The Second Sex introduction.pdf

The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

Introduction

Woman as Other

FOR a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new.

Enough ink has been spilled in quarrelling over feminism, and perhaps we should say no more about it. It is still talked about,

however, for the voluminous nonsense uttered during the last century seems to have done little to illuminate the problem. After

all, is there a problem? And if so, what is it? Are there women, really? Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine st ill has

its adherents who will whisper in your ear: ‘Even in Russia women still are women’; and other erudite persons – sometimes the

very same – say with a sigh: ‘Woman is losing her way, woman is lost.’ One wonders if women still exist, if they will always

exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should, what place they occupy in this world, what their place should be. ‘What has

become of women?’ was asked recently in an ephemeral magazine.

But first we must ask: what is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero’, says one, ‘woman is a womb’. But in speaking of certain women,

connoisseurs declare that they are not women, although they are equipped with a uterus like the rest. All agree in recognising the

fact that females exist in the human species; today as always they make up about one half of humanity. And yet we are told that

femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear, then, that every female

human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as

femininity. Is this attribute something secreted by the ovaries? Or is it a Platonic essence, a product of the philosophic

imagination? Is a rustling petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women try zealously to incarnate this

essence, it is hardly patentable. It is frequently described in vague and dazzling terms that seem to have been borrowed from the

vocabulary of the seers, and indeed in the times of St Thomas it was considered an essence as certainly defined as the somniferous

virtue of the poppy

But conceptualism has lost ground. The biological and social sciences no longer admit the existence of unchangeably fixed

entities that determine given characteristics, such as those ascribed to woman, the Jew, or the Negro. Science regards any

characteristic as a reaction dependent in part upon a situation . If today femininity no longer exists, then it never existed. But does

the word woman , then, have no specific content? This is stoutly affirmed by those who hold to the philosophy of the

enlightenment, of rationalism, of nominalism; women, to them, are merely the human beings arbitrarily designated by the word

woman . Many American women particularly are prepared to think that there is no longer any place for woman as such; if a

backward individual still takes herself for a woman, her friends advise her to be psychoanalysed and thus get rid of this obsession.

In regard to a work, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex , which in other respects has its irritating features, Dorothy Parker has written:

‘I cannot be just to books which treat of woman as woman ... My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, should be regarded

as human beings.’ But nominalism is a rather inadequate doctrine, and the antifeminists have had no trouble in showing that

women simply are not men. Surely woman is, like man, a human being; but such a declaration is abstract. The fact is that every

concrete human being is always a singular, separate individual. To decline to accept such notions as the eternal feminine, the

black soul, the Jewish character, is not to deny that Jews, Negroes, women exist today – this denial does not represent a liberation

for those concerned, but rather a flight from reality. Some years ago a well-known woman writer refused to permit her portrait to

appear in a series of photographs especially devoted to women writers; she wished to be counted among the men. But in order to

gain this privilege she made use of her husband’s influence! Women who assert that they are men lay claim none the less to

masculine consideration and respect. I recall also a young Trotskyite standing on a platform at a boisterous meeting and gett ing

ready to use her fists, in spite of her evident fragility. She was denying her feminine weakness; but it was for love of a militant

male whose equal she wished to be. The attitude of defiance of many American women proves that they are haunted by a sense of

their femininity. In truth, to go for a walk with one’s eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes

of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps thes e

differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that they do most obviously exist.

If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through ‘the eternal feminine’, and

if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question “what is a woman”?

To state the question is, to me, to suggest, at once, a preliminary answer. The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would

never set out to write a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: ‘I

am a woman’; on this truth must be based all further discussion. A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a

certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of

form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents

both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman

represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity. In the midst of an abstract discussion it is vexing to

hear a man say: ‘You think thus and so because you are a woman’; but I know that my only defence is to reply: ‘I think thus and

so because it is true,’ thereby removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply: ‘And you

think the contrary because you are a man’, for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A man is in the right

in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. It amounts to this: just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with

reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these

peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks

with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete

hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively,

whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it. ‘The female is a

female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural

defectiveness.’ And St Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an ‘imperfect man’, an ‘incidental’ being. This is symbolised

in Genesis where Eve is depicted as made from what Bossuet called ‘a supernumerary bone’ of Adam.

Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being.

Michelet writes: ‘Woman, the relative being ...’ And Benda is most positive in his Rapport d’Uriel : ‘The body of man makes

sense in itself quite apart from that of woman, whereas the latter seems wanting in significance by itself ... Man can think of

himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.’ And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the

sex’, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex – absolute sex, no less. She is

defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed

to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.’

The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies,

one finds the expression of a duality – that of the Self and the Other. This duality was not originally attached to the division of the

sexes; it was not dependent upon any empirical facts. It is revealed in such works as that of Granet on Chinese thought and those

of Dumzil on the East Indies and Rome. The feminine element was at first no more involved in such pairs as Varuna-Mitra,

Uranus-Zeus, Sun-Moon, and Day-Night than it was in the contrasts between Good and Evil, lucky and unlucky auspices, right

and left, God and Lucifer. Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought.

Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself. If three travellers

chance to occupy the same compartment, that is enough to make vaguely hostile ‘others’ out of all the rest of the passengers on

the train. In small-town eyes all persons not belonging to the village are ‘strangers’ and suspect; to the native of a country all who

inhabit other countries are ‘foreigners’; Jews are ‘different’ for the anti-Semite, Negroes are ‘inferior’ for American racists,

aborigines are ‘natives’ for colonists, proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the privileged.

Lvi-Strauss, at the end of a profound work on the various forms of primitive societies, reaches the following conclusion:

‘Passage from the state of Nature to the state of Culture is marked by man’s ability to view biological relations as a series of

contrasts; duality, alternation, opposition, and symmetry, whether under definite or vague forms, constitute not so much

phenomena to be explained as fundamental and immediately given data of social reality.’ These phenomena would be

incomprehensible if in fact human society were simply a Mitsein or fellowship based on solidarity and friendliness. Things

become clear, on the contrary, if, following Hegel, we find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards every other

consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed – he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the

inessential, the object.

But the other consciousness, the other ego, sets up a reciprocal claim. The native travelling abroad is shocked to find himself in

turn regarded as a ‘stranger’ by the natives of neighbouring countries. As a matter of fact, wars, festivals, trading, treaties, and

contests among tribes, nations, and classes tend to deprive the concept Other of its absolute sense and to make manifest its

relativity; willy-nilly, individuals and groups are forced to realize the reciprocity of their relations. How is it, then, that this

reciprocity has not been recognised between the sexes, that one of the contrasting terms is set up as the sole essential, denying any

relativity in regard to its correlative and defining the latter as pure otherness? Why is it that women do not dispute male

sovereignty? No subject will readily volunteer to become the object, the inessential; it is not the Other who, in defining himself as

the Other, establishes the One. The Other is posed as such by the One in defining himself as the One. But if the Other is not to

regain the status of being the One, he must be submissive enough to accept this alien point of view. Whence comes this

submission in the case of woman?

There are, to be sure, other cases in which a certain category has been able to dominate another completely for a time. Very often

this privilege depends upon inequality of numbers – the majority imposes its rule upon the minority or persecutes it. But women

are not a minority, like the American Negroes or the Jews; there are as many women as men on earth. Again, the two groups

concerned have often been originally independent; they may have been formerly unaware of each other’s existence, or perhaps

they recognised each other’s autonomy. But a historical event has resulted in the subjugation of the weaker by the stronger. The

scattering of the Jews, the introduction of slavery into America, the conquests of imperialism are examples in point. In these cases

the oppressed retained at least the memory of former days; they possessed in common a past, a tradition, sometimes a religion or a

culture.

