After all, there is no reason to apply the same model of sex in all efforts to understand biological facts of all kinds. One might apply a one-sex model to X, a two-sex model to Y, and a five-sex model to Z. For what could possibly be the purpose of a model if it were not to better approximate & facilitate an understanding of an object while matching the objective of each inquiry? One might understand the importance of objectivity in this twofold sense: objective in the sense of approaching the truth of each object; and objective in the sense of being relevant to the objective of an inquiry.
Further, we might avoid saying _the_ one-sex model, _the_ two-sex model, etc., in that within the boundaries of one-sex perspective, there exist different one-sex models, and the same goes for any number of sex.
>Are most people who don't already take these things for granted --
>who haven't already been trained by some contact with feminist
>struggles -- able to read anything at all on this topic? Kelley's
>original subject heading is looking less and less merely rhetorical.
Not only is there no opposition between passion and reason; it seems necessary to be passionately committed to a project of emancipation -- in this case feminism -- to understand the truth of the social constraints blocking the said emancipatory project. Knowledge-acquisition is always _interested_. This, I think, is a fundamental dialectical truth (= interpenetration of subjective and objective) of historical materialist knowledge that doesn't take "what is" for the only possible world.
>But do read Laqueur for yourself. You will learn a lot of history.
Here's another excerpt from _Making Sex_ to encourage learning:
***** Thomas Laqueur, _Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990), pp. 194-197
Politics and the Biology of Two Sexes
The universalistic claims made for human liberty and equality during the Enlightenment did not inherently exclude the female half of humanity. Nature had to be searched if men were to justify their dominance of the public sphere, whose distinction from the private would increasingly come to be figured in terms of sexual difference. The Encyclopedists' argument that marriage is a voluntary association between equal parties -- a relationship in which neither partner has an intrinsic claim to power -- is immediately met by the counterargument that someone has to be in charge in the family and that someone is the male, because of his "greater force of mind and body" (essentially Locke's position). Biology thus assures marital order, but it also sets the terms for still another counterclaim: "man does not invariably have more strength of body," from which it follows that the exceptional circumstances in which women [who] do control families and kingdoms are not unnatural.[1]
Sex was also a major battleground of the French Revolution: "a contestation between male and female, in which the middle-class revolutionary creation of political culture was to validate the political culture of men and culpabilize that of women." However much class lines might be blurred, "that between men and women had at all costs to be made visible."[2] The promises of the French Revolution -- that mankind in all its social and cultural relations could be regenerated, that women could achieve not only civil but personal liberties, that family, morality, and personal relations could be all made afresh -- gave birth not only to a genuine new feminism but also to a new kind of antifeminism, a new fear of women, and to political boundaries that engendered sexual boundaries to match. The creation of a bourgeois public sphere, in other words, raised with a vengeance the question of which sex(es) ought to legitimately occupy it. And everywhere biology entered discourse. Obviously those who opposed increased civil and private power for women -- the vast majority of articulate men -- generated evidence for women's physical and mental unsuitability for such advances: their bodies unfit them for the chimerical spaces that the revolution had inadvertently opened. But revolutionary feminists also spoke in the language of two sexes. It is ridiculous, Condorcet argues, to exclude women from the political franchise because of biology: "Why should individuals exposed to pregnancies and other passing indispositions be unable to exercise rights which no one has dreamed of withholding from persons who have the gout or catch cold quickly." On the other hand, he is sure that women -- and here he is speaking of fundamental sexual characteristics -- "are superior to men in gentle and domestic virtues."[3] Olumpe de Gouges, in her famous declaration of the rights of women, says that "social distinctions can be founded only on general utility," but already in the previous paragraph she announced that she speaks in the name of "the sex that is superior in beauty and in courage of maternal suffering."[4] For both, a woman's place is determined by her body; revolution and not simply male bourgeois desire for a "haven in a heartless world" generated "separate spheres."
Whatever other ideological work the doctrine of separate spheres did in the nineteenth century -- and it will turn up both to justify and to condemn woman's political action -- it explicitly shattered the notion of a hierarchy of the sexes and served as the cornerstone of a powerfully multivalent alternative model. Women as beings who are "little affected by sensuality," "a species of angel," "a purer race...destined to inspire in the rest of the human race the sentiments of all which is noble, generous, and devoted" (this is from a French feminist of the revolutionary era), were the cultural creation of the middle classes, men and women, with a variety of political agendas.[5] But woman so construed is _not_ a lesser man [as in the pre-modern one-sex model], measured on a male scale of virtue, reason, or sensuality....
