Are Women Human? (Back to the Future, Part 17)

It's been nearly 49 years since the Roe v. Wade decision was issued by the US Supreme Court on 22 January 1973. Norma McCorvey, the "Jane Roe" in the case, lived in Texas, where abortion was was illegal, except when the life of the pregnant woman was at stake. Opponents of abortion have never accepted the court's 7-2 decision, and the efforts to overturn Roe have been unending in the decades since.

Now, with a new Texas abortion law in place--one that clearly violates the Roe decision (and doesn't allow abortion even to preserve the life of a woman), and with the Supreme Court considering a Mississippi abortion case that could overturn Roe, the crazy train to Gilead is picking up steam as it barrels down the track--we're now hurtling back to the future at a breakneck pace. Who is behind the wheel?

Is it Tate Reeves, the governor of Mississipi, who insists on "individual liberty" and "my body, my choice" when it comes to vaccines, but is hell-bent on denying women the same control over their own bodies when it comes to pregnancy? 

Is it Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the most recently installed Supreme Court justice, who blithely hand-waves a woman's autonomy, agency, and self-determination--and who thinks it's perfectly fine to force a woman to give birth because she can just dump an unwanted newborn at a "safe haven" drop-box while she is on her way to the gym or the grocery store and, hey, problem solved!

Or is it Madison Cawthorn, unbelievably an elected member of the US House of Representatives, who has said the quiet part out loud--it's not like women are people, they are just like pickle jars, only made of clay instead of glass, "earthenware vessels," in his words, with a baby stuck inside instead of a dill. (He's so proud of himself he not only repeated his words in a tweet, he included a clip of his speech as recorded on C-SPAN.)

The truth is, no one is driving this runaway train. We're heading not just back to a time before Margaret Atwood's fictional Gilead or even before the U.S. pre-Roe--we're heading back to a much grimmer future.

And so I have posted here an essay I first wrote in August 2012--it was originally printed as an op-ed in my local newspaper, but I had only 800 words, hardly enough for what I wanted to say. I published this more complete piece on my own website in September 2012.

Without any revision, the piece is as relevant today as it was when I wrote it nearly ten years ago . . .*

Are Women Human?

Last March, just a month into the spring semester, a shy student who usually sat quietly in the back row came dancing into the classroom, waving a handful of printed pages over her head. Instead of climbing over chairs and other students and backpacks on her way to her usual retreat in the last row of desks, she came right up to me, where I was standing in the front of the room. What was she so excited about? She had a photocopy of Jessica Winter’s Time essay, “Are Women People?” in her hands, and she was excited because she thought it was a perfect piece for our class discussion.

Christine de Pizan,
from MS Harley 4431
(British Library)

She was right—it was perfect for our discussion. We had just finished reading Christine de Pizan’s fifteenth-century defense of women, The Book of the City of Ladies, on the very day that Winter’s essay had been published. And the question of women's humanity was very much on Pizan's mind as she wrote. 

But the fact that Winter was struggling with that same question more than six hundred years later was deeply unsettling. Are women people, she asks? “I’ve always assumed that women are fully autonomous human citizens—who vote, even!” Winter wrote, “but now I’m not so certain.”

The question of whether women are, rightly considered, “people” has a long history. Winter certainly isn’t the first to ask. And her wonderful piece, which appeared in the midst of the Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke controversy, is smart, articulate, and funny. (Are women people? “Only when they’re pregnant.” “They’re more like really expensive blow-up dolls.” “Not quite—they’re objects with certain people-like traits.”) But Winter doesn’t address the long history of the question she was confronting.

Are women human? Philosophers, theologians, biologists and physicians, lawyers—well, all men, really—have been asking this very question for millennia. And for more than two thousand years, their answer to that question has pretty much been the same. Are women human? Sort of, maybe, well, in a way, but not really, no, I don’t think so.

My students had been shocked when they first began reading The Book of City of Ladies. There, in the opening pages, Pizan’s first-person narrator, “Christine,” is reduced to the depths of self-loathing:

I finally decided that God formed a vile creature when He made woman, and I wondered how such a worthy artisan could have deigned to make such an abominable work which . . . is the vessel as well as the refuge and abode of every evil and vice. . . . I detested myself and the entire feminine sex, as though we were monstrosities in nature.

My students were horrified. How could a woman write such things about women? How could Pizan suggest women were "vile" or "abominable," much less conclude that they were the source of "every evil and vice"? Why would she even suggest the possibility that women were “monstrosities in nature”? And why would “Christine” pray to God in her agony, asking, “Alas, God, why did You not let me be born in the world as a male”? 

That’s when we had to stop to look at the complex, contentious, ugly history of the question to which Pizan was responding in 1405. Are women human?

When Pizan, through her first-person narrator, "Christine," refers to women as “monstrosities in nature,” she’s quoting Aristotle, whose profoundly influential views about women still reverberate in today’s political debates. From Aristotle’s perspective, men and women are clearly so different that it might well be asked whether they even belong to the same species: “One might raise the question why woman does not differ from man in species, when female and male are contrary and their difference is a contrariety” (Metaphysics). Although Aristotle ultimately decides that women do belong to the same species as men, he rejects the views of earlier philosophers that women, like men, contribute “seed” to reproduction. Women are cold, infertile, and passive; they contribute only matter or “stuff” to reproduction. Men alone contribute seed, soul, life force—in other words, the right stuff.

