Volume 53, Number 10 · June 8, 2006
Mousiness
By Garry Wills
Manliness
by Harvey C. Mansfield
Yale University Press, 289 pp., $27.50
I once described in these pages a meeting of the Women's Caucus of the American Bar Association at San Francisco in 1992. The woman presiding began by asking attendees to stand if they were the first woman to be an editor of her law school's journal—or the first woman to be made senior partner of her firm, to become a law school dean, to become a judge on her bench, and so forth. There were hundreds and hundreds of women standing by the time she went through her list. That scene is one of many things that bothers Harvey Mansfield—'the willingness of women to claim solidarity with other women.' He claims that 'a man's movement would be more divided against itself, each individual looking out for himself and caring less for the general cause of his sex.' He proves his point by writing a whole book promoting 'the general cause of his sex.' Mansfield objects to claims of women's victimhood by issuing his own lament for men's victimhood. People are trying to prevent him from using the very word 'manly.' It is enough to make a man cry.
Review, 3397 words
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