The Gender of Rationality

Jill Lepore wrote an article in this week’s New Yorker (“Just the Facts, Ma’am: Fake Memoirs, Factual Fictions, and the History of History) about the difference between ‘history’ and ‘fiction’. Tracing the twin development of historiography and novels, Lepore’s main point is that the two genres are more similar than we would commonly believe – no more than two different kinds of history, each with its own form of truth. History books are, like novels, a form of “literary art” (pp. 80) and are never as ‘objective’ and unbiased as they claim to be; fictional stories on their part often convey larger truths about the human condition (they can ‘ring true’). What has separated them in the public mind has less to do with objective than with cultural standards of ‘truth’. Our standard looks for neutrality and empiricism: this means that we accept the outsider’s perspective and emotional distance of historiography as ‘fact’, while the personal perspectives and passions that take center stage in novels become its antithesis.

What is interesting to me is that this divide between two kinds of truth came to be drawn along gendered lines as well as literary ones. As Lepore recounts, the history of novels had by the eighteenth century become a women’s history. That realm of histories told through the eyes of individuals and through the stained-glass of affect and motivation, whose truths lie in the plausibility and universality of the experiences they recount, appealed to women’s processes of thought and experience. History, on the other hand, did not interest them – this ‘objective’, ‘neutral’ account of events that became men’s domain. Add to this, of course, the common rejection of novels as fancy and fantasy, the consequent fear of novels’ power to corrupt the minds of young women, and you not only ‘prove’ that men and women think differently, but also that women’s thought is somehow less true than that of men.

This is an incredibly interesting issue, but one I never know what to make of. These theories about gender differences in patterns of thought comes up in (cultural) psychiatry as well. It is invoked to explain gender differences in the prevalence and course of disease (are women more prone to depression or bipolar disorder because they are more sensitive to emotional mood swings?), and sometimes even factors into treatment decisions (as in, it informs the doctor’s goals of treatment. What is considered ‘normal’ affect for a man differs from what is considered ‘normal’ for a woman. An interesting discussion of this is Sara Starks & Joel Braslow’s historical overview of psychiatry in the post WWII-decades. They show that doctors were more likely to perform lobotomies on women because its side-effects interfered a lot less with women’s ideal behavior than with men’s).
No doubt there is some truth to all this – I am willing to accept the idea that women, in general, may tend to think more concretely and relationally than men do. I won’t bring up the critique of overgeneralization here, because as much as that critique should always be kept in mind, this article really does not intend to suggest that all women think in similar ways – and that they are categorically different from men. Nor, I think, do psychiatrists intend to do so (not all of them, anyway). But what I do want to bring up – because I think this article facilitates this question – is the issue of causality, or better said, the question of the chicken and the egg. That is, if these ‘generalizations’ are true, why are they true? What came first? Are women born with different wiring, that then gives rise to different ways of socializing and different domains of cultural activity (as some evolutionary psychologists would argue)? Or do culturally prescribed gender roles and expectations socialize men and women – born with equal potential – to develop their patterns of thought in different ways to match these expectations? Many anthropologists will argue that the impact of socialization is significant: women learn in large part to think more relationally and concretely because as girls they are socialized immediately into caretaking roles. They are taught to view the world and their actions in the terms of their relationships to others (a woman acts not just for herself, but for her children, and her husband), while a man is trained to pursue his own goals.
Even if there were some different wiring at birth – which I think we should not assume at all until it can be in any way ‘proven’ – the second scenario (the constructivist viewpoint) seems to me much more plausible and realistic. We are social beings who are not determined fully by our biology at all. We cannot disregard the incredible shaping force of our cultural environment. (Of course, much of my own work critiques this viewpoint, arguing that we are not fully or passively shaped by our environment. My point is that we are not passive blocks of clay but rather active intakers who confront and respond to the cultural environment in ways that are not always predictable. Nevertheless, a shaping influence is always there – that I assume to be true).

In any case, all this means that women did not ‘dislike’ history because they were born with a relational and concrete mind that eschewed ‘facts’, but rather because they were trained and expected to dislike it. Their consequent focus on novels as models of truth cannot have had a negligible effect on the solidification of even more relational, emotionally oriented, perspectives on ‘truth’ and ‘history’.
The article does not address this question directly – when I mentioned above that it facilitated the question, I meant to suggest that I think the article leaves the issue open. It does not unequivocally accept the idea that women are ‘naturally’ anything, and suggests through its wording and use of quotes that it disagrees, at least, with historical judgments of women as aversive to history.
Of course, the very reason for writing this article, as Lepore suggests, is the fact that these boundaries between history/men and novels/women have been blurring. Historiography has begun to tackle ‘alternative’ histories: personal accounts and relationships, the stories of subaltern populations, ‘social history’, ‘family history’, and so on. In other words, it has begun to tread back onto the territory traditionally claimed by novels. What hasn’t changed, according to the article, is the gender divide. Women still make up the bulk of fiction buyers, and men buy the bulk of history. What drives the changes in historiography, then, seems to have little to do with changing gender relations and patterning of thought. Lepore suggests that what is really going on is an emerging rejection of ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ history altogether – that not only women, but men too, miss the element of storytelling, emotion, and personal accounts that novels provide. Can we conclude that men, perhaps, aren’t so different from women in their patterns of thought at all?