Excerpt from The Wonder of Girls by Michael Gurian, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

As a mother of two girls put it to me after learning about the biology and biochemistry of girlhood: "This is incredible. Now my girls make sense."



THEORY 2
WOMEN DO BEST WHEN THEY ARE INDEPENDENT OF MEN.

To be safe and successful as human beings, women must become, for the most part, independent of men. Boys and men are not inherently trustworthy; girls and women must compete with them as needed, become more like them as it is strategic to do so, and seek a social position in which they don't need the other sex.

When I was a boy my mother told me what her life was like in the 1950s. "A woman got married and had children, and her husband got a job and supported her and the children. I was alone in my own house, and I relied on your father so much that for years I just didn't know who I was, or what I could be. I felt so second-class, I came to resent him, myself, and the world."

My mother's sense of loneliness, of utter dependency on a man, and of social inequality was shared by many women of that time. When Betty Friedan cried out, "We want equality! Now!" to a huge crowd gathered at the Washington Monument, a nation listened. The dependency of a wife on a husband's social status had become destructive to women's psychological health, and thus to human society.

Our culture took up the cause of women like my mother, and continues to do so to this day, through one of the best outlets available: the workplace. In order to extract themselves from the loneliness of the wife at home, and the low status they were given (and for other economic reasons) women entered the workforce en masse, and discovered a mainly male-dominant environment. Women saw that they needed to compete with men. And the most efficient female strategy appeared to be for women to become more like men. If they became like men, they would compete and succeed in the male world. And many women have.

Because of feminist theory and strategies, the financial worth and social independence of most women in Western economic cultures is now not primarily controlled by a man's money. "Women need men like a fish needs a bicycle" said Gloria Steinem in the 1970s. Her thinking inspired young women seeking to make it on their own. Feminist theory, and our cultural adjustment to it, has helped create an economic culture in which most women can, should they choose to, create a life separate from intimate dependency on men. In a recent poll, however, reported by the Associated Press, the majority of women who were asked if they were happier than their mothers said no. The number-one item on the list of what they felt they missed? Stable relationships. This was especially true for women raising kids.

While the compelling need for a woman to be independent was a dominant necessity of my mother's generation, what was not clear thirty to forty years ago, but is clarifying for many of us now -- especially when the sciences of neurobiology and sociobiology are applied to the lives of girls and women -- is this natural fact: In most cases, human females and males need to form intimate, long-lasting, and symbiotic relationships in order to feel safe and personally fulfilled and in order to raise the next generation safely. Furthermore, the safety of civilization as a whole depends on the social guidance, protection, and valuing of bonds between males and females who are in the nature-based process of raising children. Couples who are not raising children can often experiment with serial mating, divorce, and social independence without structurally harming a society; but couples, families, and extended families that raise children without valuing the bonds among the caregivers have a higher probability of raising troubled children. The weight of this greater probability falls on not only individual families, but the civilization as a whole.

In the old patriarchal logic of raising girls, females were overly dependent on males and got in return a family arrangement that would give most women the relational stability in which to raise children.

Copyright © 2002 by Michael Gurian