Journal of Adult Development, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1994

The Social Construction of Gender S o p h i e F r e u d 1,2

The categories provided by the language of our culture give us a meaning-making framework that guides our perception of the world. This paper views the process of categorizing people from a constructivist perspective. It argues that many categories such as race, nationality, homosexuality, and gender are arbitrary social constructions created to fill some human purpose based on sociopolitical rather than biological or "natural" considerations. Similarity among people may arise from a history of being in the same category rather than being the basis for categorization. Whereas people are attached to categories that shape their identity and unite with other persons from similar categories to fight for their rights, they should also envisage the possibility of revising these arbitrary categories. KEY WORDS:

Categories; constructivism;gender; sexuality; social construction.

a simple step that presumably did not change my personal essence, talents, energy, etc., and yet enormously increased my chances for a good enough life. These same potentially destructive categories---such as nationality, ethnicity, religion, race and, of course, g e n d e r - - a r e also the very ones that define our identity. We are very attached to them and, indeed, often ready to die for them. Only cowards are said not to be ready to die for their country. There is an urgency, at this m o m e n t in history, to examine all categories--reminding ourselves that they are mere social creations--and to justify their social utility. A mental exercise in making existing categories relative will not abolish them, a preposterous goal opposed by almost everyone regardless of their own categories. Still, it deserves some reflection. We live in a revisionary time in which small new steps are constantly being taken leading us to an unknown future. I shall use the most widely agreed upon category of gender for consideration. I shall suggest that gender is primarily a social construction and that its use as a major organizing principle of our whole social world and of our very identity is an historical process not based on inevitable biological necessity. After a brief overview of the essence of constructivist ideas, I shall focus on the social construction of categories and the social construction of dualities

INTRODUCTION H u m a n beings have devised language and, with it, categories to introduce organization and meaning into an otherwise chaotic world. It is this capacity for symbolic thinking that makes us distinctly human. Yet these same life-sustaining categories have also been used in divisive ways since time immemorial. Some categories of people have been able to amass power, .at least for a period of time, and then use it to kill, subjugate, and exploit humans who belong to different categories. An important consequence of these victories was often the very creation and definition of new categories by those in power. F r o m an o u t s i d e r ' s viewpoint, d i f f e r e n c e s among categories might often seem quite minimal and indistinct (e.g., those between the ethnic groups in former Yugoslavia, especially since intermarriages between ethnic groups must have been very common). Yet, belonging to one or another category shapes one's life. I changed from the category of refugee to the category of A m e r i c a n at the age of 21, 1Simmons College, School of Social Work, Boston, Massachusetts 02115. 2Correspondence should be directed to Sophie Freud, 34 Laurel Drive, Lincoln, Massachusetts 01773. 37

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38 that, taken together, have constructed gender. As a social work educator and clinician, I shall attempt to show not only the philosophical importance of these ideas but also their practical utility for these professions.

SOCIAL C O N S T R U C T M S M The social constructivist perspective adopted here is an important core of the postmodern paradigm that has spread over all disciplines. It considers our social and even, to a large extent, our physical world as a human enterprise, a human invention. It postulates that our understanding of the world is based not on objective facts, truths, or realities, but on more or less consensual social constructions. Consensual agreements may actually be limited, or at least seldom explicit, because of the multiple constraints that face each human being and each new generation. We are born into a world that has been socially constructed through cultural prescriptions, taboos, beliefs, assumptions, and activities, all developed throughout the history of a particular culture. While this implies, as I have just suggested, that the process of changing and developing continues, it is slow, incremental, and intensely controversial. Our culture as the medium in which we develop as human beings, offers us a central meaning-making framework in which our activities take place. We do not discard such frameworks lightly lest we lose our bearings. Our culture teaches us a language, with its syntax, vocabulary, and of course ready-made categories, all of which shape our assumptive world.

