The New Eve - Lewis Robert [6]
Medical School. By 2003–2004 females composed 48 percent of all medical students, up from only 6 percent in 1960.16 This percentage is expected to grow.
Law School. Women make up 50 percent of all new law students.17
All of these statistics are revealing, but the ones concerning education are especially telling because education is the best predictor of future demographics. As U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings says, the predominance of women on college campuses “has profound implications for the economy, society, families, and democracy.”18 All indications are that women will gain a clear majority in most professional fields as the twenty-first century progresses. As this enormous social realignment continues to play out, men will increasingly find themselves working for and tailoring their lives to women rather than vice versa. Whether men and women will adapt well to this new arrangement remains to be seen, but it is coming. The spotlight is clearly on the rising power of women.
A Warning from History
While it's true that freedom, power, and opportunity are wonderful assets to a woman's portfolio, there is a dark side. History illustrates this by pointing us back to other occasions when women had far-reaching rights and freedoms at their fingertips. In his book Caesar and Christ, Will Durant detailed one prime example of this from the first two centuries AD, when women in the major urban centers of the Roman Empire experienced their own season of liberation. Indeed, the parallels to our present day make Rome feel like America's historical twin.
That's because Roman women of this era had also acquired new and expanded freedoms that went well beyond the traditional boundaries. Long held back by law and custom, they won unprecedented rights for themselves and a level playing field with men. With this new power, they became doctors and lawyers, owned property, and traded goods. They enjoyed the liberty of conducting business with men in private quarters. This new tang of freedom was exhilarating, dizzying, and seductive.
Wisdom and restraint soon became the enemies of this newfound freedom rather than guardrails for it. Excess and foolishness disguised as chic became the new virtues. Women threw off modesty and walked the streets wearing however little they liked. Adulteries increased so much as to deaden the sense of scandal. Divorce was common; open marriage more so. Men preferred concubines to wives, and wives sought lovers in full view of their husbands. Abortion became a mundane means of birth control. Women lobbied for and eventually won the right to fight alongside men in military combat roles. Classic femininity became decidedly out of vogue in the new Rome. With this new femininity and the shift from an agrarian to a cosmopolitan social structure, women pursued new, more aggressive roles in society and, along with their husbands, gave less and less attention to their homes.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Predictably, family problems exploded and birthrates fell sharply. Childbearing interrupted opportunity and the pursuit of beauty, so women avoided it like the plague. Caesar Augustus was so alarmed at these developments that he moved to bolster the image of motherhood in Rome by according mothers special honor in public. He dressed them in fine robes, exempted them from taxes, seated them in the luxury boxes at the Colosseum, and in earnest bid the nation do homage to the institute of motherhood. But his bid failed. The new Roman woman simply wasn't interested.19
In a final reflection on Rome's gender revolution, Durant noted that these women in their liberty chose more often than not to emulate men's vices rather than their virtues. Perhaps more to the point, Roman women took their new equality with men as an opportunity to become virtually indistinguishable from the men they once chafed under and disdained.20 Some feminists of our own era have noted this same tendency among modern women. French activist Simone de Beauvoir, for instance,