"Are Women Human?" is the title of an address given by Dorothy L. Sayers in 1938 to the Women's Society. If this essay was in the public domain, I would reproduce it on the spot and let you read it for yourself. But alas it is not, so I will try to distill some of Sayers' insights.
Sayers believed that an aspect of humanity is being an individual and being respected as such. We have tastes and preferences, strengths and weaknesses. The danger arises when categories dictate who we must be, leaving no room for our individuality. Consequently she felt that men and the feminists of her era fell into this error. On the one side, all girls must like dolls. On the opposite side, all girls can be mechanical geniuses if they are properly trained. Neither idea is sound because all humans are not the same, and if girls allowed to be human, they are not the same either.1
In addition, the idea of women copying men for that sake alone was simply absurd to Sayers. "Is it something useful, convenient and suitable to a human being as such? Or is it merely something unnecessary to us, ugly, and adopted merely for the sake of collaring the other fellow's property?"2
She writes:
2. Ibid.23.
3. Ibid.20-21.
Sayers believed that an aspect of humanity is being an individual and being respected as such. We have tastes and preferences, strengths and weaknesses. The danger arises when categories dictate who we must be, leaving no room for our individuality. Consequently she felt that men and the feminists of her era fell into this error. On the one side, all girls must like dolls. On the opposite side, all girls can be mechanical geniuses if they are properly trained. Neither idea is sound because all humans are not the same, and if girls allowed to be human, they are not the same either.1
In addition, the idea of women copying men for that sake alone was simply absurd to Sayers. "Is it something useful, convenient and suitable to a human being as such? Or is it merely something unnecessary to us, ugly, and adopted merely for the sake of collaring the other fellow's property?"2
She writes:
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 practical purposes… 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….
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?" The answer is NOT that all women would be the better for knowing about Aristotle… but simply: "What women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle. It is true that most women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him - but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him."31. Are Women Human? Dorothy L. Sayers, Eerdmans, 1971, pp. 29-30.
2. Ibid.23.
3. Ibid.20-21.
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