{"id":205,"date":"2009-04-26T09:49:14","date_gmt":"2009-04-26T14:49:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quackingalone.wordpress.com\/?p=205"},"modified":"2009-11-15T20:00:56","modified_gmt":"2009-11-16T01:00:56","slug":"she-force","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/26\/she-force\/","title":{"rendered":"She Force"},"content":{"rendered":"

It's easy to read a romance novel and get caught up in all the big, bad brawls, the political intrigue or the business wheeling and dealing. You can see the men standing around and talking to each other about how they rule their roost and manage their woman. Often, of course, it's the bachelors boasting and issuing proclamations that they wish to wed a nice, biddable female. Any happily married man in the story will snort, guffaw or issue a vague warning --\u00a0 you'll see.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Those bachelors may get what they think they want.\u00a0 If they do, they'll end up in a typical society marriage where\u00a0they share a house and not much else.\u00a0 If the bachelors end up happily married, they'll see that the women rule the house and set the pace.\u00a0 And if the women do it right, the men won't mind a bit.\u00a0 That's one type of female power.<\/p>\n

Male power works like men's minds, men's interests, and men's bodies - it's open,\u00a0obvious and hard to miss.\u00a0 Female power\u00a0works like women's minds, women's interests, and women's bodies - it's subtle, secretive and hidden.\u00a0Men use their power to run governments and businesses.\u00a0 It helps them build an empire and control it.\u00a0 Women use their power to run men.\u00a0 It helps them to rule the world softly, gently, and in the wonderful world of historicals, they\u00a0do it without ever having to soil their tender hands with working outside the home.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Where She Force is wielded\u00a0in the hands of a good author, it defines and controls and does it without ever being obvious.\u00a0\u00a0In Flame And The Flower\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0Brandon makes several vows of what he will and won't do, and by the end of the book, as a prior post addressed, he's broken them all but has arrived at the happier ever after he swore he never wanted.\u00a0 In Johanna Lindsey's Mallory novels,\u00a0Georgie gets James to break his promise never to wed by tying him in so many knots that he forces her brothers to force the wedding.\u00a0 Amy\u00a0gets Warren to trust women again, makes him compromise her, refuses to wed him if he's forced, and coerces him to propose properly.\u00a0 In Nicole Jordan's Bride<\/em>\u00a0series three male best friends\u00a0who don't want to marry meet three sisters who want to be independent.\u00a0 The men chase the women, try to compromise the women and ultimately, it's the women who come to the men and make the marriages on their own terms.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Female power works quietly and stealthily.\u00a0 It's not motivated by force or will but rather by love and tender persuasion.\u00a0\u00a0Which force is stronger?\u00a0 All the loud, brash clashes of testosterone in the world can't compete with the soft force that changes men's vows, aims and goals and ultimately shapes the world.\u00a0 She may do it over the breakfast table or in the bedroom, but look behind any happily married man and you'll find the woman shaping\u00a0the policy, making the rules and defining the world.<\/p>\n

Today, many -most (me too)- women are forced to be out in the everyday working world.\u00a0 A lot of us would like to be like those ladies in historicals, working our magic from behind the scene.\u00a0 Perhaps that's part of the charm of regencies and historicals - they paint a world we'd like to live in.\u00a0 And why would we like to live in an age where men held the power?\u00a0 Because we know they never did.<\/p>\n

Or rather, in historicals, men\u00a0held the power\u00a0women didn't want.\u00a0 It freed ladies to shape and manage the power they wanted, and to exercise it from the homes, the worlds, they built.\u00a0 Economy has forced most of us out into the greater universe.\u00a0 We\u00a0should go there recalling that behind the shouts and shoves of men lurks the quiet intensity of women whose\u00a0work makes the world go round as surely as\u00a0it\u00a0allows life itself to continue.<\/p>\n

And when the working world gets to be too much, and the shouting and shoving makes us want to rip our hair out by the roots, we can pull out a romance novel and take a refresher course.\u00a0 Then, with revived strength, recharged batteries and the recollection that the brash efforts of male employers or co-workers will never, can never, erode our She Force, we quietly keep ruling the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The next time you read your favorite romance novels, or treat yourself to a new one (My new book, Golden<\/a>, is an excellent example of female power<\/em>)\u00a0 look\u00a0behind the obvious and notice how the women exercise their power.\u00a0 The next time you're in the working world, notice how many of the men's decisions are really made by women laboring quietly at keyboards,\u00a0running the show from behind the scenes.<\/p>\n

She Force beats He Force every time and does it without ever letting the men\u00a0realize that women run the world.\u00a0 But then again, the smart ones do know.\u00a0 Remember the happily married man talking to the boasting bachelors I mentioned at the beginning of this post?\u00a0 He could\u00a0tell the bachelors the secret truths behind \"Yes, Dear.\"\u00a0 \u00a0But likely he won't.\u00a0 He'll let them figure it out on their own and we get to enjoy\u00a0each man's\u00a0lessons, one page at a time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It's easy to read a romance novel and get caught up in all the big, bad brawls, the political intrigue or the business wheeling and dealing. You can see the men standing around and talking to each other about how they rule their roost and manage their woman. Often, of course, it's the bachelors boasting ...continue reading \"She Force\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":746,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions\/746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}