Is it significant that many of the women who succeed in a man’s world had in
their childhood a strong relationship with their father?
Alfred Roberts was highly regarded in his home town of Grantham, but his
greatest claim to fame proved to be that he was the father of Margaret
Thatcher. Hugh Rodham will be even more famous than Alfred Roberts if his
daughter Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes President of the US. Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru was undoubtedly famous in his own right as the first Prime
Minister of India, but so was his daughter In-dira Gandhi, the third Prime
Minister.
When William Edward Nightingale taught his daughter mathematics he did not
expect that Florence would not only turn nursing into a profession but also
that she would become a remarkable statistician who, among other
achievements, pioneered the visual presentation of statistics that is now so
much part of our lives.
It seems that in a close intellectual relationship with her father a girl can
get something that she cannot pick up from her mother, particularly if the
mother has concentrated her efforts on domesticity and motherhood.
Such relationships between father and daughter are not of the “Daddy’s little
girl” variety where the father delights in his daughter’s feminine charms
and rewards her for being pretty and sweet. Rather, they are relationships
where the father recognises and encourages the girl’s intellectual ability.
From the beginning the father responds to the girl’s interest in the world. He
doesn’t direct it towards feminine things while disapproving of her interest
in what he sees as masculine things. He doesn’t ignore or punish her for
being interested in, say, fairies, but acknowledges that an interest in
fairies can be accompanied by an ambition to become a genius in computing.
In a good relationship a father rewards his daughter’s intellectual
achievements, but not so that she comes to see winning her father’s approval
as her main aim in life. This often happens with men who cannot bear the
thought that they will one day be surpassed by their children. They withhold
their approval so that their sons and daughters continue to feel like
failures.
In my work with depressed clients I encountered many people who felt that
their existence depended on the unconditional love and approval given by the
dominant parent in the family. When this love and approval was not
forthcoming, they blamed themselves.
Not that all children who become locked in a lifelong battle to get their
parent to give them unconditional love and approval become depressed. It
might be that a child whose dream is to gain unconditional love can become
the adult who never quite leaves home, who stays close to the parent, caring
for them no matter how unpleasant and demanding the parent might be. The
child who believes that the parent’s unconditional approval is essential
might become an achiever who always sees another goal ahead that must be
attained. Yet, no matter how great each achievement is, none brings the
desired parental endorsement.
Some parents mellow with old age and have no difficulty in giving their
children the unconditional love and approval that the children desire.
However, we should always remember that we each live within our own
individual world of meaning. There are parents for whom the ideas
“unconditional love” and “unconditional approval” lie so far beyond their
worlds of meaning that they could no more show it to their children than Ian
Paisley could become a Catholic priest.
Adult children who cannot see that their parent is incapable of giving them
what they want can waste their lives trying to get from them something that
is unobtainable. It’s very sad to have to give up such a hope, but until
they relinquish it they cannot be free and autonomous adults.
What though, of the happier scenario, where a father’s interest in his
daughter’s intellectual ability has a profound effect? This effect is found
in many women who may not have gone on to become world famous, but who have
done well in whatever field they chose to work.
In my family my sister, six years older than me, was close to our mother and I
was close to my father. I became an intellectual (“brainy”, as my sister
would say scornfully). My sister chose teaching domestic science and being
in charge of a home, a husband and children.
My father left school when he was 11 and went to work delivering
groceries. He taught himself by reading and seeking out better educated
people with whom to converse. His passions were history and politics. My
mother didn’t share these passions, and so he talked to me. My mother was
interested only in what related directly and immediately to her, and my
sister absorbed her way of thinking. I saw how my father’s way of
interpreting events differed markedly from my mother’s. I found his
interpretations infinitely interesting and my mother’s interpretations
infinitely boring. I didn’t realise until much later that my father had
given me an understanding of a masculine way of seeing the world.
