Men and Women at Russian

Men and Women at Russian

November 28, 2009

Who’s better at Russian, Newcomb women, as they used to be called, or Tulane men, as they used to be called? Male or female minds at work on a "foreign language”? I won’t repeat the egregious and pompous mistakes of a man I respect, Larry Summers as Harvard pres, who said, among other things, that women may possibly be biologically unprepared for thinking like a scientist, that the research isn’t yet completely in on this question. And in the process he managed to offend not only women in general but the whole faculty he was supposed to lead.

There was always an old cliché that women were better than men at French. And then there was the truism — a false truisim — that men in French studies were gay. I studied French in high school and I knew lots of Frenchmen with mathematical minds, and French students with ordinary minds, who were not gay, both males and females. I met a lot of very cute girls in high school French classes, I must admit, but that’s not the reason I took those classes. I wanted to learn French literature and read Proust in French. I didn’t care about gender approaches. I don’t know how these defunct old legends survive.

Well, I honestly think both genders can learn Russian equally well, and the more creative minds take a more creative approach to the task. It’s true that statistically more of my women students through the years did all my homework conscientiously, came to class with more fervent regularity, and learned details of grammar more systematically. Most certainly, women students are better Slavic calligraphers than men, and, as I tell all my students, better than I am at longhand Cyrillic. There is a clarity and a finitude, a tidiness to their constructions of Russian that maybe fewer men like to cultivate. But you know, in the end, after forty years’ time, it evens out, and the men manage to learn as much and to progress as far as the women. Men more often actually went to Russia, treating the subject not like a calculus so much as a socioculural reality that you can feel and taste and live in. Some men told me that they did homework mainly “out of guilt,” and that they didn’t feel it was as useful as conversation in class or my grammatical discussions. In my classes this fall I think 101 has a number of really strong female students, and maybe a weaker number of men who have really tried as hard as they had planned. But actually it’s pretty close.

In 203 this year I have a group of sixteen more advanced, more mature students who have seen how difficult Russian is in three full and eventful semesters of study; just about every student is good, and I do not see much of a difference in approach between the genders. There is one telltale characteristic about this class: having gone this far down the difficult and narrow path to Russian shows mettle and intelligence. Not everyone who begins 101 can do this. And this mettle and intelligence has emphatically nothing to do with gender. Male and female are equal in this, I think.

You knew this would be my conclusions, didn’t you? Well, I didn’t. I almost came to a completely different ending, but then I lost my nerve, струсил. But, in point of fact, it has nothing to do with gender, it does indeed have to do with mettle.

gmc