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Technorati"In the last four decades, a feminist revolution has swept the globe," observes W. Bradford Wilcox. Indeed, a rising tide of feminist concerns has reached almost every part of the world, with ideological feminism exerting its greatest influence in Western Europe and North America. The feminist revolution Wilcox describes has brought, he acknowledges, "many beneficial changes to our world." Nevertheless, the same movement has "brought less welcome developments to the global scene," and one of the most unwelcome of these developments is what Wilcox describes as "the androgynous impulse."
W. Bradford Wilcox serves as Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, and is the author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands. In the November 2005 issue of Touchstone magazine, Wilcox confronts the "androgynous impulse" in his article, "Reconcilable Differences: What Social Sciences Show About the Complementarity of the Sexes and Parenting."
In one sense, androgyny – the blending of the sexes and the denial of gender differences – has been part of ideological feminism from the beginning. The androgynous have denied basic gender differences by suggesting that distinct roles for men and women, along with distinctive gifts and abilities, are a product of oppressive social conditioning. The suggestion that men and women differ in any basic respect – other than the biological – has been roundly denied and denounced.
Wilcox traces this "androgynous impulse" to international bodies associated with the United Nations. He documents the role played by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women [CEDAW]. "This committee has called on countries like Armenia and Belarus to end public policies and practices that support distinctive maternal roles for women, such as Mother's Day and maternal leave policies," Wilcox reports. "Instead, it and other proponents of this type of feminist agenda would like to see public policies that promote an androgynous parenting ethic where fathers and mothers devote equal amounts of time to parenting, and parent with essentially the same style of parent-child interaction."
In Great Britain, this is currently a matter of hot controversy. The British government is considering legislation that would equalize parental leave policies for men and women – and would encourage men to stay at home with their young children so that their wives can re-enter the workplace. Similarly, the current government in Spain has argued for making paternal leave mandatory in order to equalize male and female roles.
Wilcox sees a big problem with this approach. "The primary problem with this androgynous impulse is that it does not recognize the unique talents that men and women bring to the most fundamental unit of society: the family. A growing body of social scientific evidence confirms what common sense and many of the world's religions tell us: Men and women do indeed bring different gifts to the parenting enterprise."
Thus, Wilcox argues that governments should seek to protect rather than prohibit the distinctive and complementary parenting roles and styles that fathers and mothers represent.
For several years now, Bradford Wilcox has been producing some of the most interesting research in the social sciences. His path-breaking work Soft Patriarchs, New Men turned the conventional scholarly wisdom on its head. The prevailing orthodoxy in the social sciences assumed that conservative evangelical fathers would be less engaged with their children and more likely to be characterized by harsh and abusive parenting styles. Wilcox found the opposite to be the case – evangelical Christian fathers tended to be more engaged and less harsh than the population at large. Continue »
