Although I shall be arguing that we should not ratify the CEDAW convention, I want first to speak as a feminist who would very much like to see a realistic international effort for securing women's rights.
American women have been the beneficiaries of two major waves of feminism. In the First Wave, led by the great foremothers, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, women won basic political and legal rights, including the right to vote. The Second Wave, which came in the sixties and early seventies, advanced women economically and socially. Employers could no longer legally restrict a job to one sex. A company could no longer refuse to hire a woman because she had children. Such laws have been critical to the well-being and success of American women and most of the reforms of the First and Second Waves are appropriate and necessary for women everywhere.
With this historical progress, American women have achieved virtual equality with men. There are still some unresolved equity issues, but overall, we are now among the freest and most liberated women in the world. In some ways, we are not merely doing as well as men--we are doing better. We live longer, we are better educated, we have more choices on how to lead our lives. By any reasonable measure, equity feminism is the great American success story.
When I lecture about the history of the women's movement on college campuses, students often ask what's next for the Third Wave. My answer is always the same; we have to help women in other parts of the world secure the freedoms we now take for granted. There are countries, especially in Africa and Asia, where women have not yet had their Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony; as for second wave reforms, they are light-years away from them.
American women have much to tell the women of the world. We can and should help women everywhere to achieve the kind of equity we have here. But joining the CEDAW convention is the wrong way to do that. I have several reasons for opposing ratification of this treaty. I will focus here on two or three that I regard as decisive.
The CEDAW convention has many admirable and sound goals that any person of conscience must support. But it was formulated in the 1970s and it promotes several reforms that we now know to be harmful. These programs looked promising, exciting and progressive in 1975, but since then we have come to realize that they undermine economic prosperity. Article 11, for example, calls for governments to set wages. It demands "The right to equal remuneration. . . . in respect of work of equal value." This is the policy we call "comparable worth." Americans have rightly rejected comparable worth as unjust and unworkable at home. So, why should we advocate it for women anywhere?
Article 11 also demands that governments provide paid maternity leave, and provide the "necessary supporting social services to enable parents to combine family obligation with work responsibility and participation in public life . . . through the establishment and development of a network of childcare facilities." All very salutary, except that experience shows that such programs tend to burden a country's economy to everyone’s detriment. American women have benefited from a free, open and economically dynamic society: shouldn't we be promoting policies that bring these advantages to needy women everywhere?
The Treaty includes several sweeping demands that are socially divisive and likely to create unnecessary misery. Article 5, for example, calls for all governments to "modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and all other practices which are based on . . . stereotyped roles for men and women." What exactly does this provision entail? Of course, some gender stereotypes are destructive and prejudicial and we must call disparaging attention to them. (Typical examples include generalizations that women are irrational, that they are less intelligent than men, that they are politically immature, etc.) But, other male/female stereotypes are descriptively true. In the 1970s, many feminists believed that truly liberated men and women would become more and more alike--that a gender-just society would eventually become androgynous. Gender was supposedly an artificial social construction that gave men the advantage. Well, today, only a handful of scholars in Women's Studies programs still believe that.
A growing body of research in neuroscience, endocrinology, and psychology over the past 40 years provides evidence that there is a biological basis for many sex differences in aptitudes and preferences. Males have better spatial reasoning skills; females better verbal skills. Males are greater risk takers, females are more nurturing. (There are exceptions, but these are the rules.) As the Rutgers University anthropologist Lionel Tiger has said, "Biology is not destiny, but it is good statistical probability." Unfortunately, much in CEDAW is premised on the false idea that all gender preferences are socially constructed.
Of course, in recognizing the obvious differences between men and women, I am not for one moment suggesting that women should be prevented from pursuing their goals in any field they choose; but I am suggesting we should not expect or aim at parity in all fields. More women than men will continue to want to stay at home with small children and pursue careers in fields like early childhood education or psychology; men will continue to be heavily represented in fields like helicopter mechanics and hydraulic engineering.
A few years ago I took part in a television debate with celebrity lawyer, Gloria Allred. Ms. Allred was representing a 14-year-old girl who was suing the Boy Scouts of America for excluding girls. Allred characterized same-sex scout troops as a form of "gender apartheid." She spoke of the need to "socialize" boys to play with dolls so they could be more nurturing and less fractious. CEDAW will give all the Ms. Allred's in this country a treaty of their own to create mischief.