But Aristotle’s most influential “truth” about women is found in his biological work (On the Generation of Animals). A woman may be the same species as a man, but she is by no means his equal:

Just as it sometimes happens that deformed offspring are produced by deformed parents, and sometimes not, so the offspring produced by a female are sometimes female, sometimes not, but male. The reason is that the female is as it were a deformed male.

So there it is. Are women human? To be fully human is to be male. To be female is to be deformed, a failure of the reproductive process. To be female is to be almost human, just not quite.

And thus another question arises. What is the place of this almost-human-but-not-quite creature in society? To be male is to be fully rational—the human species is distinguished by its rationality, according to Aristotle. But to be female is to be irrational. Women have some rational faculties, but only within limits (Politics):

A question may indeed be raised, whether there is any excellence at all in a slave beyond and higher than merely instrumental and ministerial qualities. . . . Since they are men and share in rational principle, it seems absurd to say that they have no virtue. A similar question may be raised about women and children. . . .

Yes, a woman has some rational faculty, Aristotle decides, but her limited rational faculty is “without authority”—the child also has some rational faculty, “but it is immature.” Presumably, a male child’s rational faculty will mature; a girl’s will not. Without authority, a woman is bound to obey. She is a “natural subject”: just as the “free man rules over the slave,” “the male rules over the female” (and “the man over the child”). A woman’s “virtues” are silence and obedience.

The influence of Aristotle’s view of woman is incalculable. The Roman physician, Galen, adopted Aristotle’s conclusions about women. Women were necessary for reproduction, certainly: “there needs to be a female,” Galen concedes. “Indeed, you ought not to think that our Creator would purposely make half the whole race imperfect, and as it were, mutilated, unless there was to be some great advantage in such a mutilation” (On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body). The “advantage” to her “mutilation” is her role in reproduction. A woman can give birth.

Galen would remain the foremost medical authority well into the early modern world. Aristotle, meanwhile, was so important that he was, throughout the Middle Ages, known simply as “the philosopher.” No name was necessary. Thus Dante does not need to name him in the fourth canto of Inferno—there, in the middle of all the great philosophers, Dante writes, is il maestro di color che sanno, “the master of those who know.”

So famous and influential is Aristotle that when Christine de Pizan wrote The Book of the City of Ladies in 1405, she didn’t need to identify the source of the view that women were “monstrosities in nature.” That wasn’t her view, or the view of “Christine,” her first-person narrator—that was Aristotle’s view and the view of all the male authorities who followed him. No matter what else they disagreed about, philosophers, theologians, legal scholars, doctors, poets, and politicians could “all concur in one conclusion.” They all “judged, decided, and concluded against women.” Women were the “vessel as well as the refuge and abode of every evil and vice.” They were “monstrosities in nature.”

And it wasn’t just the Greeks and the Romans, of course—Christian theologians were also pretty clear on the subject. Consider the views of St. Augustine, one of the great Latin "fathers" of the church. On the one hand, he seems to reject a woman’s femaleness as a physical defect, rendering her less than fully human (male). “There are some who think that in the resurrection all will be men,” he writes, considering the view of those Christian thinkers who argued that, in heaven, imperfect women would find themselves perfected, losing their female bodies and becoming male. Augustine disagrees: “I think that those others are more sensible who have no doubt that both sexes will remain in the resurrection” (The City of God). He agrees that, after resurrection, “all blemishes of the body will be gone,” but a woman’s sex “is her nature and no blemish.” Both men and women inherit grace; “You created male and female, but in Your spiritual grace, they are as one” (Confessions).

But what happens after the resurrection isn’t necessarily true in this world, and while spiritually male and female “are as one,” that doesn’t quite translate to full equality. In his commentary on the meaning of Genesis, Augustine clarifies his position. How were Adam and Eve created, he asks. Adam is made in the image of God; he is complete, perfect. Eve, created from Adam’s rib, is not created in the image of God. What is her role? “Is it to work the earth with [Adam]?” Not at all, for “if the need was there, the help of another man would have been preferable.” Is it to be a companion? To be a comforting presence, in case “solitude weighed on him”? No again. “To live and to talk to each other, how preferable is the companionship of two male friends than that of a man and a woman!” Then what is a woman good for? What is her purpose? “I do not see for what goal woman would have been given to man as a helpmate if not for generating children.”

Are women human? Well, if to be fully human is to be made in the image of God, to be a helpmate in work, to be a companion in solitude, then no. A woman is sort of human. She is useful for one human function—she’s necessary for making babies.

In the centuries that followed, Christian bishops debated whether women could be called “human beings” (homines) since the word homo, used in the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, meant, strictly speaking, “man” (just as adam is the Hebrew word for “man” of “mankind”) and whether women had souls. Some of these debates may be rumored or mythic—according to one such story, the Council of Nicea (323 C.E.) debated the issue of whether women had souls and took a vote, with the women-have-souls side “winning” by only one vote. Another such account has the Council of Macon (585 C.E.) deciding that women don’t, after all, have souls. Apocryphal or not, these stories were believed, their "truths" about women perpetuated through the centuries.

