TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2005
COPENHAGEN On the surface, women have never been stronger and more powerful.
In the United States, the idea of a female commander in chief no longer
seems so far-fetched. In some Nordic countries, almost half the members
of Parliament are female. And shows like "Sex and the City" have conquered
viewers worldwide with their take on equality and sex. And yet the legacy
of the feminist revolution, which enabled the rise of strong women and
sensitive men, is under scrutiny these days.
Studies from the United States and Scandinavia, where gender equality
has progressed the furthest, show that many women find it hard to fuse
their high-flying careers with raising a family, and, consequently, they
back down from having a professional life - some even before they've started
one. In Sweden, for years the poster country for equality between the sexes,
a new feminist party gained enormous momentum last year by objecting to
the increase in violence against women and the gap between women's and
men's salaries. This autumn, however, the feminist initiative fell into
disarray after the movement embarked on a radical direction, rendering
negative feelings that some have dubbed an antifeminist backlash.
A similar backlash has now hit neighboring Denmark, too. Denmark is
one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, where paternal leave
is becoming increasingly popular and 75 percent of women have jobs. Yet
in a new book, 12 prominent and influential women - artists, intellectuals
and politicians - from the golden age of feminism in the '60s and '70s
wonder whether gender-equality has gone too far. The women interviewed
in "What Life Has Taught Me," by Ninka-Bernadette Mauritson warn against
"totalitarian feminism," which they think might wreck harmony between the
sexes: Men need to be men and women, women, they now say. Some of the women
regret their earlier militant insistence that men should be soft and sensitive
and want back the prefeminist "real man."
A good life is a life with a man who is unabashedly a man, according
to this group of feminists born around 1945.
Their generation spent their 20s burning bras, dumping high heels and
crashing buses while paying only 80 percent of the fare - since women were
paid less then. Now they say they want men with broad-shouldered attitudes,
men who can admire them and whom they can look up to - even from the high
heels that are back in vogue. Take the singer Trille Nielsen, for example.
She achieved superstar status in the '70s by singing "Hey Sister" with
a hoarse voice. Today she says: "I've reached the point where I'm no longer
afraid of or irritated with men who are proud of their masculinity."
A Danish former first lady and member of Parliament, Lone Dybkjaer,
dispatches her husband, the former socialist Prime Minister Poul Nyrup
Rasmussen, to their empty, chilly summer cottage with a toolbox. There
he can be a handy he-man with only birds and rustic floors to distract
him. "He has a whole world of construction projects and tools," the former
first lady says with an amused smile. Earlier feminists defined freedom
as dividing up all housework, which served to engage men in child care
and housework and pushed women toward becoming tough professionals. But
Dybkjaer concludes that "there is a freedom in having these spaces on our
own. I have read men saying that they feel driven into a corner; they feel
they don't have any room at home. It's not like that at our house. Poul
takes up quite some space." She thinks the wise woman lets her man play
macho - and that only then can she be a real woman.
Anne Braad, a well-known cleric in Copenhagen, thinks that she feminized
her husband into obscurity and may have made him a caricature of himself.
"He was womanly, approaching the motherly. There he was, shaking up the
pillows in the living room, looking after the children and calling me when
he wasn't at home to make sure I had put Band-Aids on the kids." Roles
were completely switched in Braad's marriage. "And that was a huge mistake,"
she says today.
Braad blames her divorce on this exchange of roles. She now suspects
that she threw her husband right into the arms of a much younger woman,
where his battered manhood could be restored.
Other earlier feminists interviewed in the book also assert that gender
equality can be stifling. "It is good to have a man you can look up too,"
the actress and writer Anne Marie Helger says. And Etta Cameron, a singer,
claims: "All men that we meet teach us something. If you're wise, you accept
that knowledge."
A famous feminist slogan from the '70s said, "The private is political."
It still is, some of the feminists declare. Braad sees the equality debate
today as about women wanting even more power: "Men are hardly allowed to
present their points of view or raise their voices without feminists crying
out."
Having listened to one woman after the other deplore differences lost
in the name of freedom - it's freeing to reach Lillian Knudsen, former
head of the women's union in Denmark. She has herself greatly improved
women's working conditions and pays more attention to what is gained than
what is lost. Equal pay and equal power in public and private spheres are
still distant dreams, even up here in the north. Yet in the World Economic
Forum's new gender gap index launched in May, Sweden, Norway, Iceland,
Denmark and Finland ranked one through five among several nations in female
economic participation and opportunity, political empowerment, educational
attainment and access to health care. Knudsen says she adopted "manly behavior"
to reach the top and suspects that she had no choice.
Her generation of women had to establish networks from those old schools,
like men - to lobby, push and conduct cloakroom politics over drinks late
at night - like the opposite sex, Knudsen says.
And Maria Marcus, a writer and television-journalist notorious in the
'70s for a tell-all book about her masochism, says that the not-yet-subtle
notions of the equality movement ravaged old ways while it infused women
with new life chances: "We started raising question marks because the starting
point was discontent with the roles and structure."
Another strong voice that epitomizes the feminist movement here is
the writer Suzanne Brogger. In 1974 the feminist madonna, famous for her
huge hats, untamability and candid statements, published the book "Free
Us from Love," which bulldozed the notions of marriage and family and was
translated into 20 languages. And then she ended up in - marriage. Does
Brogger want to declare the death of the soft man these days?
Nope.
"The thrill is gone when it comes to mating, that's true; the electricity
level is on low. But the dream of the 'strong man's' comeback is mere fantasy,"
she asserts.
Feminists knew from the start that the women's revolt would threaten
male supremacy and upset the erotic scene, even ruin it, Brogger says.
"That was the price. You don't change 2,500 years of female oppression
in a summer holiday or a generation or two. We are still longing for the
fully developed human potential in both men and women in all spheres of
life, private and public." And in the meantime? "Women might want - not
a sentimental macho," Brogger says, "but a bright man with a sense of humor
who can make us laugh."
Louise S. Nissen is a Danish journalist and former U.S. correspondent.