Ardent Amazons also skew to the right—with 76 percent calling themselves conservative or moderate, and only 1 in 4 identifying as Democrats. They are more rural, and less urban, than a typical national sample.

  Ardent Amazons adore their work. Forty-four percent love it most of the time, and another 52 percent like it most of the time. And nearly all would recommend their jobs to girls or young women considering going into this work—more than half, with vigor.

  Would you recommend your job to girls or young women considering your line

  of work?

  %

  Yes, enthusiastically 56

  Yes, with some hesitation 30

  No, probably not 8

  No, definitely not 2

  Don’t know 4

  Their enthusiasm for their work is high despite the fact that it hasn’t been easy. Six in 10 say they’ve been discriminated against at work because they are women, and almost 4 in 10 say that in their line of work, women’s perspectives get ignored. But the groundbreaking quality of it seems to be part of the thrill. Sixty-four percent said that the fact that the work was traditionally male made them more interested in going into it, compared to only 10 percent who said that that fact had made them less interested. And the male tradition of it is a point of pride in social conversation:

  When you tell people what line of work you are in, are you:

  %

  Proud, because it’s a traditionally male line of work 76

  Hesitant, because it’s a traditionally male line of work 4

  Don’t know 20

  Finally, Ardent Amazons have found the ticket up. While fewer than 1 in 4 have finished college, they are making good money—42 percent have annual household incomes over $75,000, including 14 percent who make over $100,000. Money and benefits nearly topped the list of what the women like best about their jobs, second only to the mental challenges.

  In terms of marital status, 76 percent of Ardent Amazons are now married, and another 18 percent have been. And while most respondents said they knew someone who was gay or lesbian, only 13 percent—the smallest group of respondents—said such people were their co-workers.

  But it appears that working in male-dominated professions either carries the risk of sexual assault or was motivated by such assault. Nearly 4 in 10 respondents said they had been the victim of a sexual assault at some point in their lives, which is quite high relative to the reported experience of women overall. Perhaps the experience of being assaulted moved some of these women toward professions where physical strength is prized, and vulnerability is not.

  Physical women on the rise have real implications for society. First, these women love their work, and they are gaining acceptance. While some women’s groups have complained that the number of women in traditionally male roles has not risen nearly fast enough, men who would hoard these jobs to themselves frankly shouldn’t expect to prevail. They have chosen themselves some of the toughest, most dedicated opponents on earth.

  Second, to some degree, women will change these professions. At entry, the positioning is that they can and will perform exactly like men—but once they reach a critical mass (as has happened in law and journalism, and arguably medicine), their perspective will shift the enterprises themselves. In 2002, the National Center for Women and Policing found, based on a study of seven major U.S. police agencies, that women police officers are substantially less likely than their male counterparts to use, or to be accused of using, excessive force. As a result, the average male police officer costs his jurisdiction somewhere between two and a half and five and a half times more than the average female officer in excessive force liability lawsuit payouts. Do female police officers focus more on diffusing tension than battling it down? And while that wouldn’t be a winning strategy in every case, wouldn’t it, in the grand scheme, be a useful balance to excessive force?

  Half of all violent crime calls to police concern domestic violence. Does a woman police officer have a better sense of how to react?

  Of course, I wouldn’t generalize women’s strengths any more than I would their weaknesses. Sure, it was under America’s first female attorney general, Janet Reno, that the nation’s police forces became focused on “community policing” and preventing crime before it started. On the other hand, the first female national security adviser (and later secretary of state), Condoleezza Rice, helped pave our path to war in Iraq. And first female prime minister Margaret Thatcher deployed the British military more aggressively than any predecessor had in years. There haven’t been enough women in power to make sweeping generalizations about whether or how they might lead differently from men, but based on what we’ve seen in law and journalism, I would expect changes in the Amazon professions, too.

  The other fascinating thing about Ardent Amazons is that as more and more women take up careers that require physical force, women’s average strength is likely to increase. Since the late 1960s, men have improved their record marathon times by three minutes—but women have improved theirs by thirty-one minutes. Deprived for so long, in significant numbers, of access to intense physical training, women (and men) have taken it as God-given fact that women are smaller, weaker, and slower than men. But who knows? More women are taking physical training and are becoming stronger. For some time, men have been able to sort themselves out on the basis of physical strength. Women are only now getting that opportunity, and millions of women who would never have run a real race or tested their physical abilities are starting to get that chance. This is going to continue to narrow the physical differences between the sexes.

  Just as many women have discovered the power of words, other women are discovering their own physical power and their ability to compete toe-to-toe with men in the most physically demanding professions. The women who choose these new paths love them and are becoming their own distinctive group—strong, proud, intense, and leading the way for others to follow. Twenty-five years ago, we had a national debate on the Equal Rights Amendment, and one of the big arguments against it was that women might have to serve in the armed forces or be police officers. Today’s Ardent Amazons are proving what a silly debate that was.

