A good post-mortem on the feminist movement by Dan Seligman in Commentary. Here's one of many intriguing quotes:
A final obstacle to the resurrection of the women's movement is that Americans have been gradually discovering that its core proposition is false. In the 1960's and 70's, it was still possible for an educated person to believe that the observable differences in male and female behavior reflected only social conditioning–that, as Betty Friedan put it in The Feminine Mystique, women “happen to be the people who give birth,” and nothing much follows from that. But in the 1980's, even some feminist scholars, notably Carol Gilligan of Harvard, were finding “natural” differences in the moral and psychological tendencies of the two sexes.
Since then, evolutionary research has dealt successive hammer blows to the “social conditioning” perspective. The logic of Darwinian sexual selection has always required substantial differences in male and female behavior, and in recent years evolutionary biologists have been busy filling in the details. In Male, Female (1998), for example, David Geary of the University of Missouri elaborates a range of biologically based sex differences in academic skills, predisposition to violence, accidental death and injury rates, incidence of anxiety and depression, eating disorders, occupational interests, and occupational achievement.
The news that men and women really are different, just as your grandmother assumed, need not change much civilized behavior. It need not affect the rules about equal opportunity in the job markets or in college admissions. It might, however, affect the laws pertaining to such matters, for instance by making it harder to adduce different success rates as prima-facie evidence of discrimination.
