THE FUTURE OF MANKIND IS A WOMAN

The future of mankind, if we have a future, rests most securely in the arms of a particular kind of woman, a phenomenon of the postcolonial world, never seen before in history. Let’s call her Femina complexa. But you’d be wrong to think complexity is her most salient feature. “Complexo” in Latin means “encompass,” or “embrace,” and the woman whom I entrust with our future prosperity embraces the world.

I first met such women in my travels abroad: an opera-loving waif with a nose ring in Zurich, a bartender in Chiang Mai who asked me out for a drink, a Mongolian slogging through Europe with a suitcase twice her size. But then I noticed them at home as well, as drug reps in my uncle’s medical practice, from Chandigarh and Manila, as postdocs from Poland and South Korea, as homegrown prodigies with Facebook pages filled with snapshots from Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu.

These women are very much individuals, and that’s what makes them interesting. But they fall into a class nevertheless, and it was only after many years that I began to realize their numbers were greater than it seemed, and growing. It’s because they don’t fall into the usual categories that they’ve been ignored as a demographic. Though they are usually in their twenties and thirties and from middle or upper-class families, they come from all nations, all ethnicities, all religions. What unites them are subtler yet perhaps more consequential markers not found on pollsters’ questionnaires. Most notably, while they are all daughters and many are wives and mothers, they don’t define themselves by their social relationships but by what they do. It wasn’t so long ago that even in America women formally called themselves by their husband’s names, such as Mrs. Harry Smith. But Femina complexa cultivates her own identity, even when raised in such traditional societies as India and China. She embraces learning, she is enthusiastic, peripatetic, optimistic, energetic, opportunistic. Above all she is tolerant, often marrying outside her group. But she is a smiling revolutionary, not a rebel at the barricades.

And this is why she is the best chance for our future. The last three centuries were revolutionary ones, but our planet has become too small and our weapons too large for fanatics who want to set the calendar back to zero. What we need are legions like the Indian woman who can find a way to wear jeans, marry a German, get her MBA and still go home for Diwali.