Dialogue: Now how about a hand up for sidelined blokes?

By DON DONOVAN*

I know a young woman whose partner abandoned her in the middle of the night without warning. He left her with three children under 5, a car with a flat battery, no money and no prospect of support.

Since then she has become a capable and positive woman with management ability any chief executive might be proud of. She's making a go of it while her erstwhile partner has contrived to shed all responsibility and lives as if he were a free agent.

But in an odd way she has become free, too - free to make full use of the common sense that was always there but that was made subordinate to the man's.

The contrast between those two parents in some ways typifies an all-too-common present-day state of the genders: increasingly, men are copping out to women in the control stakes. So it comes as no surprise that with the appointment of Dame Silvia Cartwright to the governor-generalship of this country, our five main politico-legal leaders will all be women.

Praise be, I say. I have long yearned to see women take over some of the burdens that were traditionally (and for no good reason) in the male domain. It has never made sense to me that women were not treated as at least intellectual equals and encouraged to share power. Indeed, we might hope for better outcomes.

The days when women had no vote are easily remembered, the era of their exclusion from the law and medicine not far beyond. A step further back reveals that women artists and composers were virtually unheard of and those in literature were so few that they stood out from their peers like leading lights in our history.

Male dominance is to blame, and while it is idle for contemporary generations to apologise for the treatment of the undervalued women of the past, it is nonetheless difficult to appreciate just why it was that they were so put down.

Certainly women and men are different and have discrete biological roles to play (much as social mores might change it is still immutable that women can ovulate, menstruate, lactate and bear children while men can't) but it was never reasonable to deny them education, opportunity and achievement as equals.

A huge measure of power has always been in women's hands in the subtlest of ways. Despite their exclusion from affairs of state, they always had their hands firmly on the reins of family in the days when the family was husband and wife joined in duty to their children and neighbours.

What has really changed in the past few years is that women have stepped into the key ranks of civic, political and administrative power - they now occupy their rightful place and will no longer be put in their traditional place. I don't know what my granny would have thought of all of this.

I imagine she would as much object to the Prime Minister or the Governor-General being a woman as any of her contemporary menfolk would. But then she also disapproved of women who smoked, swore, wore slacks or entered bars unescorted. Although she held sway in her own domain, my granny, the scales had not yet fallen from her eyes.

All the same, she was a realist and stood ready to embrace change for the better. If she were here today, she would approve of women having taken their place in the sun. She might even be ready to roll up her sleeves and become a bit of a hands-on string-puller herself. Having said that, I'm also certain she would have advised her governing sisters not to try to be like men as they take on their roles.

She would have said: "When you shoulder men's duties and privileges, don't masquerade as them. Don't dress like them, don't sound like them, don't try to be macho. Use your femininity and female intellect, for those are the very characteristics that have got you where you are today."

To which I, a mere male, would add: "And now that you've proved you're just as good, if not better than we are, reach down occasionally and offer sidelined men a helping hand. God knows some of us need it."

*Don Donovan is an Auckland writer.