THE RIGHT BOOKS

What—exactly—is being implied when people speak of women as “historic victims of discrimination,” historically barred or discouraged from “positions in which they have been underrepresented”? Nothing, certainly, that is in the slightest way pertinent to history, which knows nothing of such horrors. It is at best unhistorical, at worst mendacious, to conjure out of presentist experience tableaux depicting brilliant, aggressively aspiring women being passed over for ecclesiastical preferment in fourteenth-century Italy, or for admission to the Inns of Court in sixteenth-century England, or for wellpaid directorial positions in the House of Rothschild in nineteenth-century France. The absurdity is equal to that of suggesting that men living in the frontier communities of the American West were discriminated against—“historically”—by the madams of local establishments, who chose perversely to employ nubile females exclusively.

Ellen Frankel Paul, of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University and the Cato Institute, would agree. Both Western society and the capitalist market have subsequently made room for women in their differing roles and occupations, in proportion as women have shown the desire and the ability to assume such roles and occupations. “We ought not,” she insists, “to dwell upon the past. . . . If women of another generation wanted to remain at home tending to their children, and their husbands’ salaries . . . [allowed] them to do so, then it is foolish to blame ‘society’ for the results. . . . Rather than condemning the market system, feminists ought to be glorying in it, for it has proved remarkably adaptable to women’s evolving desire to work full-time, to work throughout their lives, and to work in new and challenging jobs.” Reading Professor Paul’s new book, Equity and Gender: The Comparable Worth Debate (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903; $24.95), I was reminded of Evelyn Waugh’s remark upon finishing Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood: “If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.”

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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What—exactly—is being implied when people speak of women as “historic victims of discrimination,” historically barred or discouraged from “positions in which they have been underrepresented”? Nothing, certainly, that is in the slightest way pertinent to history, which knows nothing of such horrors. It is at best unhistorical, at worst mendacious, to conjure out of presentist experience tableaux depicting brilliant, aggressively aspiring women being passed over for ecclesiastical preferment in fourteenth-century Italy, or for admission to the Inns of Court in sixteenth-century England, or for wellpaid directorial positions in the House of Rothschild in nineteenth-century France. The absurdity is equal to that of suggesting that men living in the frontier communities of the American West were discriminated against—“historically”—by the madams of local establishments, who chose perversely to employ nubile females exclusively.

Ellen Frankel Paul, of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University and the Cato Institute, would agree. Both Western society and the capitalist market have subsequently made room for women in their differing roles and occupations, in proportion as women have shown the desire and the ability to assume such roles and occupations. “We ought not,” she insists, “to dwell upon the past. . . . If women of another generation wanted to remain at home tending to their children, and their husbands’ salaries . . . [allowed] them to do so, then it is foolish to blame ‘society’ for the results. . . . Rather than condemning the market system, feminists ought to be glorying in it, for it has proved remarkably adaptable to women’s evolving desire to work full-time, to work throughout their lives, and to work in new and challenging jobs.” Reading Professor Paul’s new book, Equity and Gender: The Comparable Worth Debate (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903; $24.95), I was reminded of Evelyn Waugh’s remark upon finishing Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood: “If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.”