Meet the alpha female
By Margie David Collins
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:34:00 08/31/2008
MANILA, Philippines - I’m sorry,” he told New Hampshire voters, “I can’t make her younger, taller, male!”
Bill was campaigning early this year for his wife Hillary, who had just lost Iowa. The United States presidential hopeful was the same Hillary who, campaigning for Bill in 1992, bristled at criticism of her alpha-female profile. She said: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies, but I decided to fulfill my profession [law].” And then: “I’m not some Tammy Wynette standing by my man!”
Oh, the delicious irony of it all.
Can you blame her for believing it was her manifest destiny to be the 44th Occupant of the White House? A clever political maven in pursuit of a holy grail, she wasn’t entering pioneering territory—Golda Meir, Indira Ghandi, Margaret Thatcher, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Angela Merkel trod the path before her, smashing the glass ceiling to smithereens.
But while it’s an illustrious place to be, it’s a lonely, sparsely populated land.
If biology no longer dictates destiny, who are these alpha females? Do they exist? Do we even like them?
Empowered
Thanks to our mothers, Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir and Gloria Steinem, who inspired timid women slaving away in menial jobs and desperate housewives chained to the kitchen sink, empowered women are today in positions of influence and in high-flying careers that pay the kind of money that was once the preserve of men.
“So, which office do you prefer,” asked the male boss of his female employee. “The one with the sticky floor or the glass ceiling?” An old joke which, if uttered today with malice, could land you in a great heap of trouble.
Girls are outperforming boys academically and entering the workforce in greater numbers than ever before. Women are surging ahead, racing to the top and doing everything men can do, twice as well.
Luckily, this is not difficult, as Charlotte Whitton said. In a defining race, some women park their femininity and nurturing side to clamber over everyone else, leaving others behind. Their sense of self is so bound up with their ambition that they realize, to gain what’s worth having—well-paid job, smart house, fancy vacations—it may be necessary to sacrifice everything else.
Sacrifices
These are the alpha women, at the feet of the bitch-goddess success who, said Aldous Huxley, demands strange sacrifices from those who worship her. They’d been taught they could do anything a man could do, to want everything a man could have—power, money, status. They had become that curious thing—the men we wanted to marry ourselves.
The alpha female has to be so clever, polished and capable from the crack of dawn to the small hours, ticking all her roles with superior efficiency—workaholic manager; supermom baking brownies; sexy wife with amorous intentions.
In her downtime, she goes to art films, reads The Economist, plays the market, does her Pilates, plans parties with military precision.
“Alpha female, like alpha male, depends on a sense of innate superiority she’s probably not aware of. While she would be effortlessly capable, she would need a reduced capacity for empathy, because otherwise, it would derail her. If she has children, they only come out between 7 and 8 p.m., washed, dressed and brought up by someone else,” said the author Sarah Dunant.
Not for her gamma man; if she has a husband, he would have to be carved from the same timber, or he would feel indubitably emasculated in no time. Testosterone kicks in, starts to resent her, loses his desire, walks out the door.
She would need a small army of people trailing after her; poor poppet, she would be so tired she might just, well, give up. Not like Jerry Hall, prepared to improvise: “Mom said that to be a great wife, you must be a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen, a whore in the bedroom. I told her I’ll hire the first 2 and I’ll take care of the third.”
Unachievable
A recent poll by New Woman magazine found that superwomen are seen as unattractive, unachievable; seven out of 10 women say they want to take it easier; one in four would give up work to raise a family. Seventy-seven percent said women were expected to fulfill too many roles; 67 percent said the man should be the main provider for his family.
“There’s a fundamental shift in young women’s attitudes. They’ve seen their mothers trying and failing to have it all; they’ve decided they don’t want it all. They don’t want to work crazy hours while their children are in nurseries and their relationships disintegrate. They’re increasingly putting their personal happiness before a big salary or a high-powered career,” said editor Margi Conklin.
We might not like her, but we don’t object to a woman being a great scientist or a captain of industry if, at the same time, she’s also a good wife, friend and mother. Except this alpha juggler is now an endangered species. She can have it all, but as Tina Brown said, just not all at the same time.
Recent studies show that just as high-achieving women are about to hit the fabled ceiling, they turn back. With babies, they rediscover their softer side, don’t want to return to work, turn down a promotion so they can have flexibility or a redeeming purpose in their lives.
Susan Pinker, author of The Sexual Paradox, said: “The majority of women have more balanced goals. Not that long ago, being at the top of the managerial chain was the highest rung on the ladder for them. Now, one generation after second-wave feminism, they’re moving beyond that view; they want rewarding family and work lives.”
So, women are no longer killing themselves in a race to the top because, suddenly afflicted with cold feet, the landscape littered with stupefying emptiness, feral kids, broken families, they no longer want to be there. Something has to give, compromises made. They’re prepared to enjoy the spoils of war, but not to fight so damn hard for them anymore.
Alpha woman is quite possibly the maverick result of our wishful thinking. Too good to be true, too tired to last and nursing Vatican-sized guilt, she has measured what she stood to gain by what she had to lose, and found it all wanting.
No matter how high a price she paid, she’s alone in that awful way that no man—alpha or not—ever has to be.
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