Of Soldiers and Mothers: A Meditation on Men and Women

There’s something to be said for gender roles.

At the far end of our neighborhood is a cemetery. Unlike a traditional one with a variety of headstones spanning many eras, this one is simple. Nearly every grave marker is alike: a rectangular slab of granite set in the ground with two bronze plates affixed — one each for husband and wife —  and a receptacle for flowers between them. 

In the scant room available, there is space for little writing apart from the necessary elements — name, and dates of birth and death. There are no long reflections here on the life remembered or, as one sometimes sees on gravestones, admonitions directed at the living. Instead, the epitaph upon each bronze plate is confined to a brief phrase.

I was struck one afternoon as I wandered among the headstones by the substance of those phrases. On what seems like nearly every grave, the bronze plate belonging to the man would indicate his tenure of military service (“US Navy, World War II”) and that belonging to the women would declare, “Beloved wife and mother.”

This is remarkable if you stop to ponder it. What, after all, is the purpose of an epitaph? Surely it is designed to capture — if such a thing were possible — the essence of the life lived; the most salient characteristic of the person whose husk now lays buried in wait for the end of all things. 

That “soldier” or “wife and mother” might be selected as the most fitting label for a life is not in itself surprising. What is surprising is that these labels seemed to suffice for so many from an earlier era. They bear witness to a consensus about what is at the heart of being a man or a woman. 

How might we articulate that consensus? It appears to be something like this. The consummation of manhood is to do one’s duty and face danger, protecting home and country. Women, on the other hand, are most themselves in lovingly nurturing others, especially their families. Each is entitled to look back on these things as their proudest achievements. 

Gain and Loss

From the perspective of contemporary culture, this is at best quaint and naive and at worst sexist and offensive. We are wary of the thought that there is something essential to being a man or a woman.

In our language we increasingly mark a distinction between sex, having to do with our biology, and gender, having to do with our psychology, severing the connection between the two. Many contend that gender is purely a function of socialization. To the extent that women or men share certain tendencies, they claim, this is the result of being formed within the same culture enforcing the same expectations upon them. 

This cultural shift is rooted in part in a sensible concern that rigid gender norms could be unnecessarily restrictive, particularly for women. Suppose a young woman doesn’t feel drawn towards nurturing a family but instead wants to pursue psychological research or launch a company? The epitaphs don’t seem to envision this possibility.  

In the past several decades, we’ve left behind the confines of “beloved wife and mother.” A young woman now may aspire to any life trajectory and receive plenty of social support for her decision. This is a gain. The freedom to follow one’s passion, interest, or sense of vocation is a privilege of modern, Western life and a benefit we ought not take for granted. 

What is less often noticed, however, is that the changes in our culture have also generated corresponding losses.

No Direction

Perhaps most important is a loss of direction. In more traditional societies, young people were directed into relatively well-defined channels. This would be true in matters spanning gender roles to occupation to religious belief. What a young person faced was not so much a series of decisions, but a process of learning to fulfill relatively clear expectations. 

The negative side of this is obvious and has already been mentioned. There is a positive side, too, however. The reality is that growing up in the absence of expectations is stressful, confusing, and bewildering. Psychologically, we’re worse off when we face too many choices.

One important aspect of growing up is figuring out what it means to be in the world as a man or as a woman. It’s clear enough to kids that this isn’t an arbitrary, unimportant distinction. Despite the cultural mythology, girls and boys seem different and they are trying to figure out how to navigate this fact. They instinctively look to the adults in their lives for guidance.

The adults today respond by saying, “There is nothing in particular attached to being a man or a woman. It’s all just arbitrary cultural expectations. Make your own way. Relax. Be yourself.”

It reminds me of something German philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, reflecting on education back in 1954. She notices the adults, as she puts it, “refuse to assume responsibility for the world into which they have brought the children.” They are like parents who say to their kids, “In this world even we are not very securely at home; how to move about in it, what to know, what skills to master, are mysteries to us too. You must try to make out as best you can.”

The result is a good deal of flailing about. Could it be that our agnosticism about what a woman is constitutes a key contributor to the gender confusion suddenly plaguing especially our young girls? Could it be our refusal to try to offer young boys some idea of what it means to be a man is an essential element of our present “crisis of masculinity—a widespread and deep confusion among men about what exactly they are for”? 

