Mathew Forstater said:  
>Can people not understand the difference between endorsing the notion  
>that 'rationality is masculine' and the point made by Nelson quoted  
>(from the "respectable" journal, the Journal of Economic Perspectives)  
>in the previous e-mail that, historically, "people in U.S. and European  
>cultures tend to mentally *associate* certain characteristics with  
>masculinity or femininity," including, possibly, rationality with  
>masculinity (or verse-vice-a)?  
  
Samuel Bostaph replied:  
Yes, I see this difference clearly.  Cultural layers get added to almost any  
concept.  
  
  
Forstater and Bostaph understand each other.  This is well and good.  
  
Still, I want to know what any of this has to do with understanding Gary   
Becker's writings about the family and its organization.  If Becker helps us   
understanding certain events or the broad shape of phenomena in the real world,   
then it should be translatable without any loss in meaning from "feminine   
sounding characteristics" to "male sounding characteristics" or vice versa.  It   
shouldn't matter.   
  
Is any one on this list seriously implying that this is not really social   
science but ideology or normative banter or worse?  That seems to me to be a   
different problem from what is being descirbed by feminine or masculine sounding   
words (concepts).     
  
Becker was one of my teachers in graduate school and I never got the impression that his
economics was especially designed for men rather than women.  Our names (and genders) were
disguised on all the exams and the grade distribution was not something that raised our
concerns during the turbulent 1960s!  We had more pressing concerns.  Hopefully, members
of this list still do.
  
Laurence Moss