T H E TRUTH The most unsettling consequence of the idea that the world is a mere invention of the human mind is a challenge to the belief in a unique truth. Social constructivism points to the existence of multiple perspectives, several consensual truths, many of which may be possible valid constructions. Perhaps I have e m b r a c e d social constructivism so wholeheartedly because I was exposed to endless generations of students who wanted to know "the Truth." However, during my 25 years of teaching psychological theories.about human development, "the Truth" kept changing almost faster than we could keep up with it. "Tell us once and for all whether there is

Freud or is not such a p h e n o m e n o n as penis envy," demanded my students impatiently. "You name it," I explained, "and it exists, everyone has experienced it, women dream about it. Y o u deconstruct it and it disappears, it becomes a quaint idea, and we laugh about it." Many psychological concepts have lived through such histories of construction, deconstruction, and sometimes reconstruction. None of us is ready to give up truth. We desperately need to understand our social world and some interpretations of current and historical event are blatantly m o r e true t h a n others. We need a guide to separate truths from falsehoods. We must establish criteria that include not only multiple sources of evidence, but also the human purpose behind a truth, the nature of the consensus, its source, its implied values, and its intended or even unintended sociopolitical consequences. After thinking about this for several years I have come up with the notion of a good enough truth that is better than an absolute truth. I want to return later in this paper, to this notion that a "good enough" product or process may serve us better than a perfect one. The essence of power is the ability to sell, maintain, or coerce others into a particular view of reality. Feminist theory suggests that the reality of the Western world is primarily a privileged white male construction that must be deconstructed. Social constructivism and social deconstructivism often can be used alternately in that they are both similar challenges to the one and only social order. Both social construction and deconstruction need to be group rather than individual processes. Like-minded individuals must get together and transform reality, often through political action, to create, let us say, gay power. If it is done individually, the person is likely to be viewed as mad, bad, sick, or at the least, deviant or eccentric. It might be clinically useful to view our clients as social constructivists who have not yet been able to sell their own unique truth to other people.

LANGUAGE Since language is, in Keeney's (1983) words, our foremost "epistemological knife" etching in the distinctions of our social reality, it needs to be the first object of our deconstructive efforts. The feminist movement has had some success in its challenge of the masculine forms of the English and other IndoEuropean languages that were supposed to subsume

Social Construction of Gender

women but did not really do so. Much has been written about this, so I want to give only one example from Freud (1933), which is a little less obvious than many others. Explaining an artist's motivations, he writes: "He earns their [the people's] gratitude and admiration and he has thus achieved through his fantasy what originally he had achieved only in his fantasy---honor, power and the love of w o m e n " (p. 166). From this sentence, it is clear that Freud is not only using the masculine pronoun, the usual practice of his days, not only in English but in German as well, but that all artists, in Freud's mind, are men. It is a common enough type of sentence that gives us sublimal signals about the gender world.

CATEGORIES The effort to make women somewhat more visible in the English language was necessary and important, hut a focus on the categories that our language forms is even more essential since they guide our thinking in every way. Categories range from concrete ones, like fruit or chairs or dogs, to abstract categories like a developmental stage or the O e d i p u s Complex. C a t e g o r i e s draw b o u n d a r i e s around a number of objects or ideas that are then seen as belonging together. Linguists (e.g., Lakoff, 1987) teach us that the consequence of having a category is to maximize between-group differences and to attenuate within-group differences. I shall argue at a later point in this paper that the existence of the category of "women" has led to undue generalizations. N e v e r t h e l e s s , most c a t e g o r i e s have fuzzy boundaries. Even very concrete categories have uncertain boundaries. Let us say that a tomato could be classified as a fruit or a vegetable, or that a chair could sometimes be a footstool or an antique treasure not to be used for sitting. When it comes to social c o n c e p t s , the a r b i t r a r i n e s s o f b o u n d a r i e s becomes the focus of major sociopolitical controversies. I think the categories of "hero" and "coward" are of great interest in this respect. Is a hero a person who is willing to die for the fatherland or a person who defies the draft in wartime? The category of hero is in the process of being reexamined with some new uncertainty as to who may be included. Who would have thought 50 years ago that a cultural hero such as Christopher Columbus was to be dethroned? Before tackling gender, I shall start with

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a few easier examples of important categories with very problematic boundaries.