  PART III

  Race and Religion

  Stained Glass Ceiling Breakers

  A final trend about women at work. Women may be poised to dominate America’s word-based professions, like journalism, public relations, and law, but women’s preeminence gets more complicated when it comes to professions regarding The Word.

  In the last two decades, the number of female clergy in America has more than tripled. Women students in divinity school just passed 51 percent. In the last ten years, the number of women majoring in religion or theology more than doubled, while among men it grew by barely half. We are seeing the dramatic growth of a new clergy, with a new set of personal priorities driving them to join the ministry. And while they are being turned out in the divinity schools, they are still searching for their permanent place in religious life in America.

  Women who wear the cloth seem motivated by a deep sense that the world needs repair. Women clergy, often more so than their male colleagues, are very active in political and civic issues. According to surveys of women clergy, their top issue, by far, is social welfare, including the widening gap between rich and poor. Next is tolerance and rights, including racism; followed by public order and civility; and then gay rights. Toward the bottom of their list is defense and foreign policy; and in particular contrast to many male clergy in America, women pastors’ last priorities are “family values” or the “spiritual and moral concern that the nation is turning away from God.”

  Perhaps not surprisingly, given that list, women clergy are also liberal, sometimes overwhelmingly so, and generally support Democratic candidates for office. A generation ago, many of these women would have been teachers, social workers, and civic volunteers, but now they are combining their commitment to social justice with their personal faith, and ascending instead to pulpits and ministries.

  The rise of women clergy promises some changes in American religion. Both male and female clergy tell survey-takers that clergywomen are more caring about the individual lives of congregants, more nurturing, and more likely to draw on personal experiences when preaching, teaching, and counseling. Women are also reported to be far less interested in congregational politics, power over others, and job prestige. And they are said to be more welcoming to newcomers who had been alienated from the fold.

  But for all these contributions, and the rise in their numbers, women clergy face some pretty serious challenges. It starts with personal stress, reportedly far greater than what male clergy feel. In a study conducted of 190 United Methodist clergywomen around the country, 60 percent said their sleep was restless, 56 percent said they felt tearful, and more than one-third (35 percent) said they “could not shake off the blues even with help from family or friends.” The biggest challenge by far, the clergywomen reported, was balancing work and family. Round-the-clock pastoral duty and primary child care duty at home can be very taxing. And whereas most male clergymen have wives who perform leadership roles in the congregation, women clergy find themselves doing both the wifely duties and the clergy’s. Finally, for single clergywomen, dating is a very big challenge. Unmarried clergywomen report that most men are intimidated by them, and those who aren’t—like fellow clergymen—are too busy to be ideal partners. (Imagine trying to sell your fraternity brother on a blind date with a minister.)

  More generally, even those religions that admit women clergy seem to resist their playing too large a role. There is a widely observed phenomenon among women clergy—known as the Stained Glass Ceiling—that while they finish their training in numbers equal to or greater than men, they rise in congregational work far more slowly. To this day, a very large congregation—in any religion—led solely by a woman is almost unknown.

  Some say it’s just a matter of time until women clergy break through the Stained Glass Ceiling. They have made solid progress in other professions—especially word-oriented ones—and this field might just be taking longer, in part because the First Amendment bars recourse to anti-discrimination laws. (Which is why, with impunity, male pastors can ban women from their profession by just saying: “When Adam followed the leadership of his wife and ate the forbidden fruit, look where it led.”)

  But a deeper look at the struggles of women clergy suggests that what’s ahead may not be Good News.

  In the past fifty years, nearly every major religious group in America that has permitted women clergy has seen a profound drop in membership. And every major religious group that has excluded women clergy has seen a dramatic rise. As the chart below shows, most mainline Prostentant groups that permit women clergy have dropped in membership. Most other denomations that exclude them have grown.

  Source: Demographica, Christian Church Membership in the United States: 1960–2002

  Catholics in America, whose numbers are too large to even fit on this chart, exclude women clergy and in the past fifty years have grown from 42 million to 67 million. American Muslims, as yet too few to fit on the chart, also exclude women clergy, and grew from 527,000 in 1990 to 1.1 million in 2001, according to the American Religions Identification Survey. (Their numbers may be much larger by now.) Immigration is, of course, also at play, but the pattern holds.

  Some will find it tempting to say that women’s presence in certain denominations caused the flocks to stray. Who needs St. Paul’s “I permit no woman to teach or have authority over men”—if you can use empirical trends alone to prove that if you want to grow your religion, bar women clergy.

  But more likely, the link is that the admission of women clergy is part of a larger liberalizing trend that is itself becoming unpopular among some religious people. Women clergy, rising as they did with the feminist movement, represent the integration of progressive civil society into religion. But more and more, progressivism is not what many people are looking for on a Sunday morning. Fully 77 percent of people who regularly attend church say they go for the way it involves their hearts; only 23 percent say they go for the way it involves their heads. For political advocacy, fellowship, and shared ethics, people are figuring they can go to the Sierra Club. If they’re going to church, they want inspiration, fear, and conviction. And so women ministers are working on finding a style that gives religion more heart, and that is something quite new for these old congregants.

