Even that is probably but one element in a much more complex puzzle. Following Freud, many psychologists, specifically including some of the most prominent female ones, have argued that the decisive moment in any boy’s life arrives when he has to switch from dependence on his mother, under whose care all children spend their infancy, to identifying with his father.30 War being the male activity par excellence, playing at it could be interpreted as one way to act out the transition and fix it in the psyche, so to speak. All over the world, many rites of initiation seem to be designed specifically with this objective in mind. The rites require that boys engage in all kinds of wargames until they are considered ready to be enrolled as mature men and/or permitted to marry. Conversely, had any number of girls been allowed to play along with the boys, then of course the games would have been unable to serve that function.
Last but not least, earlier in this study we saw that play appears to be limited to vertebrates, and more specifically mammals. Our relatives the primates are particularly likely to engage in play-fighting. Whether or not females participate in play-fighting appears to depend primarily on how sexually dimorphic the sexes are: in other words on the relative size of males and females. In primate species where males and females have approximately equal size, weight, and strength, as is the case with gibbons, animals of both sexes participate equally. However, theirs is an exceptional case because most primates are strongly dimorphic. Among most of them young females are less involved with play-fighting, and stop engaging in it at an earlier age than young males. Chimpanzees have been specifically mentioned in this context.31 This does not necessarily mean that females have less “fun”; rather, they seem to get it in a different manner, spending more time grooming as well as handling infants.32 Close observation seems to show that vervet monkey mothers do not interfere in the play of their female offspring more often than they do in that of their male siblings. Females, in other words, are permitted to play-fight as much as males are, but choose not to.33 The fact that female primates do not engage in play-fighting as much and for as long as males do, points to some real biological differences between the sexes. At least one expert has argued that nowhere are such differences as evident as precisely in play.34
Humans, too, are dimorphic, though not nearly as much as some closely related species such as gorillas and orangutans. Right from their first appearance on this planet human males have always been considerably larger and stronger than females.35 Indeed some biologists believe that natural selection has made them stronger precisely “in order” that they may fight.36 Thanks in part to the decision to open the military to women, we now have a large number of studies which document the differences rather precisely. They show that the average US female army recruit is 4.7 inches shorter, 31 pounds lighter, has 37 fewer pounds of muscle, and 5.7 more pounds of fat than the average male recruit.37 All this leads to her having only 55 percent of the upper-body strength and 72 percent of the lower-body strength of the average male. Since fat mass is inversely related to aerobic capacity and heat tolerance, women are also at a disadvantage when performing the kind of aerobic activities of which warfare is full. Even when the experiments were controlled for height, women only turned out to have 80 percent of the strength of men. Overall, only the upper 20 percent of women can do as well physically as the lower 20 percent of men.
Intensive training, far from diminishing the physical differences between the sexes, tends to increase them still further. This has been linked to some differences in the chemistry of their muscles.38 After eight weeks of such training male plebes at West Point demonstrated 32 percent more power in the lower body and performed 48 percent more work at the leg press than female ones. At the bench press, the men demonstrated 270 percent more power and performed 473 percent more work than the women. One biologist claims that, if the hundred strongest individuals were to be selected out of a random group consisting of one hundred men and one hundred women, then ninety-three would be male and only seven female.39 Another has calculated that only the upper 5 percent of women are as strong as the median male.40
Morphologically, too, women are less well adapted to war. Thinner skulls, lighter bone ridges, and weaker jawbones make them more vulnerable to blows.41 Many women develop large pendulous breasts that impede movement and require special protection. Shorter arms makes it harder for women to draw weapons from their scabbards, stab with them, and throw them; possibly a different brain structure renders them less adept at guiding or intercepting projectiles.42 Women’s legs are shorter and are set at a different angle, making them less suitable both for sprinting and for running long distances; tests among Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadets showed 78 percent of men, but only 6 percent of women, could run two miles in under fourteen minutes.43 Once a woman has given birth the difference in pelvic structure becomes even more noticeable. All these qualities have always been relevant to war and many kinds of wargames too. While perhaps no longer quite as dominant as they used to be, they remain so to the present day.
These biological facts go a long way to explain why, historically speaking, few women have participated in war – and in wargames. Given the considerable difference in physical strength, having women fight men would inevitably result in severe injuries if not in a massacre. That is why, in the few cases when women did confront men either of their own free will (as in judicial combat) or because they were forced to do so (as seems to have occasionally happened in the Roman arena),44 they were matched either with dwarfs or with handicapped men; to differentiate a fight from an execution, equality of some sort is absolutely necessary! The difference in physical strength between men and women goes a long way to explain why the latter have always been reluctant to face the former. But it also explains why the former have usually been rather reluctant to face the latter in combat, whether real or simulated. A man who loses to a woman loses; a man who defeats a woman also loses.
