2.
Opinion
Page 4 University Daily Kansan, April 21, 1981
Biology leaves no question; women make better mothers
The following words of Betty Friedan, founder of the National Organization for Women, in a nutshell the aims of the movement in a nutshell are: 'The stand: "The challenge of the 80s will be to transcend (sex
ERIC BRENDE
role) polarities by creating new family patterns based on equality and full human identity for
Considering that the statement at its core consists of a contradiction, it will be interesting to see how the feminist movement proceeds in the coming years. For unless, by "equality," the feminist movement is important, then "equality" for both sexes contradicts "full human identity" for both sexes.
At the heart of the matter is the heredity vs. environment controversy. Friedan begins, as John Locke and B.F. Skinner did earlier on, from the mistaken premise that at the moment of birth human minds are uniform, blank sheets of paper onto which personalities and behavior patterns subsequently are etched by the process of social conditioning. According to the likes of Katherine Hassler, hypothetical man and female "sex roles" are just that: Roles, which people act "out" and which, therefore, can be wiped away at will without any psychological consequences.
And they ought to be, considering the inequality they bring about. That way, the reasoning goes, husbands and wives could relate to each other as "human beings" and raise a family as the "equals" they always were, deep down. And the result would be familiar bliss.
The optimism contained in this view of human psychology is exceeded only by its shallowness. The truth is that, from the moment of birth and before, the "seed" or "kernel" of a personality already exists, which has a feminine or masculine predisposition, depending on the sex. This predisposition society merely later reinforces.
Indeed, it would be naive for us to presume that we alone, among the higher species of life on the planet, were devoid of innately born behavioral differences between the sexes. Far more likely is the possibility that Mother Nature created two different sexes in humans in order for their traits to complement, rather than mirror, each other.
Thus, a woman's "full human identity" is not equal to a man's "full human identity," despite Friedman's assertion to the contrary, and the difference in her experiences concerning the family roots on a contradiction.
For skeptics there is concrete evidence. An ingenious psychological experiment recently demonstrated that 3-month-old boys listen to fairy tales with the left hemispheres of their brains, whereas 3-month-old girls listen to them with the right hemispheres. The findings are significant because they lend credence to the possibility that sex “roles” are the result of bioloy, not social conditioning.
And indeed, right-hemisphere functions are closely related to those qualities often associated with "femininity"—imagination, emotions, intuition. Likewise, left-hemisphere functions pertain to so-called masculine traits—such as analytical thinking. (An added biological feature in males is the presence of certain hormones that cause them to be more aggressive.)
Betty Friedan and other prominent feminists envision a family in which there would be a perfect division of labor between the sexes. But what are the sexes to do with their inherently complementary natures of the sexes?
Women, merely by living according to their feminine predispositions, make marvelous, nurturing mothers, and thereby create the ideal environment for the "seeds" of their babies' potential. Parents need a mother's love something for which there is no substitute, however, is a mother's anatomy.
As one child-development professor has described it, "Women have natural advantages in parenting. It's not just nursing... Mothers also have the experience of carrying the baby for nine months, and if the business of attachment (the famous 'mother-infant' bond) comes from sensitivity to being tuned in to a baby, mothers have the advantage."
Given their advantage, it is essential that mothers be the ones to stay in the home during the first three years of life of their children—the critical formative years—and highly preferable years. For two years more, while healthy personality development for their kids may still be touch and go.
Although it is true mothers aren't preprogrammed to push vacuum cleaners, it is also true that children are not motherly instinct to "mind the nest." Thus, after the critical years of their children have passed,
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mothers may well be better off making the most of housewifehold (admittedly now a dirty word) instead of abandoning ship and entering the ship. The more they also would maintain the stability of the household.
Fathers, on the other hand, while they may be important in child-rearing, are secondary in importance to the mother. The combination of innate aggressiveness and more analytical skills allows them to make them ideally suited to a role that nicely complements the mothers'; the role of the provider.
Let me insert that by no means do I advocate that women be forced to remain in the home or, for that matter, that men be forced to have jobs. In fact, people who really feel that it is in themselves to pursue something in the realm of the other sex should be encouraged to do so.
However, generally speaking, when husbands and wives attempt to "transcend" their sexual "polarities" and create "new family patterns based on equality and full human identity," they attempt the impossible. They attempt to apply a contradiction to real life. The result, which may be upon us already, is social chaos.
The times, they are a-changing,
and as long as babies are in vogue,
the diapers will need a-changing, too.
