Dialogue: David

To: Robert

Robert,

 In asking specifically that we unleash the power of women, you point to a change that may well have already begun to happen. There is considerably more humanitarianism in the world today than 100 years ago, when the women’s movement had begun to gather force. Women already have done much to bring their best ideas and qualities to bear on culture. We live in an age of reforms and charities, of rescues and attempted rescues of those in trouble. Human rights now constitute the leading international issue. These changes exhibit the higher and finer qualities of womanhood. Since the 1960s, however, and to some extent even before that, many American women have at the same time been degraded by coarse ideas of liberation. Small wonder that we confuse the world on such issues.

 Our barrel of culture has a lot of rotten apples mixed in with the good ones: bad ideas advanced by some just to earn money or to play to the dogmas of materialism. Some say all the apples are equal. That of course is inane, truly a bad apple. Out of it all, however, it’s probable that the leading reform ideas of today are on average more potent than those of 100 years ago. How do we test this postulate? We must look deeper into the makeup of individual consciousness, of both women and men. In quantum mechanics, peering into the virtually invisible, a wave can also be a particle, and vice versa. Each state exhibits useful data. By analogy, why can’t we look more discerningly at women, and at men, too, to see their mental and spiritual compositions, their different combinations of qualities? The dualities of people may end up being more richly and beautifully complex than that of particles.

 A man who has both strength (traditionally seen as a masculine quality) and tenderness (traditionally seen as a feminine quality) is  still one, a unity, a whole. A woman who has both tenderness and strength is also a very whole woman. These two individuals might get along well together as friends, or as wife and husband, or as teacher and pupil, or as employer and employee; and they could teach one another more about the composition of each other’s individualities, improving each of them. We need to learn more about the nature of the duality of women and of men, recognizing that there are both similarities and differences between men and women. This can enrich our culture. These basic ideas, with a stress on mental qualities, are worlds beyond a strict focus on gender. Womanhood undoubtedly includes the qualities most essential to a higher civilization, a way of life worth living deeply. Manhood today includes many of these qualities, but usually not in as great a degree. The power of normative values should demand the better qualities.

 In a world of war, terror, destructive and shifting values, we must unleash the lasting qualities that help society cohere and care. Who can deny that we need to uplift the authentic feminine today, in the lives of both men and women? Authentic womanhood is in the long run more powerful than all of the rotten ideas in our cultural barrel. Let men see this and they will be better % and then they also will let women emerge to the status of equality. This approach, however, does not mean abandoning the values that protect families, in particular children and women. Why sneer at the idea of protecting female sexuality when we can see clearly what happens when this is not done. In sub-Saharan Africa, where female sexuality is not protected, United Nations experts now talk of the “feminization” of the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic. These experts say that young women in some parts of that region are now three times as likely to become infected as young men. If this happens, basic infrastructures of life in that part of the world will fail. So we see that money is not the answer, but rather caring about the things that make us human. 

 I know the mother of two young children who tells me that at least 50 percent of the intelligent women in America today really want to have children and stay home with them to get their lives going in the right direction from the start. They are willing to break their own careers into two parts in order to do this. The culture and the economy work against them in many ways. These women, however, network and support each other extensively. This mother and her husband have a girl five and a boy three. The husband admits he does not have the patience needed to help raise children seven days a week, from about six in the morning until 8:30 at night, not to mention the chores that remain after the kids are in bed. He’s very glad to go to work.

 Both of these parents say that boys are wired very differently than girls. All of the wife’s friends with children know this, she says, and they talk about it a lot. As children, boys are usually the fullbacks of life, crashing ahead, making the vroooom noises of trucks, while the girls tend to be, yes, more nurturing.  Both sexes share the qualities of intelligence and joy, but their interests are different. What will the parents bring out in the children? Some will let the girls turn into Madonnawannabes when that could well be just exactly the opposite of what a girl might really want. I know of a case where a very smart man had one child, a daughter, and he wouldn’t let her have dolls because he wanted her to be a lawyer. She would rush to play with her friends’ dolls when she visited her friends. She ended up a Harvard lawyer, yet in ten years a very sad, lonely case. Boys of course have their teddy bears and other play creatures. Someone once got some successful Wall Street males to pose for a photo with them holding their childhood teddy bears. Girls, however, often love their dolls in ways that show their innate nurturing qualities, having long play sessions with them, tucking them in for naps, taking them on trips, fussing over them.