A school for girls.

• Author: Howell, Llewellyn D.
• Position: Worldview

A SCHOOL FOR GIRLS by Louisa May Alcott. Don't we wish. Don't we wish it was an Alcoa story. It is not. This actually is a tale about war--the one in Afghanistan, and the women there. It is, maybe, the fundamental story in human existence, embedded in Judeo-Christian culture with Adam and Eve, but repeated in every other society. It clearly is biology--men are physically stronger; women can nurture life and feed the young.

History is the story of how we gradually are escaping from biology. Women are moving slowly from the state of subservience and virtual slavery to equivalence with men, in their fights and contributions to economy, governance, science, and mathematics, and society generally. If human society is going to thrive, this shift has to occur--on a global, national, and local scale. We cannot deny haft or more of our intellectual and conceptual resources.

At the global level, there is a "Clash of Civilizations" occurring. Samuel P. Huntington's foreign affairs article from 1993 and his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, set out an argument that has been a template for discussion in politics, sociology, anthropology, and academic and media chatter for the last several years.

Most of Huntington's writings, as it turns out. are about the relationship between men and women. Huntington established himself in the scholarly community with 1957's The Soldier and the State. This concerns military men and their relationship with civil society. A half-century later, we still are arguing about women in fighting forces, submarines, and as a part of nation-building in American society. Huntington then set the academic world afire with The Clash of Civilizations, arguing that "the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs but the principle conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The Clash of Civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future. Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase in the evolution of conflict in the modern world."

One of the most critical characteristics of culture, it turns out, is the role of women and their relationship with men. His arguments about the Clash of Civilizations overshadow his subsequent books. Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress (2000) and Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (2004) also were critical supplements to the discussion about rivalries among cultures.

In Who Are We?, Huntington argues persuasively that American success is in debt to its "Anglo-Protestant" underpinnings. By Anglo, he means English civil law. By Protestant, he means a work ethic that derived from the individualistic culture that originated in the break the Taliban out of government, but to remove its members from society. Now, has to face the challenge of stopping the from turning the dock back on women." away Protestant churches of Europe. Huntington believed that a dilution of this culture would result in a lesser capability of the country and Western society, generally, to compete with those of the Islamic world, in particular, but also China and others. It also contains the seeds of gender equity that generally have come to flower over the past several centuries.

We have not been particularly good about gender equity in the West and the U.S. but. as English statesman Winston Churchill described democracy, it is a terrible system, but better than all the others. In the U.S., women still are making 70 cents for the dollar that men make, but there is constant, if irregular, progress in making a common standard.

Time magazine pointed out in its Aug. 8, 2011, issue that men and...