In our discussion about New Feminism, I've referenced complementarity quite a bit, and I wanted to clarify how that differs from other approaches to the relationship between men and women. The chart below, which is slightly modified from the one in the ENDOW Letter to Women Study, really helped me to understand this. (Click on it for a bigger version.) For each philosophy, we can simply ask two questions: 1) Are men and women equal? 2) Are men and women the same?
When it comes to Gender Unity (which Plato promoted), we can see that yes, men and women were theoretically equal! However, the human body is considered unimportant and differences between the genders are ignored. You can still see this today, when people try to say that all the differences between the sexes are from socialization (I don't think you see anyone still claiming there are no differences), and then they get really upset when their sons prefer to play with trucks and their daughters with dolls, despite all their efforts to the contrary.
Next we have Gender Polarity, where the differences between men and women are held to be so important that one sex or the other is considered superior. So long, equality. That's how you get folks like Aristotle saying man is superior to woman. Sometimes now you have radical feminists say that woman is superior to man (although that doesn't work if you also want to say they're equal).
Finally we get to Gender Complementarity. It acknowledges that men and women are equal and different. Yay! The only caution in this is in understanding how the differences between men and women work. As pointed out by Sr. Prudence Allen, RSM and Fr. John Riccardo, fractional complementarity divides the differences into parts that either males or females have, and it takes both a man and a woman to make a single whole person. In this view, a man or a woman are only half of a person. However, in integral complementarity every single person is considered whole. And yet, when a man and a woman come together, they are more than the sum of their parts. How cool is that?
As you can imagine, New Feminists would consider integral sex complementarity to be the correct understanding of the relationship between men and women.
Related articles:
"A Place in the Paradigm" is a beautiful reflection about singleness that reminded me of the difference between fractional and integral complementarity.
Sr. Allen has an article about this that I have printed out to read on the airplane - let me know if you'd like a pdf copy. Here's the reference: Allen, Prudence. 1990. Integral sex complementarity and the theology of communion. Communio 17: 523-544.