I was an undergraduate in college when I first encountered W. B. Yeats’ “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” I was so struck by the poem that I memorized it and turned it over in my mind for days and weeks afterward. In just 24 lines, Yeats tells a story of a man who catches a trout in a stream. As he prepares a fire to cook the fish, it suddenly transforms into a girl, who calls his name and then runs away, fading “through the brightening air.”

To this point, the poem feels whimsical and fun, but the third stanza turns the tables:

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

What moved me, I think, was the haunting echo of a scene I saw before me in a world-weary new millennium. Men and women seemed guarded, cynical, and suspicious of one another. In Shakespeare, say, or Jane Austen, the sexes delighted in one another in a way that moderns no longer seemed able to do. In my youthful classmates, I sensed a palpable yearning to break free from this jaded atmosphere, once more enjoying the interplay of man and woman in a natural and wholesome way. But beneath our adolescent awkwardness there lurked a deep fear that it was impossible; we might journey for lonely years like the Wandering Aengus, searching for a thing barely glimpsed and never truly enjoyed. The quarry seemed hopelessly elusive, like the glimmering girl of Yeats’ poem.

I thought of this poem again while reading Richard Gunderman’s reply to my essay “Woman, Defined.” Gunderman shares that evident longing, common among traditionalists, for a glimpse of the rich depths of masculinity and femininity. A medical doctor himself, he was dissatisfied with my argument that womanhood (like manhood) is fundamentally defined by biology, with a woman properly understood to be “the sort of person who can gestate and give birth to a child.” Gunderman grants that my definition works as a “lowest common denominator,” but he finds it clinical and uninspiring. 

On one level, I can readily sympathize. “Lowest common denominators” may be necessary in an age where highly educated people insist that they don’t know what a woman is, but the conversation about sexual difference surely should not end in what I have called the “functional-reproductive” definition of sex. It’s serviceable for bare purposes of classification but grossly inadequate to meet the social and spiritual needs of our time. We need the kind of insight that can help young men to be better suitors and husbands while guiding girls toward virtuous womanhood. Gunderman doesn’t want the sort of analysis of “woman” that can help him select the right medication for a patient. He wants the kind that puts us on the track of Yeats’ glimmering girl. To that end, he offers an extended meditation on Anna Karenina, and the lessons Leo Tolstoy teaches about feminine excellence.

This approach has its own promise and peril. Womanly virtue, for Tolstoy, is overwhelmingly maternal virtue. His characters are nuanced and interesting, and as a mother myself, living in the degraded age of “birthing people” and “chestfeeders,” I do appreciate Tolstoy’s rich exploration of the topic of maternity. But even as I applaud the effort, I also find that Gunderman (following Tolstoy) makes a significant error, which merits attention precisely because it is the kind of mistake that can derail a well-intentioned effort to put forward an elevated view of manhood and womanhood. Women can be mothers, and motherhood is meaningful, but maternity does not exhaust the range of feminine potentialities.

Maternity, Menstruation, and Meaning

Gunderman’s central mistake can be stated rather simply. Because I define “woman” as “a potential (human) mother,” he wants to explore feminine excellence first and foremost as maternal excellence. He even suggests that this is my idea. Gunderman writes:

By choosing to define woman in terms of gestating and giving birth, Lu invites us down a certain path of inquiry—namely, into the idea of motherhood as deeply definitive of woman. She does not, for example, say that a woman is a person with the kind of body that can menstruate, which might in many respects function just as well as a definition.

This is a misunderstanding. Though I will gladly confirm that having a baby is far more memorable than having a period, that is not as relevant to the argument. My definition is built on biology, and more specifically on reproductive function, which is what fundamentally distinguishes men from women. We might say: every healthy human being has a complete digestive, respiratory, endocrine, and circulatory system, but only half a reproductive system. Humans do not reproduce by parthenogenesis; we need the help of another human, and not just any human. It takes two opposite-sexed people to make a baby. 

Woman is thus defined as “potential mother” not because motherhood is the thing that defines her as a person, but rather because reproductive differences are what define both sexes, qua man or woman, and making new humans is the purpose of reproduction. Menstruation does not perpetuate the human species. 

My definition is reciprocal. It treats reproductive function as equally defining for both sexes. But if we rip it from its original context, and make it the core specifically of a woman’s life, that reciprocity may cease to hold. Is fatherhood as defining for men as motherhood is for women? Since Gunderman’s article is focused on the feminine, his position on this is unclear, but for Tolstoy, it is obvious that parenthood and family life are defining features of a woman’s life far more than a man’s. In keeping with that view Tolstoy also takes it that women must naturally excel at caretaking, while excellences more extrinsic to that vocation are properly the domain of men. A brief look at some of Tolstoy’s texts makes this clear.