In truth, it isn’t as though contemporary culture offers no guidance. It would be more accurate to say that authoritative culture—the voice of teachers, scientists, professors, and the like—offers no guidance beyond the suggestion that one can be whatever one likes. Pop culture, however, is happy to supply the want with its own images of femininity and masculinity. 

Alas, the images on offer are a sort of caricature of the concepts of man and woman inscribed in the headstones at the edge of my neighborhood. Young women will see reinforced over and over that being a woman essentially means being an object of sexual desire, whose most important virtue is attractiveness. For their part, young men have a more varied selection of models among which to choose, but they usually amount to some kind of skilled inflictor of violence or charismatic dominator of others. 

You can see how much progress we’ve made as we’ve moved beyond the sacrificial, duty-bound protector and loving, nurturing caregiver. 

The idea that men and women have no nature and are basically interchangeable, were it not for regressive socializing influences, may have some plausibility in the sociology classroom. It has no plausibility in the real world. Even though socialization is real and important, men and women have real and equally important underlying biological and psychological differences. 

Young people experience this and are looking for some guidance from the adults. If those of us who care about them refuse to provide it, those who want to exploit them will. We can do better. 

A Middle Way?

The modern way of thinking about men and women is driven at least in part by the fear that recognizing sex differences leads to mandating role differences. If, for instance, we say it is natural for a woman to want to raise a family we will soon be saying it is required that she do so. 

In this view, the way to ensure true equality of opportunity is to deny difference. Conversely, any suggestion of difference is greeted with hostility as a way of trying to deny women opportunities.

As I have argued, however, and as both the scientific literature and universal human observation put beyond doubt, differences there are. We never get off on the right foot by denying what is true. 

Surely there is a way to hold these two things together: the recognition of characteristic tendencies for men and women and the recognition and acceptance of exceptions. 

Think of how this looks in a simple case. Young boys, on average, have a lot of energy and find it more challenging than girls of the same age to sit still in a classroom. (Researchers are increasingly paying attention to this as one of the reasons why men are falling behind women in educational attainment.) Recognizing this would seem to dictate adjusting the way instruction is conducted for boys, perhaps incorporating more breaks or active learning, for instance. 

Naturally, however, there will be some girls who have as much trouble sitting still as the average boy and boys who can follow a lesson without interruption for hours at a time. 

The solution? We develop classroom strategies that are designed to promote the flourishing of the average boy or girl but remain flexible and attentive to the individual needs of children. Ignoring the general tendencies leads to many frustrated learners. Ignoring individuality leads to frustration, too. Ideally, tendencies and individuality can both be respected. 

Good parents are naturally adept at this. They buy their little girl dolls and their little boy trucks not because they are anxious to impose the “right” gender roles, but because they intuit there is something in each one’s nature that responds naturally to this sort of play. And if by chance their little girl goes for the trucks and their boy wants to play with dolls, most parents take this in stride, too. They provide an appropriate environment in which the nature of their children can find expression, but are attentive to the possibility that growth may proceed in unexpected directions. 

This raises naturally the question of boundaries. If we say that the presence of tendencies doesn’t mean everyone must exactly conform to them, is anything ruled out? 

Again, a prominent current of thought in our culture wants to say ‘no.’ This is the promise of the transgender movement, that modern medical technology can transform a man into a woman, and vice versa. The promise, however, is an empty one. No matter how sophisticated the surgeries, a trans woman is not a woman nor is a trans man a man.* 

What this means is that a boy can never aspire to grow up to be a wife and mother, nor can a girl dream of one day being a father. Whatever variation there may be in the nature of individuals, these roles belong exclusively to the members of each distinct sex. Whatever else they might be in life, it is the particular glory of a woman that she might be a mother and of a man that he might be a father. 

I recall a conversation with a young woman, one of my students, who was about to graduate from college. She confided that what she really wanted to do was become a wife and mother, but she felt ashamed of that desire and that path. So she was pursuing a business career instead. 

We may imagine we are liberating people to pretend there is no content to the idea of what it means to be a man or a woman. In fact, we are often taking something precious from them — the joy of embracing and living into an aspect of their nature. 

Surely we can make room for individuality while honoring the distinct contribution that each sex makes to our common life and affirming our boys and girls as boys and girls. 

*In our present context, this is probably worth an essay in its own right. I am not trying to be provocative. There are a number of differences, however, that are incontestable, including skeletal and brain structure, genetics, and reproductive potential.