The parallel drawn by Bebel between women and the proletariat is valid in that neither ever formed a minority or a separate

collective unit of mankind. And instead of a single historical event it is in both cases a historical development that explains their

status as a class and accounts for the membership of particular individuals in that class. But proletarians have not always existed,

whereas there have always been women. They are women in virtue of their anatomy and physiology. Throughout history they

have always been subordinated to men, and hence their dependency is not the result of a historical event or a social change – it

was not something that occurred . The reason why otherness in this case seems to be an absolute is in part that it lacks the

contingent or incidental nature of historical facts. A condition brought about at a certain time can be abolished at some other time,

as the Negroes of Haiti and others have proved: but it might seem that natural condition is beyond the possibility of change. In

truth, however, the nature of things is no more immutably given, once for all, than is historical reality. If woman seems to be the

inessential which never becomes the essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this change. Proletarians say ‘We’;

Negroes also. Regarding themselves as subjects, they transform the bourgeois, the whites, into ‘others’. But women do not say

‘We’, except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say ‘women’, and women use the same word in

referring to themselves. They do not authentically assume a subjective attitude. The proletarians have accomplished the revolution

in Russia, the Negroes in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese are battling for it in Indo-China; but the women’s effort has never been anything

more than a symbolic agitation. They have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have

only received.

The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organising themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the

correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as

that of the proletariat. They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates community feeling among the

American Negroes, the ghetto Jews, the workers of Saint-Denis, or the factory hands of Renault. They live dispersed among the

males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men – fathers or husbands –

more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with

proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro women. The proletariat can propose to

massacre the ruling class, and a sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting sole possession of the atomic bomb and

making humanity wholly Jewish or black; but woman cannot even dream of exterminating the males. The bond that unites her to

her oppressors is not comparable to any other. The division of the sexes is a biological fact, not an event in human history. Male

and female stand opposed within a primordial Mitsein , and woman has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unity with its

two halves riveted together, and the cleavage of society along the line of sex is impossible. Here is to be found the basic trait of

woman: she is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another.

One could suppose that this reciprocity might have facilitated the liberation of woman. When Hercules sat at the feet of Omphale

and helped with her spinning, his desire for her held him captive; but why did she fail to gain a lasting power? To revenge herself

on Jason, Medea killed their children; and this grim legend would seem to suggest that she might have obtained a formidable

influence over him through his love for his offspring. In Lysistrata Aristophanes gaily depicts a band of women who joined forces

to gain social ends through the sexual needs of their men; but this is only a play. In the legend of the Sabine women, the latter

soon abandoned their plan of remaining sterile to punish their ravishers. In truth woman has not been socially emancipated

through man’s need – sexual desire and the desire for offspring – which makes the male dependent for satisfaction upon the

female.

Master and slave, also, are united by a reciprocal need, in this case economic, which does not liberate the slave. In the relation of

master to slave the master does not make a point of the need that he has for the other; he has in his grasp the power of satisfying

this need through his own action; whereas the slave, in his dependent condition, his hope and fear, is quite conscious of the need

he has for his master. Even if the need is at bottom equally urgent for both, it always works in favour of the oppressor and against

the oppressed. That is why the liberation of the working class, for example, has been slow.

Now, woman has always been man’s dependant, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality. And even

today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change. Almost nowhere is her legal status the same as

man’s, and frequently it is much to her disadvantage. Even when her rights are legally recognised in the abstract, long-standing

custom prevents their full expression in the mores. In the economic sphere men and women can almost be said to make up two

castes; other things being equal, the former hold the better jobs, get higher wages, and have more opportunity for success than

their new competitors. In industry and politics men have a great many more positions and they monopolise the most important

posts. In addition to all this, they enjoy a traditional prestige that the education of children tends in every way to support, for the

present enshrines the past – and in the past all history has been made by men. At the present time, when women are beginning to

take part in the affairs of the world, it is still a world that belongs to men – they have no doubt of it at all and women have scarcely

any. To decline to be the Other, to refuse to be a party to the deal – this would be for women to renounce all the advantages

conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste. Man-the-sovereign will provide woman-the-liege with material

protection and will undertake the moral justification of her existence; thus she can evade at once both economic risk and the

metaphysical risk of a liberty in which ends and aims must be contrived without assistance. Indeed, along with the ethical urge of

each individual to affirm his subjective existence, there is also the temptation to forgo liberty and become a thing. This is an

inauspicious road, for he who takes it – passive, lost, ruined – becomes henceforth the creature of another’s will, frustrated in his

transcendence and deprived of every value. But it is an easy road; on it one avoids the strain involved in undertaking an aut hentic

existence. When man makes of woman the Other, he may, then, expect to manifest deep-seated tendencies towards complicity.

