REVIEW: Are Woman Human?

I don't want the title to fool you into thinking that this is an actual review on the essay by Dorothy Sayers. It just helps me to keep my posts organized.


A little bit about Dorothy Sayers...
She translated Dante's Purgatory into English. She was one of the first females to attend Oxford, she was a Christian humanist, and she was close friends with C.S. Lewis. Also, this book was recommended by Ravi Zacharias!

Some things I didn't know.
Introduction:
Sir Thomas More was exceptional , though not unique, in providing a classical education for his daughters, and they, though exceptionally privileged, were not unique in receiving and using their education constructively.

To aim directly at serving the community and serve the work...If your heart is not wholly in the work, the work will not be good-and work that is not good serves neither God nor the community; it only serves Mammon. ("Why work?")

Are Woman Human? address
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; 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. (p.24)

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 about themselves. (p.25)

When the pioneers of university training for women demanded that women should be admitted to the universities, the cry went up at once: "Why should women want to know about Aristotle?" ....What women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle. (p. 26)

The fact remains that the home contains much less of interesting activity than it used to contain. What is more, the home has so shrunk to the size of a small flat that -even if we restrict woman's job to the bearing and rearing of families-there is no room for her to even do that. (p.32)

I am always entertained...by newsmongers who inform us, with a bright air of discovery, that they have questioned a number of female workers and been told by one and all that they are "sick of the office and would love to get out of it". In the name of God, what human being is not, from time to time, heartily sick of the office and would not love to get out of it. (p.35)

What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: "You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls"; if the answer is, "But I don't," there is no more to be said. (p.39)

...The woman's point of view has no value at all. In fact, it does not exist. No special knowledge is involved, and a woman's opinion on literature or finance is valuable only as the judgement of an individual.

"Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a babyface, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopaedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won't accept her as is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex." (P.44)

Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross.