By Bunmi Fatoye-Matory

Special to the Gazette

The access that women secured to mainstream electoral politics through suffrage turns out to be only a partial victory, says Constance H. Buchanan, associate dean at the Divinity School. It has not yet translated into real political leadership for them. By the same token, women's unprecedented access to the workplace and the professions in the wake of feminist activism has not yet eliminated all the barriers to their leadership in public life.

Buchanan, founding director of the Divinity School's Women's Studies in Religion program argues in her new book, Choosing to Lead: Women and the Crisis of American Values, that persistent cultural beliefs and assumptions about male and female leadership are responsible for the paucity of women in setting the public agenda.

Women are currently at the center of the discourse of the "value-crisis" in America, either as mothers, homemakers, or workers. Yet they are visibly absent among the leaders of that debate. In her thought-provoking book, Buchanan traces the historical, religious, and cultural roots of the bias against female leadership in America. She also details the achievements of organized women reformers of the 19th and early 20th centuries who, despite the limitations and constraints of those times, forged a better and more humane America by the sheer force of their moral convictions rooted in religious values.

Scapegoating Mothers

The traditional belief that mothers build families and can only do this successfully in a two-parent, male-headed family is still ingrained in American culture. The locale for such family-building is also still culturally assumed to be within the private sphere, which is the home. Buchanan observes that despite the fact that only 10 percent of American families conformed to the two-parent model by the early 1990s, discourse about the American family continues to revolve around the two-parent model.

As a result of this faulty premise, the conclusion reached by certain politicians, journalists, and social commentators has resulted in the scapegoating of women who head households as "bad mothers." They are blamed for the moral and social decline of the nation. The incidence of single motherhood is increasing among the poor as well as the privileged. Buchanan argues, however, that female-headed households, which Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan identified as a cause of social disintegration in his 1965 report on the black family, actually should draw our attention to deeper structural inadequacies in American society. The cultural ideal of the "good mother," she says, limits women's participation to the domestic, private sphere and also reinforces the association of masculinity with the public sphere. That the private sphere should support the public is at the core of the argument of those who call for a return to traditional values.

Male dominance of the public sphere

Masculinity, Buchanan argues, affects the organization and structures of public life even though many journalists, experts, and scholars would rather discuss the realm of public life as gender-neutral. This "public world" is often seen as reflecting a universal experience, representing all perspectives and experience while, conversely, feminism is seen to be pursuing a narrow, self-serving agenda. This explains why in modern American politics, the perspectives of women (and other disadvantaged groups) are labeled as special interests. It is assumed that the perspective of privileged men is inclusive, above special interest and particularity.

Erosion of male authority

Male authority since the 16th century has been predicated on a social pact to uphold the truth and protect the vulnerable, says Buchanan. The erosion of this authority in contemporary times is due less to the earning power of women than the severe compromise of that pact. The promise of male protection has been broken and the privilege that comes with it, abused.

Child molestation by biological or adoptive fathers, murders of wives or lovers, sexual harassment of women in the military, the Senate, and the workplace, and religious leaders' molestation of children are some of the cases that strike at the very heart of male authority in America.

Buchanan cites as defining national moments such instances as the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings, Senator Packwood's sexual harassment of women colleagues, Woody Allen's relationship with Mia Farrow's adopted daughter, and the sexual abuse of children and women by the clergy. No longer able to trust the integrity of male authority, many women have had to fall back on their own resources and forge a new view of themselves and the world. This view, Buchanan surmises, no longer assumes that "male authority transcends self-interest through its capacity to comprehend the human and its unfailing allegiance to human interests."

A leaf from history

Buchanan agrees with many women reformers of the 19th and early 20th century that moral inequality is the root of sexual inequality. Christianity relegates women to an inferior moral status because of their "original sin." Women reformers not only rejected this religious view of themselves but established leadership in reshaping their society based on their own interpretations of the principles of justice and fairness derived from Christianity. Another effective strategy of the women reformers was their public and reform-enhancing use of motherhood. Of course, motherhood was a major factor in restricting women to the domestic sphere. Yet, paradoxically, their public campaign was launched on their moral authority as mothers who, more than anyone else in society, were knowledgeable about the consequences of certain public policies on children and their families. They claimed to be taking maternal values out of the home into the public world, thereby making mothers not only public actors, but also confident, if unrecognized, public experts. They focused their work on institutions that were critical for the health of the whole society -- family, education, democracy, public health, and religion. The greatest contribution of these women reformers, Buchanan says, "was injecting the vision of social welfare into American society and government."

Women in the workplace today face the challenges of discrimination, discouragement, and a lack of the kind of domestic support that helped make men successful workers. They also face the moral dilemma of straddling two ethical modes, the prevailing workplace values that emphasize self-interest and their obligation to perform unpaid social labor in the home. This, Buchanan says, has raised fundamental questions of meaning and value for many women.

She urges women to reclaim the tradition of public service established by their predecessors in the last century. Modern feminists, she says, need to address the moral aspect of inequality with the same energy devoted to its economic and legal aspects.

The struggle for parity in public life by women must start with the central role of motherhood because of the huge gap between traditional ideals of this institution and social reality. Buchanan warns that "this gap imperils the values of family and community welfare for which motherhood has stood in society." There is a need to reconstruct motherhood and organize an effective social structure to support the work of family and community committment it alone has traditionally been responsible for performing. There is also a necessity to redefine the beliefs about adult work that presently shape public policy and institutions. She concludes that at this particular historical moment, women have a tremendous opportunity to redefine a new public vision because of the very fact of being newcomers in the public world. Because they are not wholly invested in its existing patterns yet, they have the opportunity to reevaluate the meaning and structure of their own lives and press for more inclusive and responsible institutional and work norms.

Buchanan calls on women to make public life more responsive to the full range of human needs and experience in society. But this will be possible only if women, like their 19th- and early-20th-century predecessors, are able to make the deliberate and conscious choice to lead.