Meanwhile, Aristotelian “truths” were further melded with Christian thought and belief. The greatest medieval thinker, Thomas Aquinas, asks a question that can at first seem rather startling to a modern reader: “Whether the woman should have been made in the first production of things?” (Summa Theologica). The answer is a foregone conclusion—the Christian God could never have made a mistake. In his answer to this question, which thus really isn’t a question at all, Aquinas replies that woman’s creation was “necessary.” He agrees with Aristotle that women are defective, and that women are “naturally subject to men.” Women are “the occasion for sin,” but if God had “deprived the world of all those things which proved an occasion of sin, the universe would have been imperfect.” God created women so that sin would exist! Oh, and women are also needed to be a “help” to man—their “matter” is needed for men’s “seed” in the process of reproduction.

Of course academics and scholars and linguists have contextualized, rationalized, explained, translated, retranslated, and interpreted these authors, their texts, and even their words for generations. And of course I am pulling quotations out of much larger contexts here. Of course I am not dealing with the nuances of the original Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts. But what I have indicated here is exactly how these “truths” and authorities have always been quoted, rationalized, explained, interpreted, and understood. That’s why we see them so clearly in Christine de Pizan, who wrote to defend women against such misogynist “truths.”

To the question “are women human,” Pizan responds unequivocally and unambiguously. Yes, women are human: “There is not the slightest doubt that women belong to the people of God and the human race as much as men.” she asserts. They are not “monstrosities in nature.” They are “not another species or dissimilar race,” they are fully human.

But Pizan was fighting a losing battle. Perhaps nowhere is that lost battle more obvious than in an anonymous pamphlet published in 1595, A New Disputation against Women, in Which It Is Proved That They Are Not Human Beings (Disputatio nova contra mulieres, qua probatur eas hominess non esse).** Whether or not it was originally intended as satire, it was not widely read as satire—it was reprinted, answered, translated, plagiarized, and adapted, including a 1647 variation attributed to one “Horatio Plato,” Che le donne non habbino anima e the non siano della specie degli huomini, e vienne comprobato da molti luoghi della Scrittura santa (Women Do Not Have a Soul and Do Not Belong to the Human Race, as Is Shown by Many Passages of Holy Scripture), which itself was then translated and republished. Indeed, the Disputation remained in print well into the eighteenth century (a French edition was published in 1766).

The anonymous pamphlet,
Disputatio nova contra mulieres,
1595

According to the argument presented, not even a woman’s reproductive capacity qualified her as sort of human— “the smith is not able to forge a sword unless he has the help of his hammer,” “the scribe is not able to write unless he likewise has the help of a pen,” “a tailor is unable to darn unless he has the help of a needle.” And, obviously, “a man is not able to beget unless he has the help of a woman.” But just as hammers, pens, and needles are so clearly not human, neither are women. And this is only one of the fifty “invincible” proofs offered to show that “woman is not human, nor is she saved.”

The uncertainty about women’s humanity—or, rather, the certainty that whatever they are, women aren’t fully rational, equally human—is at the root of so much of the institutional inequality that women faced and still face. In the American colonies, when Thomas Jefferson included the claim that “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, he certainly didn’t mean female persons in his construction of “all men.” 

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that women gained some measure of legal, political, and economic equality, presumably a measure of their humanity, and not until early in the twentieth that they finally got the right to vote. Reproductive rights took longer yet. At the end of the twentieth century, it almost looked as if, in the United States at least, we were ready to answer the question “are women human” with an unambiguous “yes.” 

But lately things have taken a turn for the worse. Much worse. Here we are now, in 2012, right back where we started. Women have been reduced to their reproductive capacities. They are irrational and incapable of making decisions for themselves about their own lives. They can’t be trusted to know whether they’ve been raped or not—is it really “legitimate” rape? If they wind up pregnant, it's proof that they haven't been raped—women's imperfect, deformed female bodies have magical powers to prevent pregnancy if they are truly victims of rape. (The medical view that pregnancy cannot result from rape goes back to the Middle Ages—at least to the thirteenth century, when Thomas Aquinas was asking whether God made a big goof when he created women.)

If women can't even be trusted to know whether they've had consensual sex or been raped, what decisions can they be trusted to make about their own (imperfect) bodies? If they don't know what kind of sex they've had, surely they can’t properly make decisions about whether and when to have children. Those decisions must be taken out of their hands and placed in the hands of wise (male) humans. Like those of George Bush and the rest of these guys, shown here signing yet another bill limiting women's healthcare and reproductive decisions.

George Bush, 5 November 2003,
 signing the Partial Birth Abortion Act--
WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE??

Are women human? The Sanctity of Human Life Act (HR 212), introduced into the 112th Congress by Todd Akin (he of the "legitimate rape" and the magical ability of women's bodies to "shut that whole thing [possible pregnancy] down" if they are raped) and Paul Ryan, among others, declares that “the life of each human being begins with fertilization.” 

According to definitions helpfully provided in the bill, a “human zygote, a one-celled human embryo” has all the legal rights of a “human” or “human being,” by which the bill means “each and every member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, beginning with the earliest stage of development, created by the process of fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent.”

Is a zygote human? According to this definition, a zygote is clearly and unambiguously fully human.

Are women human? Their autonomy, bodily integrity, and independence guaranteed under the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment? Are they thinking beings? Are they entitled to make decisions about their own lives? That, unfortunately, is not nearly so clear.

