Shauna holds an M.B.A. from Marquette University. Her first novel, What the Body Remembers, was published in 1999. It has been translated into eleven languages, and was awarded the 2000 Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best Book, Canada/Caribbean region. The Tiger Claw, published in 2004, was nominated for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize.

I’ve seen men who cared and created from their shakti, and often felt the power of the so-called masculine within myself, I believe we can recover it.

The night my brother was born in Montreal, I was six years old. Manjit Singh, a bachelor friend of my parents looked after me at his home till my parents returned from hospital. No one said he couldn’t do it because he wasn’t a woman.

A few years later, we went to live in India where I met my paternal grandfather, Kishan Singh. A orchard farmer who stood six feet four with his turban on, he taught me how to climb mango trees without damaging the fruit, to taste fragrance, to know a khas-ul-khas from a langdra. He could weep at the destruction of one tree, he could laugh at the antics of red monkeys. No one called him feminine.

In India, my father’s secretary was a man, and it was my father who rose at 5 am to take me to riding classes. In the communal kitchen of our gurdwara, Sikh men did most of the cooking, and afterwards, a man would walk down rows of cross-legged worshippers and ladle lentils onto my plate. No one called him feminine.

A middle class woman in Delhi could be a prime minister, teacher, doctor, journalist or entrepreneur — no one would call you masculine. I learned to play polo, and played on national teams with men. I may have been considered different, but no one called me masculine. Every day, I saw poor women bring their babies to the edges of construction sites where they did the job of several men.

When I returned to North America in the eighties, obtained an MBA and took a job installing systems, I was surprised to find few other women in computing — it was “masculine.” Hotels didn’t provide hairdryers, cars didn’t come with makeup mirrors on the driver’s side. Terms like “pink-collar job” and “mommy track” sprinkled our language. Yet strict gender-differentiation couldn’t change that my husband David was far more capable of interior decor, advertising and jewelry design than I.

Women in North America were the lower caste, aspiring to earn enough someday to have machines or part-time servants to deal with dirt, dishes and runny noses. Some of us fought the men we loved, forcing them to help with housework. We aspired to men’s economic goals, tapping our “masculine” traits — risk-taking, aggression, knowledge-power. And soon, we asserted ourselves as employers, investors, consumers, artists — and in hundreds of other ways.

Today, the web paradigm tells us relationships have value. That globally, cooperation is more advantageous than competition. We see what education can do and want it not only for children here, but for the babies whose mothers work on construction sites in India. We have learned that someone else’s loss or suffering will eventually affect our own. In Iraq, we can see the destruction wrought by men and women who went to pre-emptive war, ignoring Red Cross conventions human rights agreements made over fifty years. We in the west so desperately need what we have pejoratively termed “feminine.”

And because I’ve seen men who cared and created from their shakti, and often felt the power of the so-called masculine within myself, I believe we can recover it.

For This I Believe I’m Shauna Singh Baldwin in Milwaukee Wisconsin.