The "Feminine" Behaviour of Powerless People

by Zane Kotker, Savvy, March 1980

(The Gender Centre advise that this article may not be current and as such certain content, including but not limited to persons, contact details and dates may not apply. Where legal authority or medical related matters are cited, responsibility lies with the reader to obtain the most current relevant legal authority and/or medical publication.)

Warm, sensitive, dependent, passive, emotional, cooperative, supportive, subjective. It is becoming clear to psychologists that the old string of adjectives describing women is not so much a description of femininity as it is of a social and psychological state of powerlessness. And the oppositive adjectives generally applied to men ­aggressive, active, cold, task-oriented, competitive, intellectual, objective, independent - do not represent masculinity per se, but more accurately describe the attributes of a person in possession of power. This is an idea still in transition, still being tested.

Women's speech, for instance, had been described by a linguist as full of questions and questioning intonations, overly polite, grammatically precise and marked by modifiers through which women could get out of admitting they said what they'd said. Women were thought to speak this nonassertive female dialect, designed to ward off wrath, because they were women. But when two psychologists, Faye Crosby and Linda Nyquist, took the list of "female" speech characteristics to a Boston police station and checked it against a spectrum of power behaviours, they found something enlightening: Both male and female clients pleading in front of the police desk spoke the female language. And female police officers working with male police officers behind the desk did not speak any of it. "Female" speech turned out not to be the speech of women at all: it was the speech of the powerless.

Women are hardly the only subordinates, either psychologically or socially. Children and the poor play subordinate roles everywhere, while in America blacks and certain ethnic and religious groups have long shared the back seat. Not to be forgotten, either, are the old, the sick, and even later borns (who often imagine power as existing outside themselves): some would argue the same for Southerners, for the unattractive, for the uneducated. The list is endless. Dominance and subordination make up a highly complex, and often mutually exclusive, pattern of categorisation. Each of us probably has a drawer full of identities to which others (and we ourselves) give various weights of powerlessness or powerfulness. Some are real, some are internalised myths. A man and woman standing before that police desk in Boston might be speaking in the style of the powerless there. But, at home, after they finally get their kids out of the clink, how do they speak to them? All of us stereotype groups, and these stereotypes affect us all, in turn. Take what happens to listeners.

... more attention was paid to what the videotaped men were saying simply because our society perceives males as more powerful.

If the powerless speak a special language, they are also listened to in a special way. In a study at the University of North Carolina, men and women judged by testers to be of equal articulateness were videotaped making the very same factual speeches. The tapes were shown to different groups of male and female students who were instructed to listen carefully. Then the students were questioned on the facts delivered by the speakers. The students remembered more and could answer questions better on the speeches delivered by men than on the same speeches delivered by women. Researchers Kenneth Gruber and Jacquelyn Gaebelein concluded that more attention was paid to what the videotaped men were saying simply because our society perceives males as more powerful. The powerless, no matter how well they speak, are apt to be ignored. "Wha'dja say, lady?" Other tests in which well-dressed and poorly dressed people speak, or in which blacks and whites speak, or in which children and adults speak, might further verify the testers' conclusion.

In a recent study of emotional expression at the University of Maine, eighteen women and eighteen men answered ten questions apiece. Five questions carried little emotional clout and five others were emotionally loaded. In answering the ten questions, women consistently used facial expressions, which emphasise emotion. Yet, oddly, the women were not any more expressive over the emotional questions than they were in response to the factual questions. The women were simply "putting out" emotion while responding to questioners. The men, on the other hand, were controlling emotion. This is shown by the fact that men revealed some small facial expression in responding to the factual questions, but when the questions zeroed in on emotional areas, the men's faces blanked out. Tester Paul Cherulnik thinks this is explained by the fact that women are simply trained to express emotion (whether it's there or not) while men are trained not to (even when they feel like it). One thinks of the steely faced chairman of the board whose sole "emotional" act may be to open the window of his 30th floor suite and step out. Even that will be preceded by the careful preparation of a note expressing undying love to the children and precise directions for funeral arrangements.

