In the last four decades, a feminist revolution has swept the globe. To be sure, this revolution has brought many beneficial changes to our world. Now, for instance, much of the world allows and encourages women to bring their talents into the public spheres of work and public policy. But this revolution has also brought less welcome developments to the global scene. What might be described as the androgynous impulse—an impulse that seeks to deny any essential or biologically based differences between men and women—is one of those developments.
Androgynous Impulse
This impulse can be found, among other places, in the public policies and social agendas of international bodies associated with the United Nations.
The UN committee responsible for monitoring compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is one example. This committee has called on countries like Armenia and Belarus to end public policies and practices that support distinctive maternal roles for women, such as Mother’s Day and maternal leave policies. Instead, it and other proponents of this type of feminist agenda would like to see public policies that promote an androgynous parenting ethic where fathers and mothers devote equal amounts of time to parenting, and parent with essentially the same style of parent-child interaction.
The primary problem with this androgynous impulse is that it does not recognize the unique talents that men and women bring to the most fundamental unit of society: the family. A growing body of social scientific evidence confirms what common sense and many of the world’s religions tell us: Men and women do indeed bring different gifts to the parenting enterprise. Consequently, at all levels of social life—the international, national, and local—public policies, cultural norms, and social roles should be organized to protect rather than prohibit the complementary parenting styles that fathers and mothers bring to family life.
But before embarking on an overview of this literature, let me offer two caveats:
First, not every mother or every father will possess all of the distinctive sex-specific gifts described below. For instance, some fathers are not endowed with a firm temperament suited for discipline, and some mothers are not endowed with a sensitive temperament suited for nurturing. Nevertheless, most fathers and mothers possess sex-specific talents related to parenting, and societies should organize parenting and work roles to take advantage of the way in which these talents tend to be distributed in sex-specific ways.
Second, although both sexes possess most of these parenting talents, one sex nevertheless tends to excel in each of them. For instance, mothers are generally better at nurturing small children than are fathers, but fathers can also nurture their children. Thus, societies should build on these comparative sex-specific advantages by letting each sex take the lead in the domains where it excels.
Talented Mothers
Among the many distinctive talents that mothers bring to the parenting enterprise, three stand out: their capacity to breastfeed, their ability to understand infants and children, and their ability to offer nurture and comfort to their children.
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