Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy by Melvin Konner

Author:Melvin Konner [Konner, Melvin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Science, Life Sciences, Evolution, Social Science, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9780393246544
Google: O3mhBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-03-09T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

♦

Developing Daughters

Men have ceded some power to women partly because we have daughters and want them to succeed. It’s not that we don’t love our boys, but girls have been kept down for thousands of years. I have a son, two daughters, and a stepdaughter, and I want them all to do well. Boys today are running into serious trouble, and they need certain kinds of protection. But in terms of who runs things, in the present as well as the long course of history, the odds remain stacked against girls. So this chapter’s title has two different meanings: it’s both about how girls develop into women and about how we can develop them into great achievers without making them mimic boys and men.

Journalist Hanna Rosin’s provokingly titled book The End of Men made the case that among younger women, a replacement process is well under way. I agree—but anthropologists take the long view. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton made her stunning speech about the difference, a devastating war had just freed the slaves, but the nonviolent struggle for women’s rights was only beginning. Half a century later women would vote, control property, find out about and use barrier methods of birth control, and begin to infiltrate the professions.

Half a century after that, women realized how far they had to go and created second-wave feminism. At stake were equal pay for equal work, equal access to education, the media, the military, and the professions, new and full reproductive rights, sexual freedom of choice, the end of the double standard of sexual morality, a real voice in the public square, the option to escape from an abusive or otherwise bad marriage, an end to rape and other violence that kept women down and out, and a final expiration of Kinder, Küche, Kirche.

Now we are closing in on yet half a century more, and we should take stock. Rosin’s hard-hitting book was criticized by many for predicting male demise, of course, but not all women’s advocates welcomed it, either. Rosin, they said, grossly exaggerated progress. I don’t think she did. Although I don’t want to see the end of men, I think progress for women is now steady and irreversible. Rosin reasonably looked back as well as forward, but on a time scale of decades. In this book I have asked you to look back millions of years, then thousands, then hundreds; we can look forward generations at least, but even centuries and millennia start with decades.

I acknowledge the limitations. As of 2014, women were CEOs of only 4.8 percent of Fortune 500 companies and 5.2 percent of Fortune 1000 firms. They held only 78, or 18 percent, of the 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and only 20 of the 100 Senate seats. Women headed only 20 of some 190 nations. Only 26.4 percent of colleges and universities had women presidents. This looks bad. But with one exception—there were also 20 women heads of state when Rosin wrote—every one of these numbers was better.

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