The Violence Against Women Act expired at the end of September 2011. After nearly a year of wrangling, it still has not been renewed. Women are apparently not human enough to guarantee their protection from from violence. Sixty-eight U.S. Senators thought women were worth protecting, passing the renewal of the VAWA. In the U.S. House, meanwhile, 221 members, a majority of those voting in May, agreed that, while some women might be human enough to bother about, Native American women, LGBT women, and undocumented immigrant women were definitely not quite human enough to worry about; the House version of the VAWA left them out. If they have to be included, well, it's just better to forget about the whole thing. There has been no reconsideration of the Violence Against Women Act in the House since.***

Meanwhile, the Equal Pay Act was first passed in 1963, its aim to end wage differences based on sex. In that year, women earned 58.9 cents for every dollar earned by men. Today, nearly 50 years later (!), women earn just 77.4 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gain of less than half a cent a year. Are women human? Not according to our value of their work.****

And while they may have been "given" the vote, God forbid women should talk about what and who to vote for. Overcome by the sound of women's voices at the Democratic National Convention, CNN's Erick Erickson [in September 2012] responded, "First night of the Vagina Monologues in Charlotte going as expected." Although more than 30 men also spoke during the Tuesday session, no one tweeted "First night of the Penis Lectures going as expected" or "First night of the Dick Talks going as expected."

Because men are human—they have ideas, opinions, hopes, and dreams. We should listen to them. 

But do women have ideas, opinions, hopes, and dreams worthy our attention? Of course not. They are merely reproductive organs, useful for sexual intercourse and childbirth, not for thinking. Or, God forbid, for talking.

Are women human?

The answer still seems to be sort of. Maybe. Well, in a way, but not really. No, I don’t think so.

Or, as Jessica Winter concludes, “they’re objects with certain people-like traits.”

. . . 

*I've updated the links--some of the original links no longer worked--and added a few others for context (the Sandra Fluke/Rush Limbaugh controversy, for example).

**For the English translation of the 1595 text, see Theresa M. Kenney's edition, "Women Are Not Human," an Anonymous Treatise and Responses. An Italian translation of the 1595 text was published in 1647, which spurred a savage response by Arcangela Tarabotti, Che le donne siano della spezie deglie uomini (Women Are of the Human Species, 1651). Kenney includes a translation of Tarabotti's piece as one of the texts in the volume.

***As indicated in the headnote, this piece was written and first published in August 2012. Since then, unfortunately but not surprisingly, efforts to permanently enact the Violence against Women Act have failed. 

After the VAWA reauthorization failed in 2012, it was temporarily reauthorized in 2013, but it expired once again on 21 December 2018. Reinstated once more in January 2019, it expired again just a month later, 15 February 2019. Another attempt to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act was made in April of 2019, but negotiations to pass it stalled in November.

HR 1620, the Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act, was introduced into the 117th US Congress on 8 March 2021. It passed the House on 17 March 2021 by a vote of 244 to 172 (yes, you read that right--apparently 172 members of the House seemed to think violence against women was okay). The bill was received by the Senate on 18 March 2021. The Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings seven months later, on 5 October 2021. And there it remains . . .

****I have written several posts on the issue of equal pay--to read more, click on the label "pay equity," below. In 2021, women still make only 82 cents for every dollar earned by men--though obviously these broad figures do not take into consideration the wage gape for women of color or the terrible price working women have paid during the global pandemic.

Finally, on this same question--"Are Women Human?"--you might enjoy Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Consideration of the Major Error in the Discussion of Woman Suffrage" (access here); two essays by Dorothy Sayers, "Are Women Human?" and "The Human-Not-Quite Human," published in a single small volume (click here); and Catharine A. MacKinnon's 2007 collection of essays, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues, which puts the question into a global context (her 1999 essay, "Are Women Human?" is available here.) 

Update, 11 December 2021: Here's another conductor on the crazy train. Governor Greg Abbott, who signed Texas S.B. 8, effectively banning abortion, strongly supports your right to bodily integrity: "This is whether or not somebody is going to have something put into their body that they do not want put into their body. That’s more than freedom, that’s the right to control and secure your own body. And that’s exactly why we’re winning on this issue." Except, ooops, he doesn't mean women who object to forced pregnancy--he means he doesn't want to have to get a COVID vaccine. These guys just can't help themselves, can they?

Update, 16 March 2022: As if you needed any more information about Republican views of a woman's humanity . . . On Monday, 14 March 2022, the Idaho Legislature, led by Republicans, passed S. B. 1309, which is now awaiting Republican Governor Brad Little's signature--the bill grants the right to control a woman's body to relatives of a "preborn" fetus. But here's the twist on the vigilantism of Texas S. B 8--in Idaho, random strangers can't sue anyone who helps a woman who is seeking an abortion. Nope--as legal experts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern note, the Idaho law would allow "the father, siblings, grandparents, aunts, and uncles of a 'preborn child' to veto an abortion. The law applies not just to minors, but to any adult seeking the procedure." And no wimpy $10,000 bounty either--in S. B. 1309, damages start at $20,000 (plus, of course, attorney's fees). 

So, no, woman, you're not human, not a grown-up person, capable of making decisions for yourself--crazy old Uncle Harry can make that decision for you and just veto the whole damn thing. 

