I had thought that I should expand a bit on my theory that pregnancy and lactation are not the absolute defining characteristics of women, especially after the Kansas City Chiefs place kicker decided to celebrate Mother’s Day by insulting his own mother, but plenty of other people said better things about that than I did. He did inspire me to look up to see how many other people had said the same things Butker did. There was the religious angle, espoused by Pope John Paul II. Given the place and occasion where Butker spoke, that might have been appropriate. I am not nearly good enough on my theology, however, to address those issues.
I looked for secular versions of the same spiel and hit a rich vein, especially the following piece by Charles Murray, one of the Ur-bigots of the contemporary Right. Most people know him as the co-author of the racist screed The Bell Curve but he, like all racists, holds women in complete contempt as well. Other people have taken his racist arguments apart quite well, and the large majority of those pieces can be found via Google. I am only going to address one of his assertions in the piece.
Murray asserts that “the historical reality of male dominance of the greatest achievements in science and the arts is not open to argument.” He then claims that this is because women have babies:
Among women who have become mothers, the possibilities for high-level accomplishment in the arts and sciences shrink because, for innate reasons, the distractions of parenthood are greater. To put it in a way that most readers with children will recognize, a father can go to work and forget about his children for the whole day. Hardly any mother can do this, no matter how good her day-care arrangement or full-time nanny may be. My point is not that women must choose between a career and children, but that accomplishment at the extremes commonly comes from a single-minded focus that leaves no room for anything but the task at hand. We should not be surprised or dismayed to find that motherhood reduces the proportion of highly talented young women who are willing to make that tradeoff.
Murray treats the problems of combining motherhood and devotion to career as if it’s a purely chemical reaction with no conscious actions involved. Motherhood denies women opportunities for excellence in the same way sodium reacts with chlorine. Nothing can possibly be done to change the environment in which this occurs any more than wheat can be grown in Antarctica. This assertion is obviously not true.
Figuring out the ways in which Murray is lying here requires teasing out he implies that women will never make contributions to the arts and sciences with the fact that, at least in his opinion, we have made very few contributions in the past. “To put it in a way that most readers with children will recognize, a father can go to work and forget about his children for the whole day. Hardly any mother can do this, no matter how good her day-care arrangement or full-time nanny may be.” This sentence is in the present tense. It is also an assertion that has no evidence to support it. Better historians dispute Murray’s assertions about women being unable to leave their children in other’s care. (Note: Blaffer Hrdy’s work on allomothers disproves Murray’s assertions.) By phrasing this in the present tense, Murray suggests that his assertion is as unchangeable as the melting point of zinc instead of a description of a historically-contingent condition of human society that is subject to change through public policy.
His assertion that women have made minimal contributions to the arts and sciences in the past also merits analysis. First, who decides what a ‘significant’ contribution is? In his own time, Shakespeare was popular in the pejorative sense. His work sold to the literature bourgeoisie but the people who would today be literary critics called him an ‘upstart crow.’ Only later did he become SHAKESPEARE. Now, I do love me some Bard of Avon and I agree that he really is the World Poet. That said, his work acquired the status they now enjoy through the efforts of a bunch of people promoting them and not because the words can be put in a test tube with a reagent and produce Greatness. There is a system involved, some of which is human prejudice.
Human prejudice was, in fact, the largest roadblock to women making important contributions in most of the fields Murray praises. How did one become a philosopher in the past? Were women encouraged to enter the schools or find the patrons that were the necessary supports for a career in philosophy? What made it possible for MEN to follow such careers in the past? I think it’s fair to assume that Plato had someone else to do his cooking and cleaning. Who were those people? Lots of that work was done by slaves. Would Murray argue that human achievement depends on slavery?
He specifically states that no woman is in the first rank of composers. He never defines what makes a person one of the ‘first rank’ of composers, which makes it impossible — and I do believe this is deliberate — to argue that a particular woman composer in the past deserves attention in the same way, say, Bach does. We do have an example, however, of how one woman was precluded from becoming a great composer. Nannerl Mozart was Wolfgang’s sister. She played piano and harpsichord and, as the Wiki notes, was sometimes given billing over her brother. Clearly the girl had talent. She was, however, a girl, and her father Leopold stopped allowing her to perform when she was 18 so that she could be married off. She did continue to teach piano and pursued as much of a musical career as she was permitted.
It should be noted, contra Murray, that Nannerl left her oldest son in the care of her father and servants. Leopold Mozart raised his namesake grandson while his daughter returned to overseeing her household and teaching piano. Historians speculate on why Nannerl allowed this, but it was indeed unusual for the time and place. There is no evidence that she ever regretted this decision. To be fair, there’s no evidence that she didn’t regret it either. Still, it’s clear that she allowed her son to be raised by someone else while she was working and this did not affect her work, which was highly regarded.
No one can say that Nannerl would have been the genius her brother was. What we can say is that she was exceptionally talented and committed to music but wasn’t allowed the opportunity to fully express that commitment. She was required to perform other tasks that kept her away from composing. Not only was her time not her own, but her internal world — inside her own mind — almost certainly inhibited her ability to express whatever genius she had. Her world, both internal and external, was made much smaller than her brother’s. This was a deliberate act.
Murray ignores completely the effect that human agency has on the world. His geniuses just drop from heaven like the gentle rain, to steal a metaphor from one mentioned earlier, fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus and float through time like asteroids, subject only to the mindless laws of physics. Philosophers make contributions like acids combine with bases to make salts, and everyone immediately perfectly recognizes their unique brilliance. Calling this ‘wrong’ is an insult to the concept of wrong. It is malicious concealment of history.
What distinguishes Shakespeare from Steven Spielberg is 400 years. Humans have had time to learn that the Upstart Crow had some brilliant things to say, and also to interpret Shakespeare’s works in ways that made him more brilliant now than when he wrote 420 or so years ago. I referenced part of Portia's famous closing argument above. When “The Merchant of Venice” was originally performed, Shylock wore a red fright wig and a huge fake nose. It was only when the 19th Century Shakespearean Edmund Kean humanized the moneylender that anyone noticed the subtleties in the character. Interpretation and performance changed the text. Kean didn’t treat the play’s text mindlessly. Human agency changed a character from an offensive stereotype to a complex and human character study.
Charles Murray must HATE Edmund Kean.
Human behavior is not infinitely malleable, but it’s a lot more changeable than we think. We don’t have to accept that women are inferior to men and incapable of genius just because women haven’t had the chance to create great works before now.
Also, I am NOT saying that we have to throw out Shakespeare or Mozart because they produced their works in an unjust era. For one thing, there’s a lot of room for women to interpret those works now. One element of a genius is producing works that outlast the creator and allow for many interpretations. There are women today who could be Edmund Kean for Lady Macbeth or Cleopatra or Shylock or Othello. What we won’t know is whether women’s contemporary creations stand the test of time because we won’t be here in 400 years. We have to wait, but that doesn’t mean we have to wait passively.
Murray’s thesis — that motherhood is Just A Thing that keeps women from doing anything really important — is a counsel for laziness. Nothing can be done so best just continue as is. If we took his advice to its logical conclusion, we could simply close the patent and copyright offices because all the science and art possible has already been made. Calvin Coolidge actually proposed closing the US Patent office a century ago because he thought we had already invented everything possible. Just like inventions, social systems can change. We have agency and can make new ones. The Charles Murrays of the world will hate it, but that makes it much more fun.
Excellent. BTW, I was pleased to see that the Benedictine nuns pushed back sharply.
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/harrison-butker-benedictine-nuns-commencement-speech-rcna152896