T H E SOCIAL C O N S T R U C T I O N O F RACE "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are n o t h u m a n , " H i t l e r is s u p p o s e d to h a v e said (Spiegelman, 1973). It was easy to see how fuzzy the pseudoracial category of Jews was in Germany since many regulations had to be made to distinguish Jews f r o m non-Jews and rules were devised that depended on the number of Jewish grandparents of each person. The century-old tendency of G e r m a n Jews to convert also confused the picture. Jews had to wear yellow stars lest they be indistinguishable. Not only the Jewish so-called race but races in general now appear to be equally fuzzy categories. Gould (1977) has explained the p h e n o m e n o n in the following way: Human races are subspecies of Homo Sapiens and the division of a species into subspecies has become an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a species . . . . The subspecies is a category of convenience . . . . We use it only when we judge that our understanding of variability will be increased by establishing discrete, geographically b o u n d e d packages within a species. Many biologists are now arguing that it is not only inconvenient, but also downright misleading, to impose a formal nomenclature on the dynamic patterns of variability that we observe in nature. (p. 233)

When we arbitrarily impose categories on people, they start to have a c o m m o n history, which then might make them into a category of people with a common history. The different social constructions o f human sexuality offer a fertile field for vivid examples of how culture prevails over nature. Foucault (1976), a leading spokesperson for that viewpoint, has raised the question of how sexuality came to be constructed as a central force in social life and a driving force for all human motivation. In Foucault's view of history, Freud was less a daring innovator than a m a n who reflected the social preoccupations of his time. A m a n of course, since I believe it was unlikely that a woman would have invented a theory in which sexuality was such a central force. I shall choose perversity and homosexuality as further examples of social constructions since they might be of special interest to mental health professionals and educators.

40 THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF PERVERSITY Many of us might still insist that there are natural and perverse ways of being sexual. A crossdresser or a fetishist is said to be perverse. In social constructivist thinking, perversity is a category that society has constructed to forbid or at least discourage certain sexual practices. It might even be a leftover from the time when all sexuality was to have reproduction as its only legitimate purpose. Many of us are instinctively repelled by perverse sexual practices because we have been socialized that way. Yet, I remind you that different sexual practices have been viewed as perverse in different historical periods. Masturbation was held responsible for a wide range of mental illnesses in the 18th and 19th centuries. M a y b e s o m e of you know just w h e n or whether oral sexuality has been taken off the list of perversities. Some perversities like voyeurism may be illegal in one context and recreational in the form of "adult videos" in another. People who are labeled perverse are very preoccupied with their sexual practices, but I wonder whether this would be true if the activity were not deviant, and therefore, shameful, secretive, or defiant and provocative. The culture creates deviance as well as the social consequences of engaging in deviant behavior (e.g., stigmatization, shame and guilt), which often result in a damaged identity.

HOMOSEXUALITY T h e social construction of homosexuality is plagued by similarly indistinct boundaries. Homosexuality as a distinct category rather than a practice, sometimes even a culturally valued practice as in ancient Greece, was only invented at the end of the 19th century (Connell, 1987). O f course, the category of heterosexuality was created by implication at the same time. Before that time, people had various sexual preferences. While they might have been persecuted and punished, homosexual practices did not put them into a particular category. One cannot be a lesbian if there is no such category. One could prefer to have sex with women, but that would not necessarily put one into a different category.of persons. Instead, it would be a sometimes activity or even a preferred activity, but without the category there are no lesbians. Actually, much

Freud research on lesbians has shown that they share few common characteristics outside of a particular emotional/sexual orientation toward women (Bell & Weinberg, 1978). T h e category is also an extremely indistinct one. W-hy would we call celibate women who have no interpersonal sexual activities heterosexual? What about my Aunt Anna Freud who lived with a woman as her life companion, but who never would have defined herself as a lesbian? People like to speculate endlessly: Was she or wasn't she? There is a similar uncertainty about Eleanor Roosevelt: Did she or didn't she? Is it just sex that counts? However, it is well known that some women do not engage in sexual practices but define themselves as lesbians. Berdaches form a category of "part-man/partwoman" persons in a Native American tribe (Whitehead, 1981). It is not their sexual practices 'that relegate men to that category, but the kind of work they choose to perform and the clothes that they choose to wear. O t h e r men might engage in homosexual acts without being designated berdaches. T h e r e are, thus, gender categories that do not rely on sexual behaviors. Further confusion has been created by the dev e l o p m e n t that the categories of lesbians and o f mothers are no longer mutually exclusive but overlapping, creating increasing uncertainty in people's minds. The advantage or disadvantage of blurred boundaries is yet another subject of hot controversy. Kitzinger (1987), for example, is very angry that lesbians and gay people are now being classified as persons with an alternative life style, thus becoming subsumed and even co-opted into the status quo of the social order. She would prefer to highlight the challenge to the patriarchal gender order by people who refuse to obey its rules, perhaps hoping that a gay rebellion might e x p a n d to o t h e r groups and eventually create a social revolution. It has been a dilemma for the homosexual community to know to what extent they wish to defy the social gender order or else buy into it, for example, by asking for legal marriages. I think the creation and selling of the category of bisexuals was a major political coup, transcending our straight/gay duality and making a distinct category out of the quite c o m m o n human tendency to feel sexual attraction for people of both genders. Once one starts to think about categories in a new way, categorizing people by the gender of their love object seems a quaint custom.

