Honorary male

Large granite sphinx bearing the likeness of the pharaoh Hatshepsut, depicted with the traditional false beard, a symbol of her pharaonic power—Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sworn virgin in Rapsha, Hoti, Ottoman Albania at the beginning of the 20th century

An honorary male or honorary man is a woman who is accorded the status of a man without disrupting the patriarchal status quo.

In "Queen Elizabeth I and the Persistence of Patriarchy", Allison Heisch describes honorary males as women who accept the values and practices of the male society in which they function, and internalize and follow them. She notes that honorary males tend to support rather than subvert patriarchal governance, and cites as an example Queen Elizabeth I, whose reign had little to no impact on the status of women in England. She also cites the example of Gertrude Stein sitting in her salon, smoking cigars and conversing with the men. Stein's participation temporarily modifies the after-dinner ritual in which men smoke cigars and talk amongst themselves, but does not permanently alter it.^[1] An exception is made for her because she is seen as different from other women; Ernest Hemingway once wrote in a letter, "Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers".^[2]

The honorary man, Carolyn Heilbrun writes in "Non-Autobiographies of 'Privileged' Women: England and America" (1988), must isolate herself from the common run of women to maintain her "privileged" status. In this way, she exchanges one form of confinement (the domestic sphere) for another (the male realm).^[3]

Comparing male domination of the political sphere in Zambia to that in the United States in 1998, Sara Hlupekile Longwe writes that honorary males are often also queen bees who have been "schooled to believe that women already have equality—because they themselves have reached the top"; she calls this the Thatcher syndrome. Such women, she claims, do not wish to empower other women, but rather to preserve their own exceptional status among the men.^[4]

Margaret Atwood described the results of a study of book reviews conducted in 1972:

We also found that, if a man's book was being praised, it tended to attract excess-of-malehood adjectives; the writer was an ultra-man. If dispraised, the poor guy would be allotted adjectives from the Quiller-Couch "female" slate. If female and unsatisfactory, a woman writer would be more female than female; if admired, she would "transcend her sex" (that's a quote) and would be raised to the status of non-woman, or honorary man. "She thinks like a man" was a compliment.^[5]

Ursula K. Le Guin once said in an interview, "I read the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women from cover to cover. It was a bible for me. It taught me that I didn't have to write like an honorary man anymore, that I could write like a woman and feel liberated in doing so."^[6]

References

1. Heisch, Allison (1980). "Queen Elizabeth I and the Persistence of Patriarchy". Feminist Review (4): 45–56.
2. Hemingway, Ernest (2003). Baker, Carlos, ed. Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961. Simon and Schuster. p. 62. ISBN 9780743246897.
3. Parati, Graziella (1996). Public History, Private Stories: Italian Women's Autobiography. U of Minnesota Press. p. 161. ISBN 9780816626069.
4. Longwe, Sara Hlupekile (1998). "Education for women's empowerment or schooling for women's subordination?". In Sweetman, Caroline. Gender, Education, and Training. Oxfam. p. 24. ISBN 9780855984007.
5. Atwood, Margaret (1994). "Not Just a Pretty Face". The Women's Review of Books 11 (4): 6–7.
6. Freedman, Carl Howard (2008). Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin. Univ. Press of Mississippi. p. 100. ISBN 9781604730944.