Just who will be changing the diapers
in the future, the female parent or
the male parent?
Who's minding the kids?
What was once easily answered "the female parent" can now be answered either way. And any family starting out today faces other related questions: Whose responsibility is child-rearing? Should there be paternity leave as well as maternity leave?
Responsibility of parenthood shared by men and women
These related questions are controversial ones, and they're debated here on this page today.
This is the story of Mr. Demers, a nice man who loved his wife very much. He loved his children very much, as all good moms and dads love their children. He was kind, patient, and that he fact, that he had a $2,000 a year job to take care
JUDY
WOODBURN
of his two kids and house while their mommy pursued her lifelong dream of finishing medical school.
When the mommy finally became a real doctor, and began pulling in 60,000年 early in emergency medicine, he began to get a little restless. Reting shoes, packing school lunches and organizing carpools were fine, but he needed a little more.
So Mr. Demers got the blue, business suit that had hung lifeless in his closet for more than 10 years. He was a big fan of the
The battle of sex roles
90x360fos ^81
Letters to the Editor
Atom bomb use can never be justified
To the editor.
I was very sorry to read that Clark Bricker, in an interview with the Daily Kansan, said he did not regret his involvement with the development of the atomic bomb.
He said, "I felt what I done is probably shortened the time of World War II. We saved lives."
This is a typical evaluation of "Hiroshima" among Americans I have talked with. I wish Bricker would visit Hiroshima and talk with those who are still suffering from their physical and mental damages since Aug. 6, 1945. I have to repeat these facts.
Despite Hiroshima's cries for peace, the nuclear armament race is becoming more fierce. We are threatened by nuclear catastrophe in these days though Bricker said, and because of the war we have with Hiroshima hope people all over the world learn a lesson from their tragic history in order to
Some 210,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the explosion. Most of the victims not military but citizens; and that's not all. Those who received extraordinary amounts of radiation died of cancer or leukemia. Their children and grandchildren have the tendency to have the same diseases.
An argument is that without "Hiroshima," the Japanese would have continued the war and more lives would have been lost. So the atomic bomb saved a lot of lives. This argument seems reasonable. But it is just an assumption.
I do not intend to justify the Japanese crimes nor charge the American government. The questions should be to our individual consciences rather than to international politics because nuclear weapons are the complete destruction of human beings. In any situation, the use of nuclear bombs should not be justified.
In fact, the Japanese government was seeking a way to cease fire before the atomic bombs were dropped. Wouldn't there have been any other alternative? And why should the people of Hiroshima have responsibility for Pearl Harbor?
Takahisa Ogawa
Tokyo, Japan, sophomore
Poor crew coverage
stop crazy military buildups. I seriously ask American scientists to realize their responsibility for the happiness of mankind and to join with the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the abolition of all nuclear weapons. No more Hiroshima! Toodai Ogawa
To the editor:
The results, with winning time, need take no more than two inches. If anyone should work to find that space for news about a student organization, they either student organization, your newspaper.
On March 28, the KU Crew swept the Washburn Crew here in Lawrence on the Kansas River. Saturday, April 11, the KU Crew won the Big Eight Championship in Manhattan on Tuttle Creek, winning four of seven events and taking two second place finishes.
Tadashi Ogawa
I congratulate the KU Crew, Big Eight Champions, and encourage the Kansas to inform the campus about their success. I hope that you will allow KU faculty and students to follow the progress of the crew throughout the remainder of the season.
The Kansas did not publish these facts, citing a lack of space.
Howard Moore Lawrence resident
Loans threatened
To the editor:
As if it had not been adequately demonstrated during his tenure as governor of California, Ronald Reagan's antipathy toward students has become manifest in the president's budget recommendations to Congress.
If the president has his way, federal grants to students will be cut back; students receiving grant money will be required to produce a certain amount of money themselves in order to pay for their survivaler's benefits for students will be reduced eventually to nothing; student loans will
become more expensive and harder to get; and
research grants will be practically eliminated.
There is not much that students can do to oppose those nigidly demagogues who claim to have won a Mandate of the People, because they afford expensive lobbying programs. However, they and Nancy Kassebaum, both claim to favor education, and Congressman Larry Winn purports to do wonderful things for the University of Kansas. I urge those students who stand to be financially expelled from school to write three and let them know that we need their help.