What good is this split? By what process of social evolution could it have developed? Why should dominants suppress emotion and subordinates express it? Ask a poker player. You don't want to reveal your vulnerabilities. Ask a mayor. You can't let them know you're scared or confused or they won't follow you anymore. Ask Queen Victoria why she never looked anxious lowering her backside onto space where she hoped soon to feel the chair. "If I did, I wouldn't be a queen!" Which is to say, "My people want me always to be secure - so they can be." It's not to look surprised in public, whereas the underlings can all roll their eyeballs in graveyards, giggle in the girls' room, or fall into fits of weeping at the theatre.

Which one of two strangers is dominant? That question seems to be in the air whenever strangers meet, and each of the strangers' behaviours will change in some way, according to how each perceives the answer. In a test involving 44 men and 44 women, Susan J. Frances of Humboldt State University in California asked each individual to hold a seven-minute conversation with a stranger of the same sex and another with a stranger of the opposite sex. She found that each pair maintained a turn conversing, but that men talked longer than women. This, explains Frances, is probably because holding the conversational floor is considered a power move, and the men (as well as the relatively silent women) had automatically assumed they were dominant in the male-female pairs. When facing another male, men talked at even greater length - trying to establish themselves as dominant. They even resorted to considerable "uhms" and "ahs" to fill and hold space. The females smiled and laughed more than the males did. Those women who did this the most later described themselves as uncomfortable during the conversation and as generally "retiring and deferential". Interestingly, the few men who did smile and laugh later described themselves as "friendly and social". Another thing women did more of was to look at their partners. Now anyone who's given a speech to a roomful of people will recall the difference in her own mood between the moment when her eyes chanced upon a listener who had fallen asleep and then upon another listener staring up raptly. If you gaze at someone while that person is talking, you reassure the speaker. The women performed this stroking service for the men far more than the men did for the women. Women also looked at the men while they themselves talked, revealing a need for feedback. Frances explains, there were no women among the 44 who acted as if they considered themselves equal to or dominant over at least some of the men? Similar tests showing what happens in conversations between patients and doctors, or students and teachers, or mothers and children would be welcome.

These last three pairs exemplify temporary states of inequality. Boston psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller points out in her popular text, "Toward a New Psychology of Women", in these pairs the task is for the superior to move the inferior along in level of skill or maturity until eventually the inequality is ended. Not so with the traditionally accepted inequalities of race, sex, class and so forth. Here the object is for the dominant to keep the subordinate in their places. And it is from this process that many characteristics frequently pinned on "passive" women and "active" men derive. Being dominant, whether in class, sex or race (or on the job ladder) traditionally means that you have to do certain things well, and this can be read to mean that you have to keep others, the subordinates, from doing them as well or at all. You have to master knowledge, skills and become task-oriented, all while, as we've seen, censuring emotional expression so that no one will spot your weaknesses. And on the broad side, you have to define the restricted roles of subordinates and convince them of the wisdom of this definition.

"Power corrupts", it has been said. This sleight of hand against others, in which the boss succumbs to a temptation to lead the underling to believe he's dumber, clumsier or inferior to make it easier to keep order, is one of those corruptions. The boss may even follow the timeworn course of rewarding subordinates for shows of submissiveness, passivity, docility, dependence, lack of initiative, lack of effectiveness in thought ("She's so cute, such a scatterbrain!") and for indecisiveness. For her own comfort, the new boss may deny that she is using subordinates to do the dirty work, and she may yearn to join with equals in a group denial. Eventually she may even convince herself that the subordinates ought to be serving her because, as everybody knows, they are inferior, submissive, passive, dumb, etc. "Thou shalt collect the garbage," she repeats daily, "and feed me, and clothe me and get me heat. I'll handle the real thinking". In her heart, she may suspect the worst about what she's doing and surely she'll suspect the worst about what she's doing and surely, she'll yearn to let herself go and have a good cry " she'll miss the "other" human qualities she's cast out of herself upon the great unwashed "them".