But why are women so hard to find even in the many kinds of wargames in which physical strength is not required? In part, women’s non-participation in wargames that do not require physical force may have resulted from the fact that they did not participate in war either – after all, throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries many of the former were seen mainly as education in, and preparation for, the latter. It is also possible that men deliberately “steered” women away from what they saw as their own domain. Yet this does not end the mystery which was giving people food for thought throughout the nineteenth century. Take the case of chess as one of the best-known, longest-lived, and most intellectually challenging wargames of all. Some have tried to enlist psychoanalysis to explain women’s voluntary absence from the field; others have blamed that absence on motherhood and menstruation which, they claim, do not leave women the necessary peace of mind.45 In view of the game’s history, though, these attempts do not appear to carry conviction.
During the Middle Ages quite a number of ladies played chess. Some considered it especially suited for women, given that they tended to stay indoors and did not spend as much time in the open, either hunting or tourneying or fighting, as their male relatives did.46 Both in Christendom and, what may be more surprising, in Islam, skill at the game was counted among the accomplishments that made the fillies of the upper classes presentable as well as nubile. Noblemen and perhaps other well-to-do persons appointed chess masters to instruct their daughters in it so as to enable them to entertain guests.47 Anne of France (1461–1522), the eldest daughter of King Louis XI who after his death acted as regent throughout the reign of her son Charles VII, recommended the game to her daughter Susanne as a way of escaping from “our fragility and wicked way of life.”48 Numerous charming tales tell of challenges delivered and accepted and matches being won and lost. Legend has it that the game was sometimes used as a test to decide whether a suitor was good enough to receive a lady in marriage.
More than one Renaissance male painter produced works showing women as they played chess. So
did at least one female painter, Sofonisba Anguissola, an aristocratic Italian lady. In 1555 she painted The Chess Game, a truly beautiful canvas. It shows her playing a match with one of her sisters with two others looking on.49 Female rulers who played included Louise of Savoy (1476–1531), mother and regent of the French King Francis I; Margaret of Angoulême (1492–1549), the king’s sister, and the even better-known Queen Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots. The beautifully carved sets made for some of these ladies still survive. Yet another female chess player, albeit a fictitious one, was Miranda, Prospero’s daughter in The Tempest. Interestingly, Shakespeare makes her use the game to express the intensity of her love for Ferdinand, thus suggesting that she cared much less about it than about him.50 Supposing her attitude is in any way true to life, it would explain why, even during this period, the real experts on the game, those who made their living teaching it and writing books about it, were, as far as we know, without exception male.
By this time the queen, originally one of the weakest pieces on the board, had been turned into by far the most powerful one. Some authors have claimed that the change reflected a wider social process in which “women off the board also witnessed a period of increased leverage in exchanges of power.”51 Perhaps so, perhaps not; in both Europe and India, it is worth noting, chess was equally popular among top-of-the-line courtesans eager to attract clients by providing them with more than sex alone.52 In any case the period in question only lasted a short time. As the seventeenth century progressed conditions changed and male dominance of the game became more pronounced than ever. Except in the Netherlands, the bourgeois country par excellence and the first in which middle-class women ceased to work outside the home, paintings of women playing chess either with men or with other women, which earlier on used to be common, all but disappeared. Possibly this had to do with the fact that the game began to move out of the home into the coffee houses; such places were seen as promoting license, which sometimes led to decent women being prohibited from entering them.53 Another cause might be the increasingly competitive atmosphere which surrounded the game. The two processes reinforced each other. Publicity led to increased competitiveness, and increased competitiveness to greater publicity.
Once world championships had been established during the late nineteenth century, competition, as opposed to mere social play, became even more important. By that time chess had long ceased to be a skill that ladies were expected to master. That paragon of femininity, Jane Austen, does not mention it either in her works or in her correspondence. Some (male) contemporaries regretted that fact. They tried to inquire into its cause, suggesting that “every young lady will do wisely in acquiring the power of adding its fascination to the attractions of Home.” Women, it was claimed, had both the opportunity to play – more so than men, since their responsibilities were lighter and they did not have to work for a living – and the ability to do so.54 William Steinitz, the American who was world champion from 1886 to 1894, is said to have been “enthusiastic” about female players. He thought that “undoubtedly there is a great field for women in this science.”55 Yet none of these appeals did much to attract women to the game.