Robert Frigo Council Grove graduate studen
Union comments
To the editor:
The Kansan's reporting on discussions of faculty unionization needs a context. The AAPU, along with two other organizations (those organizations happen to be unions), meets in the fall to discuss the President's to speak at a meeting of faculty governance representatives at Emporia last week on the subject of securing better treatment for the Regents' budget requests in the legislation; unionization seems to be a possible means of budget improvement.
The idea was therefore somebody else's, and I told a recent AAUF meet briefly to check on my contacts.
I also (simply to give helpful background on a complex topic) responded at length to your reporters' questions. As for my own assessment of faculty reactions, I stand by my words of last July: 'The prospects for a reasonable economic level and a responsible decision-making role will be the main influences on faculty members' attitudes. In the next few years will determine their choices.' This is a prediction (which may yield different results at different schools); it is not an advocacy or a threat. William O. Scott
Professor of English
how to do that kind of thing now) and trotted off in search of a job.
But all Mr. Demers got were rejections.
Not a single employer in all of Dayton, Ohio, thought anything of his work as a daddy. Not even when he pointed out that it required many of the same skills necessary in the business world, such as effective time management, self-discipline and sacrifices, not to mention teamwork. This is one reason the record of previous employment and his bachelor's degree in business administration.
As the president of a prestigious employment agency put it, "There isn't a male executive I know of who would accept raising kids as a form of excuse for not working for three years."
He says he gets tired of having to talk about dinner each, but he likes it at home okay.
The very discouraged daddy finally got a job, making only half of what he had been earning before. He was making less than one-sixth of what the mommy was making. After two weeks on the job, he began to worry about the kids, about lining up baby sitters, about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. So Mr. Demers quit the job and went back home.
The story of Mr. Demers first appeared—in slightly more complex syntax—on the front page of the Wall Street Journal last week. Nobody can doubt that he was a very keen person of Mr. Demers. The men may have laughed at him; they may have felt a little sympathetic for what they thought was a very hempacked husband; or they may have thought he was just plain stupid for loving his wife and kids enough to be married to him. You can be sure, however, that they all thought the Demyers guy was unusual, very unusual.
For women readers, however, the story was probably more irony than oddity. Women know that Demers had been a Mrs, the story would never have been on page one of the Wall Street Journal.
It wouldn't even have been news.
On its face story reads like a tacky sitcom: Mommy goes to work while Daddy dons a frilly apron and bumbles around like Dagwood and quicksidacity, the story has two very important lessons.
First, it is living, breathing proof that, as Betty Friedan would say, "Anatomy is not destiny." There's no special chromosome in women that automatically makes them any better parents or homemakers than men. Daddy Demers proved that he could dispense kisses and handle diapers, dishes and general domesticity just as well as any Mom. And like it, too.
The idea that fathers can, and should, provide child care and just plain old tender love caring to children on an equal basis with mothers is nothing that runs contrary to nature. Society just keeps telling them they should be bringing home the bacon instead of cooking it.
Many times, men—and women—who want to believe a female's only real purpose is child-bearing point to her breasts and uterus as proof. But they are no more proof of a woman's true function or worth in life than a man's penis is of his.
It is a point that hardly requires debate anymore. The realities of the working world no longer support the outdated belief that women should work in the job market. Supreme Court ruled several years ago that because such a large percentage of women aged 18 to 64 were in the job market, the concept of women as the sole homemaker was invalid and therefore they were not automatically from lurvy duty.
The fact of the matter is that three out of five American families that included a husband and wife now have at least two wage earners trying to keep up with the soaring cost of living. The family where Mom stays home and knits boots just isn't an economic reality.
But children need care just as much as they require economic support, and that necessity is just not reflected in today's employment practices. Women, and increasingly, men, leave the workplace to care for their children only to find that they are out of work. And out of luck.
The ideal situation would be one in which employers recognize the importance of child care by providing paternity as well as maternity leaves, or by providing the option of part-time work to both sexes. That way, mothers and fathers can share responsibilities of caring for children in their early years without jeopardizing their livelihoods in the process.
Another solution would be to provide child care at parent's places of employment.
But most of the time, the American workplace does not recognize that its employees are human. And the story of Mr. Demers shows just how little regard the business community really has for the job of parenting, no matter who does it. The words of that employment agency preside come back to haunt us over and over again: "There's not a male executive . . . who would accept raising kids as a legitimate excuse for not working."
Remember that the next time somebody looks you square in the face and tells you, "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world." Don't believe it. The one who rocks the cradle all too often can't even get a job when he or she is done rocking it.
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The Kansan reserves the right to edit letters for publication.
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