And, hey, no worries if you happen to be a rapist!!! Be assured, you can still collect: "The bill’s sponsor, Republican state Rep. Steven Harris, has confirmed that if a rapist has 10 siblings, each can sue for $20,000." Not only can the rapist cash in, his family can too: "The bill therefore makes it incredibly easy for a sexual assailant’s family to further victimize the woman by profiting from her pregnancy."

In case you were wondering--Republicans hold a 28-7 majority in the Idaho Senate and a 58-12 majority in the Idaho House of Representatives. S. B. 1309 passed in the Idaho Senate by a vote of 28-6 and in the Idaho House of Representatives by a vote of 51-14 (also good to know--a couple of House Republicans voted against the bill because they wanted to ban abortion from the moment of fertilization, and this bill doesn't do that . . . ) 

Update, 22 March 2022: Are women human? Another big answer in the "NO" column. This time it's Oklahoma, where many Texas women have been seeking healthcare after the passage of Texas S. B. 8. No fooling around with a six-week time limit for women to exercise their control over their own bodies. Nope. Oklahoma House Bill 4327 grants full personhood to an "unborn child" that is "in any stage of gestation from fertilization until birth," and bans abortions "at any point during pregnancy."  And, by the way, according to the bill, "pregnancy" is understood to be "calculated from the first day of the woman's last menstrual period," but the bill bans any abortion counting "30 days after a person’s last menstrual period." 

Ha ha ha! Fooled you there! That word "person," as in "after a person's last menstrual period"? That's from reporter Mariel Padilla's piece posted at The 19th News. The only time "person" is used in the Oklahoma bill is in the bill's lengthy discussion of the way the law will be enforced: "This act shall be enforced exclusively through private civil actions." As in the Texas bill, a person can bring a civil action and sue everyone and anyone involved in an abortion. Yup. Another one for vigilante "justice." 

Anyway, I've been a woman for 70 years, and the confusing way this bill calculates when pregnancy begins just doesn't make logical sense--much less medical sense--to me.

Update, 23 March 2022: Calling it "unwise" (no kidding), Idaho Governor Brad Little--a Republican, in case I need to spell it out for you, signed Idaho's S. B. 1309. What the fuck, Brad? He believes that "this legislation risks retraumatizing victims by affording monetary incentives to wrongdoers and family members of rapists," but he signs it anyway? Because women can't be trusted to make sensible decisions?

Update, 5 April 2022: And now it's Oklahoma, with the state house passing S. B. 612, a total ban on abortion. The bill passed without any questions being asked, much less floor debate. An update to the update: the bill was signed into law by the governor on 12 April.

Update, 13 April 2022: Kentucky's H. B. 3, vetoed last week by the state's governor, overrode that veto and takes effect immediately, banning all abortions. In addition, 

the law institutes new regulations for patients who have abortions, including requirements that many patients with abortions file “birth-death certificates.” Physicians who perform abortions also have to report each procedure to the state, along with the method of abortion and substantial biographical detail about both the person who received the abortion and their sexual partner, including their age, race, ethnicity, hometown and health information.

HB3 also enhances the state’s power to audit abortion providers, create a state website that publishes the names of all physicians who provide abortions in Kentucky, bans telemedicine for medication abortion, further restricts the circumstances under which minors can get abortions. There are no exceptions for rape or incest.

Go, Kentucky, first state in the nation to go all-in on denying women personhood.

Update, 14 April 2022: Okay, no surprises, I guess, but today it's Florida. I would say it's the same old, same old, except this ban has an extra-dose of cruelty: no exceptions for rape, incest, or human trafficking. (Although maybe, in the deluge, I've just missed that in other laws.)

There seems to be no point any more in keeping up these "updates." Let's just say that, soon, the question "Are Women Human" will be answered, in a majority of states, with a big, fat "NO."

Update, 2 May 2022: That didn't take long. This answer from the Supreme Court is clearly "NO."

Update, 2 May 2022: And now, Louisiana has decided that "equal protection of the laws" should be granted to "an individual human being" from the "moment of fertilization"--though, obviously, this law does not apply to a female human being. House Bill 813 would also classify abortion as a homicide, allowing for women to be charged with murder, and would limit birth control options (such as oral contraceptives that prevent implantation and IUDs). Also, good to note: Louisiana has the highest maternal mortality rate in the U.S. 

Bottom line: women aren't real people, but a fertilized egg is. 

And if women aren't real people in Louisiana, god help Black women, because the state sure won't. In an interview for the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health (19 May 2022; the series is called Public Health on the Brink, I kid you not), Senator Bill Cassidy had this to say about the state's horrific maternal mortality rate: “About a third of our population is African American; African Americans have a higher incidence of maternal mortality. So, if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear.” Yeah, he actually said that--just don't count Black women. He's a fucking doctor! M.D., Louisiana State University--for shame. Best online comment in response to Cassidy's dumbassery: "Prostate cancer death rates are only bad if you count men."

Update, 3 May 2022: Oklahoma again. This time a vigilante law--S. B. 1503 "would also allow private citizens to bring a civil lawsuit against a person who performs or induces an abortion, intends to perform an abortion, or knowingly aids or abets an abortion, such as paying for the procedure. Under the bill, relief would include at least $10,000 in statutory damages for each abortion the defendant performed or aided in violation of the act, legal fees and compensatory damages." At least this Oklahoma bill doesn't allow a woman's rapist to collect the bounty. (Looking at you, Idaho.)