Early in the twentieth century special women’s chess clubs and leagues began to be established. However, so small was their number that when Arpad Elo, a professor of physics and a chess master, first started devising his Rating System in the 1960s he encountered a problem with the separate women’s list. There simply were not enough women players around who had played tournament chess, making it impossible either to rate them against each other or to relate the female list to the male one.56 Several years ago I was lucky enough to host Professor Alla Kushnir-Stein. Before moving to Israel in 1976, she had been the Soviet Union’s joint women’s chess champion. I asked her why there were so few women grandmasters around. She answered that when boys and girls started playing as young children they showed equal aptitude. Later, though, most girls left the game behind. The few girls who continued to play after puberty formed a much smaller pool of candidates from which champions could be selected and trained: where quantity was absent quality could not develop.
Professor Kushnir’s hypothesis, which she kindly communicated to me over dinner, has since become part of the common wisdom. It has been used, for example, to explain why the world’s highest-ranking player, Judit Polgar, was the only woman among the top hundred. In 2009 she came in at no. 27 on the ladder, though earlier in her career she had twice been ranked among the top ten; incidentally, no other woman has ever done remotely as well. In the same year this common wisdom received support from a piece of serious academic research. A team of British scholars focused on Germany, the reason being that records in that country are more complete than most. It turned out that just 6 percent of rated players were female. From these facts they went on to calculate that exactly 96 percent of the gender gap in the quality of play was due not to differences in innate ability but to the fact that few females invested enough in chess to become grandmasters.57 One doubts whether any figures pertaining to social life can ever be that accurate. Assuming that this one is reasonably so, however, the question becomes even more pointed: if the natural abilities of men and women at the many kinds of wargames that do not require physical force are in fact quite equal, then why do male players outnumber female ones by as much as they do?
One student feels that girls stop playing because they find more interesting things to do – they discover that dating is more fun than checkmating.58 Showing their skill at chess might actually cost them in terms of the number of boys who are attracted to them; conversely, they are not very interested in boys whom they could beat at the game. Even if they go on playing, most of them appear to be less obsessed by the game, and less inclined to put as great an effort into it, than their male colleagues. This in turn might have something to do with the fact that, in chess as in all other fields, a woman can improve her social status by associating with a man who is good at what he does. That is not nearly as true for a man: for him, indeed, things might just as well work the other way around. Whatever the answer, only in Hungary, the Ukraine, and China does the number of woman chess players even come within an order of magnitude of that of male ones.59 Worldwide no more than 5 to 7 percent of rated chess players are female. In the United States the number is just 3 percent.
Only in 1978 did the first woman, Nona Gaprindashvili of Georgia, which at that time was still part of the USSR, become a grandmaster. Even then she did not win her title in quite the same kind of competition men had to engage in; the first woman to travel the entire road was the Hungarian Judit Polgar in 1991.60 Since then a handful of top-ranking female chess players have suggested that the FIDE-mandated method whereby women need 200 points less than men to earn the title of grandmaster is insulting. Women, they say, should voluntarily renounce titles they did not really deserve; however, the idea has found no takers. As is also the case with other fields in which “affirmative action” is practiced, the argument goes round and round. Some women, notably Judit’s sister Susan, insist both on their own right to play in men’s tournaments and on the continued existence of all-female tournaments. Participating in the former enables Susan to claim that she is the equal of men; doing the same in the latter, to win her matches without too much difficulty. The bottom line is that, as of 2011, women made up just one 1.6 percent of all grandmasters, living or deceased.
Female participation in Reisswitz-type wargames is even lower. As always happens to minority groups, the outcome was, and still is, a certain tendency to look at women who did play as somehow deviant. Women have stubbornly stayed away from wargames (and many other kinds of games, but these are not under consideration here) even when every effort was made to engage them. I am referring to the kind of game that started coming on the market during the 1970s and that is played onscreen. They were promoted by two groups: feminists, and game-making companies. The former were trying to prove that women could do anything as well as, or
better than, men. The latter hoped to double their sales by attracting women, the more so because, by baby-sitting and the like, girls often get their own independent money at an earlier age than boys.61 Success was slow in coming. I personally know one American lady who started a firm to produce this kind of game and sell them to women, only to go bankrupt.
By way of solving the riddle, it has been suggested that girls are repelled by violence.62 Gadgets to zap their friends with simply do not interest them. A different and perhaps better answer is provided by the above-mentioned game designer Chris Crawford. In an entertaining aside, he tells us how his wife, who like most women did not think much of the “silly” games he was working on during the 1980s, took an instant liking to Excalibur.63 What set it apart was the emphasis it put on social interaction between King Arthur and his band of forty knights. Not only do they fight, but they set tithes for their vassals, send plagues and pestilences (with the help of the magician Merlin), rebel against the king, and are either rewarded for their loyalty or banished. Other designers have also noted, albeit often only after years of failed attempts, what one of them calls “the tremendous attraction for girls of complex characters and narratives . . . [as well as] the overwhelming importance of relationships.”64 These words are confirmed by the fact that some 20 percent of those involved in 1980s-vintage fantasy games such as Dungeons and Dragons were female.65
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