The Gender Problem
by Meredith Sprunger
The Spiritual Fellowship Journal
Fall 1993
Overview: Scientific evidence shows that men and women have different brain-mind capacities, while our educational-political contention is that these differences do not exist. The Urantia Book harmonizes these diversities.
Although The Urantia Book has many references to sex differences, we should like to direct the reader's attention to the following quotation for discussion:
"Each sex has its own distinctive sphere of existence, together with its own rights within that sphere...women's rights are by no means men's rights. Woman cannot thrive on man's rights any more than man can prosper on woman's rights . . . Civilization never can obliterate the behavior gulf between the sexes. From age to age the mores change, but instinct never. Innate maternal affection will never permit emancipated woman to become man's serious rival in industry. Forever each sex will remain supreme in its own domain, domains determined by biologic differentiation and by mental dissimilarity.
Each sex will always have its own special sphere, albeit they will ever and anon overlap. Only socially will men and women compete on equal terms." (The Urantia Book, p. 938)
In the longer research paper, we have considered possible definitions of "domains determined by biologic differences..." and the more controversial issue of "domains determined by...mental dissimilarity." If we continue to follow the thread of the Book's argument about sex differences, we now arrive at a concept of gender even more controversial--the notion of complemental but distinctive "spheres of gender-specific activity, along with an exclusive set of undefined rights belonging to each sphere. Whether you agree with it or not, this appears to be The Urantia Book's master concept of gender.
One may ask whether it is wise to confer upon this terse theory of sexual spheres the status of "pure revelation." Some will argue that it represents only the highest point of evolutionary thought in the 1930's; others will accept it as the last word on the issue. I prefer to treat any sociological statement in the Book as a working hypothesis and an indispensable starting point. In this column, I treat the spheres theory "as if it is revelation." I believe that the burden of proof for an alternate view should fall to the reader.
Let us turn to exegesis. Note the use of a three-dimensional spatial metaphor-"spheres of existence." Apparently, Creator design has reserved for each of the sexes a substantive "gender-world", an expansive realm in which it "reigns supreme.
We observe that these gender-spheres are not merely conditioned by biology and psyche; they are "determined by inherent physical and mental characteristics." What guidance do the revelators give us concerning how to recognize woman's distinctive sphere? Literally speaking, it seems there are only two passages: one on moral and spiritual leadership, and one on "spheres of charm and grace."
In constructing the first of these, it appears that the revelators ranged far and wide in the written record of planetary thought in search of "a highest existing human concept that might apply. The result is a fragment from an 1865 poem by William Ross Wallace, a minor poet of the nineteenth century who was a close friend of Edgar Allen Poe. The poem is entitled, "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle Is the Hand That Rules the World", and the original stanza is as follows:
Blessings on the hand of woman!
Angels guard its strength and grace,
In the palace, cottage, hovel,
Oh, no matter where the place;
Would that never storms assailed it,
Rainbow ever gently curled;
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
These lines appear to be translated into the following passage, one of the most vivid in the entire Book:
"Women seem to have more intuition than men, but they also appear to be somewhat less logical. Woman, however, has always been the moral standard-bearer and the spiritual leader of mankind. The hand that rocks the cradle still fraternizes with destiny." (U.B.p. 938)
She leads in spirituality and in upholding moral standards. This is the domain in which she has reigned supreme. Does she still? The revelator's next move is a leap to the concept of her instinctive mother-love. Yes, the mother of the species gives birth to, and "fraternizes with, the child's destiny. Of course, fraternize is a weaker term than Wallace's sentimental notion of "ruling the world." Still, this passage presents a strong image of leadership.
Let's not ignore the previous context of this line. We can also see in this cogent passage a connection between what seems to be a mental dissimilarity-more intuition and "less logic-and the sphere in which she reigns supreme. The use of "however strongly implies that moral and spiritual leadership do not require logic so much as intuition; in contrast to logic activities more specific to the male sphere.
In the final analysis-and this is key-women's right to leadership in the moral/spiritual domain is derived from her motherhood, and the biological and mental capacities that accompany it. As the poet Wallace would have it, this supremacy is symbolized by her nurturing hand, whose "strength and grace is guarded by angels."
The distinguished anthropologist Ashley Montague argues this case in his beautiful book, The Natural Superiority of Women, especially in a chapter entitled, The Genius of Woman as the Genius of Humanity:
"The maternalizing influences of being a mother have, from the very beginning of the human species, made the female the more humane of the sexes. The love of a mother for her child is the basic patent and model for all human relationships. Indeed, to the degree to which men approximate in the relationships with their fellow men the love of the mother for her child, to that extent do they move more closely toward the attainment of genuine humanity." (p. 182)
For Montague, this mother-love is paradigmatic of the highest form of human love. Men participate in this love as a child, but increasingly depart from it as they leave childhood behind. Because of their "greater competence in loving and cooperative relationships", women are naturally superior to men in the moral and spiritual realm. Indeed, Montague concludes the argument with an allusion to Wallace's famed poetic line!