Update, 10 May 2022: In the U.S. Senate today, Steve Daines (Republican, Montana), compared women to sea turtles and eagles, arguing that if we protect "pre-born baby turtles" and "pre-born baby eagles," we should ban abortion. Or something like that . . . Pretty sure that he must think that women are animals, just not human animals. (Neither a turtle nor a bird is a mammal, so I'm not even sure what class of animal women might be . . . )

Update, 19 May 2022: Jeez, Oklahoma is back at it, adding even more draconian measures just for shits and giggles. As if the two previous bills passed in the last month+ weren't bad enough, the Oklahoma House today passed S. B. 4327, this one banning abortion "from the stage of 'fertilization.'" In case you were in any doubt, Governor Kevin Stitt signed it into law.

Update, 26 May 2022: What is going on in Oklahoma????? Just a day after the state enacted a law that bans all abortions from the moment of fertilization, now gubernatorial candidate Mark Sherwood claims that life begins before conception: "I believe life begins in God before it begins at conception.” And as if the new Oklahoma law isn't enough, he wants to enact some kind of law that will increase punishments for abortion. WHAT????? The chyron running under his interview, broadcast on Real America's Voice, identifies him as a doctor--he's a doctor of naturopathy. Evidently naturopaths don't study biology. Or is he saying that men who masturbate will now be punished for abortion? I could almost get on board the crazy train with good old Mark Sherwood if that were what he was claiming . . . 

I suppose this doesn't really have anything to do with the "are women human?" question any more, but somehow I can't quit.

Is it time to quit now, when Roe is overturned? (click here)

Update, 26 October 2023: I obviously haven't updated here for a while, but I thought I had to insert this clip of the new Speaker of the House of Representatives weighing in on the question? Are women human? Not if it means that they have rights and stuff, obviously. Women are only useful to be forced to produce more "able-bodied workers"!!!!!!

Update, 2 November 2024: Here it is, straight from the horse's mouth ass. Donald Trump: "He was hit by some of the strongest, not human beings, women."

Lucrezia Marinella, "A Woman of Wondrous Eloquence and Learning"

Lucrezia Marinella Vacca (9 August 1600)

Despite her literary fame among her contemporaries, we know very little about Lucrezia Marinella's life. She was born in Venice in 1571. She married Girolamo Vacca, but just when is not clear. We know that she had two children, Antonio and Paulina, only because they are named in her will, dated to 1645, and in a codicil, added in 1648, she mentions a granddaughter. She died on 9 October 1653 and was buried in the church of San Pantaleone, in Dorsoduro, one of the six sestiere, or districts, of Venice.

About Marinella's life, Letizia Panizza notes, "Despite the fame bestowed on her by her publications, her own life was lived in seclusion--the norm, it must be said, for a Venetian woman of her social rank, regardless of intellectual status."*

Marinella "did not travel," and "there is no evidence" that she was included in any of the intellectual and literary academies in the city. Nor is there any "record of her corresponding with her admirer Arcangela Tarabotti," her contemporary, living in the convent of Sant'Anna, whose own work, protesting “paternal tyranny,” addressed themes similar to those treated by Marinella.

Marinella does not seem to have known about another Venetian contemporary, the Jewish writer Sarra Copia Sulam, who was able to form a salon and engage in intellectual discussion with a variety of men of letters. Nor does Marinella mention the Venetian poet Veronica Franco, who died in 1591, just before Marinella begins her literary career.

But Marinella's work survives. Between 1595 and 1606, she published  ten books--including a sacred epic, The Holy Dove (La colomba sacra); an epic on the life of St. Francis; a life of the Virgin Mary, La vita di Maria Vergine imperatrice dell'universo; an anthology of sacred verses; a pastoral drama, Happy Arcadia (Arcadia felice); a life of the virgin-martyr St. Justine; a major prose life of St. Catherine of Siena; and a heroic epic, Enrico; or Byzantium Gained (L'Enrico overo Bisantio acquistato). 

I am posting about Lucrezia Marinella today, 9 August, because a dedicatory letter prefacing her most well known work, The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, is dated 9 August 1600.

When I first ordered a copy of Marinella's book for my university's library, the collection specialist laughed uneasily at its title, so it's important to say something about that before we go any further. Marinella's title may seem odd, if not funny--or perhaps even offensive--today, but the title is carefully crafted and demonstrates that Marinella's work is a direct response to a vicious attack on women that was published in Venice in 1599, Giuseppi Passi’s The Defects of Women (I donneschi difetti). 

Passi’s Defects is a scathing attack on women, and it is voluminous in its treatment of women’s defects, running to nearly four hundred printed pages. It is also a work that proved exceedingly popular, running through at least three editions between 1599 and 1618. (Marinella’s book seems to have been republished at the same pace as Passi’s: the first edition of The Nobility and Excellence of Women was published in 1600, a second edition in 1601, and a third in 1621.)

