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.

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