Social Construction of Gender

UNREALISTIC NORMS There is by now considerable research, starting with Kinsey and frequently replicated since then, which suggests that sexual practices in terms of choice of a love object are on a continuum and that the extreme positions of exclusive heterosexuality or homosexuality may not be the most frequent (Loewenstein-Freud, 1985)• Each time a new biography of some famous person is published, we find, perhaps with increasingly less surprise, that their public image did not conform to their actual private sexual behavior. Currently, our politicianz ~,vhen subjected to the same scrutiny about their sexual conduct--are also found wanting, creating for all of us the dilemma of upholding a social order that does not exist. It is astonishing how little the norms we have constructed for people fit the actual men or women or families that these norms describe. I believe that the theories of our fields have much to do with creating these ill-fitting norms, although it was perhaps the ill-fitting norms that created the theories since cause and effect tend to be circular. The result is that most people carry a more or less secret conviction that either they and/or their families have grave failings. The current popularity of the recovery movement that comprises more and more categories of people is perhaps based on this image of a loving nuclear family that oneself, unlike most other people, unfortunately and unfairly did not enjoy.

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT CATEGORIZATION The empirical science tradition (e.g., Lakoff, 1987) constructs social categories according to possibility of generalization and number of common attributes. We saw, in the case of the racial and lesbian examples, that likeness can arise out of classification rather than be an independent basis for it. We also saw that the basis of likenesses is very arbitrary. Any two things are alike in some respects and different in other respects, all depending on what attribute is the focus. So the similarity has to be an important one and the importance depends on the social purpose for which the category was created. Linguist Lakoff (1987) has devoted a whole chapter in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things to pointing out that even such basic scientific categories as biological species are human-made and often

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controversial. He concluded that there is no "natural kind" of species and that "natural" depends on context and purpose. He also concluded that social behavior is rule-governed and that social categories are established to enforce rules. The construction of categories, so his reasoning went, is to establish classes of things the behavior of which can be regulated and governed by prescriptions, recommendations, and taboos. It is instantly apparent how his theory fits the category of sexual behaviors just discussed; it certainly fits the category of gender. Mental health professionals have been active participants in the creation and condemnation of many changing categories, sometimes medicalizing human conditions that might threaten the social order. The successful challenge of gay people against being medicalized has highlighted the political nature of psychiatric categories. A reexamination of the political consequences and therapeutic usefulness rather than the accuracy of diagnostic categories might be in order. I consider it a grave matter that, for their clinical practice, mental health professionals have become beholden to insurance agencies and the categories they choose to enforce.

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF DUALITIES The second aspect of the construction of gender deals with our predilection to organize the world in terms of polar opposites. This tendency to think in either/or polarities is exhibited in objectivist science, in psychoanalysis, and in folk psychology. We draw sharp distinctions between mind and body, conscious vs. unconscious, sickness or health, beginnings and endings, objective vs. subjective, gay or straight, nature or nurture, etc. Postmodern thinking has transformed the dualism of either~or into a more holistic either/and form. Once again, our thinking is drawn back to categories with their uncertain and changeable boundaries, Consider, for example, how fuzzy and arbitrary the boundaries of beginnings and endings are as well as how political c o n t r o v e r s i e s rage over these boundaries, such as in the question: When does life begin? When does a divorce begin, for another example? The day you got married, the day you realized it was the wrong partner, the day she found him in bed with another woman, the day he moved out • . . ? Beginnings and endings are arbitrary punctua-