What I call a masculine way of thinking is not confined to men and does not
apply to all men. It is a way of perceiving the world in terms of the
essentials and stripping away the decorative and the dross. This way of
thinking can be seen in Florence Nightingale’s reports and statistical
analyses. The feminine way of thinking, which again does not apply to all
women, is made up of myriad observations, thoughts and feelings, with
constant interruptions and changes in what is being attended to, often with
details to the fore and the wider picture ignored.
Not all women who think in a feminine way are as self-centred as my mother
was. Most women are interested in all the people they encounter in their
life and through the media, though the wider world doesn’t always catch
their attention. The feminine way of thinking grew out of domestic settings
in which women had a multitude of overlapping tasks, usually involving
people, and where they had little control over their situation.
Many men who think in a masculine way make one major error. This is that, when
engaged in interpreting a situation in which people are involved, they
disregard how these people interpret their situation. Men who make this
mistake fail to understand that what determines our behaviour isn’t what
happens to us but how we each interpret what happens to us, and that no two
people ever see anything exactly the same way.
Thus a girl may learn from her father how to see the essentials but, if he
does not understand that an individual’s perception of a situation is an
essential, the girl is likely to be as inept in dealing with people as many
men are. On the other hand, if her father shows her how essential it is to
understand how other people think, she acquires the great skill of combining
clarity of thought with compassion. Another feature of a masculine way of
thinking is being able to put aside emotion when it is appropriate to do so.
A colleague of Hillary Clinton once remarked: “She can separate personal
emotions from the goal and task ahead in a way few women can do.” Many men
claim not to feel emotion, but they are lying to themselves to appear strong
and manly. Later they are likely to discover that unacknowledged emotions
take a mental and physical toll. To put aside our emotions when we know it
is appropriate to do so, we need to be aware of our emotions but not let
them overwhelm us. To do this we need to understand that emotions are solely
about us. They are interpretations that relate to ourselves in terms of
whether we feel safe (happy, content, satisfied) or in danger (fear, anger,
guilt, hate, envy, etc). Acknowledging our own emotions can help us to
perceive and understand what other people feel, but, if we consider that our
own emotions are of absolute prime importance we are simply being selfish.
Having a father who appreciates his daughter’s intellectual ability can have
its drawbacks. She can see in him the ideal man whose exact copy she forever
seeks and fails to find. She can mould herself and her life to suit his
wishes and never be herself. In emulating her father she can find herself
alienated from other women, despising their femininity. She can spend her
life trying to live up to her father’s expectations, or to prove him wrong,
and never get the response that she tells herself she must have.
On the other hand, she can simply get from him a way of seeing herself and her
world that gives her a larger vision and a greater understanding of the
complexities of life. My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend: Making and
Breaking Sibling Bonds by Dorothy Rowe is published by Routledge, £9.99
Famous daughters
Virginia Woolf: Had a very close intellectual relationship with her
father, also an author, which highlighted his much colder relationship with
her sister, Vanessa.
Edith Wharton: The author was close to her father, George Frederic
Jones, who came from a wealthy New York family. It has been implied that she
believed rumours that her real father was another man – and that she
harboured incestuous desires for Jones.
Hillary Rodham Clinton: Her father was a successful businessman and a
staunch Republican. His son described him as “confrontational”. When Hillary
got straight As at school her father said that it must have been be an easy
school.
Ségolène Royal: The daughter of a former artillery officer
who didn’t believe in women’s education. She sued him for refusing to
divorce her mother.
Angela Merkel: Her father, Horst Kasner, was a Lutheran pastor who,
reserved his love for the priests he trained, claim his biographers, and
seemed disappointed by the daughter who went on to became Germany’s first
female Chancellor.
Nancy Pelosi: The only girl among five brothers, she has an easy
intellectual relationship with her father, Tommy D’Alessandro, who was a
congressman and a mayor of Baltimore. She is Speaker of the US House of
Representatives.
