On 9 August 1956, more than 20,000 South African women marched to the Union Buildings to protest against the Apartheid pass laws. Seventy years later, we remember that courage during Women’s Month.
These women were not waiting for men to rescue them.
They organised. They led. They found their voice. And they acted.
Perhaps there is something important in that for us men.
Women’s Month quite rightly celebrates women: their contribution, courage, resilience, leadership and place in our society. But perhaps it also offers us men an opportunity to look at ourselves.
Not because Women’s Month is about us, but because the flourishing of women is impacted by who we are.
Who we are as husbands and partners; fathers and sons; brothers and friends; leaders and colleagues; coaches and teachers; members of churches, sports clubs, friendship groups and communities.
If we want our homes, workplaces and communities to flourish, what kind of men do these environments call us to be?
Perhaps We Have Been Offered a False Choice
Much has been said about toxic masculinity, and there are certainly expressions of masculinity that wound rather than restore: domination, violence, control, intimidation and the use of power primarily for oneself.
And on the opposite end of the scale, there is passive masculinity. Stand back. Say nothing. Don’t offend. Don’t exert strength. Don’t take responsibility. Don’t get involved.
Neither seems particularly redemptive.
Redemptive masculinity offers another possibility. It asks what happens when a man takes responsibility for the strength, influence and agency he has and places these in the service of something beyond himself.
Strength without domination.
Courage without intimidation.
Protection without possession.
Leadership without silencing.
Care without embarrassment.
Responsibility without control.
It doesn’t ask men to become less masculine so that women can flourish.
Nor does it ask women to become more like men.
It asks something more interesting:
How might men and women bring the fullness of who they are into relationship with one another, without either having to diminish the other?
What Does Home Call From Us?
For many of us, this begins with the women closest to us.
What is it actually like to be our wife, partner, daughter, sister or mother in relationship with us?
Not what do we intend it to be like. What is it actually like?
Does our presence make it easier for the women around us to speak honestly? Can they disagree with us?
Do the women closest to us experience our strength as something that creates security — or something they occasionally have to manage?
Perhaps one expression of redemptive masculinity is simply being fully present. Not merely providing for a family, but participating in it.
And even our instinct to protect deserves reflection. Protection can be beautiful. But protection becomes something else when it takes away another person’s agency.
The question is therefore not simply:
“Am I protecting the women I love?”
Perhaps it is:
“Does the way I love and protect them support them in becoming more fully themselves?”
And Then We Walk Into Work
We don’t leave our masculinity at home when we walk into a boardroom, workshop, office or team meeting. We take it with us.
And this is where the conversation can become uncomfortable.
Women currently hold only 29.3% of South Africa’s top-management positions, despite representing 45.7% of the economically active population. In the private sector, the proportion at top-management level is even lower, at 27.6%. (Commission for Employment Equity)
Statistics cannot tell us the whole story. But they can invite questions.
Who do we instinctively picture in our mind’s eye when somebody says “CEO”?
Who gets heard most quickly in the meeting?
Whose idea receives attention first or most often?
Who gets the stretch assignment?
Who gets sponsored for the next opportunity?
Whose confidence do we admire — and whose do we experience as abrasive?
Research has described a leadership “double bind” in which women can be judged against traditionally masculine expectations of leadership, while simultaneously being judged negatively when their behaviour does not fit expectations of how women are supposed to behave. (Catalyst)
Redemptive masculinity asks us to notice this. Not so that we favour a woman because she is a woman. But so that we can become curious about whether we are limiting what we see in somebody because she is one.
There is an equally important counterpart.
Men can also become trapped by gender stereotypes: expected always to be decisive rather than uncertain, strong rather than vulnerable, competitive rather than nurturing, rational rather than emotional.
Perhaps breaking down unhelpful gender stereotypes is therefore not something men reluctantly do for women.
Perhaps it creates greater freedom for both.
A woman can be assertive without being considered unfeminine.
A man can be empathetic without being considered weak.
A woman can drive performance.
A man can nurture relationships.
And either may bring courage, creativity, commercial instinct, emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, decisiveness, compassion or wisdom into the room.
Difference Does Not Have to Become Hierarchy
None of this requires us to pretend that men and women are the same.
They are not. Nor are men and women simply interchangeable.
