Defending Womanhood
Madeleine MacKenzie, Politics Editor
Throughout history, various cultural movements have significantly altered people’s understanding of gender. In the 1970s, the push for the enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment sought to eliminate all legal distinctions between men and women. However, women’s activist Phyllis Schlafly, among others, opposed it because the ERA threatened to erode the legal and social protections that honor women’s unique roles as mothers, caregivers, and citizens. The ERA did not pass, not due to the common claim of patriarchy or misogyny, but because it was an attempt to undermine women, wrapped in a deceptive package of elusive equality.
More recently, the LGBTQ movement has sought to expand gender theory and eliminate binary definitions entirely. Public figures like J.K. Rowling have openly opposed this idea, asserting that dismissing biological sex undermines women’s identity and their safety. Pushback has also come in the form of legislation, such as President Trump’s executive order, which declared that there are only two genders.
These events and trends reveal a growing societal shift from recognizing gender as a meaningful distinction to treating it as a construct that should be eliminated and replaced with a fluid spectrum. This argument echoes Judith Lorber’s Paradoxes of Gender, an inherently anti-feminist document that attempts to disenfranchise established truth and suppress what it means to be a woman.
Lorber argues that feminists should do what they can to break down gender distinctions because they cannot be avoided in terms of superiority or inferiority. Lorber hopes women are naive enough to believe that they are inferior because they are women, and insists their identity must be separate from their womanhood.
Lorber tells women their identity is not rooted in their struggle, in their unique ability to create life, in their distinctive feminine genius. It is anti-woman to cling to this identity because it is an unavoidably inferior mark. Nothing more than falling victim to social apparatuses and unequal statuses.
Paradoxes of Gender establishes the intellectual groundwork for the outside interests, such as the modern gender-theory activist agenda, which seeks to tear away at women’s identities and label them bigoted for acknowledging biological reality.
To be a woman is an entirely different experience from that of a man. I am proud to be a woman, and I understand that this label does not mean that I am inferior; instead, it means I am unique. The female experience cannot be reduced to a social illusion because it is lived and it is real.
Lorber’s argument doesn’t just disparage women. It’s absurd.
Lorber encourages rebellion against gender norms and the avoidance of “producing” them in daily interaction. Why, however, should women be ashamed, even afraid, to produce gender? I know that by looking at me, you can tell I am a woman. That has never been a problem for me. I don’t believe in this notion that “woman” is synonymous with “problem”. I produce my gender through the way I dress, the way I speak, my desire to have children, and my sensitivity. These expressions do not limit me; they complete me. And they exist because I am a woman.