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Occasionally a book stands out from the torrent of new releases of disparate quality that rain on a reviewer each year, giving the reader a new vocabulary for everyday verities. Manliness is such a standout. Brave, thoughtful, elegantly written, both erudite and commonsensical, it constitutes the best contribution to the perennial debate on sex roles since George Gilder's Men and Marriage some three decades ago. A renewed understanding and appreciation of "manliness" is the goal of author Harvey C. Mansfield, a Harvard professor of political philosophy. Manliness is defined principally as "confidence in the face of risk," for good or ill. While manliness may be manifested by women as well as men, it is naturally expected more of men. Mansfield takes the reader on a tour of the intellectual history of manliness, touching on modern psychology, 19th- and 20th-century British/American literature, classic political theory, and finally ancient Greek philosophy, finding many stereotypical sex differences generally confirmed. Men are aggressive and single-minded, women contextual and nurturing. Men tend to be self-important, protective of their honor, assertive in causes beyond themselves. Women operate with more aversion to risk and indirect means. Although Mansfield treats feminists with gentlemanly respect - paying the compliment of ascribing manliness to them - his core message is that they are profoundly mistaken. The heart of his book is the chapter on "Womanly Nihilism," which rightly concludes that 20th-century feminist intellectuals such as Beauvoir, Friedan, Millett and Greer wanted independence from morality, from nature (motherhood) and from men. "One problem of women's autonomy is that women are the weaker sex," the author observes. "So let's tell the truth. Now that women are equal, they should be able to accept being told that they aren't, quite." The late-20th-century advent of expanded career opportunities for women has not changed the fact that women do the same proportion of housework and child care that they did in 1955 - two-thirds. Men still dominate politics, warfare, police work, firefighting, scientific discoveries and business organizations, and contribute two-thirds of family income. Mansfield does not think these politically incorrect realities are likely to change. While denying that he intends to give the reader "pointers on how to live," the author does just that. He ends with a plea for a more pragmatic approach to sex roles in private life. He fully accepts a gender-neutral society in the public sphere, with equal opportunities for women in most occupations, but urges us to admit in private that sex stereotypes are largely true. Browbeating men to do 50% of housework is futile, as is an expectation that "women can do anything" and uniformly aspire to high professional success. "It should be expected that men will be manly and sometimes a bit bossy," and that "women will recognize manliness with a smile by checking it while giving it something to do or, on occasion, by urging it on." A couple of quibbles: It is a serious misreading of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to describe Wickham's relationship to Lydia Bennet as one of "sexual harassment." And the author apparently confused Biblical femme fatale Salome with Judith. Overall, however, his scholarship is reliable and gracefully rendered for the general reader, and refreshingly non-polemical in tone for such a charged topic. Manliness draws on some scientific sources, but is ultimately skeptical of the power of science to explain the behavior of individual manly men, who need to feel important and not like some statistical average. Mansfield gives far more credence to philosophy and literature to explain human behavior. Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea - a quintessential tale of manliness examined in some detail - could not possibly have been written about a woman. (Yale University Press, 2006, 244 pp., $27.50) |
Womanliness and feminism naturally come in for considerable attention as well, and indeed women would profit even more than men from reading this book, the better to understand men.
