Feminism in recent years has destroyed the myth of the female as the weaker sex. Bartky turns the clock back. When she begins her article with the question “What does a man want?” one is drawn into her theory that man is exploitative and some women are either willing to accept it or driven to emotional despair when they cannot match the male’s demands. Man, as Bartky opens with a quote from Sulamish Firestone, is parasitical. So, we are to assume that the male animal” feasts on the weaknesses, the needs and desires of the woman.
Her article puts the idea of gender equality back several generations, and she is as unkind to minorities as she is to the white majority: “Black women have frequently been singled out for failing to provide their men with ‘female tenderness’ (157). Where is the fact that black women are often exploited by black men, left to raise children born either out of wedlock or after the husband deserts her? Where is the fact that the strength of some black women (to single out a minority for a moment) manages to keep her “family” together when the male of the household is nowhere around, un employed or wandering and irresponsible? Furthermore, why is it the female’s responsibility to offer “tenderness” when there is none in return?
Bartky focuses on what she calls “care giving”. In a way, this seems like an article on assisted living for those too feeble to care for themselves. She uses this term again to somehow bolster her view that men are strong and healthy and women’s task is to keep them that way. Some cite the better mental and physical health of married men as evidence that men receive very significant benefits from women’s emotional care giving . She pats women on the back for this care giving by claiming that statistics show married men live longer than single men. However, the facts are also clear (and Bartky ignores them) that women- married or unmarried, tend to outlive men. This is genetic, perhaps, and has little to do with emotional stability.
Bartky is so serious and single-minded in her desire to put men to shame that she claims “men are emotionally rescued by female care giving from the pressures of competition” . What she fails to recognize here is that the competition is not over another woman (younger better looking, better in bed), it is about a better job with a higher salary to maintain a life style that adequately houses, feeds, nurtures and educates a growing family.
Speaking of “family” there are many sociologists who believe that the best and soundest, lasting marriage is one between equal partners. Yet, Bartky finds those who agree with her and not statistics. She cites Theodore Kemper: “‘Status accord’ he defines as ‘the voluntary compliance with the needs, wishes, or interests of the other'” . Unwritten here is that the needs and wishes of the man is foremost and the woman is compliant. It is the woman, subservient, care giving, nurturing, who massages the egos of her man. Bartky puts us back into the Victorian era, where women were stay-at-homes, crocheting, cooking, bearing and raising children, while the men work, and gambol in Men Only clubs. Bartky refuses to enter the 21st century with two wage-earner families, with latchkey kids and nannies. Whether some female like it or not, the task of a woman is to nourish herself as much as her man. There is far more to a marriage and/or relationship than having a man tell the woman “you’re really very good to me!”
Bartky skews the whole male-female relationship even further when she denigrates Nancy Reagan as being nothing more than an adoring wife to her husband, the President. Perhaps she ought to have done a little more research on what an iron willed taskmaster Nancy Reagan was during the White House years, and especially as her husband sank more deeply into Alzheimer’s loss of self. Yes, she was, at the end, a care giver, but she was and remains her own person no matter what file photos may show as to her physical presence slightly behind her husband at the speaker’s podium. Is Nancy Reagan really a valid example of what Bartky claims: “emotional caregiving….confers status on men ”
Bartky takes us back to the times when the marriage ceremony still included the words to “love, honor and obey”. The past meant that a woman “married well.” This was the time when the ideal mate was one who would “take care of the little woman” for a lifetime. Instead of seeing the present as it is- the high incidence of divorce and one-parent families, she continues to carp on the idea of a woman’s responsibility to provide emotional sustenance to her man. What is worse, she cannot express herself or disagree with her husband: “If she articulates her doubts, it is as likely as not she will be seen as rejecting him or as being disloyal” In other words, a woman can never say No! This at a time when the incidents of rape among married people is on the rise, all because the woman dared to say No! Bartky’s model wife, therefore, could never deny her husband (or her man) anything at all, lest she be seen as “disloyal.”
To show how far behind reality and the present time Bartky really is, she seems top insist that the when the man asks and demands, the woman gives in. “Unreciprocated caregiving also endangers woman’s ethical development” Bartky has the nerve to even suggest that women have a view of the world “that is more reliable and less distorted than the view of things available to men.” What does that mean? If her task is an emotional (and no doubt sexual) caregiver to her man, how does she find time for a world view? There is an old joke about a man discussing how he and his wife separate their tasks: “She does all the little things like shop, cook, raise the children clean the house, select my clothes. I have the broader world view, like what we should do about mainland China.”
Where are Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and other feminists whose platforms have touted the mental and professional and, yes, the emotional equality of women versus men? Bartky’s views sometimes make one wonder whether this article and her beliefs are some sort of satire. Much of her comments could be interpreted that way. To a scholar, the very term “good wife” is horrendously out of date. Has Bartky forgotten than there were “soccer moms” whose political activity elected Bill Clinton, regardless of their husbands’ political views? Has she overlooked the fact that suburban housewives bought into the “fight terrorism in Iraq so they won’t come to America” that reelected George W. Bush? Is Cindy Sheehan a “good wife” demonstrating in Crawford, Texas, and at the White House? Whose caregiver was she?
Bartky also ignores the fact that there are now more and more same sex alliances. Where does the emotional exploitation fit in there?
And yet, Bartky ignores active interested ambitious and successful women. She sees woman as both wife and mother when she writes “a woman’s adult partner is not a child, no matter how childish he may behave” Yet, just as she praises women for handling childish husbands, she also protests that this is still a male-dominated society: “…we rarely get to make laws or direct the major financial institutions” Well, a skeptic might respond- how can women be in power when they are so occupied with nurturing and emotionally sustaining their demanding and sometimes childish husbands?
What is truly frightening about Bartky’s article is that she really seems to believe that woman’s job is little more than providing emotional strength to her husband at the cost of her own individuality. How “old-fashioned” of Bartky to assume that when a woman provides her husband or man with unreciprocated emotional sustenance “she agrees to the unspoken proposition that his life deserves much more attention than her own”
Bartky tends to see women as emotional dart boards instead of what they should be and today often are: equal partners in a relationship that transcends care giving and nurturing of egos.
At the conclusion she even scolds conservatives by claiming that some of their efforts to raise consciousness and to extol women lead to the fact that “women may suffer moral danger by doing emotional labor.”
What needs to be argued is that women have as much right to, and need of, emotional stability. The female gender is not on earth merely to sustain male needs and male egos, and to stand by as a devoted weaker sex and “little woman” while the male forages for the means of sustaining a family. Little is made of the role of the wife as a mother, except as a “mother” to a childish man. We are living in times that are not only physically but emotionally dangerous. Many teeter on the edge of despair. The good wife and mother cannot turn her family into Prozac addicts and think of herself as a combination care giver and peace maker in a growing nuclear family. Bartky does women- and also men-p a disservice in her old-fashioned arguments about emotional exploitation.
Like it or not, some men are as much exploited emotionally as women, and to lay the blame and a subservient role merely on the female is wrongheaded and far from accurate. Bartky is entitled to her opinion, but sure it is a minority opinion, and should be read and taught in Ancient History classes. (One also wonders where she is married, a m other, divorced, or even interested in herself as she seems to be in pushing women back a century.)
REFERENCE:
Barttky, Sandra Lee: “Emotional Exploitations” from
Ethical Practices (LaFollette, Hugh, ed.) Blackwell Puoblishers
