Saturday morning, I watched my nine-year-old granddaughter, Louisa, play on her girls’ basketball team. I assumed they shortened the court and lowered the baskets.
Boy, was I wrong.
These nine-year-old girls played on a full court with slightly lowered baskets. They knew what they were doing. They understood the rhythm of the game. They dribbled, passed, shot and defended. In the last possible second, with her team down by two points, Louisa, make the basket tying the game.
I was surprised that so many little girls would not only want to play basketball but could play at that level of skill and intensity. But that was then and this is now. Since women got the right to vote a century ago, the rights and roles of girls and women have been growing and is currently moving into unchartered territory. In the mid-term election of 2022, women broke records. In 1961 only three women served in the United States Senate. Today, twenty-four women serve in the Senate and a record-breaking 124 women serve in the 118th Congress. Female governors have also broken records with twelve currently governing. And let us not forget Nancy Pelosi, the first female speaker of the House, Kamala Harris the first female vice-president, Nickie Haley, a serious Presidential contender, and a record-breaking four women on the Supreme Court.
My wife’s aunt was a doctor; she appeared on the television game show, What’s My Line, on the assumption the savvy panel would not have guessed her profession. Today, the number of female physicians has burgeoned. Women comprise 37% of practicing physicians in the U.S. Even more amazing, since 2019, the number of female medical students has surpassed the men.
Women are everywhere: attorneys, judges, accountants, bankers, managers, CEOs, University presidents, newspaper editors, news anchors, writers, war correspondents, professors, surgeons, high ranking military officers and so on. They have also invaded that male bastion of testosterone, the football field. After the Superbowl, a woman interviewing Patrick Mahomes, looked like a midget.
Now we come to the Big Question: Is the emergence of women, good or bad?
Good
1) With few exceptions, in the last 5000 years of recorded history, women had no rights, nor did they even think they should. Women were, for the most part illiterate baby makers. They didn’t go to school and had few legal rights. “Keeping ‘em barefoot, pregnant, ignorant, and dependent,” was almost universal. There must have been an extraordinary number of women who were brilliant and talented, yet had no opportunity whatsoever to create or invent or in any way add to their societies. I wonder if they went through life in a malaise, feeling something wasn’t right. The skills, imagination, creativity, raw intelligence of half of the human race was wasted.
2) This sorry state of affairs began to change in the nineteenth century, when women turned to writing. Jane Austin, Louisa May Allcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hellen Keller and others showed that women were talented and efficacious. For the week ending January 13, 2024, for example, seven of the ten best-selling fiction books and non-fiction books were written by women.
We no longer say, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Now men say, “You’ve arrived, ma’am, and I’m not sure how I feel about it.”
Bad
While it’s been great for women, this sociological/cultural/civilizational tectonic shift, has not been so great for men. Phrases like “toxic masculinity” are unfair and divisive. Men are masculine. But toxic? That requires another conversation. (My dad, who wrote math text books, used to say, “all men are animals.” Undoubtedly true. But most of us control our more destructive instincts.)
1- Perhaps the most surprising - and troubling - statistic for men is this: as of 2021, women made-up 59.5% of college students. For every 100 Batchelor Degrees awarded to women, 74 are awarded to men. Why troubling? Because couples at the same education level tend to marry. Does the specter of educated women marrying lesser educated men represent a potential social problem?
2 - Men account for almost three out of four “deaths of despair,” by suicide, depression or drug overdose. This is tragic. Why? Why now?
3) In 1979, in today’s dollars, weekly earnings for a typical man with a high school education was $1,017. Today it is 14% lower at $881.
Feminist, Susan Faludi wrote:
The more I consider what men have lost – a useful role in public life,
a way of earning a decent and reliable living, appreciation in the
home, respectful treatments in the culture, the more it seems that
men…are falling into a status oddly similar to that of women in
mid-century.
Keep ‘em out of trouble with beer, pizza and a remote.
Conclusion: If the two most important areas of human life are, as Freud said – love and work - women are gaining ground, men are on a downward slide. According to Hanna Rosin in The End of Men, “The strangest and most profound change of the century [slide] is exacerbated because it is unfolding in a similar way pretty much all over the world.”
When men become idle, they become discouraged, depressed, angry and unruly.
You’ve come a long way baby, but where is all this going?