Henhousing

The girls from Sex and the City discuss the finer points of straw bedding, feed, and roosters.

Henhousing is the female equivalent of wolfpacking, but it shares some important differences.

As a developmental stage, women "henhouse" later than men "wolfpack", as female individuation tends to follow a different process.

Men go from child, to buddy, to careerist, to husband, to parent.

Women go from child, to wife (or girlfriend, as the case may be for most young modern women), to buddy, although increasingly later marriage is altering this course so that women evolve from child, to careerist, to buddy, to wife, to parent.

Where a wolfpack consists of young single males, a henhouse consists of women who are either already married and not seeking mates (the coffee klatsch set) or who have reached their late 30s and are unmarried, but who have already strongly individuated away from their family and away from the boyfriend-grasping stage. Henhousers are secure in their identity as women. They define their femininity not by the presence or lack of a man... but by their membership in the henhouse.

Where wolfpackers leave the pack to marry, and form a primary identity as a father, henhousers arrive at the henhouse having experienced many or most of the other roles. It is a developmentally later stage than wolfpacking. Much may have to do with
the change in hormones at midlife, as women masculinize and men feminize.

At twenty, the girlfriend complains that her boyfriend spends all his time with his "posse" - his wolfpack.

In ten years, this same woman will get most of her social needs met by women she meets through the PTA, and other mothers in her neighborhood.

And in twenty, she will be stuffing cash down the jockeys of moonlighting young wolfpackers, while sipping pink drinks with her "posse". While her husband sits on the couch and complains that she spends too much time with her friends.