The Better Half: A Dangerous Idea About Women, Men, and What We Could Become

A boy says he's fine. He isn't. One person at the table notices. That gap - between what was said and what was true, and the fact that somebody closed it - is where this book begins. We have a word for the skill involved. The word is nice. Nobody has ever been promoted for it, tested on it, or admired for it the way we admire intelligence or nerve or drive. The Better Half argues that this is one of the larger mistakes we've made, and that correcting it is a bigger project than anything we've attempted so far. For a century the question was can women do what men do? It was the right question, and the answer came back yes, definitively, at enormous cost. And then we kept asking it - long after it was answered - because winning had become the identity and the question had become the movement. Which left something out. Nobody ever asked whether the thing we were all competing to become was worth becoming. Equality is a floor. We've spent a hundred years treating it as a ceiling. Through six people you come to know across twenty-six chapters - a father who can't ask the second question, a mother who can, a woman who thinks the whole argument is sentimental and says so, a man of sixty-one who did everything right and ended up with nobody to call - this book makes a case that cuts across the usual lines. That noticing, care and restraint are skills rather than temperaments. That they were assigned to women, developed under pressure that should never have been applied, and then ranked below the capacities assigned to men - not after any comparison, but because of who was doing them. That men were not the winners of this arrangement. They won the scoreboard and lost something else, and a great many are finding out what, at fifty, alone, in a flat. And that the fight for admission was only ever the first half of something. This is not a book about how women are better. It contains an entire chapter attempting to demolish its own argument, and it half succeeds. It refuses, flatly, the idea that women owe anybody the work of improving men. And it ends with four things a reader can actually do on a Tuesday. The author's identity is withheld until the final pages - not as a trick, but because the book has spent twenty-six chapters asking you not to judge an argument by who's making it. For readers of Rebecca Solnit, Richard Reeves, bell hooks and Caitlin Moran - and for anyone who has ever suspected that winning the argument we were having isn't the same as having the right one.