To be sure, Passi does not present his work as an attack on women but, rather, as a book with an entirely worthy purpose, that of warning young men about women’s faults: “young men, in reading this book and learning of the deceits of women,” will be kept out of harm’s way, and to this end, Passi says that he will “consider carefully and discuss the infinite events that have befallen men on account of women.” In support of his “warning” Pass cites nearly two hundred and fifty authorities listed alphabetically, from Accurso and Augustine to Virgil and Xenarchus, at the beginning of his book.

Having marshaled his authorities for the reader’s immediate consumption, Passi then follows with a table of contents designed to illustrate his assertion that women are “defective”--and, if unchecked, a danger to men. This table summarizes the contents of the thirty-five chapters that follow. He begins with a chapter devoted to defining “woman,” then proceeds to a series of chapters, each devoted to a particular “defect”: “proud women,” “avaricious and traitorous women,” “lustful women” (with their inordinate appetites), “irascible women,” “gluttonous and drunken women,” “envious women,” “boastful women,” “ambitious women,” “ungrateful women”--all in the first ten chapters.

Women are pitiless, adulterous and “roving”; women prey on men, selling their own sexuality--as prostitutes and whores--or selling other women, as bawds. Women dabble in magic, they color their hair, they love to adorn their bodies with beautiful clothing and jewelry, and they are entirely untrustworthy, their beauty and their advice equally dangerous to men. Chapter 21 is devoted, simply enough, to jealous women, while Chapter 22 bristles with synonyms, devoted to women who are fickle, inconstant, unstable, frivolous, credulous, foolish, and stupid. Further chapters focus on women who are nosy, litigious, hypocritical, vain, and, in another chapter filled with excess, “faint-hearted, cowardly, timid, and fearful”; women are “worthless, incompetent, and useless.” Women are obstinate, indolent, thieving, tyrannical, fraudulent, and, in yet another bit of overkill, “slanderous, talkative, feigning, biting, and lying.” And, finally, they are unable to bear any of life’s adversities.

As if this comprehensive enumeration of women’s weaknesses isn’t enough, Passi provides yet another extensive list, this one a detailed, eight-page table of all the “notable things contained in the work,” a more-or-less alphabetical hodge-podge of women’s faults (from their appetite for wine, for example, to their venery), of infamous women (from Agrippina the lustful, for example, to Xantippe, the quarrelsome wife of Socrates), and of praise for assorted worthy men (Alexander the Great, for example, noted for his continence) and their revelation of women’s failings (Virgil, for example, who is said to have given evidence of women’s rapacity). If you're inclined, you can take a look at Passi's diatribe by clicking here.

In her discussion of Lucrezia Marinella's literary response to The Defects of Women, Panizza calls her work “dazzling” and “blistering”—a veritable “fireworks display” of Marinella's “stunning” mastery of philosophical, medical, historical, and literary authorities and arguments. Panizza notes that it was composed “at a furious rate” as a direct reply to the misogyny of Passi.

To that end, Marinella’s response to The Defects of Women is two-fold, as indicated by the title my friend and colleague found so funny: first, Marinella will defend women’s “nobility and excellence” against attacks like Passi’s, and then she will herself go on the attack, enumerating the “defects and vices” of men.

In countering Passi’s attacks, Marinella throws male authorities back at Passi—Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Petrarch, and Dante, to name only a few, are all used to defend woman’s nature, her “essence,” and even the very name, “woman,” by which she is known. As Marinella reaches her fifth chapter, “Of Women’s Noble Actions and Virtues, Which Greatly Surpass Men’s, As Will Be Proved by Reasoning and Example,” Marinella is ready to move from defending women to cataloguing their abilities. She has already shown that women possess nobility of soul; now she is ready to show “that their actions are more esteemed than men’s.”

Marinella relates the stories of “learned women and those who are illustrious in many arts,” of “temperate and continent women,” and of “prudent women and those expert at giving advice.” “It is a fact known to everyone,” Marinella asserts, that “we never see or read about [women] getting drunk or spending all day in taverns, as dissolute men do, nor do they give themselves unrestrainedly to other pleasure.” Women are “moderate and frugal in everything.” 

After completing her argument that women are “far nobler and more excellent than men,” Marinella then undertakes what none of her predecessors since Christine de Pizan has dared: she not only “corrects” men’s judgments about women, but she challenges specifically, and by name, a number of her male contemporaries, specifically those who have, motivated by the “arrogance” and “envy” of Aristotle, revived his “shameful and dishonorable” denigration of women.

One final aspect of Marinella’s writing back to Passi is the way she has constructed her work. She is not only responding to them, she is mirroring them. She responds to each argument with a corresponding argument, each quotation with a countering quotation, each example with an example of her own. 

Lucrezia Marinella’s Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, first published in 1600, was expanded and republished in 1601. A third edition appeared in 1621. 

But, like so many women intellectuals and writers who preceded her, Lucrezia Marinella, renowned for her “eloquence and learning,” was rather quickly forgotten. As Panizza indicates, “after her own century, Marinella’s name and The Nobility and Excellence of Women become items in catalogues,” and her “works all but disappeared from sight.” 

Lucrezia Marinella is mentioned twice in the eighteenth century and once in the nineteenth; her works were not republished. Even as the twentieth century drew to an end, only one of Marinella’s many and varied works, her 1605 Arcadia felice, finally appeared in a critical edition in Italian in 1998. 

