If it’s all right with the rest of you, I’ll just make a small observation about the proposed campaign to ban the word “bossy.” Wouldn’t want to seem bossy myself, would I? But of course, the point of the campaign is precisely that the word is never used of men. Nor, I might add, are the words “slut” or “slattern,” which I’m sure bossy women somewhere are also trying to ban at this very moment. But why? Please allow me to propose that the reason lies in the residue of the Western honor culture which still lurks in nooks and crannies of the consciences even of the most progressive among us. You can see it too, as I point out in my book Honor, A History, in the way that the promiscuous but progressive women of “Sex and the City” are brought up short by the question, “Are we sluts?” Yet, if anyone else had dared to call them so, he (or she) could be confident that the imputation would have been furiously resented.


In the old days, of course, the resentment would have been left to the woman’s male protector — father, brother, husband — to express publicly with an invitation to her accuser to fight. That’s because male honor was overwhelmingly summed up in courage, or the reputation for same, as well as in the chastity of one’s womenfolk, both of which would have been fatally compromised by backing down from a fight to defend their honor. Other primary points of male honor included truth truthfulness and loyalty. But female honor traditionally involved three things that male honor didn’t: sexual continence (chastity before marriage, fidelity after), cleanliness and submissiveness. From the feminist point of view, of course, all three things are scandalous anachronisms in need of obliteration from women’s value systems. And yet, somehow, they all linger.


If “bossy” — the opposite of submissive — did not still have the power to wound, there would be no need  for Sheryl Sandberg and Beyoncé to inveigh against it. The same is true of “slut,” which some feminist campaigners tried to reclaim from pejorativity a couple of years ago by going on  “Slut-walks” dressed as, well, sluts. The bossiness of the anti-“bossy” campaigners must have a similar purpose in view. Alice Thomson in The  Times of London, for example, takes the example of the late Clarissa Dickson Wright, one of the “Two Fat Ladies” of TV fame, as an example of the kind of bossiness women and girls should aspire to. But that misses the point too. It’s just because Ms Dickson Wright was so unusual, because she was measured against a quite opposite standard of femininity, that she stood out as she did. She needed the submissive woman as a latent cultural norm in order to make her name by subverting it. But that doesn’t mean she got rid of the norm. On the contrary, she reinforced it by pointing out the kind of trade-off that “bossy” women are, were and probably always will be required to make for their bossiness. They can be sexually attractive or they can be bossy, but they cannot be both at the same time. Railing against this stubborn cultural prejudice seems unlikely to change it, any more than the “Slut-Walks” did.

As for the third point of female honor, cleanliness, I was amused by a letter to the Editor of The Times a couple of months ago from Dame Joan Plowright, Baroness Olivier, about an eminent female lawyer who, when asked if her mother was proud of her, replied that “when people praised her to her mother, that lady looked amazed and said ‘Och, her? You should see the state of her skirting boards!’” That is, baseboards. Ronald Dworkin years ago in The Public Interest pointed out that the decline in the nursing profession proceeds pari passu with the decline in the female honor culture, noting that “the virtues associated with nursing. . . were seen as distinctively feminine, and are still to this day.”

In the hospital, subliminal reminders of domesticity abound: Shining washbasins recall the rules not just of hygiene but also of a well-kept home, and a nurse’s dedication and selflessness recall a mother’s sacrifice for her children. The link between nursing and feminine virtue is a major reason why only six per cent of nurses in the United States are men, a number that has not significantly changed in over 40 years. In contrast, almost 30 per cent of U.S. teachers are men, as are a large number of airline-service workers. Men are comfortable entering these other, traditionally female-dominated careers because they do not see them as inherently feminine.


Not that feminists are not trying to change the idea of feminine and masculine careers as well! But since it has been the case that “the nursing leadership repudiates the older ideal of nursing as a career well-suited to a woman’s special attributes, young women see little in nursing that is honorable or distinctive.” Or at least not from which, these days, they are allowed to claim publicly any honor or distinction. What they may feel in their unreconstructed hearts is another matter.

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