  Of course, congregational membership is not to be confused with truth. All of the world’s great religions started small. So while a denomination’s fall in membership may say a lot about what the people want, many would argue it doesn’t say anything about what God wants, or about what congregants will want over time. The cold statistics now show that this new class of women clergy is having a tough time, as the stricter religions are growing and the liberalized religions are shrinking. But this pendulum has swung many times before, and the role of religion today in so many of the world’s conflicts may cause a reaction against religious polarization, and then Stained Glass Ceiling Breakers may be the pioneers of a new movement poised to become the mainstream of modern religion. Consensus and compassion may be on the outs right now, but they are bound to make a comeback. Just as America may be poised for the first woman in the White House, we are also ready for the first female Billy Graham—the first woman minister to catch the imagination of the country through the power of TV and perhaps even the Internet.

  Pro-Semites

  In one of the funniest scenes in Woody Allen’s 1977 hit movie Annie Hall, Alvy Singer goes to his non-Jewish girlfriend’s house in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, to meet her parents. Although Annie and her family are hospitable enough, never mentioning their religious differences, Allen shows us how Alvy imagines Annie’s grandmother sees him: an old-world, bearded Chasid, complete with a yarmulke and pais (the side curls worn by traditional Jewish men). Jewish audiences roared at Allen’s paranoia. But it wasn’t so long ago that Alvy’s perception—that non-Jews automatically regarded Jews as foreign and undesirable—was the truth.

  Today, that movie scene might be played out differently. Today, Alvy might actually sport the yarmulke and pais, and Annie’s parents might sit there secretly hoping that Alvy’s the boy Annie will marry.

  Because today in America, Jew-loving is a bit of a craze. Jews are in demand everywhere. Whatever in the past seemed to trigger envy or rejection of Jews now seems to be triggering admiration and attraction. It used to be the Jews who often sought out relationships outside their faith, hiding their religion in the process. But now there is growing evidence that the opposite trend is happening: Non-Jews are seeking out Jews.

  Jewish women, long stereotyped as making reservations for dinner, are now highly sought-after, looked up to by a new generation. And if perhaps it is true that a few of them don’t cook, it may be because Jewish women are at the forefront of the professional revolution of the last several decades, racking up unparalleled rates of college graduation, graduate degrees, and high-powered jobs. (Sixty-eight percent of Jewish women aged 25–44 have a college degree, by far the highest percentage of any religious group in America.)

  In today’s service-oriented, education-based economy, lifestyles that were once seen as out of the mainstream are now highly popular. And so Jewish spouses (of both sexes) are right in the sights of people looking for successful, well-educated mates.

  It wasn’t always this way. America has had its share of anti-Semitism; in 1939, a Roper poll found that only 39 percent of Americans felt that Jews should be treated like other people. Fifty-three percent believed that “Jews are different and should be restricted.” Ten percent actually believed that Jews should be deported. In the 1940s, several national surveys found that Jews were considered a greater threat to the welfare of the United States than any other national, religious, or racial group.

  Compare that to a Gallup poll taken in August 2006. When Americans were asked how they feel about people of different religious or spiritual groups in the United States, Jews rated the highest of any group in America, with a net positive of 54 percent. No one—not Methodists, not Baptists, not Catholics, not evangelical Christians, fundamentalist Christians, Mormons, Muslims, Atheists, or Scientologists—scored higher in the view of Americans nationwide.

  Such “Pro-Semitism” has turned, for some, into a very personal preference. According to J-Date, the most popular online Jewish dating service in the world, as of early 2007, nearly 11 percent of its members were not Jewish. That means that something like 67,000 non-Jews worldwide, and nearly 40,000 non-Jewish Americans, are paying monthly fees for the privilege of proactively seeking out dateable, marriageable Jews. In one of our own polls in September 2006, nearly 4 in 10 non-Jews said they would be “very” or “somewhat” interested in dating or marrying a person who is Jewish.

  Those most interested were liberal to moderate, slightly downscale, Catholic men. (A little less Annie Hall, a little more Joey Tribiani from Friends.) It is this affinity with Catholics that is driving Pro-Semitism, as both groups typically emphasize big family values and a strong orientation around food—a merger of matzoh balls and meatballs, as it were. Both groups have felt left out or discriminated against at times, and both have lately made significant gains socially. At one point, a Catholic president seemed unthinkable. But with polls like Gallup’s—could a Jewish president be in the making?

  As of 2006, there were eleven Jewish senators—including one from Oregon, a state that is less than 1 percent Jewish.

  Another important part of Pro-Semitism in America is the rise in strong support for Israel from unexpected quarters. Today in America, there are more Christian evangelicals than Jews who support Israel. Senator Bob Bennett, whose Jewish constituency in Utah is 0.2 percent, was recently a lead speaker at a pro-Israel rally. President George W. Bush—whose family was once regarded with great suspicion by the Jewish community—has high popularity ratings in only one country in the world: Israel.