At home, perhaps we see this most clearly in motherhood and fatherhood. Circumstances may require a father to carry responsibilities usually associated with motherhood, or a mother those associated with fatherhood. But doing our best to fulfil what is absent does not make the two roles interchangeable. There is something meaningful in both.
But doing our best to fulfil what is absent does not make the two roles identical.
There is something meaningful in both motherhood and fatherhood.
Acknowledging difference, however, is not the same as turning difference into hierarchy.
And it is not the same as stereotyping.
Problems arise when we take something we believe to be broadly true about men or women and use it to determine the capability, character or contribution of the individual standing in front of us.
A woman does not become less feminine because she is commercially ambitious, decisive or strategically gifted.
A man does not become less masculine because he is emotionally perceptive, compassionate or relationally skilled.
Redemptive masculinity does not erase difference. It honours difference without using it to establish superiority or prescribe the limits of another person.
That matters enormously in teams.
Successful teams do not benefit from men and women competing to prove whose contribution matters more. They benefit when people bring their strengths into relationship with one another in service of something larger than themselves.
We don’t have to become the same to become equal contributors.
Perhaps our invitation is to become curious enough to discover the person before us rather than assuming we already understand them because of their gender.
Redemptive masculinity is not threatened by a capable woman.
It has no requirement to be the cleverest voice in the room.
It can champion another person’s contribution without experiencing their success as its own loss.
That is not weaker masculinity.
I would suggest it is more secure masculinity.
What Kind of Men Are We When Women Aren’t There?
And then there is community.
Our friendship circles. Churches. Clubs. Teams. WhatsApp groups. Braais. Schools. Organisations.
Here another question emerges:
Who are we as men when women aren’t in the room?
What gets laughed at?
What gets challenged?
What gets ignored?
What behaviour do we quietly excuse because “that’s just how he is”?
South Africa’s first national gender-based violence prevalence study found that 35.5% of women reported having experienced physical and/or sexual violence during their lifetime. (South African National GBV Prevalence Study)
That reality cannot be addressed only by asking violent men to stop being violent. It also invites the rest of us to consider the cultures we participate in creating. Redemptive masculinity therefore isn’t demonstrated only by how respectfully I treat the women I know. It is also demonstrated in the behaviour I help make acceptable — or unacceptable — amongst other men.
Sometimes courage looks like stepping forward.
Sometimes it is speaking up.
Sometimes it is refusing to laugh.
Sometimes it is asking another man, privately, whether he is okay.
Sometimes it is challenging behaviour without rejecting the human being behind it.
And sometimes it is simply demonstrating through our own lives that there is another way of being a man.
Not Men Against Women
This, for me, is essential.
The conversation about women flourishing cannot become another battleground between men and women.
If women flourish while men disintegrate, we have not created flourishing communities.
If men reclaim their identity by pushing women backwards, we haven’t restored masculinity either.
Richard Reeves makes a similar argument in Of Boys and Men: taking the challenges facing boys and men seriously does not require abandoning the pursuit of equality between men and women.
It is not one or the other.
We can create environments in which men and women flourish alongside one another.
Perhaps that is part of what makes masculinity redemptive. It doesn’t have to defeat somebody in order to know its worth. It doesn’t require women to become smaller. And it doesn’t ask men to disappear.
Instead, it invites us to bring whatever strength, courage, influence, compassion and capacity we have into the environments entrusted to us — and to use them in ways that restore rather than diminish the people around us.
Perhaps Women’s Month Can Be a Mirror
Women’s Month celebrates extraordinary women.
Perhaps it can also offer ordinary men like me a mirror.
A chance to consider the environments in which we have influence.
My home.
My workplace.
My community.
What happens to women in those spaces because I am there?
Are they heard?
Are they respected?
Are they able to contribute fully?
Do they experience greater freedom to become who they are?
And what happens to the men around me?
Am I helping create a masculinity in which strength and kindness can coexist?
Where courage and vulnerability are not enemies?
Where a man’s worth is not established through his ability to dominate somebody else?
Seventy years after thousands of courageous South African women marched together, perhaps their legacy still asks something of us.
Not to rescue women.
Not to retreat from them.
But to stand alongside them.
And to ask:
If we want our homes, workplaces and communities to flourish, what kind of men do these environments call us to be?
Further Reading
Kopano Ratele, Why Men Hurt Women and Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity — a particularly relevant South African exploration of love, violence and masculinity.
bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love.
Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men.