According to figures Chace presented at the dinner, women accounted for 31 percent of the University's student body in 1962-63. Last year, women comprised 53 percent of Emory students. The increase in women among the faculty has been much less dramatic, rising from 10 percent of the faculty 30 years ago to 26 percent last year. Chace said if current trends continue to hold true, women will comprise 62 percent of the faculty by 2008. Having those numbers in place, however, will not mean that women will have achieved equity with their male counterparts.
"We have few women department chairs and only one woman dean," Chace said. "There must be more women occupying key roles in the management of the University. These kinds of changes are not happening as quickly as they could," given recent educational data on American women. The ratio of women among non-faculty employees has remained largely unchanged, dipping only slightly from 72 percent in 1963 to 71 percent last year.
Given the fact that women now receive more than half of all master's degrees and one-third of all doctorates, Chace said, the wage gap between men and women should be narrowing quickly. The average women in 1955 earned 63.9 cents for every dollar a man made; in 1984, however, that gap had widened slightly to 63.7 cents. Today women still earn only 70 cents for every dollar earned by men.
In today's national climate of cynicism and mistrust of politicians and public institutions, much of the public discourse on women's status in society has turned away from a focus on women's accomplishments as agents of social change to an emphasis on the power of the individual woman.
A literary scholar, Chace cited the works of 19th-century French author Alexis de Tocqueville to illustrate a dilemma in American culture that was quite puzzling to most Europeans. The dilemma resulted from the collision between two cherished American principles: 1) an absolute belief in democracy, in people living together in social solidarity, and 2) the figure of the American as an isolated, completely self-sufficient individual.
"Betty Friedan brought out that solitude and poverty of emotion that women were feeling in the late 1950s and early 1960s," Chace said. "Women's lives were characterized by being at home, married with children. Women were beginning to ask themselves, `Is this all?' Friedan felt that a whole generation of American women were buried alive. She wanted them to move into the public sphere, take jobs, take command, have an autonomous existence."
To draw a contrast to Friedan's work, Chace pointed to three controversial contemporary women writers: Camille Paglia, Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Paglia wrote in Sex, Art and American Culture, "We need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex in all their dark, unconsoling mysteries. The feminist of the fin de siecle will be bawdy, streetwise and on-the-spot confrontational, in the prankish Sixties way."
"What disappears with Friedan," Chace said, "is any real connection with the larger enterprise of society. The workplace is seen as either a place to conquer men or a place where women will be harassed. There is no discussion of jobs, family, home, voting, the election of women to public office."
Just as Friedan can be viewed against a backdrop of her contemporary male writers, so can Paglia and company be viewed in a larger societal climate of rapidly diminishing faith in politicians and social institutions.
"A much larger number of women faculty leave the University than men," said Robyn Fivush of the psychology department. "Why do they leave? Unless we start retaining more women faculty, we are not going to make any real progress."
Chace acknowledged that the University's statistics on retention of women faculty need to be more reliable and thorough, and pledged to do what he can to improve the situation.
Pat Marstellar of the biology department pointed out that many of today's youth are deeply involved in the public sphere, which she sees as a sign of hope for the future.
"Today's students tend to invest themselves in local projects in which they can see concrete returns," said Chace. "That's different from a huge organizational struggle or a political campaign. Bill Clinton was elected by 43 percent of the 33 percent of eligible Americans who voted. We are seeing a real erosion of electoral power."
--Dan Treadaway