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tion marks upon the flux of life. Of course, every ending can also be viewed as a beginning, either, and. Narcissism is a good illustration of this either/ and principle. We are forever uncertain whether narcissism is a sign of excessive self-love or excessive selfdoubt--which feeling is more fundamental? It would be convenient to think of narcissism as a state in which either self-love or self-doubt is alternately disowned. We may consider that it is a mixture of both and that the problem is a lack of balance and a lack of integration between these two extremes. Dualities are not seen as opposites in postmodern thinking but only meaningful in relation to each other. There is no happiness unless unhappiness has been known and vice versa, no day without night, no attachment without separateness. We recognize the proximity of love and hate when we consider so called "crimes of passion" in which murder is justified by overwhelming albeit possessive love. Opposites belong together and are best kept in balance. This kind of thinking encourages therapists to draw new boundaries. For example, we might consider a boundary around the victim system, rather than victim vs. oppressor, especially when they are members of the same family. We also notice that when the extreme of one polarity is embraced, it often tips over to become the other pole, such as bombarding abortion clinics with the danger of hurting people inside to defend the Right to Life. This thinking relates to my prior claim that a good enough truth is preferable to an absolute truth. Either/and thinking favors a view of the self as a multiple self, or a divided self, rather than as a layered sell Psychoanalytic theory, which posits the latter, views the repressed voice that comes from the person's "depth" as the expression of the more authentic self. This is the theoretical explanation of most defenses, especially that of reaction formation. In postmodern thinking, it is not a question of a truer, deeper, or more authentic self, but of conflicting inner voices all of which can be acknowledged. This leads to a more benign clinical view. Yet, psychoanalytic and postmodern theory share the view that the self has multiple and often conflicted voices and that those voices that are viewed as socially unacceptable get silenced, dissociated, or rendered unconscious and repressed, depending on theoretical language. The disavowal of these antisocial voices, according to both theories, removes them from a person's deliberate control. Silenced feelings, in such cases, are then constructed

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as capable of erupting into violence against others, sabotaging the plans of other parts of the self, or being projected onto other people who then become externalized enemies. In the very same vein, each person is constructed as carrying not only conflicting feelings, but also both poles of most human traits and capacities, such as dependence and independence, strength and weakness, integrity and evil, and that pathology arises when only one pole is embraced and the other disavowed. I suggest that the man/woman duality represents that kind of pathology.

GENDER

Since human beings are different and similar along many dimensions, the question arises why we highlight sexual organs. The survival of homo sapiens in our evolutionary past may have depended on human reproduction outweighing human deaths, making reproduction a central human capacity. This might explain the human purpose for which the category of gender was created and explain why it took such a central place. Yet times have changed and current global conditions hardly suggest insufficient reproduction as the greatest danger for our species, but rather the opposite. The justification for dividing the human species along that particular axis thus disappeared at least about several thousand years ago. What about the fact of gender being biologically grounded, and thus natural? Flax (1990), in Thinking Fragments, is very eloquent regarding this argument of "natural." She has suggested that culture is generally about the challenge to natural facts. We challenge our climate by inventing heat or cooling, we challenge illness, we challenge our weakness by inventing tools. Why is there such great respect for the "naturalness" of our genitalia and childbearing differences. Why should certain differences in anatomy become our destiny? In these days of in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination, even "natural" sexual intercourse has become only one of the ways that children are currently produced. We are not exactly a society that upholds "the natural" except when it comes to gender arguments. Nature has become the object and product of human action and has, long ago, lost its independent existence. For example, "wilderness" preservations do not preserve anything natural but simply create a park for the protection of animals.

Social Construction of Gender

"Far from being an expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities" (p. 79), wrote Connell quoting Rubin in Gender and Power (1987). Actually, it takes a great deal of constant effort to maintain one's gendered identity and avoid the stigmatization that threatens if this is not done well enough. This is illustrated in the controversy about cosmetic breast surgery. Some women would rather face serious illness than take a chance on not having the right body image. "Having attractive breasts," said some man on the radio who seemed to be involved in the legal regulation of breast implants, "is a natural Darwinian survival feature, like the feathers of a peacock that attract mates in the mating season, and women should be entitled to display such features." I suppose that having silicone breast implants is also natural. The arduous and almost hopeless attempt to live up to the gender images our culture prescribes has shaped the behaviors and the interactions between men and women, not to mention the creation of multiple thriving industries in charge of upholding and profiting from our "natural" gender images.

