Are Women Human Dorothy Sayers Pdf To Word
Download PDF. Are Women Human?: Address Given to a Women's Society, 1938. When I was asked to come and speak to you. Volume called Are Women Human? In this past year, as America found itself engaged regularly in discussions. Vdo Dayton Supercoder Keygen Music. To read more of Dorothy L. Sayers’s nonfiction, which.
When I was asked to come and speak to you, your Secretary made the suggestion that she thought I must be interested in the feminist movement. I replied—a little irritably, I am afraid—that I was not sure I wanted to 'identify myself,' as the phrase goes, with feminism, and that the time for 'feminism,' in the old-fashioned sense of the word, had gone past.
In fact, I think I went so far as to say that, under present conditions, an aggressive feminism might do more harm than good. As a result I was, perhaps not unnaturally, invited to explain myself.
I do not know that it is very easy to explain, without offence or risk of misunderstanding, exactly what I do mean, but I will try. The question of 'sex-equality' is, like all questions affecting human relationships, delicate and complicated. It cannot be settled by loud slogans or hard-and-fast assertions like 'a woman is as good as a man'—or 'woman's place is the home'—or 'women ought not to take men's jobs.' The minute one makes such assertions, one finds one has to qualify them. 'A woman is as good as a man' is as meaningless as to say, 'a Kaffir is as good as a Frenchman' or 'a poet is as good as an engineer' or 'an elephant is as good as a racehorse'— [End Page 165] it means nothing whatever until you add: 'at doing what?' In a religious sense, no doubt, the Kaffir is as valuable in the eyes of God as a Frenchman—but the average Kaffir is probably less skilled in literary criticism than the average Frenchman, and the average Frenchman less skilled than the average Kaffir in tracing the spoor of big game. There might be exceptions on either side: it is largely a matter of heredity and education.
When we balance the poet against the engineer, we are faced with a fundamental difference of temperament—so that here our question is complicated by the enormous social problem whether poetry or engineering is 'better' for the State, or for humanity in general. There may be people who would like a world that was all engineers or all poets—but most of us would like to have a certain number of each; though here again, we should all differ about the desirable proportion of engineering to poetry. The only proviso we should make is that people with dreaming and poetical temperaments should not entangle themselves in engines, and that mechanically-minded persons should not issue booklets of bad verse. When we come to the elephant and the racehorse, we come down to bed-rock physical differences—the elephant would make a poor showing in the Derby, and the unbeaten Eclipse himself would be speedily eclipsed by an elephant when it came to hauling logs. That is so obvious that it hardly seems worth saying. But it is the mark of all movements, however well-intentioned, that their pioneers tend, by much lashing of themselves into excitement, to lose sight of the obvious. In reaction against the age-old slogan, 'woman is the weaker vessel,' or the still more offensive, 'woman is a divine creature,' we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that 'a woman is as good as a man,' without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that.
What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: not that every woman is, in virtue of her sex, as strong, clever, artistic, level-headed, industrious and so forth as any man that can be mentioned; [End Page 166] but, that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person. A certain amount of classification is, of course, necessary for. • If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution that supports Shibboleth authentication or have your own login and password to Project MUSE, click 'Authenticate'. • • • You are not currently authenticated. • View freely available titles: OR.
“What is unreasonable and irritating is to assume that all one’s tastes and preferences have to be conditioned by the class to which one belongs. That has been the very common error into which men have frequently fallen about women – and it is the error into which feminist women are, perhaps, a little inclined to fall into about themselves.” Dorothy L. Sayers argues that every human ought to be accepted first as a person in his/her own right, with sex considered only when relevant. She had a very personal work-philosophy (saying that all she wanted in Paradise was time, space and tranquillity to work), and always stressed that it didn’t matter what kind of job you did, providing it was your job. Sex is mostly irrelevant to decide if a human being is fit for a job – and she always stressed the humanity of women, and their consequent kinship with, rather then differences from, men. The cold brain, she says, that great and sole true Androgyne, can mate indifferently with male and female and beget offspring upon itself. Another Monster Manga Download Sites there. She also insisted that the job one does defines him/her and his/her relationship with society more than sex does.
She does not say sex is never relevant, or that there can never be any rational disagreement about when it is relevant. But she does deny the frequent assumption that when one is considering a woman it is always relevant. “When Women write or talk (and they have always talked pretty freely) one gets the impression that Man as such is an open book to them The great love-lyrics, the romantic agony, the religion of beauty, the cult of the ewig Weibliches, the entire mystique of sex, is, in historic fact, of masculine invention. The exaltation of viriginity, the worship of dark Eros, the apotheosis if motherhood, are all alike the work of man: the Fatal Woman is his discovery (and so, indeed, is the Fatal Man: Faust and Don Juan, Lovelace and Manfred are not of woman born). (Notes on Dante, Purgatory 33) — Dorothy L.
Sayers – Are Women Human?