Stanley Kurtz, the author of the article, is a fellow at the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank. He has written a number of articles defending the "traditional family" and attacking the political and social agenda of feminists. The thrust of this article is that feminist arguments for equal treatment of women are based on what in his view is a mistaken theory about the nature of gender. In his argument, if nature (not society) makes men and women different, then social reforms aimed at equality between men and women are bound to fail.
Kurtz is correct in observing that modern feminism (the feminism of the last part of the twentieth century, as distinct from the earlier "liberal feminism" of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) has as one of its central themes the notion that gender is primarily a social-political construct, not a biological given. From the feminist perspective, the oppression of women is the result of the patriarchal structure of society which defines male roles as dominant and female roles as subordinate. These feminists argue that it is not merely sufficient to have equal laws for men and women, but it is necessary to change the structure of society to have genuine equality for women. One of the changes that is most necessary is changing the structure of the family, since the the traditional family structure is the source of gender differentiation and is also one of the more oppressive institutions (in the view of these post-modern feminists).
While I agree with Kurtz that eliminating all gender differences is not just undesirable but impossible, I cannot agree with the unstated but implied assumption that all gender differences are natural, that the structure of gender roles in our society is natural and unchangeable, and that social changes to promote equality of women are unnecessary. In arguing against androgyny, he is arguing in favor of the status quo regarding the social and political inequality of women.
The truth is, gender is partially natural and partially social. In this, gender is like language. It is natural for human beings to speak, but the particular language we do speak is the product of our social environment. There are natural differences between men and women, but these differences are distributed over a wide spectrum of individuals (for example, men on average are taller than women, but an individual woman may be taller than an individual man). Gender roles, however, are largely the result not of natural differences but are due to the way in which boys and girls are socialized. The kibbutz experiment which Kurtz cites as evidence for the failure of androgyny, may not have eliminated gender differences, but it did contribute to the redefinition of gender roles in a more egalitarian way.
Androgyny is connected with the ideal of gender equality. Central to the notion of androgyny is the rejection of the idea that either masculine or feminine is "higher" or "better" than the other.
