Surely it is a wonderful thing, isn't it, that Jacinda Ardern has become the prime minister of New Zealand?
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There are not nearly enough women leading the world's nations. The world would be a better place if the world stage had fewer awful men on it (fewer Trumps, Putins, Kim Jong-uns and Dutertes). For we all know, don't we, that women are the better, gentler, less warlike, more compassionate sex?
![Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand's prime minister-elect, speaks during a new conference in Wellington, New Zealand, on Friday, Oct. 20, 2017. Ardern?will become the world's youngest female leader after cutting a deal to form a coalition government in New Zealand. Photo: Mark Coote Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand's prime minister-elect, speaks during a new conference in Wellington, New Zealand, on Friday, Oct. 20, 2017. Ardern?will become the world's youngest female leader after cutting a deal to form a coalition government in New Zealand. Photo: Mark Coote](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/348a48ee-3b60-4e59-9d19-2de54a31c26a/r0_0_2000_1333_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
But wait. What if Jacinda Ardern proves to be, either by nature or out of political necessity, a "biform human being" and doesn't bring anything womanly to her prime ministership? Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India claimed to be a "biform human being" (neither man nor woman) when there were suggestions made to her a mere woman might not be masculine enough to govern India, especially in times of war.
And we all know of instances in which women, in office, show great muscularity in the way they go about things. As I write our dear nation has a woman, Julie Bishop, as its prime minister. Is Ms Bishop, famously stern-faced and equipped with an icy stare that could sink an aircraft carrier, a biform human being?
And what of our gynocratic-looking ACT Legislative Assembly? Of its 25 members 13 are women and this is the first female parliamentary majority in Australia's political history. But does the Assembly's womanishness translate into policies that are more kindly and maternal than they would be if the Assembly was as all-male as the Raiders' squad?
These questions are on your biform columnist's minds for various reasons. I've noticed the delight Ms Ardern's ascension has given so many of us and have wondered why this is so. Now, coincidentally, there is the appearance this week of a ripper essay in Aeon, the swish online magazine of ideas. In her piece Would the world be more peaceful if there were more women leaders? Josie Glausiusz fossicks for the facts about women and office.
This is timely since although Ms Ardern's triumph brought an idiotic grin to my face I was half-aware that it may just be idiocy to imagine that women in power will work wonders. What does Ms Glausiusz think, having fossicked among the facts and having picked some scholarly brains?
Josie Glausiusz points us to a long history of peace activism "grounded in maternal love".
But she reminds us that in spite of the power of maternal love there have been some famously "warmongering" women. Her list includes, as well as the militant Thatcher, Boudicca the fearsome warrior Queen of the Iceni people of Britain.
And Glausiusz points to the research of US global conflict scholars who have studied four centuries of European kings and queens. They've examined the reigns of 193 monarchs in 18 European polities, or political entities, between the years 1480 to 1913. And the scholars found that the polities ruled by queens were 27 per cent more likely than those ruled by kings to participate in inter-state conflicts. Unmarried queens were more likely than married queens to engage in wars and scholars think this may be because the unmarried queens felt they had to be especially macho to counter perceptions that they might be girly and weak. We see this in modern leaders too, a scholar told Glausiusz, with women leaders (she cites the examples of Thatcher, Israel's Golda Meir and India's Indira Gandhi) perhaps over-compensating by being showily belligerent about war and defence.
Yes, recently watching and listening to foreign minister Julie Bishop growl threats at Kim Jong-un and (figuratively) shake her fist at that plump tyrant she did seem to be trying (trying far too hard, I thought) to say how superhumanly manly she is.
But, perhaps, the election of women to parliaments may sometimes make for some doveishness. One of Glausiusz's scholars, Mary Caprioli, says that the data shows that as the number of women in parliament increases by five per cent, a state is five times less likely to use violence when confronted with an international crisis.
Emerging from a blizzard of statistics, historical truths and scholarly opinions Glausiuszdoes seem to conclude that we mustn't have high expectations of women as peacemongers.
Glausiusz quotes with approval how "[feminist activist] Helena Swanwick wrote in The Future of the Women's Movement (1913): 'I wish to disclaim altogether the kind of feminist assumption that men have been the barbarians who loved physical force, and that women alone were civilised and civilising. There are no signs of this in literature or history.' "
But your idealistic columnist is reluctant to let go of the reassuring myth. And how can Swanwick say there is nothing in literature to support it? Shakespeare's works assert it again and again. Lady Macbeth prays for a (temperamental) change of sex so that she can be man enough to help facilitate the assassination of the king.
The spirits oblige and unsexed Lady Macbeth (her breasts for the moment brimming with gall) becomes biform and capable of cruelties she couldn't commit as a woman.