Taking Science Seriously

Conservative dogma about sex roles ignores inconvenient realities.

Cathy Young from the August/September 2004 issue

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Rhoads trots out the usual suspects -- Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, Simone de Beauvoir -- to show that even feminist women are drawn to higher-status dominant men. For some reason, we never hear about Margaret Thatcher, a very powerful woman who seems to have had a very happy marriage to a non-alpha male.

To top it all off, Rhoads ends his book with a call to women: "Men like challenges. Women might ask them to step up and be real providers, leaving women more time and capacity to better fulfill the domestic role." They should also, he counsels, allow men to be "the ostensible head of households" as an incentive to marry, while wielding a subtler power through their feminine wiles.

Some feminists will probably say Rhoads' retro message is dangerous to women. More likely, these odd flights of nostalgia will make his book irrelevant. Americans do not, as the statistics cited by Rhoads show, embrace "androgyny." But rigid gender roles are growing steadily less popular, particularly among young people. It is now widely recognized that feminists were wrong to denigrate the traditionally feminine choices made by many women. It is just as wrong and just as myopic for conservatives to denigrate freely chosen nontraditional ways of life.