Women and The Path to Power

Professor Cynthia Fuchs Epstein takes a closer look at the nature of "women's work."

Before she launched her distinguished academic career, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein had a job at a well-known and highly regarded women’s charitable organization. As time passed, she couldn’t help but notice that there was a dichotomy in what she saw going on in the office every day; it just didn’t add up.

“I found that within that organization, all the stereotypes about women were challenged,” says Epstein. “The notion that women were not interested in power, that they were not ambitious, that they were family-centered, was challenged by the fact that I worked for a group of women who were the most powerful, ambitious, competitive people that one could imagine. And they were effective. They were very successful in raising a huge amount of money. But if you asked them what they did, they would say they were housewives.” She goes on to add, “These were women who spent eight hours a day – sometimes ten hours a day – six or seven days a week [on the job], and yet they didn’t think of themselves as people who were working.” Later on, this type of contradiction became a focus of Epstein’s scholarship. So did seeking some kind of explanation for the strikingly small numbers of women in the nation’s leading professions.

When Epstein was pursuing a Ph.D. at Columbia in the 1960s, there were only about 7,000 women lawyers in the nation. Curious about this group, she soon discovered that the entire bibliography of scholarly literature on women in the workplace consisted of just a few pages. Her dissertation, which centered on interviews with sixty-five women lawyers, was a small step in changing that scarcity. Says Epstein, “I used to joke that I’d interviewed a third of all women partners in Wall Street law firms… which was one.”

Today Epstein is a distinguished professor of sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has been applying rigorous scholarship to the notion of “a woman’s place” for over forty years. (Woman’s Place: Options and Limits in Professional Careers is, in fact, the title of one of her early books, published in 1970.) Much has changed since her days as a graduate student. Today, women are about a third of the law profession, and half of law students are women. However, women continue to face discrimination on the job and their status in the workplace remains vulnerable in times when government and economic circumstances are shifting. And when it comes to attitudes toward women at work, her research findings have revealed some striking similarities between cultures which, on the surface, appear quite different.

For example, in an era when only 3% of American doctors were women, about 75% of doctors in Russia were women. At that time, Russia also had large numbers of women in other fields that were male-dominated in the U.S., such as dentistry and engineering. Someone who chose not to examine this state of affairs with greater scrutiny would have concluded that Russians were more open-minded and inclusive of women in the professions, but Epstein took a much closer look. She found that in Russia medicine was state-funded and therefore afforded little opportunity for accumulating personal wealth. In addition, medicine was seen not as a scientific pursuit, but rather as a nurturing activity. Hence, the field was open to women.

In short, Epstein found that in different societies, women did different work, but the justification for declaring a certain type of work appropriate for women was the same. Domains that were associated with money and prestige were always considered male. Other domains were designated as female. In all cultures, if a particular job or profession was viewed as a path to power, women need not apply.

When these ideas about appropriate work are internalized by women, it can severely limit their aspirations and self-images. Borrowing a term from psychology, Epstein refers to such internalized ideas as “schemas.” The successful women fundraisers that Epstein observed at that charitable organization early in her working life were certainly subject to some powerful schemas. Despite their considerable achievements (which required the ability to compete, wield influence, and function autonomously), they were simply unable to see themselves in anything other than an “appropriate” role – the nurturing housewife.

Epstein’s theoretical work addresses issues of power not only in regard to gender, but also the other “great divides” of society – divisions of national interest, wealth, race, religion, education, class, and sexuality. These categories are, she points out, “constructs created by human agency.” By questioning these constructs, as well as the overt and subtle means that are used to reinforce them, Epstein believes that her work, and her profession as a
whole, can shed light on the ways in which we order our social existence. Then that order could, conceivably, change.

Fortunately, the body of scholarly literature on women in the workplace has grown significantly since Epstein first looked at the subject. And, unlike her graduate student days at Columbia, when there were no women on the sociology faculties of most major universities, women are entering the discipline in greater numbers and assuming leadership positions. Epstein herself recently served as president of the American Sociological Association – an organization that had only two women presidents in the first seven decades of its existence. (Seven other women have been chosen since.) Bringing over forty years of scholarly insight and a lifetime commitment to issues of social justice to bear, she issued a challenge to her colleagues in the Association, “… to observe, to reveal, and to strike down the conceptual and cultural walls that justify inequality on the basis of sex in all of society’s institutions…”

The Graduate Center has, in many ways over the years, helped to meet Epstein’s challenge. “This is a place of lively discussion and has always been oriented toward activism,” she says. “Certainly it has given women opportunity.”

—Gail Goldberg