The Hunt for Manliness

Ever wonder whether Margaret Thatcher was submissive in bed? Why women retain interior design details better than their male counterparts? Or the semantic differences between “slave girl,” “it,” and “girlfriend?” If any of those topics tickle your fancy, I hope that you attended Harvey C. Mansfield’s recent discussion of his new book, “Manliness.”

This 10-year-old side project of the Kenan Professor of Government—Mansfield ’53 normally spends his days translating Machiavelli and doling out C-minuses—broadly analyzes manliness as a fading characteristic in our modern, supposedly “gender neutral” world. “Manliness,” Mansfield said to the large crowd in the Kirkland House Junior Common Room, “is confidence in the face of risk.”

At first, Mansfield’s breathy, soft words did not set off any alarms about sexism or homophobia. They actually seemed progressive; Mansfield was shifting America’s idolatry of “manly” qualities such as intoxication, cigarette smoke, and muscular physiques to assertiveness and confidence.

But as Mansfield proceeded with his tale of how he came to this “common sense” conclusion, and how this elusive trait was exhibited in the “best” men and very rarely in women (e.g. Ms. Thatcher), an air of female repression burst to the surface.

He called his work an “extension” of findings from social psychologists and evolutionary biologists, who—restricted by the rules of science—are reluctant to extrapolate differences between the sexes into important evaluative conclusions. Therefore, he turned to the literary annals of the past two millennia for affirmations of his “common sense” belief.

From Achilles to Dostoevsky to John Wayne, Mansfield claimed, the world of literature and entertainment have shown that men almost exclusively possess a yearning for taking on risk. Hence, “the essence of men”—the Aristotelian interpretation of “manliness” that Mansfield used often in his talk—is “confidence in the face of risk.”

While these literary observations are apt, academia separates the Comparative Literature department from the Anthropology department for a reason; the aforementioned writers and characters were obviously influenced by their societies, ones that were structured not to allow women to succeed as independent and confident leaders. Even the most progressive and non-sexist writers of the 8th century B.C. could not have imagined women even having the possibility of asserting themselves in the household, on the battlefield, or wherever.

In today’s less restrictive world, the growing appearance of confident women does not completely oppose Mansfield’s thesis, but it does question its longevity. In a recent interview with The Harvard Salient, Mansfield said, “I begin from the fact that men seem to have a quality of manliness about them that you don’t find in women, or don’t find to the same degree, or don’t find in the same way.”

But the “fact” that men have possessed higher degrees of manliness in the past does not translate to the present or the future; it is not possible to derive an “ought” from an “is,” nor is it advisable to try to derive such a relation. Yet, when Mansfield defines “confidence in the face of risk” in male terms, he also implies a normative judgment about how men and women ought to act: women are told that it is unnatural or improper to harness a supposedly quintessential male characteristic.

Where President Lawrence H. Summers argued for the exploration of gender differences in scientific terms, Mansfield leaps into the realm of cross-societal analysis with his self-conscious “political incorrectness” concerning gender roles, and an insistence that a co-ed trait be defined by old, dead men. No matter how many Erica K. Jallis and Lauren A.E. Schukers—both recent Harvard Crimson presidents—grace this campus, it appears that one of Harvard’s eldest statesmen remains blind to the changing times.



Andrew D. Fine ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Stoughton Hall.