Consider, for example, how hard-liners could deploy Article 10 of the Treaty: It calls for the "elimination of stereotyped concepts of the roles of men and woman at all levels in all forms of education . . . in particular, by the revision of textbooks and school programs." Our textbooks and school materials cannot endure any more political corrections. The New York Times recently ran a story about how politics of textbook revisions is now out of control: great works of literature were recently scanned for insensitivity and altered by censors before intense lobbying eliminated the practice. The CEDAW Treaty demands this kind of textual revision--which amount to censorship inconsistent with American civil liberties.
Can there be anyone in the United States, apart from a small coterie of feminists activists and academics, who would favor empowering a committee of foreign bureaucrats to oversee American social mores--or intrude into public education by distorting the textbooks our children read?
The Treaty could do us harm by promoting male/female resentments and divisions at a time when the country badly needs social unity. Most American women feel blessed to live in a country where, for the most part, the men are fair-minded, decent and supportive of women in their quest for equality. We are proud and grateful to be part of a society that has afforded us unprecedented freedoms and opportunities. But this very favorable view of American men and of American society is not shared by the hard-line feminists in our universities. These activists/scholars tend to take a dim view of American society, routinely referring to it as a "patriarchy," a "male hegemony," a culture that keeps women socially subordinate. One leading textbook in women's studies talks of an epidemic of gender "terrorism" plaguing the average American women. Another calls the United States a "Rape Culture." Now, Bosnia, for a time, was truly a rape culture. Afghanistan, under the Taliban, routinely practiced gender terrorism. To apply such terms to the United States is ludicrous.
The activists and scholars who characterize America as a sexist society sincerely believe we are in a gender war. In all wars, the first casualty is truth. Too much of what we hear from contemporary women's organizations is outrageously false. Too much of what passes as gender scholarship is ideological and factually wrong: American men are depicted as violent predators and American women their hapless victims. If you ask me to reduce the philosophy of academic feminism to a single phrase it be this one: Women are from Venus, Men are from Hell.
For the past decade, moderate feminist academics like myself, and a growing number of dissidents scholars such as Camille Paglia (University of the Arts), Daphne Patai (University Of Massachusetts), Betsy Fox-Genovese (Emory), Noretta Koertge (University of Indiana), Judith Kleinfeld (University of Alaska), Jennifer Braceras (Harvard Law)--to name only a few--have been hard at work correcting the misinformation, challenging the naive hostility to the free market system, and calling for an end to the male bashing-rhetoric that is standard fare at most of our colleges and universities. We have made slow but steady progress in opening up the national discussion on gender to diverse perspectives, but thinking on these matters on campus and in the major feminist organizations remains dismayingly rigid and intolerant. For the time being, the organized women's movement in this country is dominated by ideological gender theorists and by well-intentioned, but misinformed, women's groups that take what these theorists say seriously.
Now what does this have to do with CEDAW? If the United States signs the Treaty, it would dramatically increase the power of the misguided gender scholars. The treaty calls for the elimination of sexism. Reasonable people believe that our American society has already achieved this goal in most of the ways that count. If you compare us with the rest of the world, we are a shining example of gender equity. Unfortunately, most campus theorists do not agree with that. They believe that American women live in a male supremacist society; and they can cite twenty years of feminist "scholarship" to persuade themselves and us that they are right. What they actually cite is a body of statistically challenged gender ideology.
This treaty in conjunction with the counterfeit feminist research could be a most toxic combination. If CEDAW is ratified, expect more rancor, more lawsuits, and more divisiveness. Gender bureaucrats from the United Nations will join the feminist ideologues and the United States will be subject to relentless legal assaults for alleged violations of the Treaty.
The United Nations has a history of using its human rights doctrines and commissions for scoring points against Western democracies--all the while carefully refraining from censuring countries that notoriously abuse the rights of their citizens. The United States was banished from the Commission on Human Rights for a year. The UN's 2001 Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa turned into a shameful anti-Semitic condemnation of Israel. There is no reason to believe that the CEDAW would not be used in a highly political way as well.
Women in the developing countries need help. We are morally bound to assist them in ways that are constructive and that reflect ideals of fairness and common sense that have lifted American women to a level of freedom and unprecedented in human history. CEDAW is not the way.
Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
