "world of work"?
The biology of human beings is not as important as the sociology of
human beings in determining what they do, and what they do well.
-- Dave Mason, U. Toronto CSRG,
{cornell,watmath,ihnp4,floyd,allegra,utzoo,uw-beaver}!utcsrgv!mason
or {decvax,linus,research}!utzoo!utcsrgv!mason (UUCP)dave@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Sherman) (10/13/83)
Now wait a minute, Dave Mason!
I never for a moment suggested that women are any less "natural"
at "deciding/thinking/advising/estimating ... in the world of work".
Being better at X does not imply being worse at Y, particularly when
X and Y are in totally different spheres.
My wife, for example, is a chartered accountant (==CPA in the U.S.).
She is highly competent at her job - deciding/thinking/advising/estimating,
or whatever you want to call it. That has nothing whatever to do with
gender. When it comes to certain interpersonal things, however, she
has certain traits/abilities which I lack. Yes, I know, that's only one
person. But the point is that by acknowledging that women have certain
natural abilities I am in no way denigrating their ability to compete
with men in other spheres.
Dave Sherman
--
{cornell,decvax,ihnp4,linus,utzoo,uw-beaver}!utcsrgv!lsuc!davenazgul@apollo.UUCP (Kee Hinckley) (10/15/83)
Assuming there is a difference (and I think that there seems to be, at least
at the level of feeling free to express that sympathy), the next question
becomes why. Is it a sociological phenomenon, or is it physiological?
-kee
P.S. Personally I would say both, but I'm interested in the reaction.guy@rlgvax.UUCP (10/16/83)
't say much of anything
about the individual man; remember, the average human being has one testicle,
one breast, and one ovary)?
2) Given how sweeping a statement it is, what hard evidence do you have?
There are several billion people in the world, and none of us have met more
than a small fraction of them.
3) What is the definition of "mothering", or "nurturing", or "nursing" (if
you mean in the sense of providing milk to an infant, this is self-evidently
true, of course), or "caring", or "sympathizing"? All these terms are rather
general, and the latter ones are in my opinion so general that they can't
be defined precisely enough to measure how much better women may be than men
at them.
4) Even if you had precise definitions of the above, and evidence that women
by and large were better at them, what evidence do you have that they are
"instinctually" and "naturally" better at them, and that the difference is
not just cultural?
When one is making statements that say that one very broad class of people
are better or worse at something, and such statements can fit in with a
cultural scheme that assigns people to social functions despite their
desire to perform that function or ability to perform it, one should be
very careful to base these statements strictly on very solid and
uncontroversial evidence. If I were a woman in a family I would be very
annoyed to be given the bulk of the resposibility for child-rearing, or
given the task of being the Great Provider of Sympathy, just because I
happened not to have a Y chromosome; I would be equally annoyed to be denied
a technical job, or a position with major political power, because it was
considered that women couldn't handle such jobs.
Guy Harris
{seismo,mcnc,we13,brl-bmd,allegra}!rlgvax!guy