Five years ago it seemed clear that emancipation had failed: the number of women in Parliament had settled at a low level; the number of professional women had stabilized as a tiny minority; the pattern of female employment had emerged as underpaid, menial and supportive. The cage door had been opened but the canary had refused to fly out. The conclusion was that the cage door ought never to have been opened because canaries are made for captivity; the suggestion of an alternative had only confused and saddened them.
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We may safely assert that the knowledge that men can acquire of women, even as they have been and are, without reference to what they might be, is wretchedly imperfect and superficial and will always be so until women themselves have told all that they have to tell. John Stuart Mill
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The characteristics that are praised and rewarded are those of the castrate – timidity, plumpness, languor, delicacy and preciosity.
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But if women are the true proletariat, the truly oppressed majority, the revolution can only be drawn nearer by their withdrawal of support for the capitalist system. The weapon that I suggest is that most honoured of the proletariat, withdrawal of labour.
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The opponents of female suffrage lamented that woman’s emancipation would mean the end of marriage, morality and the state; their extremism was more clear-sighted than the woolly benevolence of liberals and humanists, who thought that giving women a measure of freedom would not upset anything. When we reap the harvest which the unwitting suffragettes sowed we shall see that the anti-feminists were after all right.
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The Y-chromosome has a negative function: when a Y-carrying sperm fertilizes an ovum, it simply reduces the amount of femaleness which would result in the formation of a female foetus. Along with his maleness, the foetus then inherits a number of weaknesses which are called sex-linked, because they result from genes found only in the Y-chromosome. Strange deformities like hypertrichosis, meaning excessive growths of hair mainly on the ears, horny patches on hands and feet, bark-like skin and a form of webbing of the toes are some which are less well-known than haemophilia, which is in fact the result of a mutant gene in the X-chromosome which the Y-chromosome cannot suppress, so that it is transmitted by females, but only effective in males. Colour-blindness follows the same pattern. About thirty other disorders are to be found in the males of the species and seldom in the females for the same reason. There is much evidence that the female is constitutionally stronger than the male; she lives longer, and in every age group more males than females die although the number of males conceived may be between ten and thirty per cent more.
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Recently, criminologists have come up with another disconcerting observation about the Y-chromosome. They found that there was a high proportion of males with the XYY-chromosome, that is an extra Y, among those men in prison for crimes of violence, and it seemed to be linked to certain deficiencies in mental ability.
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They learn that as a rule the female skeleton is lighter and smaller, and the bone formation more childlike than the male. This last is an observation which is frequently made about the whole female body, that it is infantilized or pedomorphic while the male body is aged, or gerontomorphic. This description, far from implying any defect in female development, implies an evolutionary advantage in greater elasticity and adaptability. We can assume nothing whatever about physical strength or mental ability from it.
Nowadays women are not expected, unless they are Paola di Liegi or Jackie Onassis, and then only on gala occasions, to appear with a king’s ransom deployed upon their bodies, but they are required to look expensive, fashionable, well-groomed, and not to be seen in the same dress twice. If the duty of the few may have become less onerous, it has also become the duty of the many. The stereotype marshals an army of servants. She is supplied with cosmetics, underwear, foundation garments, stockings, wigs, postiches and hairdressing as well as her outer garments, her jewels and furs. The effect is to be built up layer by layer, and it is expensive. Splendour has given way to fit, line and cut. The spirit of competition must be kept up, as more and more women struggle towards the top drawer, so that the fashion industry can rely upon an expanding market. Poorer women fake it, ape it, pick up on the fashions a season too late, use crude effects, mistaking the line, the sheen, the gloss of the high-class article for a garish simulacrum. The business is so complex that it must be handled by an expert.
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As long as she is young and personable, every woman may cherish the dream that she may leap up the social ladder and dim the sheen of luxury by sheer natural loveliness; the few examples of such a feat are kept before the eye of the public. Fired with hope, optimism and ambition, young women study the latest forms of the stereotype, set out in Vogue, Nova, Queen and other glossies, where the mannequins stare from among the advertisements for fabulous real estate, furs and jewels.
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The myth of the strong black woman is the other side of the coin of the myth of the beautiful dumb blonde. The white man turned the white woman into a weak-minded, weak-bodied, delicate freak, a sex pot, and placed her on a pedestal; he turned the black woman into a strong self-reliant Amazon and deposited her in his kitchen … The white man turned himself into the Omnipotent Administrator and established himself in the Front Office. Eldridge Cleaver, The Allegory of the Black Eunuchs, ‘Soul on Ice’, 1968, p. 162.
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Freud saw that repression employs energy which might otherwise be expressed in creative action: what happens to the female is that her energy is deflected by the denial of her sexuality into a continuous and eventually irreversible system of repression.
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What happens to the Jewish boy who never manages to escape the tyranny of his mother is exactly what happens to every girl whose upbringing is ‘normal’.
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Little boys can get out of their mother’s way, eventually want to and are encouraged to. Little girls are not. It is agreed that ‘girls take more bringing up’ than boys: what that really means is that girls must be more relentlessly supervised and repressed if the desired result is to ensue.
