Authors: Marianne Schnall
CG
: Yeah. I mean, the rule of older white men is patriarchal—it’s not democratic. This election, the key, and the reason the Republicans didn’t anticipate the outcome, was that they didn’t see women, people of color, young people—these are all the categories that are disempowered in a patriarchal view. That’s what the fight is about. It goes to the core of what I see as feminism, which is the movement to free democracy from patriarchy. And when we do that, then of course women can be leaders, people of color can be leaders.
MS
: Going back to women as leaders, there’s been a lot of talk—and certainly it has gotten stirred up with Sheryl Sandberg’s book—about how there are a lot of structural obstacles, but there are perhaps obstacles that women may impose on themselves. There are all these studies saying that women have to really be coaxed into running and don’t naturally advocate for themselves, even if they’re just negotiating a raise or promotion. You’ve been looking at these issues for your whole career, in terms of the silencing of women’s voices beginning in girlhood. How do you see that conversation as connected to your work and research about girls’ psychological development?
CG
: I think, first of all, the structures have not changed. So the way work is defined is in terms of a model that just doesn’t even fit. Nobody really can do both work and family, if work is defined as not leaving time for relationships. If you do that, it kind of presupposes whole gender roles and says to women, “You can live like men lived,” and there were wives at home raising their children and taking care of the elderly and dealing with all the emotional needs of everybody. And so, in some sense, I think women feel the contradictions of that structure more acutely because women have been the ones who have historically done the majority of care work, and the structural obstacles are still in place. In terms of development, you
have to talk about boys as well as girls, because the research on girls was sort of the leader; it led into relooking at boys, who also have to silence parts of themselves in order to be perceived as men. I mean, they have to really deny their own needs for relationships and their own desires for emotional connection and intimacy. And you see resistance from boys, just as you see it in girls. But the pressures are very real. So Sheryl Sandberg is saying women have to resist these pressures if they want to rise to leadership positions, and I would say that for men to be good leaders, they have to resist these pressures, too.
MS
: I was thinking about where Sheryl makes that point that one of the most important decisions you can make is about choosing your partner. It’s very connected to what you’re saying, because if part of the challenge that women face is often this work-family balance, then you need men motivated and seeing themselves as caretakers and nurturers and feeling comfortable doing domestic work at home to be able to share that.
CG
: And to not see that as somehow compromising their masculinity.
MS
: Right. It seems to me that so many of these things became very fixed when people became adults, so this is something to be focused on when they’re boys and girls. How do we deal with the fact that these patterns and these stereotypes become so ingrained as part of our identity and we don’t even realize it by the time we’re adults? Where is the entryway for change? Is it through schooling and parenting? What advice would you give about what we can do to start to change some of these pressures?
CG
: First of all, the developmental work, which started with those studies of girls and then expanded to the studies of boys, shows you exactly when initiation happens. It starts with boys around four, five, six, and you
get the same conflicts and resistance in the boys that age. And then those gender roles set into girls at adolescence, and then you see girls struggling with it. In adolescence, boys again (this is Niobe Way’s work) seek out intimate relationships and emotional connection and those parts of themselves—in a sense, parts of their humanity. So then the initiation affects boys again toward the end of high school, about what does it mean to be a man? These are obvious points of intervention, and intervention because children themselves are resisting this, and we have a lot of studies showing that that resistance to incorporating these gender stereotypes, for boys and for girls, is associated with signs of psychological resiliency and health and doing well in school and living longer. It’s so clear. And that’s why my book is called
Joining the Resistance
—you join that healthy resistance in children, and then you educate it. And the other place to intervene is with adults, with a sense that these images of men and women are really all false images. I mean the notion that women don’t desire leadership, are not assertive, are not capable of making independent decisions, that kind of thing. Or the notion that men don’t care; that’s not true. They have to
act
as if they don’t care. Or the whole thing of how women don’t know. I mean women have to
act
as if we don’t know.
MS
: How much of a role do you think the media plays in all this?
CG
: Oh, I think it plays a huge role. Either it can reinforce or it can counter these images. Look, in this country, we’ve had an amazing shift with respect to the perception of gay people, which the media has had a big role in.
MS
: The other interesting thing that you have done a lot of work on is the development of ethical responsibility, our moral development. Our society does not necessary portray pursuing a career in public service, or those
types of opportunities, as glamorous or even particularly meaningful or worthwhile. How are we doing as a society in terms of fostering this kind of ethical, moral responsibility, which is another part of our psychological development?
CG
: I think there’s a big kind of strain in American culture, and it goes back to the myths of the cowboy, or the lone person . . . there’s a value in being independent, being self-sufficient. I mean, what was the question that was asked in the last election? Obama asked it. Clinton asked it. “Are you on your own, or are we in it together?” And I think that’s a very deep, moral question. Are we interdependent? Are we responsible for each other? Or are we all just on our own, in a sort of competitive struggle, and some people are superior and some people are inferior? What did Obama say this election? The American people have a choice between two visions of our future: one is a vision of hierarchy, where people are divided into inferior and superior. And the question was, are you like a man, a real man, meaning strong and independent? Or are you like a woman, meaning needy and dependent? The other transformation, the other vision, is, are you on your own? Are you all alone, or are we in it together? That’s, I think, the basic moral grounding, a kind of moral vision that government and society . . . we are interdependent. And we’re not just in it ourselves or for ourselves.
