A Dialogue in which Ursula K. LeGuin, Elaine Spencer, David Kabat, Johanna Brenner & Janice Haaken, Maureen McGuire and Katherine Dunn respond to an Article by Melvin Konner I ( V ^h e and He” came our way recently. In examining this issue, a subject ^of continuing fascination to all of us, Konner raises questions and offers evidence for a provocative and controversial point of view. We felt it would be valuable to have a number of people who were interested in the subject, some of them scientists, offer their responses to Konner’s article. Though no one can have the last word on this subject, at least not at present, at stake are not only how we perceive and relate to one another, but a wide array of legal and public considerations as well. The Article AC nk o e rr i E n h e r h H a u r t d t, t , J u Pl a ia tr n ic ni e a I G m o p ld er m at a o n - , M S cG ar in a l h e y B , l a C f a fe ro r l H N a a d g y y , Jacklin, Annelise Korner, Eleanor Emmons Maccoby, Alice Rossi, Beatrice Blyth Whiting. These are the names of some distinguished women scientists who devote their lives to the study of brain hormones, or behavior, human and animal. They range from the world famous to the merely well known. Each, within her discipline, has a reputation for tough-mindedness. All have in common that they have given considerable attention (most of them many years) to the question of whether the sex differences in behavior each has observed — in the field, in the clinic, and in the laboratory — biological. Without exception, they have answered this question in the affirmative. One cannot imagine that they did so without difficulty. Each has suffered, personally and professionally, from the ubiquitous discrimination against women that is common outside the academy and within it. Each has worked with some man who envisioned her — in his heart of hearts — barefoot, meek, pregnant, and in the kitchen. Each has sacrificed more than the average brilliant man to get in a position to work on a problem that troubles her intellectually, and the payment of that sort of price makes the truth more compelling. Nevertheless, each is wise enough to know that over the long course of time, the very sorts of oppression she has experienced are bulwarked and bastioned by theories Drawing by Stephen Leflar have a basis that is in part of “natural” gender differences. These women are doing a balancing act of formidable proportions. They continue to struggle, in private and in public, for equal rights and equal . treatment for people of both sexes; at the same time, they uncover and report evidence that the sexes are irremediably different — that after sexism is wholly stripped away, after differences in training have gone the way of the whalebone corset, there will still be something different, something that is grounded in biology. Like many stories in modern behavioral science, this one begins with Margaret Mead. She was one of the greatest of all social scientists. In a world in which all odds were against it, she established a concept of human differences as more flexible, wo w more malleable, more buffeted by the winds of life experience — as delivered by our very different cultures — than anybody had then thought possible. And this concept has stood the test of time. No question so engaged her interest as that of the role of gender in behavior. In trip after stubborn trip to the South Seas, she gathered information impossible to come by otherwise. Among headhunters and fishermen, medicine men and exotic dancers, in steamy jungles, on mountaintops, on vivid white beaches, in bamboo huts, in meeting houses on stilts high above water, in shaky- looking seagoing bark canoes, she took out her ubiquitous notebook and recorded the behavior and beliefs of men and women who had never heard of American sex roles. By 1949, when Male and Female was published, she had done so in seven remote societies. In all her cultures there was homicidal violence, and in all, that violence occurred at the hands of men. Tcham- buli men may have been effeminate in relation to certain American conventions, but they were still very devoted to taking victims — and, more traditionally, hunting heads. Mundugumor men were unthreatened by having their women provide for them. But that was because it freed them to plot and fight. This may be traced in a like manner through all the world’s thousands of different cultures. In every culture there is at least some homicide, in the context of war or ritual or in the context of daily life, and in every culture men are mainly responsible for it. There are, of course, individual exceptions, but there is no society in the ethnographic or historical record in which men do nearly as much baby and child care as women. This is not to say anything, yet, about capacity; it is merely a statement of plain, observable fact. Men are more violent than women, and women are more nurturant, at least towards infants and children, than men. Even in dreams the distinction holds. In a study of dreams in 75 tribal societies around the world, men were more likely to dream of coitus, wife, weapon, animal, red, while women were more likely to dream of husband, mother, father, child, cry. Of course, this is ethnographic fact, and that raises some eyebrows. Although cross-cultural surveys are quantitative in nature, they are based on individual studies consisting mainly of mere description. As such, they are the victims of “hard science” snobbery. That snobbery is most ill- founded. Ethnology is in its earliest phase as a science. Just as “mere” description of the look of a newly delineated brain region or a type of liver cancer as they appear under the microscope is a first step on a new path in science, so, equally, is the description of a society — description using the human eye, ear, and mind without computers. evertheless, .. 