Photo by Flickr user AnaCamila. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Hugo Schwyzer reports on the details of a fascinating conversation with an older anti-feminist woman who, as a young woman, volunteered for Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum/STOP ERA crusade to keep women separate and unequal.

One point Schwyzer makes that’s dear to my heart:

The “complementarian” view of marriage, to which YM and other anti-feminists tend to subscribe, sees men and women as fundamentally ill-suited to step outside traditional roles. This “separate spheres” ideology assumes women are better nurturers, better parent-figures, better home-makers; men are better leaders, better earners, better protectors. In a complementarian marriage, each does for the other what he or she cannot (because of their sex) do for themselves.

A feminist marriage, like a complementarian marriage, recognizes that two different people will always have different gifts. But a feminist marriage doesn’t assign roles based on sex — it allows for flexibility based not on genitalia but on desire and on need. My wife will be the one getting pregnant, and nothing can change that — I can’t take on that role. But when it comes to earning, spending, cleaning, planning, building, washing, dreaming, shopping, and caring — we are both equally well-equipped as full and complete human beings to do these tasks. We both wear pants in our family.

He says this and more here.

I’ll probably have more to say about Schwyzer’s correspondent in another post but for now I’d just like to say that the “separate spheres” or yin/yang theory of gender looks like handcuffs. I mean if there’s some “man’s area” that the man happens to be bad at or incapable of then the couple’s screwed. And they’re not screwed because the woman can’t take up the slack but because she shouldn’t. And, for that matter, she’d better fucking not or, as is the case of women driving in, say, Saudi Arabia, she can go to jail if she gets caught. Same if, for instance, she’s a lousy cook and he’d be pretty good at it — the two-sphere model says they should both eat cold food out of cans because it’s wrong for him to cook.

Or wrong for men to cook at home anyway. He could still be a chef. I still remember being reassured that while I could never grow up to be a “cafeteria lady” at my elementary school — a job that seemed like paradise since they had all that cool equipment and, I imagined, could eat all the dessert they wanted — my sister shouldn’t tease me because unlike her I could grow up to be a chef and chefs were always more important cooks than cafeteria ladies.

I choose those two examples because they really are so arbitrary. There’s nothing magical about a threshold such that a man can cook outside but not inside the home. And as far as I know even Ann Coulter, Wendy Shalit believe women should be allowed to drive.

Now to be fair, in Schwyzer’s notion of feminist marriage there may still be gaps in what can be accomplished but if so they’re bound to be fewer and, I’m guessing, regarded more sympathetically when both sides recognize it’s not “supposed” to be a gender assignment. And as long as I’m reminiscing about my extreme youth I also remember more than one father in my neighborhood comparing “his” wife’s poor cooking or ironing skills to someone else’s. He might not have been able to do a better job but the (totally arbitrary, remember) “two sphere” model forbade either of them from finding out.