Vol. 97: When women aren’t around

The truth about male-only gatherings

         Maybe a dozen years ago, when I was editing Broad Street Review, I had lunch with Caroline Millett, who wrote often for me about interior design. During our conversation, I remarked that Caroline, more so than most women I knew, seemed comfortable among men and even to prefer their company.

         “Oh, men are so much more interesting than women!” she declared without hesitation.

         “That’s strange, “I said. “I’ve always thought women were more interesting than men.”

         “You have no idea what women are like when there are no men around,” she told me.

         “You have no idea what men are like when there are no women around,” I replied.

Diversity makes you smart

         I think about that conversation often. For thousands of years, our ancestors instinctively perceived that men and women differ not only biologically but psychologically. Their solution to that quandary was to separate the sexes except when necessary.

         As one result, when I was a student in the ’50s and early ’60s, most elite schools— public, private, and parochial, not to mention prestigious colleges— equated a superior education with the removal of all extraneous distractions, especially the opposite sex. Only two of the eight Ivy League universities (Penn and Cornell) were then co-ed. Among the five prestigious private schools then operating in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, only my school— Fieldston, an unabashedly progressive school operated by the atheistic New York Society for Ethical Culture— mixed boys and girls together.

         Since then, of course, we’ve discovered that the sexes aren’t as different psychologically as we once thought, and in any case exposure to those differences can produce mutual benefits. Educators now perceive that students learn as much from their peers as from their books and teachers. Several studies have concluded that diversity— whether of gender, race, nationality, political persuasion, whatever— improves academic performance, even in seemingly cut-and-dried subjects like math and science. The apparent reason: When surrounded by people like ourselves, we’re less likely to think for ourselves and more likely to fall for bad ideas. In other words, diversity makes you smarter. Real growth, it turns out, begins when you realize that other people don’t think the way you do.

         In retrospect, coeducation taught me and my Fieldston schoolmates to think of the opposite sex as friends and classmates, as opposed to mysterious distant sex objects. Today all three surviving private schools in our old Riverdale neighborhood are coed. And of course, all eight Ivy League universities are coed as well.

         I personally tend to avoid male-only events, not as a matter of principle but just because they’re boring. (Even Penn football reunions are more interesting when wives, mothers, and daughters are present.) The transition hasn’t been easy. But then, transition is what life is all about.

The West without women

         So, what are men like when there are no women around? The so-called opening of the American West— which I studied for decades while researching Death of a Gunfighter, my 2008 biography of the Pony Express superintendent Jack Slade— provides a useful model. The California Gold Rush drew 600,000 Americans toward the Pacific, almost all of them young, single men. Throughout the 1850s, west of the Missouri River white men outnumbered white women by nine to one. The so-called fair sex was “unfitted for the hardships of pioneer life,” reasoned George Napheys, author of a popular advice book for women. An aphorism of the 1850s observed: “This country is all right for men and dogs, but it’s hell on women and horses.”

         Liberated from the restraining and domesticating influence of women, the men of the early West achieved remarkable feats. Within just a generation or two, the great expanse from the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains—once labeled “the Great American Desert” on maps— abounded in farms, towns, roads, bridges, and railroads.

         On the other hand, without the cautioning influence of women, almost all men drank to excess on the frontier, and most of them burned out, either physically or psychologically, by their early 30s. The frontier may have been no place for a woman, but without women it ultimately proved no place for a man, either.

         Nineteenth-century women were the everyday healers— the practical companions adept at nursing, sanitation, and nutrition. Without women, it turned out, illness claimed more lives than it would have in a society dominated by families rather than young single males. Adventurous men who had gone West to escape feminine restraints ultimately yearned for those restraints. “Gone to Find a Wife” read the sign tacked to many a gold miner’s abandoned cabin. “Lucky Miner’s House But No Wife,” read another where gold had been struck.

‘Didn’t you get laid?’

         Now jump ahead more than a century to another male-dominated institution: the legal profession. As of 1978, the illustrious Philadelphia law firm of Wolf. Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen numbered just one woman among its more than 100 partners. As a result, the repartee among its high-powered lawyers resembled the banter you’d find in any men’s locker room. The firm’s roster of legal eagles included Seymour Kurland, one of the great plaintiffs’ anti-trust practitioners of his day as well as a city solicitor of Philadelphia and a chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association. But within the firm, Kurland was better known for gleefully deflating the pretensions of his fellow lawyers. When confronted with a partner in a sour mood, Kurland delighted in inquiring, “What’s the matter? Didn’t you get laid last night?”

         This mockery was taken in good fun as long as Kurland’s colleagues were men. But after he used that line on a woman subordinate named Nancy Ezold in 1988, she subsequently seized upon it when she sued Wolf Block for sex discrimination. (She won at the trial level, but the verdict was reversed on appeal.) What was a joke to Kurland was no joke to Ezold.

Caught with his pants down

         Permit me one more story about how men behave when no women are around.

         When I worked in Chicago in the 1960s, the powerful law firm then known as Kirkland & Ellis encountered a bizarre legal challenge. Kirkland & Ellis traced its influence to a partnership created in 1908 whose founders included two lawyers then in their 20s: Weymouth Kirkland and Robert R. McCormick. The latter was a scion of two legendary Chicagoans: hHis grandfather Joseph Medill founded the Chicago Tribune, and his great-uncle Cyrus Hall McCormick created International Harvester. Although Robert McCormick left Kirkland & Ellis in 1920 to take charge of the Tribune, he continued to maintain an office at the law firm until his death in 1955. More significantly, the law firm acquired the Tribune as a client, and consequently it also picked up most of the major Chicago corporations that wanted to stay in the Tribune's good graces.

         It was a situation rife with conflicts: Libel lawyers at Kirkland & Ellis routinely reviewed articles about the firm’s own clients prior to publication in the Tribune and other papers. They also advised the Tribune and its sister paper about endorsing local judges who were up for re-election. Bottom line: Kirkland & Ellis was a firm designed to serve clients who wanted or needed to throw their weight around.

         By the 1960s, most of the law firm’s major corporate clients were no longer privately-owned, but their founding families remained active as executives and controlling stockholders, not to mention civic benefactors whose names appeared frequently in all four Chicago daily papers.

         One day on the mid-’60s, a Kirkland & Ellis lawyer received a frantic call from a member of one such prominent family. It seems a relative had just dropped dead of a heart attack while masturbating.
         "I don't care what you have to do," the caller told his lawyer. "Just keep this out of the papers."
         The mystified attorney— whose legal education had failed to include a course in masturbation law— sought advice from his immediate superior, who was similar clueless about this esoteric legal subject. He turned to his department head, who turned to the firm’s managing partner, who had no experience with this issue either. Eventually (as I was later told by two lawyers who were present), some half-dozen Kirkland & Ellis lawyers trooped down the hall to the office of the firm’s founder, Weymouth Kirkland, who by this time was 86. There they explained the problem to learn how this grand old man of the Chicago bar would handle it.
         Kirkland, I am told, paused only briefly. “"Well, gentlemen," he replied, "if that's what killed him, then we're all in trouble."

         So, do women behave any worse when no men are around? That I must leave to Caroline Millett or other female readers of this column. Any takers?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com