labor within the home, the ethic and practice that still
obtains is sex segregation. The separate-but-equal model applied to
men and women continues to be effective because it is seen to correspond to biology accurately and fairly. The model has credibility because the sexual subordination of women to men is seen to be in
the nature of things and a logical premise of social organization— a
biological reality that is properly reiterated in social institutions,
civil prerogatives, and sex-segregated obligations. The model is
perceived as fair because in it men and women are kept biologically
separate (discrete), socially separate (discrete), and they are declared equal because each is doing
their sex. Separation is seen to be the only real vehicle of equality
for women. The notion is that women competing with men, not
limited to a female sphere, could never achieve social or economic
or sexual equality because of their nature—which in all of these
areas would simply be inferior to male nature; females are inferior,
however, only because they have left the female sphere, which in
itself is equal, not inferior; females are only inferior to men in a
male sphere, where they do not belong. Equality is guaranteed by
setting up separate spheres according to sex and simply insisting
that the spheres are equal. This amounts to a kind of metaphysical
paternalism: constructing a social model in which women need not
experience their inferiority as a burden but instead are assigned
such social value as women that their inferiority is of equal social
worth to the superiority of men. The separate spheres are declared
equal with no reference to the material conditions of the persons in
the spheres and this is the sense in which women have equality
with men under this model. There need not be equality of rights,
for instance; indeed, it is counterindicated. Since the sexes are not
the same, they should not be treated the same, and something is
wrong when a common standard is applied to both. In this social
model, separation by sex class is viewed as the only basis for equality; sex segregation is the institutional expression of this egalitarian ethic, its program in fact. With sex as with race, separation is a
fact; equality is a chimera or a lie.
The woman-superior model of antifeminism is found in two apparently opposing realms: the spiritual and the sexual. In the spiritual realm, the woman is superior to the male by definition; he worships her because she is good; her sex makes her moral or gives
her the responsibility for a morality that is sex-specific. Being
female, she is higher, by nature closer to some abstract conception
of good. She is credited with a moral sensibility that men are hard
put to match (but then, they are not expected to try): she is ethereal, she floats, her moral nature lifts her up, she gravitates toward
that which is pure, chaste, and tasteful. She has an instinctive, sex-
based knowledge of what is good and right. Her moral sensibility
is unfailingly benign, always an influence toward the good. Her
sex-class business includes the business of being virtuous— a
strange assignment by sex, since the Latin root of the word
means “strength” or “m anliness, ” which perhaps shows the futility
of the project for her. T his goodness of her sex is essentially based
