“Studies and common sense suggest that ‘altruism’ in our culture often stems from guilt, fear, and low self-esteem rather than from freedom or self-love. (Margaret Adams has discussed the crippling limitations and definite social function of what she calls ‘the Compassion Trap’ in women.) Such traits are not devalued by either men or women. However, men benefit from such traits, almost exclusively, and reward them rather poorly. A genuinely compassionate person would have a hard time participating in the spheres of public action. There is a ruthlessness that politics or science demands—but its devotees are never totally destroyed by this demand. The devotees are men, who expect to be revived each night by female compassion in the individual, private family unit. This revival doesn't always take place—and women are always blamed as nags and bitches, as ungrateful and manipulative albatrosses around their suffering husbands' necks. This may even be true. However, it is time to blame or examine the public sphere that has exiled compassion or decency into private isolated places—and the ruthlessness involved in enforcing full-time ‘compassion’-service upon women.
Apparently there is no place for altruism or compassion in political and military ventures. The kind of training women receive as ‘compassion’-givers effectively keeps them at home, psychologically. In the twentieth century, the wives of upper-class men organized charity benefits for the poor; the wives of middle-class men organized peace and ecology demonstrations and worked as social workers, nurses, teachers, and psychologists; the wives of lower-class men took care of their families and of other people's children and husbands, as secretaries, domestics, and prostitutes. And yet poverty does not disappear; neither war nor pollution nor racism is abolished; and the universal female tie to childbearing and rearing remains as constant as ever.”
-Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness
