Harvey Mansfield on Manliness

Femininity and women “are not self-standing subjects,” declared Professor Harvey Mansfield, in criticizing the College’s Committee on the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality. Yet, earlier last year, he published a book solely on their traditional counterpart: manliness. On March 17, 2006, he gave a talk at the Harvard Book Store to discuss his book, thoughtfully titled Manliness.

Well-known on the Harvard campus for his inflammatory remarks on every hot topic—from feminism to affirmative action—and a knack for attracting press attention, the Kenan Professor of Government does not have a habit of leaving his audience indifferent. In the talks he gave surrounding the release of his new book, he did not disappoint. “Women and men should relate to each other in public the way a husband and wife relate,” he asserted. “The man should be assertive and constructive, and the woman should be nurturing and critical.” A female audience member challenged that characterization of wives, but Mansfield just smiled. “There you go. That’s the best part of a husband-wife relationship. The man creates, and the woman tweaks. And that’s how women and men should behave in the workplace.”

As a firm believer in “separate virtues” for men and women, he sees the book as his response to an increasingly gender-neutral society. “Manliness,” he argues, is a dying virtue, one that is necessary to the success of the Western state, but also one that is currently endangered by feminism and the influx of women into the workplace and higher education. According to Mansfield, manliness is “confidence in the face of risk,” a quality which is most common in men, although it can be found in some women as well. He argues that this devaluation of manliness is the root of many societal problems—including rape on campus. In response to a rise in campus sexual assaults and rapes a few years ago, he famously asserted that the solution was a “return to female chastity and male chivalry.”

The conversation often strayed to Professor Mansfield’s other interests. One student challenged him to defend his famous affinity for Aristotle. “Was Aristotle always right?” demanded the student.

“Always,” was the immediate response. Professor Mansfield looked around the room for more questions, but the student pressed on.

“But he supported slavery.”

“That’s not true,” the professor corrected. “He said that some men are natural-born slaves. And that is certainly true.”

The only topic on which Professor Mansfield declined to give an opinion was one that came up almost immediately: “Do you consider yourself a manly man?”

The audience shifted uncomfortably and laughed.

“That’s not for me to decide,” he evaded. “That’s for others to determine.”