I’m not sure why women allow it to happen, but we seem to be fine with allowing others telling us not only what we should do, but how to do it.
Take the recent spate of articles on how different women mother. First there was the recent and now infamous Time magazine cover showing a mom breastfeeding her toddler, who stood on a small chair wearing camouflage shorts. Firing up a storm of debate across all media here in the USA, the race to judgment was swift and fierce.
Then there is the what CNN commentators Heather Hewett and Deborah Siegel call the “faux mommy wars” in response to recent books that pit American mothers against their French counterparts - namely Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bebe and Karen Le Billon’s French Kids Eat Everything.
Whatever one’s position is on these issues, the far bigger issue is why women not only subject themselves to such scrutiny and judgment, but are active participants, and even drivers, in the debate. Why?
The quickest way to undermine someone’s confidence, and thus power, is to get them to doubt themselves. Doubt is a mightily powerful tool of disempowerment, all the more so because on the surface it seems so benign. Generally we like people who have a little self-doubt, it seems far preferable to its rather smug or arrogant alternative.
But if the feminine voice, the feminine view of what life should look like, and the feminine way of doing things - which values connection, cooperation, consensus and collaboration - is going to find its place as the natural counterbalance to the current millenia-old preferencing of masculine energy, and find the strength and power to create its vision of the world, then the feminine cannot allow itself to get distracted.
It is much better if she does what she does best - connecting, cooperating, and collaborating; and leave the carping to others.
