Bullish Life: Towards a Monstrous Regiment of Women TheGloss

Jennifer Dziura writes life coaching advice weekly here on TheGloss, and career coaching advice Fridays on TheGrindstone.

How much of modern-day America do women really control? Can you make a career out of only interacting with other women? (I’m not saying you should, but is that now possible?) Is an all-women MBA a good idea? What can we learn from Sara Blakely’s new billionaire status?

But first: The Reformation! And let’s explain the title of this piece.

In 1558, Protestant reformer John Knox published a tract entitled The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.

He was opposed to the Catholic queens of Scotland and England, as well as, by the way, all women.

“For their sight in civil regiment is but blindness; their strength, weakness; their counsel, foolishness; and judgment, frenzy, if it be rightly considered.” (Full text here.)

Following The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (it’s kind of fun to keep cutting and pasting the full title, which is really, in keeping with the times, The First Blast of the Trvmpet Against the Monstrvovs Regiment of Women), Queen Elizabeth I came to power, and despite the fact that she was also Protestant, she was really not that into John Knox, for some crazy reason. (Bitches are frenzied! Or, in the parlance of 1558, phrenesied.)

The Monstrous Regiment of Women is now the title of a hilariously reactionary Christian DVD. Quoth one Amazon commenter: “The practice of submissive women telling other women how happy they are in their subordinate state is as old as dirt.”

Considering all the Palins and Bachmanns (and Coulters and Ingrahams) popping up everywhere – that is, there are female politicians for every political bent – men who have problems with women as “civil magistrates” have … problems. See below: “Emily’s Lust!”

You know the Westboro Baptist Church? The awful one that pickets funerals and that basically nobody at all supports? I don’t want to link to it, but I’ll tell you – in the 1990s, the Internet was still a baby, and you didn’t just assume that everything had a website. So, when you discovered that something crazy had its own website, it was like digging up an old Roman coin in your backyard or something.

So, when I discovered that the Westboro Baptist Church had a website, and that they were scanning in their daily, hand-drawn fliers and posting them as PDFs, I was fascinated. And then I found one portraying the then-mayor of Topeka as the whore of Babylon, and I laughed so, so hard, and emailed it to everyone I knew, and I felt like this magical flier was the misogynistic equivalent of someone who is spouting homophobic hate speech while, literally, rocking his penis in and out of the mouth of his masseuse, Julio.

This morning, I woke up wondering if I could find this flier.

zanbrody

I have so many thoughts about this article, I don’t think I can even articulate one particularly well.

More and more I am realizing that my thoughts on feminism and women in business vs. men in business are going to remain ever fluid.

I feel like instead of forming set opinions, I’m currently most interested in examining the lives of women I admire and trying to dissect what it is about them that I’m drawn to hold in high regard.

So, thank you–here is another article full of women to appreciate/contemplate!!
Susan

Agreed with everything you said, Jen. My trepidation about all-women MBA programs is the worry that it will reinforce the stereotype that women are not at all interested in making money and instead want to focus on social issues and aren’t interested in competing with men. I worry that this will be the end result even though the thought is a good one.
sexist

You say, this female billionaire is quirky in a way JUST LIKE MALE billionaires are, but that she demonstrates that you don’t have to run your career like a man. You say you don’t think women are morally better, but that effectively women who choose to only interact with women are.
Don’t get me wrong. I think you are making a good point. I hope it won’t put me in the “dick-typing” category when I point out, that I wouldn’t know of any possibility to have a purely male MBA, which seems oddly unbalanced. But what I’m actually trying to point out is, that even negating clichés, you (or I for that matter) can’t help but remain in the framework of this particular bias. As long as we need to have special female MBAs, we’re not even close to where we should be. “Separate but equal” has never really done the trick, it seems.
- a woman
  
  to sexist–
  I think part of the point here is that MBAs started out as degrees for males only. The point of the program Jen mentioned is no different than that of a women’s undergraduate college–part of which is to give young women the opportunity to learn while surrounded by positive female role models. In considering the fact that higher education has a history of excluding women, it becomes apparent that the point of such schools/programs is not to exclude men, rather to encourage women in fields and professions that are historically male-dominated. The hope is that these women will then join the professional world better off for their unique educational experience and be well-situated to succeed at their jobs. When enough time has passed that women holding high positions in these fields is commonplace and inequalities (such as gender-based salary discrepancies) no longer pose a problem, then these programs may no longer be needed. Until then, please do not criticize women’s education programs simply because of the seeming “unbalance” that the boy’s club isn’t still the boy’s club.
Tania

I’m currently in business school, and I do think an all-woman MBA isn’t a bad thing. I think the reason it’s different than an all-man MBA program is that in our culture, unless you live under a rock in the literal sense you still get extremely gendered messages everywhere. On TV, in music, in movies – you’re still getting shades of male dominance. Whereas a dude in an all-male MBA program would be getting all those same messages from media without any female presence at school to mitigate the bro-messages.

I mean, there is a reason that frat boys have that reputation for being, well, frat boys – the immersion in an all-male culture can bring out the worst in a lot of guys, even those who didn’t start out as wearers of Axe body spray.