She Is A Real Womensch"

 SEP.08.2013 

When we say that someone is a real mensch, we express admiration for  a person who is better than most of us, he/she is an cut above the rest.  The term “mensch”  in Yiddish means a person of integrity. A mensch is someone who is responsible, has a sense of right and wrong and in general is the sort of person other people look up to.  According to the dictionary in English the word has come to mean "a good guy."

The word  “mensch” in  German is the equivalent of “man” which is male grammatically, but refers to a general person not a male one. Since all the definitions in the dictionaries refer to mensch as a male -- a man of integrity, perhaps it is time to revisit the term.

Although we admire a mensch, when was the last tome that we used that word to describe the good qualities of a man? It seems to me that it doesn’t happen often; finding a man who is a mensch, as a partner, a colleague, a lawyer, a friend,  an advisor  is not easy.

Yet, I was sitting with a woman friend and we were discussing an upstanding  young woman who, we both agreed, was a real “mensch.” That young woman  is a person of integrity, she is responsible, principled, honest and sympathetic. She is proactive, volunteers in the community, helps her grandmother, in short, she is a [wo]mensch.

Literature is full with examples of women of integrity: Dorothea, the protagonist of Geroge Eliot’s Middlemarch,  is a real womensch. She has a good sense of right and wrong and is brave enough to stand up and fight for her beliefs.  Since she comes from a privileged background, Dorothea  sees it as her duty to help the poor in her area by planning and building cottages for the workers and by promoting the building of a new hospital.

In real life we also don't have to look hard to find womensch; going through the list of my friends I realize that they easily fit the definition of a womensch. Otherwise they would not have been my friends; who would like a friend who is not a woman of integrity, or as the dictionary states: unwomensch, is evil or a cruel person.

So how come there are so few men who are mensch and so many women who are? it seems to me that the qualities of a mensch are not compatible with those of a successful man. We need not forget that if in our society when we want to compliment  a business man we often say that "he is aggressive." I believe that while we have fewer demands of  men, especially those who are successful, to have moral qualities, we would not want our children to be raised by women who lack integrity.

Since the meaning of the word mensch is so beautiful and clear I suggest that from now on we take over the term and refer to ourselves as womensch.

And although it might suggest being less successful, in my own life I would always prefer to be  surrounded by wo/mensch, whether they are men or women.