dom; I want to ask you not to settle for anything less, not to
compromise, not to barter, not to be deceived by empty promises and cruel lies. I want to remind you that slavery must be destroyed “root and branch, ” or it has not been destroyed at
all. I want to ask you to remember that we have been slaves
for so long that sometimes we forget that we are not free. I
want to remind you that we are not free. I want to ask you to
commit yourselves to a women’s revolution— a revolution of
all women, by all women, and for all women; a revolution
aimed at digging out the roots of tyranny so that it cannot
grow anymore.
9
The Root C ause
And the things best to know are first principles and causes.
For through them and from them all other things may be
known. . .
—Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I
I want to talk to you tonight about some realities and some
possibilities. The realities are brutal and savage; the possibilities may seem to you, quite frankly, impossible. I want to remind you that there was a time when everyone believed that
the earth was flat. All navigation was based on this belief. All
maps were drawn to the specifications of this belief. I call it a
belief, but then it was a reality, the only imaginable reality. It
was a reality because everyone believed it to be true. Everyone believed it to be true because it appeared to be true. The earth looked flat; there was no circumstance in which it did
not have, in the distances, edges off which one might fall;
people assumed that, somewhere, there was the final edge beyond which there was nothing. Imagination was circumscribed, as it most often is, by inherently limited and culturally conditioned physical senses, and those senses determined that the earth was flat. This principle of reality was not only theoretical; it was acted on. Ships never sailed too far in any direction because no one wanted to sail off the edge of the earth; no one
wanted to die the dreadful death that would result from such a
Delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, September 26, 1975.
reckless, stupid act. In societies in which navigation was a
major activity, the fear of such a fate was vivid and terrifying.
Now, as the story goes, somehow a man named Christopher
Columbus imagined that the earth was round. He imagined
that one could reach the Far East by sailing west. How he
conceived of this idea, we do not know; but he did imagine it,
and once he had imagined it, he could not forget it. For a long
time, until he met Queen Isabella, no one would listen to him
or consider his idea because, clearly, he was a lunatic. If anything was certain, it was that the earth was flat. Now we look at pictures of the earth taken from outer space, and we do not
remember that once there was a universal belief that the earth
was flat.
This story has been repeated many times. Marie Curie got
the peculiar idea that there was an undiscovered element
which was active, ever-changing, alive. All scientific thought
was based on the notion that all the elements were inactive,
inert, stable. Ridiculed, denied a proper laboratory by the
scientific establishment, condemned to poverty and obscurity,
Marie Curie, with her husband, Pierre, worked relentlessly to
isolate radium which was, in the first instance, a figment of her
imagination. The discovery of radium entirely destroyed the
basic premise on which both physics and chemistry were built.
What had been real until its discovery was real no longer.
The known tried-and-true principles of reality, then, universally believed and adhered to with a vengeance, are often shaped out of profound ignorance. We do not know what or
how much we do not know. Ignoring our ignorance, even
though it has been revealed to us time and time again, we
believe that reality is whatever we do know.
One basic principle of reality, universally believed and adhered to with a vengeance, is that there are two sexes, man and woman, and that these sexes are not only distinct from
each other, but are opposite. The model often used to describe
the nature of these two sexes is that of magnetic poles. The
male sex is likened to the positive pole, and the female sex is
likened to the negative pole. Brought into proximity with each
other, the magnetic fields of these two sexes are supposed to
interact, locking the two poles together into a perfect whole.
Needless to say, two like poles brought into proximity are
supposed to repel each other.
The male sex, in keeping with its positive designation, has
positive qualities; and the female sex, in keeping with its negative designation, does not have any of the positive qualities attributed to the male sex. For instance, according to this
model, men are active, strong, and courageous; and women
are passive, weak, and fearful. In other words, whatever men
are, women are not; whatever men can do, women cannot do;
whatever capacities men have, women do not have. Man is the
positive and woman is his negative.
Apologists for this model claim that it is moral because it is
inherently egalitarian. Each pole is supposed to have the dignity of its own separate identity; each pole is necessary to a harmonious whole. This notion, of course, is rooted in the
conviction that the claims made as to the character of each sex
are true, that the essence of each sex is accurately described.
In other words, to say that man is the positive and woman is
the negative is like saying that sand is dry and water is wet—
the characteristic which most describes the thing itself is
named in a true way and no judgment on the worth of these
differing characteristics is implied. Simone de Beauvoir exposes the fallacy of this “separate but equal” doctrine in the preface to The Second Sex:
In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not. . . 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.. . .
“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 pro
nounced woman to be “an imperfect man, ” an “incidental”
being. . .
Thus, humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. 1