Should Women Rule the World?

This email was forwarded to me by a friend, from Vicki Noble, the creator of the Mother Peace Tarot Deck and author of several books on the Goddess. It is definitely food for thought. I have often felt that the feminine has a different response to emergancy situations than the masculine. This study shows that females "tend and befriend" in crisis rather than the male response of "fight or flight." What would the world be like if "tend and befriend" was the usual response to global crisis?

Blessings,
Crystal Dawn

Dear Motherpeace Friend:

I received an announcement this morning from the Matriarchal Studies Yahoo list calling attention to a Good Morning America segment asking the question, "Should Women Rule the World?"

This long-overdue and very welcome question is rightly directed toward the current crisis on Wall Street, focusing on evidence that came out in the last decade from Dr. Shelley Taylor's experiments proving that women do not have a testosterone-elicited "fight or flight" response. Women's response to stress instead produces the hormone oxytocin (generated in a woman's labor process and also in breast feeding), and instead of taking huge and dangerous risks, women tend to the children and collaborate with each other, finding the "big picture" instead of short term unstable solutions.

I've been saying for many years that the research is fabulous, but the conclusions are pale by comparison. The early media accounts of the "tend and befriend" experiments concluded that "women need female friends," when the research clearly suggested that women should govern the world! Now, at long last--and bless their journalistic hearts--these women on ABC's Good Morning America have set the story straight.

Should women rule the world? Of course--and the sooner the better, obviously!

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=6863333

This is REAL research on women--a break from the usual way that science universalizes the male experience and generalizes it to supposedly include women. Although the news women did not mention Dr. Taylor's name, I strongly recommend that you read her incredible book, The Tending Instinct, where she lays out the most amazing research results. This work is truly radical. I'm so pleased to see it finally getting the attention it deserves with conclusions that make sense instead of simply furthering a sentimental image of women as nurturers.

Lots of love, Vicki