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CIAO DATE: 8/01
The Fonda Effect
On The Issues
May 2001
To its discredit, Harvard University has accepted a major donation earmarked for advancing the trendy but shoddy scholarship of a controversial gender theorist.
In March, Jane Fonda, the movie star, gave Harvard University $12.5 million to establish a Center on Gender and Education. Its purpose is to advance the research of Carol Gilligan, the celebrated professor of gender studies at Harvard's School of Education.
Ms. Gilligan is understandably elated by Ms. Fonda's praise and generosity. "I am so moved by my sister; it's a dream," she was quoted saying. Ms. Fonda, too, is fulfilling a dream: "Everything in my life for a long time has led me to this point." Although both women were thrilled, this is a gift Harvard should have rejected.
Ms. Gilligan, a developmental psychologist, established her reputation in the 1980s by claiming that men and women reason differently about morality. They speak "in a different voice," as she put it. Men are more abstract, women more caring and flexible.
Many feminists were tantalized by the idea that women were different from men, and possibly morally superior to them. Colleagues, including a number of feminist academics, like Faye Crosby at the University of Santa Cruz and Zella Luria at Tufts, have asked that Ms. Gilligan produce some genuine evidence for her sweeping claims. She has yet to do so, preferring to say, in answer to her critics, that thousands of readers resonate to her message. As the Harvard Crimson noted in a recent investigative piece on Ms. Gilligan, inspired in part by my own request for her research materials: "Some of her colleagues say reader resonance is no substitute for hard data."
The Perils of "Patriarchy"
In the 1990s, Ms. Gilligan announced a second momentous discovery: Children, under "patriarchy," suffer a demoralizing loss of self-esteem. Girls who are outspoken and spirited at age nine become silent and withdrawn as they enter adolescence. Ms. Gilligan ascribed the plight of girls to a kind of "psychological footbinding."
Boys suffer as much or worse, but at an even earlier age. According to Ms. Gilligan, somewhere between the ages three and seven, boys are "pushed from their mothers" and forced to "internalize the patriarchal voice." This traumatic socialization supposedly shuts boys down emotionally and renders them vulnerable to a variety of mental illnesses.
Ms. Gilligan believes that our society cannot prosper until it stops imposing gender stereotypes on children. Boys must be freed from the norms forced upon them by "the culture of the warrior, the economy of capitalism." Girls must be liberated from the stereotypes that require them to be "nice and kind."
For one reason or another, Ms. Fonda found this utterly persuasive. But should we? For one thing, Ms. Gilligan's claims about children run up against common sense. American teenage girls are, arguably, among the most gregarious and outspoken in the world; "nice and kind" are perhaps not the first words that come to mind when describing them. Nor is it clear that boys are suffering from some kind of separation trauma by being pulled away from their mothers.
But common sense need not be our only guide to judging Ms. Gilligan's work. Not surprisingly, she enjoys a higher standing among feminist academics than among academic research psychologists. Scholars who follow the protocols of social science do not accept the reality of an adolescent "crisis" of confidence and "loss of voice."
In 1993, American Psychologist published an article reporting the new consensus among researchers in adolescent development: "It is now known that the majority of adolescents of both genders successfully negotiate this developmental period without any major psychological or emotional disorder [and] develop a positive sense of personal identity." As for the claim that males are emotionally insensitive and prone to violence because the culture pushes them from their mothers, almost no one takes that idea seriously. Thirty years of research shows that it is estrangement from the other parent—the father—that puts boys at risk for juvenile delinquency and violence.
But when Ms. Fonda read Ms. Gilligan's work she found it all to be profoundly true. "It rocked me to the core," she says. Ms. Gilligan convinced her that our children need to be rescued from the constraints of masculinity and femininity. "The damage done to boys and men as a result of these gender strictures is very profound," Ms. Fonda claims.
Many elementary schools have taken Ms. Gilligan's research seriously and already embarked on a program to free children from "gender norms." Elisabeth Krents, admissions director at the Dalton School, one of New York's elite private academies, boasts of its determination to get rid of any conventional boy/girl behavior. "We don't say, 'OK, boys into the dress-up corner, girls into the block area,' but we build it into everything we do. In second grade, they are studying Grimms' fairy tales, analyzing the gender stereotypes."
Ms. Fonda's millions given to America's premier school of education will undoubtedly help produce many more educators like Ms. Krents. Even so, it is hard to imagine seven-year-old boys and girls enjoying such a didactic exercise. It conjures images of children in China during the Cultural Revolution "analyzing" stories for themes of capitalist imperialism.
Luckily, despite their teachers' best efforts, boys are not cooperating with efforts to resocialize them in the direction of femininity. One Baltimore teacher tried desperately to get a group of fourth-grade boys to accept the idea of boys playing with dolls. But as a classroom observer reported: "Their reaction was so hostile, the teacher had trouble keeping order."
A Further Diversion
Ms. Fonda's new center will not succeed in repealing the laws of nature; it will, however, promote educational reforms that will make a lot of children—especially little boys—thoroughly confused and miserable. It will also further divert teachers from their central mission of educating children.
Harvard, which normally defends academic standards and rules of evidence, has traditionally made an exception when it comes to its Graduate School of Education. Ms. Fonda took advantage of this, shrewdly insisting that the new center have "Harvard" in its name. "When Harvard takes a step, a path is created," she noted. By accepting Ms. Fonda's money, Harvard has put itself in an academically untenable position.
Ms. Fonda "has taken Harvard by storm," said Jerome Murphy, dean of the education school. The center will be "influencing educational practice," said Harvey Feinberg, the excited Harvard provost. Yes it will, and that is why Mr. Murphy, Mr. Feinberg, and other Harvard enthusiasts should have thought twice before conferring institutional respectability on a movement that escalates the gender war in elementary schools and has nothing to do with education.
Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at AEI and the author of The War Against Boys. A version of this article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on March 9, 2001.
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