What about subordinates? Those labeled subordinate, Miller says, too often believe what the dominants say about them. Being subordinate means that you learn to study the smallest nuance of mood in the master. If you actually accept the master's definition of yourself, you'll worry constantly that you aren't giving enough to others. Women will serve their husbands and then their children - and there is no more demanding, if only temporary, master than the being Freud called "His Majesty the Baby". Yes, you will come to enjoy seeing children and others prosper and may not even resent the fact that your own needs and desires aren't part of the daily thrust. Alas, splendidly serving people brings few rewards. As Miller points out: Dominants don't develop the sensitivity of subordinates and people do not really know or care for their servants, even Super Mom. Or Super Worker, we might add. Of course, you may retain and even develop a sense of a better self but you do best to keep it hidden. You become Br'er Rabbit - you outwit the fox so cleverly that the fox he don't even know it sometimes. Whence "feminine intuition", Miller says: whence "feminine wiles". They're no gift, but the product of years a­ studyin' Massa. How to please the King? How to make Pharaoh smile? Wait 'till after you serve him the blueberry tart, dear.

As a political or economic subordinate, you will hesitate to rebel (if you can work up the sense that you ought to). Rebellion can bring less of food, clothing, and shelter or it can bring jail or the label "mentally ill". In trying to chuck subordinate stereotypes, women generally accept lesser pay rather than the threat of no pay at all: no pay at all is the insult rather than physical assault. Mockery too. Small rebellions by secretaries who refuse to bring the coffee are met, Miller says, by bosses who throw up their hands and pretend the "girls" have stripped them of all their power. Bottom-rung and top ­rung subordinates usually resist identification with each other, though not always. As Caroline Bird put it in Born Female:

When white girls went down south to work for Negro rights, they found themselves identifying with the blacks more than the white boys in the movement. They knew how it felt to shut up: take a back seat: accept segregation, exclusion from clubs, restaurants, and meetings: lower their rights to work "realistically" at the only tasks open to them: cope with imputations of natural inferiority: and see themselves portrayed in print and picture as stereotypes rather than as individuals."

Through management sticks close together, labourers have to be pummeled into identifying with each other. The young subordinate's urge is to leave powerlessness behind and try to identify with the dominant. This may mean you attack your own kind and cut your ties with Brooklyn or the kitchen. Used to giving all to serving others, subordinates who do rise will tend to bring cooperation with them as a social tool. This isn't because cooperation is a feminine device, but because it's a subordinate's survival mechanism. Underlings know that cooperation is a distinct improvement over doing all the work yourself. Newly arrived management's use of cooperation may not last long. Dominants generally consider cooperation a distinct step down, because they're used to being served. Subordinates moving up to dominance have to learn not to be paralyzed by the threat of anger from or by direct competition with other dominants.

As women begin to hold more executive jobs and experience the possession of power, they discover a truth: Not all social programming for dominance or subordination is in a women's past ­one's daily function also affects personality. This is the opening tenet of Rosabeth Moss Kanter's widely read book Men and Women of the Corporation. Harvard men and Smith women both begin on the bottom rungs of corporate ladders, and though the women may come with more of a subordinate cast than the men, a few years in a particular office chair is bound to homogenise ways of thought and action.

The armless secretarial chair, for instance, tends to develop four quantities in its occupants, male or female. They are self­ effacement, dependence on praise, emotionality and a parochial subjectivity. These are traits of course, long ascribed to women - most secretaries are women: most working women are secretaries - but Kanter claims these traits to be the natural outcome of functioning in a situation of powerlessness. The secretary is dependent on her (or his) boss. First, by showing self-effacement the secretary makes clear that she/he is not competing with the boss. The secretary supports and serves the boss in a microcosm of the world's subordinate-dominant two-some. The secretary is the cheerleader cheering, the valet laying out clothes, the wife patting and studying the husband's brow for signs of mood. Second, since the secretary doesn't get a whole lot of pay or any real power, even holding the job is at the whim of the boss, the secretary needs constant encouragement. The daily pat on the back becomes narcotic for most secretaries. This praise and assurance is sometimes given by bosses in the indirect form of intimacy. The boss will tell his or her secretary carefully hidden feelings toward other corporate figures. These tidbits become the secretary's crumbs of independent power, Kanter says. The secretary takes them to the ladies' room where she trades them off for the tidbits that other secretaries have garnered. (At last! A convincing explanation of why women are constantly pictured as gossips) Third, secretaries learn to be emotional as a way of acting out the suppressed emotions of the dominant boss, male or female; this is the office counterpart of the process which Miller described. Through Secretarial wit, many a boss is brought to laugh at, and thus acknowledge and be relieved of, otherwise unmentionable feelings. Secretaries supply the coloured travel posters and the cartoons pinned to file cabinets. Secretaries jump for joy when the contract is signed, when the deal goes through. But, fourth, secretaries are buys with detailed, rather meaningless, work and seldom learn what is happening in the company at large: This lack of hard knowledge often twists in the final screw that keeps the secretary in that powerless, armless chair.