MS
: Obviously, there are a lot of problems facing the planet and humanity right now. Are you feeling optimistic about the state of things at the moment? I know you look so closely at all of these themes—do you feel like there are paradigm shifts happening?
CG
: Oh, I think we’re in the midst of a fight over the paradigm. I really do. I think even on a global level—between patriarchy and democracy, and
between having a few people at the top of our hierarchy whose interests take precedence over everybody else. And then you see the effect is so intrusive. If I want to be optimistic, I would look at the last U.S. election, which was such a victory for democracy. People who stood in line to vote; it was nonviolent resistance. And they stood in line to vote for twelve hours. And their votes made a difference. If I want to be pessimistic, I look at climate change and the fact that we seem to be unable to mobilize ourselves to deal with what is a real threat to the lives of millions of people, and the level of poverty in the world, the disproportionate number of women and children who are living in poverty.
MS
: What traits or qualities do you think are most important in a leader today, man or woman, that we need most now?
CG
: First of all, a vision—a kind of moral vision of interdependence as the reality of the world we live in, and how you promote that. So that means you have to engage with people who are different from you, and you have to be able to listen. You have to pay attention. The idea that everybody’s voice needs to be listened to—heard with respect and heard on its own terms. I think these deeply relational qualities go to the basic question: How can we live with one another? So it really boils down to somebody who’s capable of paying attention, who’s capable of listening, who’s engaged in a search for mutual understanding, who understands cooperation, who has the capacity not only to think clearly, but to respond to the feelings of their own and other people. It’s very, very basic human qualities, and all the research in the human sciences is saying as humans, this is who we are. We are responsive, relational beings. Our nervous systems are wired to connect thought with emotion. We live, we have a desire. We all have a voice. We want to be heard. We want to live in relationship.
A leader for today’s world has to basically be someone in whom those human capacities are well developed.
MS
: There are all these questions about gender roles, and this whole freeing of the human spirit to be able to be our authentic selves. Is it possible to do that in our culture, do you think?
CG
: Everybody grows up in culture, so the idea that there’s an authentic self that is not affected by culture, I think that’s not true. But there is also a psyche—we all have a voice and a capacity for resistance, and even in the most totalitarian societies, there are always some people who see through the lies and speak truth to power. That’s the human capacity. I think the question is not about an authentic self. I think the question is . . . do we have a capacity to resist those pressures coming from society, or culture, that would divide us from aspects of our humanity? The human sciences now are really aligned with this moral and political vision that within ourselves we have the capacity to love and to live in democratic relationships with one another. And if you don’t have equal voice, you can’t have free and open debate; even if you say you’re having it, you don’t. So, those are the key issues for the future.
But, you know, all of the studies about whether it’s physical health or psychological health or longevity, it’s just over and over again, the evidence is so clear: If you have gross inequality in a society, it affects the health of the society on a literal level. And if the world grows more interdependent—with nuclear weapons, with climate change, with air travel, with the Internet—you’ll see that the desire for freedom, the desire for people to have a voice, is a human desire. And we saw it in the Arab Spring. And there are very entrenched interests that want to shut that down. But my feeling is, I guess my optimism is, at least we are engaging right now,
worldwide, with what the real issues are. And I’m not naively thinking it isn’t going to be a big fight.
MS
: But you are feeling positive.
CG
: I think it’s the right place. I think this is worth fighting for. I think you saw that in the election. Everybody thought that the Republicans were going to buy the election, and all that money didn’t override the basic structures of democracy. So then what did they do? They want to go after, basically undermine, democracy by keeping people from voting, because it’s the only way they can win. And that’s true. You look at the Arab Spring—there was this incredible outpouring of voice, including women’s voices, and desire for freedom, and then it’s countered by religious groups and others that have a big stake in women not having voices.
MS
: Thinking about it on these terms, masculine and feminine, whether it’s embodied in a man or a woman, do you see a surge of the feminine coming?
CG
: I think calling it masculine or feminine is being trapped in the old patriarchal model. I think I see a desire coming forward of human qualities in both men and women, and it’s up against this division of human qualities into masculine and feminine. The problem is that with that division, I would say, neither men nor women can be leaders, because you can’t be a leader if you can’t join thought and emotion, and you can’t be a leader if you don’t understand how to live in relationships with people.
MS
: You’ve been tirelessly working on these themes in your research and your writings and speaking—you obviously care so deeply about these issues. What drives you? What is the source of your passion around these themes?
CG
: Well, I think, first of all, that this is the fight that’s worth fighting, because I think our future hangs on it. And what also drives me is this realization that we’ve been telling a false story about ourselves. We haven’t been telling the full story about both men and women. And it’s also very hopeful because there’s a sense that as humans we really do have within ourselves the capacities we need to take on and engage with the very real and challenging problems we face at this time in history. So I think what also feeds my passion has been the sense that we’re really moving ahead in understanding these issues. My initial work was to bring women’s voices into a conversation where neither men nor women were seeing the absence of women’s voices as basically significant and showing how it makes a real difference, because women were giving voice to aspects of human experience that were not being spoken or seen. And then the work on girls that showed we’re not passive victims of socialization. There’s a very healthy resistance, but it’s a resistance to real pressures in the world that are culturally sanctioned and socially enforced. I mean, you see it in your girls. And yet you can join that resistance. You can educate that resistance. And there’s been so much change in the time I’ve been working, in women’s lives, in men’s lives. But these are still issues being fought about and struggled about. My sense is, of course it’s huge . . . I think the future hinges on it. Why wouldn’t you fight for this?