GENDER DUALITIES I suggested earlier that the categories of "gay" and "straight" caused many people distress by forcing them into Procrustean categories. The same psychological damage occurs to the many persons who do not fit comfortably into one of the two genders. Society has decreed that they need to be fixed to match available categories. If a hermaphroditic child is born, meaning a child with, let us say, an uterus and a penis as happens occasionally, it would not occur to its parents not to have it fixed. Such a child would have a miserable marginal existence and, if the parents did not have the defect corrected as soon as possible, they would be viewed as extremely neglectful and the state might even take over and have the child fixed forcibly. Parents are, after all, for better and for worse, under the strict surveillance of the state. How would our society look if we had seven legitimized genders? Would we abolish the misery of people such as transsexuals? The Olympic Committee used to test women athletes by analyzing tissue from their gums to see w h e t h e r they were proper women, or only "passed" as women. The

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news media has reported that a particular woman athlete has a genetic defect and/or hormonal abnormality that does not make her a 100% woman. Difference was instantly constructed as abnormality. The poor woman is alternately being forbidden to compete and then again allowed, depending on the latest expert opinions. Due to a recent challenge, athletes now only have to pull down their pants to prove their gender. Such examples remind us that criteria for categorizing people are frequently more a matter of politics than biology. There are, of course, our gendered bodies that our society has constructed for us, the body, including our brains, developing through our personal history and experiences that are different for boys and girls. Given socialization practices that insist that every child has to fit into a prescribed gender role, it is all the more impressive that, in spite of every effort, men and women continue to grow into quite similar human beings. Epstein (1988) painstakingly reviewed well over a 1000 research studies on gender differences conducted over the last 20 years, only to conclude that in terms of basic propensities, talents, and personality characteristics, women and men are astonishingly alike. A handful of differences emerge here and there, many to be explained in role and situational terms rather than through basic predispositions. Differences between the genders appear primarily during gender interactions, not when groups have been compared side by side. Withingroup differences of a category as large as "women," even considering only women in Western culture, outweigh the differences between women and men. The feminist community is divided between emphasizing similarities between the genders vs. celebrating differences. For example, the theoretical m o v e m e n t associated with the Stone C e n t e r of Wellesley College has equated women with connectedness and men with separation both due to the cultural practice of women being the primary caretakers for both sexes, to which fateful personality consequences are being ascribed. I find it astounding that such claims can be made, and so enthusiastically accepted, given (a) the above research on minimal personality differences between the genders, (b) the large diversity within each gender group, and (c) the complexities and contradictions with which each of us lives. The claim also rests on the assumption that early experiences mold personality in a particular way. This contradicts our constant observation that

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both women and men tend to follow the social expectations, rules, and norms that their roles, stations in life, and situations in which they find themselves dictate. Moreover, people are capable of drastic changes in behavior given a change in their circumstances. At midlife, for example, men and women seem to acknowledge and embrace some human tendencies that are defined as g e n d e r - r e l a t e d and, therefore, needed to be disavowed at an earlier age. Many women who have learned to lean on their husbands are quite well able to take charge of their ind e p e n d e n t lives regardless o f early socialization should their husbands disappear at some point. This does not hold for all women but I do not want to make a statement about "all women." Puka (1989) has reported that women in oppressed situations may be more caring as a coping strategy to deal with sexual oppression, exhibiting care in order to try to satisfy male expectations, find male approval, and thus gain male support. Further, statistics on life satisfaction indicate that it seems to be more often single men who cannot manage their lives, rather than single women, who tend to have high life satisfaction, the difference depending not on c o n n e c t e d n e s s but on economics and health (Loewenstein et al., 1981). If a generalization is called for, it seems that men, rather than women, are desperate to be connected at all times. Violent men, that is, those who embody the culture's image of manliness to an extreme (e.g., battering men), are also the most deeply dependent on women. When women tend to be financially more independent, it appears to be women, rather than men, who are more apt to initiate a separation. Autonomy and attachment are one of these inseparable dualities that we have discussed. There is no attachment unless the other person is seen as an other, that is, unless there is a degree of autonomy that grows from an attachment experience. Both dualities seem to be present to some degree in each person, but they can get distributed in different ways in interpersonal relationships. There is also the danger that the wish for connectedness can escalate into overloving and overcontrol, transforming connectedness into intrusiveness, in the manner of any polarity that is not balanced by its opposite. When one partner carries only one pole and the other partner the other pole of intimacy regulation in a relationship, clinicians advise the pursuer to start distancing so that the distancer can take a turn pursuing.