Thus, woman may fail to lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks definite resources, because she feels the necessary

bond that ties her to man regardless of reciprocity, and because she is often very well pleased with her role as the Other.

But it will be asked at once: how did all this begin? It is easy to see that the duality of the sexes, like any duality, gives rise to

conflict. And doubtless the winner will assume the status of absolute. But why should man have won from the start? It seems

possible that women could have won the victory; or that the outcome of the conflict might never have been decided. How is it that

this world has always belonged to the men and that things have begun to change only recently? Is this change a good thing? Will it

bring about an equal sharing of the world between men and women?

These questions are not new, and they have often been answered. But the very fact that woman is the Other tends to cast suspicion

upon all the justifications that men have ever been able to provide for it. These have all too evidently been dictated by men’s

interest. A little-known feminist of the seventeenth century, Poulain de la Barre, put it this way: ‘All that has been written about

women by men should be suspect, for the men are at once judge and party to the lawsuit.’ Everywhere, at all times, the males have

displayed their satisfaction in feeling that they are the lords of creation. ‘Blessed be God ... that He did not make me a woman,’

say the Jews in their morning prayers, while their wives pray on a note of resignation: ‘Blessed be the Lord, who created me

according to His will.’ The first among the blessings for which Plato thanked the gods was that he had been created free, not

enslaved; the second, a man, not a woman. But the males could not enjoy this privilege fully unless they believed it to be fo unded

on the absolute and the eternal; they sought to make the fact of their supremacy into a right. ‘Being men, those who have made

and compiled the laws have favoured their own sex, and jurists have elevated these laws into principles’, to quote Poulain de la

Barre once more.

Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in

heaven and advantageous on earth. The religions invented by men reflect this wish for domination. In the legends of Eve and

Pandora men have taken up arms against women. They have made use of philosophy and theology, as the quotations from

Aristotle and St Thomas have shown. Since ancient times satirists and moralists have delighted in showing up the weaknesses o f

women. We are familiar with the savage indictments hurled against women throughout French literature. Montherlant, for

example, follows the tradition of Jean de Meung, though with less gusto. This hostility may at times be well founded, often it is

gratuitous; but in truth it more or less successfully conceals a desire for self-justification. As Montaigne says, ‘It is easier to

accuse one sex than to excuse the other’. Sometimes what is going on is clear enough. For instance, the Roman law limiting the

rights of woman cited ‘the imbecility, the instability of the sex’ just when the weakening of family ties seemed to threaten the

interests of male heirs. And in the effort to keep the married woman under guardianship, appeal was made in the sixteenth century

to the authority of St Augustine, who declared that ‘woman is a creature neither decisive nor constant’, at a time when the single

woman was thought capable of managing her property. Montaigne understood clearly how arbitrary and unjust was woman’s

appointed lot: ‘Women are not in the wrong when they decline to accept the rules laid down for them, since the men make these

rules without consulting them. No wonder intrigue and strife abound.’ But he did not go so far as to champion their cause.

It was only later, in the eighteenth century, that genuinely democratic men began to view the matter objectively. Diderot, among

others, strove to show that woman is, like man, a human being. Later John Stuart Mill came fervently to her defence. But thes e

philosophers displayed unusual impartiality. In the nineteenth century the feminist quarrel became again a quarrel of partisans.

One of the consequences of the industrial revolution was the entrance of women into productive labour, and it was just here t hat

the claims of the feminists emerged from the realm of theory and acquired an economic basis, while their opponents became the

more aggressive. Although landed property lost power to some extent, the bourgeoisie clung to the old morality that found the

guarantee of private property in the solidity of the family. Woman was ordered back into the home the more harshly as her

emancipation became a real menace. Even within the working class the men endeavoured to restrain woman’s liberation, because

they began to see the women as dangerous competitors – the more so because they were accustomed to work for lower wages.

