Brain Power Magazine Issue 2- brought to you by MSO Worldwide

Many years ago, my mother, talking about my first husband, said 'I am so glad you married someone who is more intelligent than you - just like I did!' Later, my first husband, knowing who my second husband would be, said 'You can't possibly marry such an intellectual!'

My mother was totally convinced that she was inferior to my father and yet, when I look back at her achievements, it makes me very sad that she went through her whole life with this misconception. She brought up three children, a son (born 1938) and twin daughters (Julie and Mary) born seven years later, at the end of the war in 1945.

My mother's skills were many: gardening, cooking, sewing, knitting; most important of all, she brought us up with great love and care. She was a volunteer worker for a local welfare organisation, helping young mothers with sage advice and food supplements. She handled all the finance to do with this. Her sewing was legendary.

She made all the twins' clothes, including beautiful dresses, some of which were smocked - a complicated process of making mini-pleats and then embroidering on top of the pleats in a very intricate pattern. She always had a pair of knitting needles in her hands as she and my father watched television. I still have some of the cardigans and sweaters that she made - she died in 1983, aged 67.

Of course, when you look at the intricacy of following sewing and knitting patterns, it has been shown, and I quote from an article by Doreen Kimura (Professor of Psychology and honorary lecturer in the department of clinical neurological sciences at the University of Western Ontario) in Scientific American 1992 "that women are better on precision manual tasks, that is, those involving fine-motor co-ordination."

The fact that men and women have slightly differently wired brains is, of course, of immense importance to the continuation of the race, but a large proportion of the female population has been given to understand, through the ages, that they are the inferior sex. But with our increasing knowledge of how brains work, we can actually see that men and women use different parts of their brain power to achieve the same ends, and that women are better at some tasks and men better at others, thus constituting a very efficient team for the rearing of offspring.

As we find out more about the different skills associated with female/male brains, I am sure that society as a whole will benefit much more by treating and using the inherent skills of both to the advantage of all.

Throughout evolution there have been some very notable female achievers. In Buzan's Book of Genius, six women are noted in the top 100 geniuses - Elizabeth I, Martha Graham, Marie Curie, Maria Montessori, George Eliot (nom de plume of Mary Ann Evans) and Sappho.

Today, there are many more women rising to the top in most professions - lawyers, scientists, pilots, etc., although I have to say that, in my experience, there are still too few women in senior managerial posts in companies. This is a serious lacuna in our social system: just imagine what a woman of the calibre of Elizabeth I could do for one or other of our major corporations! In the words of the Book of Genius:

"The first Queen Elizabeth of England shines by the fact that she not only entered and survived the predominantly masculine political world of the 16th century, but also ultimately ruled and governed it. If Elizabeth's goal was to maintain power, and it was, then childbirth was probably the single most serious health hazard of the age. By this enormous self-restraint she succeeded in staying on the English throne from 1558 to 1603... She left England in a far better state than it had been for centuries beforehand: united, calm, at peace, prosperous and with the immense scientific and literary tradition bequeathed by Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser and many others."

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