School Girls

These different needs and desires, Tooley argues, arose biologically. Drawing mostly on the just-so stories of evolutionary psychology, Tooley attributes the superior abilities of men in mathematics, for example, to the role of males in the Pleistocene period as hunters. Citing another scholar, he explains, “The vast spatial measures showing male bias (e.g., mental rotations, map reading, maze learning) correspond to attributes that would enable successful hunting.”

Tooley also provides evolutionary reasons for the areas in which women excel. In fact, he questions the entire notion that human beings were ever living in a real “patriarchy,” claiming that many of men’s traits evolved as a result of women’s desires.

But Tooley has not undertaken this project because he thinks women should return to their natural state. Instead, he argues that women are unhappy because they have been forced by feminists to give up being wives and mothers in order to compete with men in the workplace. Women may have more educational, job, and even athletic opportunities than ever before, but by the time they reach the age of thirty or so, career and independence are hardly enough to make them contented.

Here Tooley makes entertaining use of his knowledge of feminist literature. As it turns out, nearly everyone in this camp has noted the problem. Here, for instance, is a passage from Betty Friedan: “I’m haunted by the women I work with who are thirty and thirty-five and not having children or are torn to the core about it.”

And here is Simone de Beauvoir, extolling the joys of motherhood: “The mother murmurs almost a lover’s words, and like a lover, she makes avid use of the possessive case; she employs the same gestures of possession: caresses, kisses; she hugs the child to her bosom, she keeps him warm in her arms and in her bed.”

Noting that many of today’s feminist voices–those who don’t want women to be just like men, but want women to be respected for what they are good at and what makes them happy–are being ignored, Tooley proposes revaluing “domesticity.” He writes of his own sort of awakening on this issue, “I was struck by incredulity that anyone could think that the world of work, politics, sport or whatever–even being an astronaut or President of the USA–could possibly compensate for the loss of any of this mystery and magic” of motherhood. Given the dismal state in which Tooley finds modern womanhood, his recommendations are surprisingly timid. Aside from not pushing women to take advanced math classes and not fretting when they marry early, Tooley offers almost no substantive solutions.

ONE OPTION may be the return of single-sex education. But, as Karen Stabiner’s smartly reported book, “All Girls: Single-Sex Education and Why It Matters,” explains, girls’ schools these days are doing all they can to help their students compete with boys–on traditionally male terms.

The girls at the Marlborough School, a 112-year-old private school in Los Angeles (one of two that Stabiner profiles) are encouraged to take as many advanced math and science courses as possible. As Stabiner writes, “Although 44 percent of undergraduate math majors were women, the number dwindled to 24 percent at the graduate level. . . . Opponents of girls’ schools blamed it on the social pressure to defer when boys were around as well as on the enduring assumption that girls were not good at numbers.”

Indeed, at Marlborough, the teachers try to ensure that women overcome whatever social pressures or natural inclinations may exist. In history and literature classes, teachers try to get the girls to contribute more to discussion by giving each student a certain number of chips at the beginning of class, and asking her to give up one every time she makes a comment or answers a question. The chips must be used by the end of class, and no student can talk once she has used all her chips. Girls at Marlborough are supposed to leave with the confidence to compete in a man’s world.

There are a few teachers at Marlborough who might be interested in Tooley’s message that girls’ strengths differ from boys’. Myranda Marsh, for instance, came to Marlborough “intending to revolutionize the history department.” Marsh doesn’t think that girls excel at memorization, and so she favors a more “cooperative” learning environment. Ultimately, though, readers of Stabiner’s book will conclude that the graduates of Marlborough will finish looking very much as though they had gone to a co-ed prep school.

The same cannot be said for the girls at The Young Women’s Leadership School in Harlem, the other institution Stabiner describes. The school opened a few years ago, to the great disappointment of NOW and the ACLU, which believe single-sex education backward and discriminatory. It tries to take girls from poor inner-city families and turn them into college material, an uphill battle in a school system where fewer than 50 percent of students graduate from high school in four years and 30 percent never finish at all.

Longer school days, larger workloads, and the threat of dismissal are perhaps the easiest part of the equation for the girls at the school. Stabiner suggests the hardest tests for them come in the form of peer pressure. For these young women, a single-sex education means less time wasted on the high-school soap opera, less of a chance to get pregnant, and a sense that there is something more in store for them than the hoodlums their sisters are dating. (Stabiner usefully introduces readers to the families of these young women.) In the case of the girls at the leadership school, their only chance for making it out of a world of poverty and violence is to compete in the world of men. It doesn’t matter whether they find it more or less fulfilling than domestic life. Statistics show it’s usually the women in poor minority communities who are picking themselves up and leaving.

STABINER’S BOOK provides a stark picture of how the arguments regarding the role and education of women tend to break down along class lines now. Tooley quotes scholar Carolyn Graglia as saying, “Feminism’s war against the housewife has pitted the best educated, most sophisticated, most aggressive, and most masculinized portion of the female population against women who generally possess less education, less worldly experience, who are more likely to be docile than aggressive, feminine than masculine.”

Ironically, it may be only through a system of single-sex education, in which women are taught to act more like men, that these poorer women can win the right for their daughters to be stay-at-home mothers.

Naomi Schaefer is an adjunct fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.