In proving woman’s inferiority, the anti-feminists then began to draw not only upon religion, philosophy, and theology, as before,

but also upon science – biology, experimental psychology, etc. At most they were willing to grant ‘equality in difference’ to the

other sex. That profitable formula is most significant; it is precisely like the ‘equal but separate’ formula of the Jim Crow laws

aimed at the North American Negroes. As is well known, this so-called equalitarian segregation has resulted only in the most

extreme discrimination. The similarity just noted is in no way due to chance, for whether it is a race, a caste, a class, or a sex that

is reduced to a position of inferiority, the methods of justification are the same. ‘The eternal feminine’ corresponds to ‘the black

soul’ and to ‘the Jewish character’. True, the Jewish problem is on the whole very different from the other two – to the anti-Semite

the Jew is not so much an inferior as he is an enemy for whom there is to be granted no place on earth, for whom annihilation is

the fate desired. But there are deep similarities between the situation of woman and that of the Negro. Both are being emancipated

today from a like paternalism, and the former master class wishes to ‘keep them in their place’ – that is, the place chosen for them.

In both cases the former masters lavish more or less sincere eulogies, either on the virtues of ‘the good Negro’ with his dormant,

childish, merry soul – the submissive Negro – or on the merits of the woman who is ‘truly feminine’ – that is, frivolous, infantile,

irresponsible the submissive woman. In both cases the dominant class bases its argument on a state of affairs that it has itself

created. As George Bernard Shaw puts it, in substance, ‘The American white relegates the black to the rank of shoeshine boy; and

he concludes from this that the black is good for nothing but shining shoes.’ This vicious circle is met with in all analogous

circumstances; when an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior. But

the significance of the verb to be must be rightly understood here; it is in bad faith to give it a static value when it really has the

dynamic Hegelian sense of ‘to have become’. Yes, women on the whole are today inferior to men; that is, their situation affords

them fewer possibilities. The question is: should that state of affairs continue?

Many men hope that it will continue; not all have given up the battle. The conservative bourgeoisie still see in the emancipation of

women a menace to their morality and their interests. Some men dread feminine competition. Recently a male student wrote in t he

Hebdo-Latin : ‘Every woman student who goes into medicine or law robs us of a job.’ He never questioned his rights in this world.

And economic interests are not the only ones concerned. One of the benefits that oppression confers upon the oppressors is that

the most humble among them is made to feel superior; thus, a ‘poor white’ in the South can console himself with the thought that

he is not a ‘dirty nigger’ – and the more prosperous whites cleverly exploit this pride.

Similarly, the most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women. It was much easier for M. de

Montherlant to think himself a hero when he faced women (and women chosen for his purpose) than when he was obliged to act

the man among men – something many women have done better than he, for that matter. And in September 1948, in one of his

articles in the Figaro littraire , Claude Mauriac – whose great originality is admired by all – could write regarding woman: ‘We

listen on a tone [ sic! ] of polite indifference ... to the most brilliant among them, well knowing that her wit reflects more or less

luminously ideas that come from us .’ Evidently the speaker referred to is not reflecting the ideas of Mauriac himself, for no one

knows of his having any. It may be that she reflects ideas originating with men, but then, even among men there are those who

have been known to appropriate ideas not their own; and one can well ask whether Claude Mauriac might not find more

interesting a conversation reflecting Descartes, Marx, or Gide rather than himself. What is really remarkable is that by using the

questionable we he identifies himself with St Paul, Hegel, Lenin, and Nietzsche, and from the lofty eminence of their grandeur

looks down disdainfully upon the bevy of women who make bold to converse with him on a footing of equality. In truth, I know

of more than one woman who would refuse to suffer with patience Mauriac’s ‘tone of polite indifference’.

