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Carolina Civic Voice Winter 2005-06 Vol. 5, No 4 |
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On the Other Hand "ARE WOMEN HUMAN?"
Surprised by the question? Well, there is no reason to be. It happens to be the title of the latest book by Michigan University Law Professor, Catharine Alice MacKinnon. As I write (in mid-January), the book is not yet out, but there is little mystery about what its ironic title is really asking. MacKinnon was born in Minneapolis and was only two years old when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations (1948). Its thirty articles summed up the rights that were supposed to belong to ALL human beings by the very fact of being human. Coming in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi holocaust and all the other atrocities of World War II, the reaction of any detached observer upon reading its high ideals might well have been either to laugh, or to cry, or simply to stammer "Are you kidding!?!" But after these last fifty-seven years, if one tries to read the record honestly, it must be admitted that a surprising number of advances have been made around the world as a result of the UDHR. Even nations that endlessly violate its ideals are aware that they are being watched and are being challenged to live up to its higher standards. That's the good news. But the really bad news is that it is not just a few rogue states that have significant blind spots in certain areas of human rights. One of the worst of these was (and still is) racism, which W.E.B. DuBois tried desperately to have the U.N. deal with openly even as the UDHR was being formulated. Progress has been made in the interim, certainly, but much still remains to be done. The twin issue of racism is sexism, and it is this blind spot that is addressed in the overall work of Catharine MacKinnon, work that deserves wider recognition. The fact that she has always had critics should come as no surprise, and a case can be made that on occasion she has pushed in some directions that did not prove responsive. But this should not be allowed to obscure the magnitude of the contributions she has actually made. By asking in 2006 (the year of her sixtieth birthday): "Are Women Human?", she is zeroing in ever more concisely on the question that has been her central interest throughout her impressive career. Like her mother and grandmother before her, Catharine graduated from Smith College (1968). She went on to Yale Law School for her J.D. (1977), and earned a Ph.D. in political science, also at Yale (1987). Her father was a prominent Republican lawyer who was named a federal judge by President Nixon. It is thus no wonder that she became very familiar with the workings of the U.S. legal system "up-close and personal" from early on, and viewed some of its shortcomings with dismay. In her time at Yale the first 'sexual harassment' cases were being filed in U.S. courts, and, for the most part, they did not fare well. The male-dominated system was inclined to see them as frivolous and readily got rid of them with summary dismissal, not bothering to dignify them with serious counter-arguments. What struck MacKinnon was the ease with which this situation was accepted. The 'good-ole'-boy' fraternity was simply part of the woodwork. The UDHR did not seem to be invoked where 'women's rights' were in question. It was just one of those bewildering blind spots. Judges seemed to consider men's sexual overtures toward women in the workplace as merely a form of complimenting the women rather than providing grounds for any kind of serious complaint, even though the practice could have dire economic and advancement consequences for women who rebuffed the offenders. The female half of the human race often seemed relegated to lesser standards (and lower wages), apparently because the workplace was ruled by males and women were meant to serve only in subordinate positions. The chance to call public attention to this unwarranted assumption was too much for MacKinnon to ignore, so her decision to probe this anomaly launched her on her life's major work. Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (Yale University Press, 1979), her first book, was not only a legal milestone, but was a wake-up call that opened an entirely new era not only for U.S. law but for international law as well. The clarity of her common-sense arguments signaled that a new theory was on the rise, and by 1981 Harvard Law Professor, Laurence Tribe, for one, was introducing her original thinking about sex discrimination into his constitutional law class. MacKinnon herself participated in the 1986 case in which, for the first time, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized sexual harassment as a cause of legal action. She was being listened to (as well as criticized) as her ideas began to have an impact. The next year she published Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Harvard University Press, 1987), reinforcing her basic contentions as her audience grew. What disturbed some of her critics was her insistence on how deep the roots of the problem really run, and the fact that this had gone unaddressed and unrecognized for so long, even in the most progressive legal circles. At bottom sexist practices were due to a structural aberration of the patriarchal society itself, resulting invariably in forms of unjust exploitation and unequal treatment of women. Part of this problem was addressed in her 1989 work, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Harvard University Press), noting how profoundly sexual inequality is institutionalized in multiple areas of society. The Supreme Court of Canada explicitly adopted some of her approaches in the early 1990s. Before her work there was no "legally usable concept of sexual harassment," whereas today in decent law libraries there are dozens of works developing her ideas on dealing with the problem. Women's Lives, Men's Laws (Harvard Univ. Pr., 2005) is a collection of her writings, speeches, and briefs from 1980 to 1997. It puts on full display her uncanny ability to combine convincing theory with practical reform proposals. In the process she rattles the liberal tradition by isolating its "substantive misogyny," its failure to deal with the socially-constructed "asymmetry of power" by which male domination is allowed to continue as somehow "natural." One powerful example she pointed to was Bosnia where it was well known at the time that many women were being raped by more than thirty men per day for months on end as part of an official policy of "ethnic cleansing." Yet these atrocities were not recognized, denounced and condemned as "war crimes" by international law (i.e., law developed and interpreted by men). It is here that one can best see the full import of her 2006 question: Are Women Human? She is not asking a question about the UDHR or any other documents. Her question is directed at the prevailing human rights model. She insists on the dire need to "replace the formal concept of equality as it has been understood in the law." This model is simply not good enough. It has been allowed to stand as an ideal even while women are being "sold into sexual slavery, veiled, silenced, imprisoned in homes, bred to work as menials for little or no pay, stoned for sex outside marriage, and burned within it. Mutilated genitally, impoverished economically, and mired in illiteracy—all as a matter of course and without effective recourse." MacKinnon eloquently and insistently calls for a richer, more substantive concept of equality that would refuse to ignore the oppression of women anywhere, under any circumstances. It is in large part due to her special influence that sexual abuse of women is now more widely regarded, not just as a minor misfortune, an accident of the status quo, but as a major human rights violation in both domestic and international law. Her challenge to every thinking person is to do all they can to remove the age-old blind spot. "Are women human?" No, and neither are men, at least not fully, unless and until all can learn to settle for nothing less than "a single standard of human dignity and entitlement," instead of the double standard that has plagued patriarchal societies for so long. It requires a difficult transformation of mind and heart, but Catharine MacKinnon has certainly done far more than her share to help wake us up to the necessity—and showing us the way to seeing human rights with new eyes.
Jim Megivern is Professor Emeritus of Religion and Philosophy at UNC Wilmington, and a regular columnist for CCV. |
