Half the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
—Jane Austen, Emma

Both Homer’s Iliad and the book of Genesis tell us that the battle between the sexes has been with us since the beginning of recorded time. As contemporary observers point out, however, the gender wars are something altogether new. Men and women through the ages accepted their differences as a fact of nature about which little could be done. Many celebrated those differences—vive la différence —while others accepted them with resignation. Few thought that sex differences could be abolished without upsetting the institutions of family, state, and religion that provided stability and continuity to society. The modern feminists, however, by launching the gender wars, sought to put an end to the age-old battle by treating those enduring differences as artificial and by seeking to transcend them through politics.

The advocates of the gender-neutral society must also suppress “womanliness.”

Can such an enterprise succeed? Should it? What are we—men and women alike—giving up in the process of pursuing it? These are the questions raised in Manliness, the bold and politically incorrect new book by Harvey Mansfield, a professor of Government at Harvard University and the author of important works on Burke, Machiavelli, and Tocqueville.¹

Mansfield, an outspoken conservative on Harvard’s left-liberal faculty, is no stranger to controversy, which is a good thing, because his book seems intended to stir up controversies on almost every page. His subject is the