(HOST) Commentator, contractor and storyteller Willem Lange wonders why so many Americans are still nervous about female leadership.
(LANGE) Why do so many cultures, including our own, still choose to face life’s challenges with one hand tied behind their backs?
I didn’t notice it so much while I was working construction. Surrounded every day by carpenters, plumbers, and electricians, I enjoyed an almost exclusively male milieu. Unless the lady of the house joined us for a chat at lunchtime, the only opinions and values I heard expressed were masculine. It was a comfortable world.
At the same time, Mother, who’s a kitchen designer, often has found that world very uncomfortable. Arriving at a job to review progress and make sure things were in the right place, she would be checked by carpenters who were not going to have some woman tell them they had the cabinets in the wrong order, or a window opening framed two inches off. Their manner was intimidating, even abusive; but to her credit, she handled it herself.
As the chauvinist old guys have been retiring, her interactions have become less stressful. My world, too, has changed. No longer am I surrounded by the sounds of power tools and men’s voices; and my delight in daily association with half a dozen other like-minded men is only a memory. So I’ve been reading a lot more.
I’d saved War and Peace for my seventies, and found it a page-turner. I was struck by the nostalgia for Catherine the Great. The Russians had a great female potentate over 200 years ago, and the English probably had their greatest queen over 400 years ago – both of ’em as canny and bloody-minded as any man who’s run a country ever since – and here we are still arguing whether we’re ‘ready’ for a woman president?
Then I read Khaled Hosseini’s novels set in modern Afghanistan They kept me awake at night. The idiocy of ethnic hatred; the anomaly of men kneeling to pray and rising to slaughter each other; and most of all, the subjugation of women, was maddening. Was no one able to see that millennia of male domination had produced a great deal of hatred and fear? Could nobody understand the consequences of refusing to educate half the population? And is there nothing in the scriptures or traditions of cultures deploring that a man may tell a woman what to do, or refuse her anything, simply because she’s a woman?
This is not an anti-Muslim rant, a criticism of Afghan culture, or even an endorsement of Hillary Clinton. Sometimes, when we’re faced with progress and change, and react badly, it’s helpful to have an extreme example to consider. We resisted giving women the vote until 1920; we responded to the civil rights movement by beating African-Americans in the streets; and in the afterglow of one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, we’re still debating whether we’re ready? Are we too benighted even to consider taking the other hand out from behind our back?
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.