I belong to two clubs, each of
which meets every couple of months.
One is a book club, whose membership is exclusively male. The other is "The Girls' Club,"
whose membership consists only of women and me; for its purposes, I have been
made an honorary woman.
The book club meets over dinner. It reads and discusses mostly non-fiction: science, history,
biography, economics, current events, politics and such. Our discussions are
intense, notional, often disputatious, and thoroughly enjoyable. Rarely discussed are our children or
wives or our mutual friends.
The Girls' Club meets at lunch and sometimes for dinner and
theater. My membership in it
cannot possibly inform me of what goes on at women-only groups in general, since
my presence necessarily changes its very nature. However, the Girls' Club is distinctly unlike my book
club. Although we do discuss
current events, politics and books we have read, most of our conversation is
about our families, other people we know, and what is happening to them. Pictures of children and grandchildren
frequently circulate. The talk is mellow, feeling-centric, never disputatious,
and as thoroughly enjoyable as the book club's.
The sources of such differences between the sexes have been
analyzed so much that anything I might have to say is bound to be both trite
and dated by my upbringing in the first half of the twentieth century. Nature or nurture? Genetics, hormones or
culture? Of course, it is some
combination. Whatever the sources,
though, my experiences with the two clubs over the past decade have helped
focus my thoughts about their consequences.
I have long thought that "the fairer sex" (in both
senses of the word "fair") is also the better one. I am now completely convinced of
that. The women in the Girls' Club
and others I know temper abstractions with feelings, rarely suppressing human
factors in their thinking. They
are not at all embarrassed, as men usually are, in expressing their
emotions. They are more accepting
than men of the fallibility of others.
They are less prone than men to one-upmanship. They are less likely to shoot from the hip. In a word, I look on my female friends
as more menschlich than men, in the
word's full sense of humanity, humaneness and civilized behavior.
Like many others, I cannot help wonder what the world would
be like if it were run by women.
Would their greater Menschlichkeit
lead to a gentler result? Would
the fact that they bear and nurture our young lead to a fuller understanding of
peoples' plight in coping with the world?
I would hope so, but I am not sure. So far, women who have attained leadership positions seem to
have dosed on testosterone in their fight to succeed in a male-dominated
world. Prime examples are Margaret
Thatcher and Angela Merkel, who—in beating men at their own game—seem to have
adopted male attitudes and behavior, becoming less menschlich. Even
Hillary Clinton, who I think has
been a superb secretary of state, must feel the same pressure when going
mano-a-mano with her male counterparts in other countries.
We may have to wait until a distinctly female worldview attains a status equal to men's before it will be
able to fully express itself in political and corporate life. At that point, perhaps the urge to war
and war itself will be less frequent. Perhaps civic life will be less contentious, less
filled with aggression and crime.
Perhaps corporate life will be less of a macho rat race. Perhaps the nurturing of all segments
of society will replace devil-take-the-hindmost.
A book coincidentally published just while I was writing
this posting is less optimistic.
In The
End of Men: And the Rise of Women, author Hanna Rosin says, "A
more female-dominated society does not necessarily translate into a soft
feminine utopia. Women are becoming
more aggressive and even violent in ways we once thought were exclusively
reserved for men. This drive shows
up in a new breed of female murderers, and also in a rising class of young
female 'killers' on Wall Street.
Whether the shift can be attributed to women now being socialized
differently, or whether it's simply an artifact of our having misunderstood how
women are 'hardwired' in the first place, is at this point unanswerable, and
makes no difference. Difficult as
it is to conceive, the very rigid story we believed about [the stereotypical
attributes and roles of the sexes] is obviously no longer true. There is no 'natural' order, only the
way things are."
I hope Rosin is wrong in her assessment. Even she admits that many women now at
the top of corporations use a horizontal, collaborative management
style—coaching a team rather than ordering subordinates—and are less prone to
the testosterone-fueled excessive risk-taking of their male counterparts. To return to my previous point, I
suspect that not enough time has passed.
Maybe the "male characteristics" often displayed by even the
youngest women climbing the ladder now—the ones least bridled by the old
ways—derive from their still having to compete in a male-dominated world, as
the Thatchers and Merkels did a generation or two ago. Maybe in another generation or two,
when it hopefully will not be so difficult to climb the ladder while carrying
along a feminine worldview, we will have a world whose ethos is completely
different, and better.
Whatever the
final outcome, for now I will be content with savoring the very different male
and female worldviews in my two clubs—whose members are, as one says, "of
a certain age."