I have lingered on this example because the masculine attitude is here displayed with disarming ingenuousness. But men profit in

many more subtle ways from the otherness, the alterity of woman. Here is a miraculous balm for those afflicted with an inferiority

complex, and indeed no one is more arrogant towards women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his

virility. Those who are not fear-ridden in the presence of their fellow men are much more disposed to recognise a fellow creature

in woman; but even to these the myth of Woman, the Other, is precious for many reasons. They cannot be blamed for not

cheerfully relinquishing all the benefits they derive from the myth, for they realize what they would lose in relinquishing woman

as they fancy her to be, while they fail to realize what they have to gain from the woman of tomorrow. Refusal to pose oneself as

the Subject, unique and absolute, requires great self-denial. Furthermore, the vast majority of men make no such claim explicitly.

They do not postulate woman as inferior, for today they are too thoroughly imbued with the ideal of democracy not to recognise

all human beings as equals.

In the bosom of the family, woman seems in the eyes of childhood and youth to be clothed in the same social dignity as the adult

males. Later on, the young man, desiring and loving, experiences the resistance, the independence of the woman desired and

loved; in marriage, he respects woman as wife and mother, and in the concrete events of conjugal life she stands there before him

as a free being. He can therefore feel that social subordination as between the sexes no longer exists and that on the whole, in spite

of differences, woman is an equal. As, however, he observes some points of inferiority – the most important being unfitness for

the professions – he attributes these to natural causes. When he is in a co-operative and benevolent relation with woman, his

theme is the principle of abstract equality, and he does not base his attitude upon such inequality as may exist. But when he is in

conflict with her, the situation is reversed: his theme will be the existing inequality, and he will even take it as justification for

denying abstract equality.

So it is that many men will affirm as if in good faith that women are the equals of man and that they have nothing to clamour for,

while at the same time they will say that women can never be the equals of man and that their demands are in vain. It is, in point

of fact, a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant

but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature. The

most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman’s concrete situation. And there is no reason to put much trust in the men

when they rush to the defence of privileges whose full extent they can hardly measure. We shall not, then, permit ourselves to be

intimidated by the number and violence of the attacks launched against women, nor to be entrapped by the self-seeking eulogies

bestowed on the ‘true woman’, nor to profit by the enthusiasm for woman’s destiny manifested by men who would not for the

world have any part of it.

We should consider the arguments of the feminists with no less suspicion, however, for very often their controversial aim deprives

them of all real value. If the ‘woman question’ seems trivial, it is because masculine arrogance has made of it a ‘quarrel’; and

when quarrelling one no longer reasons well. People have tirelessly sought to prove that woman is superior, inferior, or equal to

man. Some say that, having been created after Adam, she is evidently a secondary being: others say on the contrary that Adam

was only a rough draft and that God succeeded in producing the human being in perfection when He created Eve. Woman’s brain

is smaller; yes, but it is relatively larger. Christ was made a man; yes, but perhaps for his greater humility. Each argument at once

suggests its opposite, and both are often fallacious. If we are to gain understanding, we must get out of these ruts; we must discard

the vague notions of superiority, inferiority, equality which have hitherto corrupted every discussion of the subject and start

afresh.

Very well, but just how shall we pose the question? And, to begin with, who are we to propound it at all? Man is at once judge and

party to the case; but so is woman. What we need is an angel – neither man nor woman – but where shall we find one? Still, the

angel would be poorly qualified to speak, for an angel is ignorant of all the basic facts involved in the problem. With a

hermaphrodite we should be no better off, for here the situation is most peculiar; the hermaphrodite is not really the combination

of a whole man and a whole woman, but consists of parts of each and thus is neither. It looks to me as if there are, after all, certain

women who are best qualified to elucidate the situation of woman. Let us not be misled by the sophism that because Epimenides

was a Cretan he was necessarily a liar; it is not a mysterious essence that compels men and women to act in good or in bad fa ith, it

is their situation that inclines them more or less towards the search for truth. Many of today’s women, fortunate in the restoration

of all the privileges pertaining to the estate of the human being, can afford the luxury of impartiality – we even recognise its

necessity. We are no longer like our partisan elders; by and large we have won the game. In recent debates on the status of women

the United Nations has persistently maintained that the equality of the sexes is now becoming a reality, and already some of us

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