It is in this of course, that women can realize their power for good in the world, and make their greatest gains. It is the function of women to teach men how to be human. Women must not permit themselves to be deflected from their function by those who tell them that their place is in the home, in subservient relation to man. It is indeed, in the home that the foundations of the kind of world in which we live are laid, and in this sense it will always remain true that the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. (p.183)
As Montague points out here and throughout the book, men's historical response to this natural "rule of women in the sacred work of creating human beings is tragically reactionary. In its most extreme, it drastically exalts the male sphere-the cold object-world of industry, the brute logic of the market, the violence of the battlefield-over the spiritual values of the home and the spiritual benefits derived from mother-love.
Professor Camille Paglia, writing in Sexual Personae, provocatively argues that this vindictive seizure of power was motivated by man's primitive terror of woman's procreative powers.
Male bonding and patriarchy were the recourse to which man was forced by his terrible sense of woman's power.... Reason and logic are the anxiety-inspired domain of Apollo, premiere god of the sky-cult. The Apollonian is harsh and phobic, coldly cutting itself off from nature by its superhuman purity.... Apollo's great opponent Dionysius is ruler of the chthonian whose law is procreative femaleness. (p. 12)
On its positive side, male Apollonian reason produced the material and cultural achievements of Western civilization; its negative manifestation was an all-pervasive, oppressive patriarchy.
Patriarchy acted out its fear and disdain for female power, not only by devaluing it as a realm of "soggy emotionalism and bristling disorde", in Paglia's terms, but by invading woman's domain in order to control it with Apollonian logic. This violated her basic rights. A great imbalance was set up, since Apollonian abstraction seeks to cut itself off from feeling and intuition.
Reactions and counter-reactions have followed throughout the history of the sexes. The most secular variant of ideological feminism reacted to patriarchy by adopting the assumptions of Apollonian reason. In one rendition, it has exalted the values of careerism and of the marketplace over the values deriving from the mother-child bond. Montague sees this as a colossal error.
But if women ever come to believe that...being a mother is somehow inferior to being a career woman, they will have betrayed themselves, and reveal how profoundly they have been brainwashed into accepting the mythology that males have imposed upon them. For the truth is that being a mother is the most important career anyone can be called upon to follow. (p. 187)
The Urantia Book's presentation is more subtle, however, than this formulation. The Book recognizes that woman's work at home -- conveniently delegated to her because this is where her children are -- is nothing less than domestic drudgery.
At least this was so before the industrial revolution. In the section on "Women Under the Developing Mores", the author celebrates the fact that science has "emancipated woman". The modern factory set women free from "the confines of the home". Material progress has tended toward "women's liberation from domestic slavery". These passages clearly distinguish the material requirements of home maintenance from the moral and spiritual challenges of child-rearing, which do belong to woman's sphere and her sexual constitution.
In addition, this material liberation has opened up another distinctive quality of her sphere, according to the Book:
"Once a woman's value consisted in her food-producing ability, but invention and wealth have enabled her to create a new world in which to function-spheres of grace and charm. Thus has industry won its unconscious and unintended fight for women's social and economic emancipation." (U.B. p. 937)
Here's a puzzling passage for feminists concerned about equal pay for equal work. Woman's "economic and social emancipation", won by industry, does not automatically lead her into industry to compete for equal terms with men as an emancipated woman. Rather, it enables her to create a new and quite separate world of, shall we say, enchantment and elegance. This is what industry unconsciously aimed at in its "unintended fight". This is the evolutionary gain that "even revelation failed to accomplish."
Spheres of charm and grace...Bilingual beauties spotted in uptown cafes after a long day of translating UN speeches? Future Madonnas enchanting millions with erotic spectacles? Southern belles in lace waiting for their beaus? A wife whose simple smile at the door is the only memory her husband has of the previous day? A quivering poetess who holds the world spellbound with transporting images of spiritual beauty? Delighted mothers tossing beach balls with laughing children on a spring afternoon while their men ride jackhammers at work? A superbly dressed docent leading tourists through a Degas exhibit at the Lourve? Grandma's rhubarb pie cooked to perfection just arriving at the Thanksgiving dinner table while the extended family of 18 looks on?
I will leave further definition of "spheres of charm and grace" to others. But the benefits that mother-love confer on civilization are well understood to all who have enjoyed healthy relationships with their own mothers.
A service of
The Urantia Book Fellowship