Very few men and women deviate totally from the male and female ‘essenses’ and this seems to be especially true of women. Butch lesbians for example, tend to work in social roles like teaching and welfare work and support leftist politics. It is rare to find a women who is both butch in her behaviour and in her work and interests. For example, how many butch lesbians with right wing political views and an interest in engineering are there serving in the police or military, not many.

I agree, but think that the two create each other. A lost civilization can teach its youth nothing, so they grow up casting about and hoping to someday find a path. In turn, lost people become liberals, destroy culture, and replace it with an egalitarian superstate that — while well-intentioned — leads to the externalization of values and retreat of the individual to a solipsistic state.

I guess my contribution is that women need to exist in parallel: as centers of the home, as intellects, and most of all, as a “feminine principle” which orients everything they do, but is on a more abstract level than rational-aggressive/INTJ versus passive-emotional/ENFP.

I found Paul Woodruff’s book “Reverence” useful for understanding complementary roles in life. Even within individuals, many complementary principles seem to exist.

Thank you for an interested, reasoned reply.

I believe Ms. Wood hits a fantastic point about being pushed at a young age toward something at odds with one’s personality or inherent biological desires.

As it stands, “education” is a symbolic institution that has long since departed with what made it a symbol. Parents that don’t know how to teach their children are happy to send them off to schools, encourage them to succeed in a system entirely devoid of actual life. Most children desire to please their parents on a pretty basic level, so they perform in school. Schooling continuously pushes school as necessary, and it is to the extent that the image is what employers generally look at. The children have children and the process repeats because it’s all they know – it becomes society and pressure to conform to it after enough generations.

I think what it ends up amounting to is that we’re entirely lost as a civilization because we’re lost as ourselves – and this isn’t necessarily specifically a gender issue, although I do feel that women are affected the most by it.

I think this is something of an elegant side point to the discussion – because I think it’s a combination of points that Mr. Stevens and Ms. Wood were alluding to. “Lost” civilizations are only interesting to history buffs and there’s a very large pressure to conform to this lifeless education system – where you have very little room to grow and discover yourself.

It illustrates well that combining a feminine mode of thinking with a masculine mode of thinking can very accurately describe our world, our problems, and solutions to them (obviously no solutions are here, but you can probably deduce some ways to improve our current state based on seeing the problem in this light shed by both modes of thinking).

I am confused by your last point. I do not say that intellectual women should abandon their interests. Perhaps I did not adequately enforce my view in this particular entry because I make it so often throughout my site. You will notice that I drum this point home on the Greetings page in my sidebar so that readers can understand this message from the beginning. The home is an intellectually stimulating world and, contrary to feminist propaganda, it offers many opportunities to deepen and broaden intellectual interests.

When I stated that only a cure for lung cancer could be more important than raising a family, I did not mean that women should give up all scientific pursuits once they become mothers and wives, but that they pursue these as avocations, not consuming careers.

I was anxious to address the reader’s concern that she wouldn’t be competent at traditional domestic work, that she would always be too distracted and preoccupied. A woman doesn’t need to be good at housework, at least not right away. She does need to love her family and make it the center of her life. This is something they and their families need just as much as the families of those who are less gifted. The needs of the children of an intellectual woman are not less than the needs of other children. In fact, children benefit from intelligent guidance and the presence of an adult who is engaged with the world and with them. The intelligent woman needs to have this love and the rest will fall in place. Or is a loving home somehow less important for the highly gifted?

A woman can educate her children herself, which is as challenging and stimulating as being a university professor. She can explore the world from home or from her community in any number of ways and become engaged in her husband’s work. But intellectual women are never told this. Their femininity is actively discouraged. There’s no question about that; the evidence is everywhere. They are pushed from grade school onward to exploit their minds for profit and often they discover too late that an entire aspect of themselves has been denied. They receive no schooling in the feminine arts – the practical arts and social graces -so that these things seem like rocket science. They feel clumsy and awkward, almost like impostors, managing a home or playing the role of devoted wife and mother. They are like men doing a woman’s job. I have heard some sigh, “I wish I had a wife,” when they barely know what it is to be a wife.