The Creativity of Women

Creativity refers to major, original accomplishments in difficult endeavors and cannot be correlated to any specific personality attributes. Assessments of creative success involve social judgements; in most societies, activities open to women have not been highly valued. Until recently, only very exceptional women have been able to transcend the obstacles to success in fields not reserved for their sex. Whenever such impediments are removed, women have equaled the creativity of men.

In current social conditions, public success may depend on aggressive behavior of a kind many women will not engage in, often on moral grounds. Others are likely to sacrifice self-interest out of altruism, particularly in behalf of members of their family. Pregnancy and lactation often decrease a woman's commitment to other activities, partly on a hormonal basis. Guilt about having too little time or energy for children may be expiated through self-sabotage at work, and a husband who resents a woman's creative success will frequently sabotage her as well. In such competitive situations, women tend to be more inhibited than men, probably as a result of childhood indoctrination.

At the same time, women seem to have a greater commitment to and more capacity for “self-creation” and the creation of humane communities.

Discussions of creativity are often muddled by a failure to define the term. The word may be used adjectivally, to characterize a person; on the other hand, it can refer to the successful outcome of some difficult endeavor that involves a measure of novelty. In the first sense, an individual is said to be creative as a result of a specific constellation of the personality; in the second, the attribution of creativity is a social judgment, extrinsic to personal attributes and almost entirely dependent on the shared values of a specific culture. Some commentators reserve the designation for accomplishments in the realms of high culture; others use it for novel solutions in any kind