When corporate beginners do move up to low-power positions, the climate changes, often growing noticeably hostile. The inequality switches. The beginner is now no longer subordinate, but neither is he or she truly dominant, in a low-power job. The actual inequality is so small that the low-power boss is constantly insecure, and he or she generally comes into daily harassment from the troops, be they the typing pool or the sales force. (A young teacher of high school seniors and a mother of teenage children meet much of the same; insubordination is its apt name.) Workers who will quickly muffle their aggression in the presence of a high boss only turn with a vengeance on the low boss and nip at his or her heels. The low-power boss absorbs all this hostility to avoid conflict. He or she gets bossy, becomes a nag and generally uses threats and punishments rather than persuasion and reward to get compliance from underlings. Such bosses have to be right; they take all the credit, they get rigid about rules, they breathe over every neck. Low-power jobs are usually routine, and ritual quickly replaces innovation or action; risk is avoided. The low-power boss holds on so tightly to a teacup of power that his or her knuckles whiten. Promotion had better occur, Kanger warns, before the mould of toothless hark hardens around the individual.

What happens, in Kanter's overview, if a worker rises to a position of power but then gets stuck in it? There is a rug on the floor but no hope of moving out this door. The shock that a limited future generally produces is stuck if talented workers generally evokes the same responses in men as it does in women. These responses are not dissimilar to certain aspects of the subordinate's personality. If townspeople turn to each other with social jollity during snowstorm and blackout, stuck workers turn to each other for camaraderie. The crisis, however, doesn't end for the stuck worker. The skies darken. What was once buoyant luck for smart women and men gradually becomes an ominous or even malicious fate; self-esteem drops; bitterness and anger at management sets in; workers daydream and grow catty. Women may decide to quit and have babies; men decide to quit and run small businesses from their ­basement playrooms. Workers stop working very hard and abandon any attempts at changing the system. What's the use? Eat, drink and make a few jokes. Even at the expense of each other. Cliques develop. Camaraderie replaces achievement. The guys and gals at the office become a team.

Of losers. They gripe together; they group together to offer passive subordinate-type resistance. Zombie-like, they lower Massa's production quotas and sabotage the "they", with whom they once identified. Hell hath no fury like a talented, intelligent worker scorned. Losers mock any of their group who keep on trying to advance. Who are you kidding? There's no way out of here! In this, they evoke housewives making yearly rounds through piles of dirty socks via the great waking daydream of television or alcohol. And the depressed housewife's greatest scorn is for the woman next door who works for pay. The housewife's comfort is in women like herself: The powerless may comfort each other, but they do not empower each other. The stuck worker has fallen into the same pit.

Increasingly, girls are able to reject the definition of themselves as subordinates, and some even reject the traditional definition of power as aggressive; They want power, but on their "own" cooperative, supportive terms. Kanter, Miller and the new wave of psychologist seem to pause on a common note: Dominants miss what they've projected onto subordinates, and subordinates long for power but not always at somebody else's expense.

The two halves possess an impulse to come together. When they do merge, we can expect something like mutation, revolution, a new world order. The suffering servant brought to triumph at last may establish, if only temporarily, a more kindly, cooperative, supportive kingdom - and maybe not. But for a new world, women must first get more power. To get it women have to be able to throw off the definition of themselves as powerless or substandard and some, if not all, of the subordinate behaviours.

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