Tolstoy and Motherhood

Tolstoy lost his mother when he was a toddler, and a mother-shaped hole seems to run all through his pages. No doubt, this partly explains his lovingly-crafted maternal characters, and high appreciation for motherhood generally. However, it also helps explain why feminine excellences, for Tolstoy, are strongly ordered towards motherhood and sometimes sublimated or subsumed as the woman steps into her true feminine vocation. A good woman, for Tolstoy, simply is a good mother.

The novella Family Happiness makes this especially clear. The protagonist is a young girl in rural Russia who marries an older man. As she steps into full adult maturity, she becomes enamored of society life, which her husband largely abhors. The couple quarrels and she wonders whether their romantic love will ever be rekindled. In the final scene, she does indeed rediscover her bliss, but not through a rekindling of passion, nor through a marital compromise that enables her to enjoy the active social life that she desires. Rather, she comes to recognize that the proper path to feminine happiness is through maternity. The passion she had directed first towards her husband, and then towards society life, is properly directed towards domestic life, and children in particular. Real happiness is family happiness, most fully expressed in maternal love.

Similar themes come through very clearly in the first epilogue of War and Peace. Here, we see Pierre and Natasha (the primary protagonists) happily married, sharing a tranquil and loving domestic life. Pierre, partly at Natasha’s insistence, continues his intellectual and political work; though she has no personal interest, and no real ability to understand his projects, she appreciates in her intuitive feminine wisdom that a man does need such things. She does not, however. Her own pre-maternal interests have been abandoned entirely. An old family friend, stopping through on a visit, notices with sadness, that the charming, musical, and engaging girl he remembers has become a homely housewife, barely able to make conversation. But the true nature of the transformation becomes clear when Pierre returns home from work: “the old fire” reignites in Natasha’s eyes as she runs to greet her husband. Once again, we can see that the good woman’s excellences are directed towards, and sometimes subsumed by, her true vocation to maternity.

Gunderman himself shows how these ideas come to fruition in Anna Karenina. The characters of Anna and Kitty show the moral core of womanhood (as Tolstoy understands it) through their opposite narrative arcs, as Kitty grows into the role and Anna betrays it. “All happy families are alike,” Tolstoy famously notes in the opening sentence of this novel, “but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” One wonders whether this is also true of Tolstoyan women, since they shed many of their more distinctive talents and features as they converge on one unifying goal.

Good mothers, for Tolstoy, are highly intuitive but weak on the intellectual front. This point recurs through all the above-mentioned stories. For anyone who thinks about virtue in a broadly Aristotelian way, it is difficult not to see this as an insult to women. Even if women really had the quasi-mystical intuitive goodness that Tolstoy ascribes to us, a markedly inferior capacity to reason would still distinguish us as the inferior sex. Even that, though, may be less problematic than the fact that Tolstoy seems to view non-maternal excellences as undesirable in women. Men can be involved husbands and fathers while still pursuing other projects and goods, but for women, maternity encompasses all. Is that true, or fair? Should not all rational beings be permitted to pursue the full range of human excellences, as time and circumstance allow? 

Vive la difference?

Don’t cancel Tolstoy. He made mistakes, as people do, but his novels still contain fascinating insights into many aspects of both manhood and womanhood. As the only woman, living in a house with six males, I have many times reflected on Tolstoy’s novels specifically as a window into the things that men most need from women. If we’re only willing to learn from people whose views seem entirely unobjectionable to us, our understanding of the human condition will be impoverished indeed. 

That brings me back, however, to “Woman, Defined.” In that article, I tried to articulate the necessary and sufficient conditions for defining manhood and womanhood. The point of that philosophical exercise was not to reduce the sexual difference to “mere plumbing,” but rather to create a fruitful framework for continuing conversation. What do we share as human beings, and where does sexual difference divide us? A precise definition makes it easier to discuss the cultural, psychological, or moral realities of manhood and womanhood, without reducing either to less than we are. For all their admirable features, Tolstoy’s novels do not achieve that. He allowed his own needs as a man to define womanhood in its entirety, and in so doing, he unjustly excluded women from realms of human experience that should be open to all rational beings. 

Can a mere definition prevent such mistakes? I cannot promise miracles. Still, it does sometimes happen that clarity allows us to clear away some of the baggage of mutual resentment, which has cluttered our thinking about sexual difference for many years now. Perhaps, by letting go of those grievances, men and women can find their way back to one another, plucking their apples of silver and gold til time and times are done.