...Supposed biological differences between male and female bodies were generated in a variety of contexts. Roussel and Moreau and Cabinis, the most prominent moral anthropologists of the French Revolution, wrote as part of the Napoleonic retrenchment in matters of family and gender, arguing that corporeal differences demanded the social and legal differences of the new Code. Differences were propounded in conflict. Susanna Barrows has shown how fears born of the Paris Commune and of the political possibilities opened up by the Third Republic engendered an extraordinarily elaborated physical anthropology of sexual difference, to justify resistance to change.[8] In Britain the rise of the women's suffrage movement in the 1870s elicited similar responses: women were construed as creatures who for various reasons, in many respects like those that disadvantaged the darker races, were incapable of assuming civic responsibility.[9]
But reinterpretations of the body had roots in less worldly circumstances as well. Social-contract theory at its most abstract postulated a body that, if not sexless, is nevertheless undifferentiated in its desires, interests, or capacity to reason. In striking contrast to the old teleology of the body as male, liberal theory begins with a neuter individual body: sexed but without gender, in principle of no consequence to culture, merely the location of the rational subject that constitutes the person. The problem for this theory is how to legitimate as "natural" the real world of male dominion of women, of sexual passion and jealousy, of the sexual division of labor and of cultural practices generally from such an original state of no-gender. The answer to making their "natural beings recognizable," as Carol Pateman puts it, was for social-contract theorists to "smuggle social characteristics into the natural condition."[10] However the argument works in detail, the end result is that women are absent from the new civil society for reasons based in "nature." A biology of sexual incommensurability offered these theorists a way of explaining -- without resorting to the natural hierarchies of the one-sex model -- how in the state of nature and prior to the existence of social relations, women were already subordinated to men. Therefore the social contract could then be created between men only, an exclusively fraternal bond. Ironically, the genderless rational subject engendered opposite, highly gendered sexes.
[1] _Encyclopedie (1751), 5.471, "Femme, droit nat." See also p. 469 for an explicit attack on the Galenic view that the penis was only a prolapsed uterus and more generally that woman was only a lesser man.
[2] Dorinda Outram, _The Body and the French Revolution_ (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 156.
[3] Marquis de Condorcet, "On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship," in _Selected Writings_, ed. Keith Baker (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill), pp. 98, 99.
[4] Olympe de Gouges, "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen" (1791), in Susan Groag Bell and Karen Offen, eds., _Woman: The Family and Freedom_ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), p.105.
[5] Necker de Saussure, _L'Education progressive_, 2.274, quoted in Hellerstein, pp. 184-185; see also Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, _Family Fortunes_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
[8] Susanna Barrows, _Distorting Mirrors_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), chap. 1.
[9] Susan Sleeth Mosedale, "Science Corrupted: Victorian Biologists Consider 'The Woman Question,'" Journal of the History of Biology, 11 (Spring 1978), 1-55; Elizabeth Fee, "Nineteenth-Century Craniology: The Study of Female Skull," _Bulletin of the History of Medicine_, 53 (Fall 1979), 915-933; Lorna Duffin, "Prisoners of Progress: Women and Evolution," in Sara Delamont and Lorna Duffin, eds., _The Nineteenth-Century Woman: Her Cultural and Physical World_ (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1978), pp. 915-933. For two contemporary English articulations of these themes, see Grant Allen, "Plain Words on the Woman Question," _Fortnightly Review_, 46 (October 1889), 274; and W. L. Distant, "On the Mental Differences Between the Sexes," _Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute_, 4 (1875), 78-87.
[10] Pateman, _The Social Contract_, p. 41.
*****
In other words, in the pre-modern world where hierarchical relations were considered natural, normal, and devinely sanctioned, it did not occur to male intellectuals to argue that men and women are opposite, incommensurable sexes with their respective virtues in separate spheres; nor was the distinction between nature and culture sharply marked in the pre-modern world. Therefore, in the pre-modern world, intellectuals discussed human biology in terms of the one-sex model, according to which "woman" is simply a less perfect "man." In contrast, in the world after the rise of the bourgeoisie, with its ideology of "freedom, equality, property, and Bentham," gender oppression has to be justified with references to the "state of nature prior to social relations." Political interpretations of biological differences to justify hierarchy in the face of the ideology of equality emerged: racism, modern sexism, and meritocracy (e.g., the concept of measurable intelligence correlated to financial success, racialization of the pauperized working class, etc.).
Yoshie