Hey, they rule my world
WHY WOMEN SHOULD RULE THE WORLD
By Dee Dee Myers
288 pp. Harper $24.95
Reviewed by Marty Carlock
Just a cute title for yet another White House memoir, I thought, and from a rather insignificant figure, at that. Yet what contemporary American female can resist reading Dee Dee Myers’ take on Why Women Should Rule the World?
A perceptive male of my acquaintance puzzled, “Well, why don’t they rule? Women are much more organized than men.” I’d say that generalization doesn’t hold true for quite all of us, and actually it’s not one Myers lights upon.
She rehashes most of the problems women in government and the business world have become aware of in the past 50 years. It’s quite likely, though, that a lot of this has slipped off the radar screen of the current generation of career women and those choosing to be stay-at-home moms. Myers reminds us.
Myers was—yes, I had forgotten, too—Bill Clinton’s first press secretary, the first woman and, at 31, the youngest person in the job of presidential mouthpiece. But in fact this is not a White House memoir, although it apparently had its inception at the moment Myers realized a male staffer she outranked was making $10,000 more than she was. She went to Leon Panetta, Clinton’s chief of staff, expecting compliance the minute she pointed out the disparity—and was flatly refused. He has a family, Panetta said; he’s a lawyer and took a pay cut to come here. Myers was stunned at the implication: that she was merely a woman, single and exploitable.
She decided to do nothing, thinking that a fight would be politically damaging to the President. But with this book she strikes back, sifting through mountains of studies, interviews and real-life experiences. Myers has done her homework, bolstering what she says with 17 pages of notes and a four-page bibliography—as well as interviews she has done with female activists world-wide.
Some of her findings are revealing; some not. She begins by citing instances of high-ranking women trying to fight their way in from the margins. “Male attitudes, ideas, interests, views, values and voices are the norm,” she says. “And since females don’t necessarily share them, it’s still seen as proof positive that they don’t quite get it...Being in the room is not the same as being at the table.” And even being at the table often does not guarantee that a woman can be heard.
Myers is up to date on research on gender differences. Any parent who has tried to give baby dolls to boys and trucks to girls knows the futility of nurture in the face of nature. Girls “tend to talk early, play cooperatively and develop a mysterious love of princesses at around three...Boys will turn any object they find into a weapon.” Myers’ research about male versus female brains is fascinating, but too complicated to be summarized here. Neither sex is “smarter,” she concludes, but she cites research showing that at eight weeks, in utero, boy babies get a dose of testosterone that enhances their aggressiveness and suppresses such qualities as verbal agility, skill at relationships, sensitivity to the emotions of others, and the ability to defuse conflict.
Many of Myers’ examples are heartening. Grameen Bank in Bangladesh makes tiny loans to people, mostly women, who couldn’t get credit otherwise. Wangari Maathai pays women small sums to plant trees in Kenya, 30 million so far, improving both their lives and the environment, and won the Nobel Peace prize for her contribution to sustainable development. Statistically, Fortune 500 companies with the most women on their boards perform significantly better than others, chalking up returns on capital as much as 66 percent higher than those with the fewest women.
Why do today’s young women scream, “I’m not a feminist!”? Myers says it’s because they think the movement wants women to be “the same” as men; she believes there is a radical core that still advocates this. Equality doesn’t demand that, but, she says, “questions about what equality means or how it might be achieved” have yet to be resolved.
Female skills need to be at the peace table, Myers argues. She quotes Terry Greenblatt, an Israeli peace activist, who says, “For men, negotiation is a synonym to playing cards. They...would sit one against another, try to conceal their cards as much as they can...and treat the man in front of them as an opponent, not a partner.” Who knew that in the early 1990s Israeli and Palestinian women met in Brussels—because such a meeting would have been illegal in Israel—put their grievances aside and hammered out the Brussels Declaration, which would have ended the territorial conflict in the Middle East? Naturally, their declaration was ignored and the bloodshed has continued, yet these women have maintained relationships via an organization, the Jerusalem Link.
Myers’ book could well become required reading for Feminist Studies 101. Her writing is simple but not strident, repetitive here and there, and occasionally preachy. The preachy part can be taken as a pep talk, for those in need of one.
She’s careful not to bash the other half of the population. It’s “not to say women’s priorities are better than men’s,” she argues. Rather, when women make decisions, they draw on the experience of their own lives and address different, neglected issues. “Families and whole communities benefit,” she concludes.
So how could women have a bigger part in ruling the world? First ask, Myers says. Ask for equal money, for authority, for respect. Second, take credit for what you’ve done. Oh, it’s so unfeminine, but brag. Third, don’t try to think like men.
Free-lance journalist Marty Carlock, author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston, has published more than 1,600 articles in thirty-plus publications. At present she writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines and for her own amusement.
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