Will gender rivalries impact institution of marriage?

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

Given the “gender nationalism” that was unleashed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency of the United States, is the battle between the sexes becoming literal?

Women’s groups such as Emily’s List, the National Organization for Women, and the Women Count Political Action Committee(WCPAC) provided unconditional and uncritical support for Clinton, held rallies on her behalf, reviled women who supported other candidates as “traitors,” and considered any criticism of Clinton as being motivated by misogyny and sexism.

From Chaviva Hosek, Michele Landsberg and Judy Rebick in Canada, and Betty Friedan, Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Gloria Steinem in the US, Jewish women have had a very high profile in the modern women’s movement, as theoreticians and activists. Clinton was supported by political strategists such as Ann Lewis, her senior campaign advisor.

Clearly, feminism, which has now become a political movement in America and Canada, has produced a paradigm shift in our society. Has the primary conflict become that of gender, as opposed to class, ethnicity, religion, or any other division?

I used to think there would be a “self-correcting mechanism” that would not allow animosities between men and women to go beyond a certain point. True, relations between the sexes have always been problematic and fraught with a kind of danger: After all, romance and love may involve rejection and humiliation of a particularly intimate and psychologically damaging sort, which oftentimes has resulted in negative feelings towards the opposite sex. This has been the stuff of novels and poems from time immemorial.

Still, most men and women have always somehow managed to accommodate and show concern for each other. After all, racial, ethnic or even religious groups can live in physically segregated and homogenous territories, up to and including sovereign states, should it prove necessary, but most men and women inhabit households that usually include partners of the other sex, may have both male and female children, and have parents and other relatives of both genders.

This, I thought, made it impossible to carry gender hostility to the levels we have seen among rival ethnicities, nationalities or religions throughout history.

To belabour the obvious, Gentiles don’t have to care about the fate of Jews, Serbs about Croats, Hindus about Muslims, or whites about Blacks. Callousness and indifference do not have an immediate and personal impact. Those who harbour particularly deep prejudices and hostilities can avoid, if they wish, most personal ties with the objects of their hatred or bigotry. But such separatism has been almost “biologically” impossible between men and women.

Nowadays all that seems to be changing, and a lot of male-female relations are beginning to feel like religious or ethnic intermarriage, in which larger group divisions can overwhelm what might otherwise be a harmonious alliance between two individuals.

Social scientists tell us that our identities are socially constructed – even if they do sometimes build upon physical traits such as skin colour or sex. Religions, ethnicities and cultures are the products of human development, not “natural” phenomena. And they only too often acquire significance when they become markers by which people segregate themselves into competing groups.

For example, Catholics married to Protestants do not face personal dilemmas if they live in a society where religion is not a salient political issue – say, in secular and liberal countries such as Canada or the United States – or where both their respective faiths are marginal – Hindu India or Muslim Iran, for instance.

But their religious background would remain a constant problem and have an immense impact on their lives in Northern Ireland, where members of their two faiths form antagonistic communities and vie for political power.

In the same way, a Jew and an Arab would have an easier time of it as a married couple in Arizona than in either Israel or Iraq, and a Black married to a white might prefer Indonesia to Zimbabwe. All of this is surely self-evident.

But gender is now forming an ideological and political fault line and is becoming a socially significant means of differentiating between people; it is thus assuming a role not that dissimilar to those historically occupied by ethnicity, language, culture and religion.
If men and women will indeed come to see each other primarily in terms of conflict, as contenders for jobs, power, position and status in society, then, with increasing frequency, heterosexual relationships may in the future face strains similar to those that used to be confined to unions that crossed ethnic or racial or religious lines.

And a very large percentage of marriages may become subject to the types of stresses previously confined to intermarriage. (Statistics Canada tells us that almost 40 per cent of marriages in this country now end in divorce.)

Perhaps there’s a material basis for this change in society. Men and women in our society simply don’t need each other as much as they once did. Women can work, and they don’t need men to provide for them. And advanced technology makes even the most basic reason for male-female cohabitation – reproduction – unnecessary.

Most members of historically antagonistic ethnic groups have always understood that it is prudent to avoid intimate relations with people from the opposing camp. That way lies grief. Are men and women now moving in the same direction? This will not be good for anyone, including Jews.