based largely on chastity as a moral value. The great female tragedies are stories of sexual falls. The tragic flaw in a female hero—
H ardy’s Tess or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina— is sexual desire. All
the drama of a female life, in great or in banal works, basically
replicates the biblical fall. Seduction (or rape) means knowledge,
which is sexual desire; sexual desire means descent into sin and
inevitable punishment. As a cultural symbol, the good female is
innocent: innocent of sex, innocent of knowledge— chaste in both
ways. H istorically, ignorance has been a form of grace for the good
woman; education was denied women to keep them morally good.
The elevation of a woman requires that she have this innocence,
this purity, this chastity: she must not know the world, which men
embody. The worship of a woman or a female religious symbol is
often the unmediated worship of chastity. The virgin is the great
religious symbol of female good, the female who is by nature (in
her body) good, who embodies the good. The awe and honor accorded the chaste female by men are frequently pointed to to show that men do not hate or degrade women, that men worship, adore,
and admire women. The m orally superior nature of women is honored mostly in the abstract, and women are worshiped mostly in the abstract. The worship is worship of a sym bol— a symbol ma
nipulated to justify the uses to which fallen women are put. The
morally good woman is put on a pedestal—a small, precarious,
raised stage, often mined, on which she stands for as long as she
can—until she falls off or jumps or it goes boom.
In the secular world, women are also credited with having a
sense of good that is intrinsically female, a sense of good that men
do not have. This is a frequent feature of contemporary environmentalist or antimilitarist movements. Women are seen to have an inborn commitment to both clean air and peace, a moral nature
that abhors pollution and murder. Being good or moral is viewed
as a particular biological capacity of women and as a result women
are the natural guardians of morality: a moral vanguard as it were.
Organizers use this appeal to women all the time. Motherhood is
especially invoked as biological proof that women have a special
relationship to life, a special sensitivity to its meaning, a special,
intuitive knowledge of what is right. Any political group can appropriate the special moral sensibility of women to its own ends: most groups do, usually in place of offering substantive relief to
women with respect to sexism in the group itself. Women all along
the male-defined political spectrum give special credence to this
view of a female biological nature that is morally good.
However this premise about a biologically based morality is
used, the woman-superior model of antifeminism is operating to
keep women down, not up, in the crude world of actual human
interchange. To stay worshiped, the woman must stay a symbol
and she must stay good. She cannot become merely a human in the
muck of life, morally flawed and morally struggling, committing
acts that have complex, difficult, unpredictable consequences. She
must not walk the same streets men do or do the same things or
have the same responsibilities. Precisely because she is good, she
is unfit to do the same things, unfit to make the same decisions, unfit to resolve the same dilemmas, unfit to undertake the same responsibilities, unfit to exercise the same rights. Her nature is
different— this time better but still absolutely different— and
therefore her role must be different. The worshiping attitude, the
spiritual elevation of women that men invoke whenever they suggest that women are finer than they, proposes that women are what men can never be: chaste, good. In fact men are what women can
never be: real moral agents, the bearers of real moral authority and
responsibility. Women are not kept from this moral agency by biology, but by a male social system that puts women above or below simple human choice in m orally demanding situations. The spiritual superiority of women in this model of ludicrous homage
isolates women from the human acts that create meaning, the human choices that create both ethics and history. It separates women out from the chaos and triumph of human responsibility by
giving women a two-dimensional m orality, a stagnant m orality,
one in which what is right and good is predetermined, sex-deter-
mined, biologically determined. The worship of women, devotion
to that in woman which raises man, respect for some moral sensibility allegedly inborn only in women, is the seductive antifeminism, the one that entrances women who have seen through the other kinds. Being worshiped (for most women) is preferable to
being defiled, and being looked up to is better than being walked
on. It is hard for women to refuse the worship of what otherwise is
despised: being female. Woman’s special moral nature has sometimes been used to plead her case: being moral, she w ill be able to upgrade the m orality of the nation if she has the rights of citizenship, the tone of the marketplace if she is employed, the quality of the church if she officiates, the humanism of government if she is
in it; being moral, she w ill be on the side of good. It has also been
argued, more loudly and more often, that her moral nature must
not be contaminated by vulgar responsibilities; that she has a special moral role to play in making the nation and the world good—
she must be in her person the example of good that w ill civilize and
educate men and make the nation moral. One cannot do what men
do—not in government, not in the family, not even in religion, not
anywhere—and be an example of good. “It is the task of the Positive Woman, ” wrote Phyllis Schlafly, “to keep America good. ” 1
Women keep Amerika good by being good. Many women who
hate Schlafly’s politics would agree that women have a special
moral responsibility “to keep America good. ” They have a different political program of good in mind and a different conception of women’s rights, but their conception of a biologically determined morality in which women are better than men is not different. Antifeminism allows for this sentimentality, encourages and exploits this self-indulgence; liberation does not. As Frederick
Douglass wrote over a century ago: “We advocate women’s rights,
not because she is an angel, but because she is a woman, having the
same wants, and being exposed to the same evils as man. ” 2
The woman-superior model of antifeminism also takes a sexual
form, one that is purely pornographic. The central conceit of