Since feminism promised to usher in the New Age of Equality, today’s men hardly know how to be men, husbands and fathers. And today’s women hardly know how to appreciate and encourage their men. Harvey Mansfield’s fine new book, Manliness, attempts to deal with this gender confusion.

One of Mansfield’s wisest insights is a critique of social scientists. “(Social science) studies, seeking quantifiable precision, split up the sexes into discrete aspects or behaviors, such as spatial and verbal abilities or violent and non-violent tendencies, and then never reassemble the pieces into a whole.” (Page 37, Emphasis in original.) 

This problem is especially acute in our modern understanding of fatherhood. You might say that social science has figured out that fathers are important by process of elimination. Eliminate fathers, and kids’ lives deteriorate. Father absence is a disaster that places kids at risk for negative outcomes, ranging from dropping out of school to drug use to teen pregnancy to depression.

But when the social sciences ask themselves, “What exactly do fathers do?” the answers are a little thinner. Research shows that fathers do less “child care activities,” such as feeding and changing diapers.  But what do men do more of? They rough-house with kids, toss them in the air, tickle them and teach them to take risks.

These results, of course, are the things feminists love to hate. Women work the Second Shift of household chores. Men come home from work, sit in front of the TV, drink beer and generally do nothing. The man’s “contributions” to childcare are more like play. Big deal.

Some advocates of same sex marriage have even reinterpreted the evidence on father absence to mean that children don’t really need mothers and fathers, just two loving adults. As long as the child’s needs are met, it doesn’t matter whether a man changes the diapers or a woman plays touch football with them. Mirroring the feminists, these advocates seem to believe that if social science can’t put its finger on exactly what men in particular contribute, men aren’t doing anything significant.

Like the social scientists Harvey Mansfield criticizes, the gender radicals want to disassemble mothers and fathers into their specific functions, but never reassemble the pieces into a whole. Our masculinity and femininity can be reduced to a bundle of traits and activities. If we can’t measure it, it isn’t there. But evidently, even those beer-guzzling, channel-surfing lumps are doing something.

My husband recently did something for our family that brought this into focus for me. We are foster parents.  We once had a couple of very sweet kids who had lived with us for a long time. We were very attached to them, and never really thought they would go home. Their parents surprised everybody by doing every last item on their case plan. The phone call finally came that made it clear that the kids would go home one day soon.

The kids were elated. I was devastated. I tried to contain myself because they were so happy. But I was visibly a wreck.

My husband came into our bedroom, chased all the kids out, and closed the door. I was sobbing. I had a dozen reasons why it was all a big mistake. The kids would be better off with us and the parents would surely collapse at the first sign of trouble, and The System is so corrupt and awful.

He held me by the shoulders, looked straight into my eyes and said, “These are not our kids. Let them go.”  I wasn’t ready to stop crying, but I knew he was right.

So they went home. Their parents really had gotten themselves together. The kids did great, and are still doing great.

Now I ask you, which of us, my husband or I, did the most for those kids?  To even ask this question is to misunderstand the nature of the family, of marriage and of parenting. I certainly did more driving in the car pool, and helping with homework. That is the stuff women complain about, and that social scientists measure.

But he was always there, too. He’d play catch with them, take them boating and glare at them when they misbehaved. He was there for me too, backing me up, insisting the kids respect me, holding me accountable, and yes, telling me to get a grip when I might have gone off the deep end. At the crucial moment, he kept me from doing something really stupid and destructive. You’d have to be a nut to believe that the number of hours each of us spent with the kids was the most relevant fact about who contributed to their success.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s good when father helps with kids and the household, if only because mother feels loved and appreciated by him. But even when we can’t put our finger on it, the masculine presence in the household contributes. We women do our families a great service when we recognize and respect that fact about our men.

History of Father's Day

Sonora Dodd, of Washington, first had the idea of a "father's day." She thought of the idea for Father's Day while listening to a Mother's Day sermon in 1909.

Sonora wanted a special day to honor her father, William Smart. Smart, who was a Civil War veteran, was widowed when his wife died while giving birth to their sixth child. Mr. Smart was left to raise the newborn and his other five children by himself on a rural farm in eastern Washington state.

Harvard Professor tackles topic of student sex lives on campus in a deliberately "politically incorrect" speech

“[The speech] was an assessment of the sexual scene at Harvard today by comparison to what I lived through fifty years ago,” said Mansfield. “Women and men see each other each day, study together and eat together. These things are improvements.”

He criticized, however, the increase in recreational sex.

Through recreational sex, he said, women were giving out “free samples.”

“I expect there is a lot of recreational sex and so the sexual scene is more favorable to men than it used to be,” Mansfield said in an interview yesterday. “It’s a men’s game they’re playing.”

Mansfield included this remark, which some called offensive, in his speech Tuesday.

“I found that offensive because of the stereotype and the implication that somehow women are trying to be more like men by having free sexual expression,” Alithea D. Gabrellas ’06 said.

Whether they agreed or disagreed with Mansfield’s message, the students said the speech was not something that they had expected.

“I was trying to widen and deepen the boundaries of discussion at Harvard,” he said. “I wanted to give an example of an unpolitically correct talk.”

The Harvard Crimson

Being a Man
Harvey Mansfield ponders the male of the species

ONE OF THE LEAST VISITED memorials in Washington is a waterfront statue commemorating the men who died on the Titanic. Seventy-four percent of the women passengers survived the April 15, 1912, calamity, while 80 percent of the men perished. Why? Because the men followed the principle "women and children first."

The monument, an 18-foot granite male figure with arms outstretched to the side, was erected by "the women of America" in 1931 to show their gratitude. The inscription reads: "To the brave men who perished in the wreck of the Titanic. . . . They gave their lives that women and children might be saved."

Today, almost no one remembers those men. Women no longer bring flowers to the statue on April 15 to honor their chivalry. The idea of male gallantry makes many women nervous, suggesting (as it does) that women require special protection. It implies the sexes are objectively different. It tells us that some things are best left to men. Gallantry is a virtue that dare not speak its name.

In Manliness, Harvey C. Mansfield seeks to persuade skeptical readers, especially educated women, to reconsider the merits of male protectiveness and assertiveness. It is in no way a defense of male privilege, but many will be offended by its old-fashioned claim that the virtues of men and women are different and complementary. Women would be foolish not to pay close attention to Mansfield's subtle and fascinating argument.

Mansfield offers what he calls a modest defense of manliness. It is modest, not because its claims are cautious--Mansfield courts wrath and indignation on almost every page--but because, as he says, "Most good things, like French wine, are mostly good and accidentally bad. Manliness, however, seems to be about fifty-fifty good and bad. . . . This is what I mean by a modest defense."

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