Gender aspects of female education in the discourses of «Naturalism» and «Biological determinism»

Abstract

The gender aspects of the university education which manifest themselves vividly in the professional structure of the hierarchical pyramid are closely connected with the ideas and concepts of the biological essentialism and vulgar determinism. Those radical transformations in the gender relations that took place in the last decade of the XX-th century, have a great impact on the social status of both men and women. Following the masculine – as a normative one – style of life women have borrowed the qualities immanently inherent in men; rationality is among the most important ones. Nowadays this «new rationality» is vividly represented in the professional sphere: there are many professions that have gone from «all male» to female, and almost none that have gone the other way. As successful careers are impossible without good university education now more than a half of the students in the Western world are women (in the Humanities and social sciences the ratio of men to women is 1 to 6). Among the educated class women’s new economic power has produced considerable changes both in the social and private styles of behavior. As a result the renaissance of the based on women’s biological inabilities has been evoked to fulfill social roles.   The basic myth here is that «Anatomy is Destiny». The traditional view that women's place is in the home was based on some claim that women were naturally or constitutionally unfit to take part in the public or political domain; the latter was greatly supported by the scientists in the second half of the XIX century (R. Spencer, A. Clark, Ch. Darvin, J. A. Tomson and others) and in the second half of the XX century (A. Wilson, L. Tiger, D. Barash and others). The fact that in these periods precisely the feminist movement was the most prominent shows how tightly the science is connected with ideology. In the «nature / nurture» argument feminist thinks claim that nature does not dictate whether women should be confined to motherhood, nurture does. The crucial shift that occurs here is the assertion that women's identity is not fixed by anatomy, biology, genes or DNA. Once it is admitted that women's biological nature does not determine them, but social trends, customs, beliefs and prejudices limit and prescribe their roles, then the door is open for re-education, transformation, and social change.