Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance. - book reviews

National Review, April 4, 1994 by Daniel Seligman

IN HIS introduction to Why Men Rule, Steven Goldberg mentions that he had briefly considered giving this title to an earlier version of the book, published in the Seventies as The Inevitability of Patriarchy. But, he notes, readers then would have misapprehended what he was up to. They would have assumed he was out to explain why some men, rather than other men, run things in the world. In the sexually politicized Nineties, with Naomi Wolf and other "power feminists" on the march, misunderstandings seem less likely. Although the earlier work is here substantially rewritten, its point remains the same: to explain why men, rather than women, have always run things and will continue to do so. Naomi, meet Steve.

Mr. Goldberg, chairman of the Department of Sociology at New York's City College, begins with a dangerous anthropological proposition: all known societies have in fact been patriarchal. "Authority and leadership are... associated with the male in every society." The danger in "all" and "every" is, of course, that a single sustainable exception brings your case crashing dowIl

Noting and confronting this hazard, Mr. Goldberg devotes a fair amount of space up front to debunking various claims made over the years about allfemale Amazon societies in Brazil, for example, or about female leadership in parts of Java and among the Berbers, Hottentots, and others. He brings onstage the wonderfully PC contention that Iroquois men were not dominant, and swats it down with the finding of Lewis Henry Morgan, the great nineteenth-century anthropologist: "The [Iroquois] Indian regarded woman as the inferior, the dependent, and the servant of man." Why Men Rule also takes you through the systematic misrepresentation of Margaret Mead's findings about the Tchambuli of New Guinea, published in 1935 and endlessly cited as a stunning example of sex-role reversal. Mr. Goldberg tells us that some years back he did a survey of 32 introductory sociology textbooks; 30 of them began the chapter on sex roles by asserting that the Tchambuli had women run things, then inferring that male dominance in other societies must be a matter of social conditioning. He ends up triumphantly quoting from Miss Mead's 1973 review of The Inevitability of Patriarchy: "It is true . . . that all the claims so glibly made about societies ruled by women are nonsense We have no reason to believe that they ever existed... men everywhere have been in charge of running the show .. men have been the leaders in public affairs and the final authorities at home."

Helping to shore up Mr. Goldberg's case for universality are a few critical distinctions and qualifications. Unlike Margaret Mead, he does not hold that men everywhere are dominant in familial situations; his point is merely (merely?) that they will invariably hold most of the top positions in the political and other hierarchies that set society's basic direction. He allows that there are societies in which women do apparently high-status tasks generally performed by men in our own world--but insists that in those other societies, the tasks have less status than in the United States. In the Soviet Union, for example, most practicing doctors were women, but their work had less status than that of research physicians, who were mostly men

He also insists on a sharp distinction between matrilineal societies (with kinship and sometimes property following the mother's line) and matriarchies (with women running things). Given the undisputed existence of some matrilineal societies and the eagerness of many journalists to depict them as female-dominated, the distinction is critical to his case. While I was reading Why Men Rule, the New York Times op-ed page carried a feature about the Khasi tribe of northeastern India, which is clearly matrilineal. The article was sardonically titled "What Do Men Want?" and incorporated some forlorn quotes by men indicating that they are totally bossed around by women When I dialed into the Nexis database, I instantly came across a few 1993 news stories indicating that the tribal chieftains are in fact male, and that they had given the Indian government a hard time before agreeing to permit uranium mining in the area.

Next question: Why do men rule? The author's answer is that men are driven to attain "dominance." And what exactly is dominance? Although it is put forward as a major explanatory variable in Mr. Goldberg's schema, I came away somewhat unclear about its meaning and especially disappointed in a passage headed "Male Dominance Defined" which contains no definition. Sometimes the term seems to refer to a male "psychophysiological" trait that leads to patriarchal institutions; in other contexts, it seems to be more or less synonymous with patriarchy. But one crucial point about dominance does emerge. Men, more than women, are driven to run things: "Males are . . . more willing to endure pain, frustration, and the like, to learn what they must and do what they must for . . . dominance, while females... are more willing to endure such pain, frustration, and the like for familial reasons, for children, for love . . . but not so much for dominance."