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While little boys are forming groups and gangs to explore or terrorize the district,[9] she is isolated at home, listening to tales of evil-minded strangers. Her comparative incarceration is justified in the name of protection, although the home is the most dangerous place there is. She is taught to fear and distrust the world at large, for reasons which are never clearly stated. As a form of forearming this forewarning is notoriously unsuccessful. Sexual desires are not so lacking in resource that they cannot attack little girls as they go upon those errands and journeys that are sanctioned by Mother.
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So they grossly misinterpret the typical adolescent passion for horses as a reflection of the immature girl’s penis envy. The horse between a girl’s legs is supposed to be a gigantic penis. What hooey! What the young rider feels is not that the horse is a projection of her own physical ego, but that it is an other which is responding to her control. What she feels is a potent love calling forth a response. The control required by riding is so strong and subtle that it hardly melts into the kind of diffuse eroticism that theorists like Dr Pearson would have us believe in. For many girls who are beginning to get the picture about the female role, horse-riding is the only opportunity they will ever have to use their strong thighs to embrace, to excite and to control.
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Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.
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It is true that women often refuse to argue logically. In many cases they simply do not know how to, and men may dazzle them with a little pompous sophistry. In some cases they are intimidated and upset before rationalization begins. But it is also true that in most situations logic is simply rationalization of an infra-logical aim. Women know this; even the best educated of them know that arguments with their men-folk are disguised realpolitik. It is not a contest of mental agility with the right as the victor’s spoils, but a contest of wills. The rules of logical discourse are no more relevant than the Marquess of Queensberry’s are to a pub brawl. Female hard-headedness rejects the misguided masculine notion that men are rational animals. Male logic can only deal with simple issues: women, because they are passive and condemned to observe and react rather than initiate, are more aware of complexity. Men have been forced to suppress their receptivity, in the interests of domination. One of the possible advantages of the infantilization of women is that they might after all become, in the words of Lao-Tse, ‘a channel drawing all the world towards it’ so that they ‘will not be severed from the eternal virtue’ and ‘can return again to the state of infancy’.
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We can say the brotherhood of man, and pretend that we include the sisterhood of women, but we know that we don’t. Folklore has it that women only congregate to bitch an absent member of their group, and continue to do so because they are too well aware of the consequences if they stay away. It’s meant to be a joke, but like jokes about mothers-in-law it is founded in bitter truth. Women don’t nip down to the local: they don’t invent, as men do, pretexts like coin-collecting or old-schoolism or half-hearted sporting activities so that they can be together; on ladies’ nights they watch frozen-faced while their men embrace and fool about commenting to each other that they are all overgrown boys.
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Of the love of fellows they know nothing. They cannot love each other in this easy, innocent, spontaneous way because they cannot love themselves. What we actually see, sitting at the tables by the wall, is a collection of masked menials, dressed up to avoid scrutiny in the trappings of the status symbol, aprons off, scent on, feigning leisure and relaxation where they feel only fatigue
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Every wife who slaves to keep herself pretty, to cook her husband’s favourite meals, to build up his pride and confidence in himself at the expense of his sense of reality, to be his closest and effectively his only friend, to encourage him to reject the consensus of opinion and find reassurance only in her arms is binding her mate to her with hoops of steel that will strangle them both. Every time a woman makes herself laugh at her husband’s often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks at his woman and says ‘What would I do without you?’ is already destroyed. His woman’s victory is complete, but it is Pyrrhic.
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Mystery, magic, champagne, ceremony, tenderness, excitement, adoration, reverence – women never have enough of it. Most men know nothing about this female fantasy world because they are not exposed to this kind of literature and the commerce of romanticism. The kind of man who studies this kind of behaviour and becomes a ladies’ man whether for lust or love or cupidity is generally feared and disliked by other men as a gigolo or even a queer.
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The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed slavery of the wife … Within the family he is the bourgeois and his wife represents the proletariat. Friedrich Engels, ‘The Origin of the Family’, 1943
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Nagging, overweight and premature aging are the outward signs of misery, and they are so diffuse among women in our society that they do not excite remark. Women feel guilty about all of them: they are the capital sins of ‘letting yourself go’.
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But if men are content to spend their leisure time with their intellectual inferiors, why cannot women be so? Women may remark with contempt that men are nine-to-five intellectuals, and can only relax when the heat is off and they can chat with a moron. They play Daddy the all-knowing, and their chosen dates play breathless daughter. By and large the gibe is true. But it is also true that in too many cases female intellectuals are arrogant, aggressive, compulsive and intense. They place too high a value on their dubious educational achievements, losing contact with more innocent recreations. They seek a male whose achievements will give value to their own, an ego to replace their own insufficiency, and most men are quick to sense the urgency of the quest. Many men tire of morons easily, but are more deeply repelled by blue-stockings. Rather than seek to be squired and dated by their rivals why should it not be possible for women to find relaxation and pleasure in the company of their ‘inferiors
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An eminent lady professor, addressing an adult education group at a northern university, lamented the fact that male chauvinism prevented educated men from dating the equally qualified and very accessible girls at the same institution. The girls could not be expected to hobnob with the less educated, inferior men, and so they went out with no one.
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Experience is too costly a teacher: we cannot all marry in order to investigate the situation. The older sisters must teach us what they found out.