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L e r n e r (1983) has suggested that women often make a gift of their independence to men, knowing how important it is for many men to feel that they are protecting their little woman. Sigmund Freud had three w o m e n - - h i s wife, his sister-in-law, and his daughter---who cared for and about him, in addition to an adoring housekeeper and a large group of loving women friends. F a m o u s men need many women to service them. It remains a problem of definition who is dependent on whom in such situations. Gilligan (1982), f o l l o w i n g exactly F r e u d ' s thinking, declared on limited evidence that women had a different morality than men, a morality of care rather than a morality of justice. She, too, turns to socialization to explain such a difference. It took 10 years of research studies to lay this formulation to rest (e.g., Brabeck, 1989). It is my observation that morality is not located primarily in the individual, but in his or her social context that rewards and applauds certain forms of acting for women and other forms of acting for men. The role of women in Nazi Germany has been compellingly described by K o o n z (1989) in Mothers in the Fatherland. Although Hitler had deep contempt for women, apparently seeing them mostly as breeding machines for the T h o u s a n d Year Reich to come, and excluded them from all formal political power, he could thank women, to no small degree, for his initial rise to power. It was primarily women who supported him enthusiastically and faithfully after he came out of prison. Later, it was mostly, alt h o u g h n o t e x c l u s i v e l y , m e n w h o s t a f f e d the concentration camps, while w o m e n were in the background. Frau Hoess, the wife of the commandant of Auschwitz was a pious Catholic and disapproved of the goings on in the camp. She withheld her sexual favors from her husband for 6 weeks, but then gave in with the explanation that she had felt too sorry for him. She also said that the camp had been an idyllic place for her children with all the prisoners ready to serve them and entertain them in every way, but that she was concerned that her husband was overworking. Then we learn that "when one of his physicians seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown" (p. 415), Dr. Mengele (the head doctor at Auschwitz) sent for the man's wife to come to live in Auschwitz. Loyal, virtuous, and loving women imbued with the morality of care are expected to service their men, at home, at work, in concentration camps.

Social Construction of Gender

Men, with some help from women, have constructed a social world in which there is a division of physical and emotional labor between men and women. In clinical language, we can call many women codependents who enable men to go on with their world destruction while also participating in that activity more directly but to a lesser degree. It is a pathological situation where each gender can disavow a whole range of activities, emotions, and behaviors, delegating them to the opposite gender. Gender differences, it seems, are not located within inherently different individual persons but in the social construction of gender relationships (Maccoby, 1990) within a sociopolitical power structure that is moreover supported by individual attachments and loyalties. We need to look at the nature of gender relations and not gender differences to understand the persistent and widespread inequality between women and men.

CONCLUSION Categories such as homosexuality, or race, or ethnicity, or nationality, regardless of their frequently arbitrary nature, fulfill a useful political purpose, allowing oppressed groups to advocate for their rights. The category of women has a similar political utility. In spite of such political necessity, I maintain that the struggle against oppression should not exclude some awareness of the social construction and, therefore, the arbitrariness and mutability of the categories which one's culture has established. It is a matter of either/and rather than either/or. The lens of social constructivism helps us to see an upside-down world in which the taken-for-granted world changes before our very eyes. I believe it has the possibility of opening new visions that might transform our thinking as educators, as clinicians, and as human beings.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The ideas for this paper were first developed for a symposium on " W o m e n " sponsored by the Harvard Medical School Division of Continuing Education. An elaboration of the initial talk was

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presented by me to the Atlanta Society of Clinical Social Workers on the occasion of the Diane Davis Memorial Lecture. I would like to thank Dr. Judith Reiner Platt for inviting me to participate in the symposium and the committee of the Diane Davis Memorial Lecture for choosing me as their speaker.

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