1 quantification and, at least until we recognize as necessary, recently, such quantification was more usual in the work of psychologists than of anthropologists. For many years now, psychologists in the Western world have studied gender differences, and they have done so with an exactitude very difficult to match in the tropical jungle. Eleanor Maccoby, an elder stateswoman of American psychology, and Carol Jacklin, a young scientist trained in part by Maccoby, have, after years of work on the problem, written a major book, The Psychology of Sex Differences. It not only summarizes their own work but, more important, systematically reviews and tabulates hundreds of carefully described and annotated studies by other investigators. They review studies of sex differences on scores of different dimensions — tactile sensitivity, vision, discrimination learning, social memory, general intellectual abilities, achievement striving, self-esteem, crying, fear and timidity, helping behavior, competition, conformity and imitation, to name only a few. For most of these dimensions it may be emphatically stated that there is no consistent pattern of gender difference. For almost all there are at least some studies that find a gender difference in either direction — usually both — and many studies that find no difference. Indeed, the main thrust of the book is to demolish cliche after cliche about the difference between boys and girls, men and women. There is no evidence that girls and women are more social, more suggestible, have lower self- esteem or less achievement motivation than boys and men, or that boys and men are more analytic. In the realms of tactile sensitivity and fear and timidity there is weak evidence of a gender difference — girls show more of these. There is also weak evidence that girls are more compliant than boys and less involved in assertions of dominance. In the realm of cognitive abilities, there is good evidence for superiority of girls and women in verbal ability and of boys and men in spatial and quantitative ability. But the strongest case for gender difference is made in the realm of aggressive behavior. Out of 94 comparisons in 67 different quantitative studies, 57 comparisons showed statistically significant sex differences. Fifty-two of the 57 studies that showed differences showed boys to be more aggressive than girls. Maccoby and Jacklin do not report on studies of nurturance per se, but in an earlier book, published in 1966, Maccoby summarized 52 studies in a category called “nurturance and affiliation”; in 45 studies, girls and women showed more of it than boys and men, while in only two did males score higher, with five showing no difference. While it is difficult to get accurate information in nonindustrial cultures on such measures as verbal and spatial ability, a number of excellent studies have been done on child behavior, using techniques of measurement and analysis that live up to a high standard of rigor. Beatrice Whiting has been a leader in this field, originating techniques of study and sending students out to remote corners of the Earth (as well as making field trips herself) to bring back accurate knowledge about behavior. She is one of the most quantitatively oriented of anthropologists and may be said to have built an edifice of exactitude on the foundation that was laid by Margaret Mead. She has been at it for about 40 years. In a series of investigations that came to be known as the Six Cultures study, Whiting, together with John Whiting and other colleagues, studied children’s behavior through These women report evidence that the sexes are irremediably different — that after sexism is stripped away, there will still be something different, something that is grounded in biology. direct, detailed observations, in standard settings, distributed throughout the day. These observations were made by teams in a New England town called Orchard Town — its identity is still a mystery Excerpted from The Tangled Wing, Copyright © 1982 by Melvin Konner. Reprinted with permission from Holt, Rinehart & Winston. — and in five farming and herding villages throughout the world. In Mexico, Kenya, India, Japan, and the Philippines, as well as in New England, hundreds of hours of observations were made. In all six cultures, boys differed from girls in the direction of greater egoism and/or greater aggressiveness, usually both. The difference varies greatly from culture to culture, presumably in response to different degrees of inculcation of gender role. Even more interesting, the girls in one culture may be more aggressive than the boys in another. But the direction of the difference within any culture is always the same. In other words, studies of children who are not fully socialized to their cultures underscore gender differences in the areas of aggressiveness and nurturance. It may be argued that the children in Whiting’s studies had nevertheless 20 Clinton St. Quarterly Clinton St. Quarterly 21
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