Harvey Mansfield - Gender roles and equality

In his 2006 book Manliness, Mansfield defended a moderately conservative understanding of gender roles, and bemoaned the loss of the virtue of manliness in a “gender neutral” society. In a New York Times interview, he defined the concept briefly as “confidence in a situation of risk. A manly man has to know what he is doing.”[16] He defines the idea in more concrete terms in the actual book. There, a manly man does not have to know what he is doing, but only has to act as though he does. Also in the book, Mansfield subjects the concept of manliness to a test in which he refers for support of his argument to such diverse authorities as Homer, Hemingway, Kipling, Aristotle, Plato, and Naomi Wood. In his argument, , manliness is ultimately related to assertiveness — “decisiveness without complete knowledge” — and its place in society is debated.

Manliness was criticized by Martha Nussbaum in the June 22, 2006 issue of The New Republic.[17] Nussbaum accuses Mansfield of misreading, or refusing to read, many feminist and nonfeminist texts. She argues that his book is based on overt misogynistic assumptions that take a position of indifference towards violence against women. Mansfield asserts, she contends, that a woman can resist rape only with the aid of “a certain ladylike modesty enabling her to take offense at unwanted encroachment.”[17]

Concerning controversial comments by former President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, about mental differences between men and women, Mansfield said that it is “probably true” that women “innately have less capacity than men at the highest level of science… It’s common sense if you just look at who the top scientists are.”