Who Has the Answer to What Women Need?

Go on, guess! No points deducted for the wrong answer

Many attribute to Sigmund Freud the question, “What do women want?” After writing four recent columns about men (#1, #2, #3, #4), my students asked me to write a bit about women. While I think that Freud’s question is a good one, a better question is, “What do women need?”

One common answer to that question is “Women need feminism.” There are many websites where users complete the sentence “I need feminism because …”, and the answers are so varied that one would be hard pressed to glean from these sites a consistent definition of feminism. At best, the respondents seem to think that they need feminism (whatever that may be) because that and that alone will secure them against whatever they find to be disagreeable about life in the world we live in—including violence, injustice, patriarchy, hierarchy and a vast array of objectionable “isms”.

On the other hand, there are websites where users complete the sentence, “I don’t need feminism because …” Users at these sites post a wide-ranging list of objections to whatever they think feminism is, rejecting feminism because they don’t, as some say “need to be rescued from being a woman” or because they reject the pervasive misandry they perceive in at least some schools of feminism. The most comprehensive of these memes rejecting feminism that I’ve seen recently was found in a photo that supposedly was taken in Washington, DC at this year’s March for Life. I’m a bit skeptical that the photo was taken there, as the women holding the poster seemed dressed for warmer weather than what one usually finds in Washington in late January. Their sign read,

Feminism is a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

Neither of these sites (nor those like them) brings us very much closer to a ready answer to the questions, “What do women want?” and “What do women need?” Yet I think we can all agree upon the generalization that in our contemporary culture, many women do not seem to be happy, even as they disagree among themselves about why they are unhappy and what would make them happy. Perhaps appearing to rush in “where angels fear to tread,” I offer my own contribution to the discussion.

When I was an undergraduate in the 1980s in Washington, DC, I frequently saw university women wearing t-shirts emblazoned with a Dr. Seuss-style painting illustrating a slogan often erroneously attributed to Gloria Steinem: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Even as a young man, I wondered how young women acting on that conviction would play out. Would women eventually find men dispensable? Yes—and no.

No—women would not find men dispensable. Women found that they still needed someone to provide for them while they are pregnant, nursing their children, raising their children, and so on. They still need someone to play the role of protector and provider, etc.—roles ordinarily played by men as husbands and fathers.

Yes—women would find men dispensable, as so many of them outsourced men’s traditional roles of provider/protector to Uncle Sam, i.e., the federal welfare state. I think that people across the whole spectrum of opinion/conviction can agree that this arrangement has not worked out well for women or children or men. So, perhaps the men/fish/bicycle simile needs to be reconsidered. Where shall we turn next?

I was looking through one of my favorite books, “Another Sort of Learning” by James Schall, S.J. He makes reference to the essay “The Education of Women” by Jacques Maritain. Father Schall sent the essay to his friend, Anne Burleigh. Below is part of her response:

… it would seem so important to get across to the students that how they “act” is intimately related to their intellectual life. They cannot think straight if they do not act right. And acting right is something that does not come entirely naturally. Somebody has to help them think through these things. Ideas and beliefs are so exciting. They call for great passion, for stout hearts and disciplined minds. They call for great movements of the will, in the sense of deciding to stake one’s life on them, on dying for them if necessary. It seems to me that girls ought to understand that. Girls are so naturally willing to give everything they have. And that is just where they are so vulnerable. It has to be giving to the right thing, the right person, in the right circumstances.