Anne Dunhill’s 1999 translation of Marinella’s The Nobility and Excellence of Women, with its excellent introduction by Letizia Panizza, which I've quoted here, was the first time any of her work was made available in English. Marinella's epic, Enrico, is now also available in a new English translation, as is her life of Mary and her Exhortations to Women.

These new editions all contain excellent introductory materials, but if you are wanting an easily accessible biography, with a particular analysis of Marinella's arguments in The Nobility and Excellence of Women, the entry on Marinella at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is particularly good, and it contains an excellent bibliography.

*Parts of this post have been adapted from Debating Women, Politics, and Power in Early Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan).

Valerie Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto

Valerie Solanas (born 9 April 1936)

If she had lived, Valerie Solanas would have been seventy-nine years old today, two years younger than Gloria Steinem, who is still vigorous, active, and involved, an iconic--and beloved--figure in the second-wave feminist movement. But Solanas died in 1988, at age fifty-two. She is not a revered figure whose life and work are celebrated. No major universities have endowed academic chairs in her name. A polarizing figure, at best, Solanas is still the subject of scorn and vitriol, nearly thirty years after her death.

Many people despise her--I am not one of them.

Solanas was a provocateur, radical and volatile. She was angry, confrontational, and violent--and while I do not excuse her acts of violence, neither do I believe her to be a depraved monster. 

In the past, I have compared Valerie Solanas to a woman whom I have already profiled in this blog, Arcangela Tarabotti.* And in many ways, it is hard to say which is more shocking today, Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny or Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. I've taught both texts to classes full of college students, and my sense is that they find Tarabotti's work every bit as challenging and upsetting as Solanas's.

I was in college when the Women’s Liberation movement was born, when the newly formed National Organization of Women celebrated Mother’s Day by demanding “Rights, Not Roses,” when a group of New York feminists protested by burying a dummy of “Traditional Womanhood” at a peace rally in Washington D. C., when Angela Davis was on the FBI’s list of the “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives,” and when a group of lesbian radicals began publishing The Furies, a “lesbian/feminist monthly.”

In the midst of all of this, in early 1967, Valerie Solanas began selling mimeographed copies of her SCUM Manifesto on the streets of New York. Even though I know the context out of which she wrote, I still take a deep breath before I open up my slim copy of Solanas’s work. I know what to expect, but she still takes my breath away. 

Solanas is very clear not only about the genre but about the purpose of her work: 

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.

For a long time, Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto were largely written out of feminist history. Robin Morgan did include selections from the Manifesto in her 1970 Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (misspelling Solanas’s name as “Solanis”), and Germaine Greer wrote incisively and sympathetically about the manifesto in The Female Eunuch, published the same year.

But as second-wave feminism became less radical and more mainstream, Solanas tended to disappear. Now-classic references like Yale’s 1990 The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (1203 pages) and Bloomsbury Publishing’s 1992 Guide to Women’s Literature throughout the World: From Sappho to Atwood, Women’s Writing through the Ages (more than 5,000 entries) ignored Solanas as they helped to shape an emerging canon of “women writers.” Even today, the self-proclaimed “landmark” American National Biography, which “offers portraits of more than 17,400 men and women—from all eras and walks of life—whose lives have shaped the nation” mentions Solanas only in its entry on Andy Warhol and describes her only as an “aspiring actress.”

As for me, now that I have reread Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto before writing this post, I am struck at the visceral responses it still evokes, nearly fifty years after Solanas wrote it. While critical reassessment of Solanas’s Manifesto has begun, too many readers respond not to Solanas’s work but to her life. She is reduced to the events of 3 June 1968, when she shot Andy Warhol, and the SCUM Manifesto is read as if it were the mad ramblings of a female jihadist rather than a carefully crafted text. 

More than one careful reader has compared Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal--I have made this comparison myself, in fact. The savage satire of Swift’s “proposal” is shocking and provocative, yet this eighteenth-century text is a staple of the literature classroom—I first read it in high school, and it was assigned reading in several of my undergraduate and graduate literature courses.

Swift’s The Modest Proposal is read and taught as a conscious literary effort, a brilliant example of Juvenalian satire, perhaps inspired by the second-century Christian Father of the Church, Tertullian, and his Apology in Defense of Christianity. In his “proposal,” Swift “advocates” infanticide and cannibalism—cooking and eating Irish babies—as the only logical means of curing deplorable social, political, and economic ills. Yet no one reads Swift’s A Modest Proposal literally—or, at least, they don’t read it literally for long, if the ridicule heaped on naïve high-school students in my 1967 high school classroom was typical. If you didn’t get it, you were an idiot. Although Swift’s life ended in debility, violence, and madness, that life—and his work—aren’t reduced to his debility, violence, and madness.

Swift’s legacy is his writing—A Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels, chief among his literary achievements. But Solanas is reduced too often to “madness” and her act of violence. The SCUM Manifesto is read as the primary symptom of this madness and violence. Its craft—its satiric brilliance, its linguistic sparkle, its stylistic inventiveness (Solanas’s extravagant lists, for example, with their breathtaking juxtapositions)—is all too frequently ignored. 

But, against all odds and the many efforts to discredit her or to erase her altogether, Valerie Solanas managed to live on, despite the outrage and the efforts to make her--and her work--disappear. When she was interviewed in 1991, Solanas’s mother gave her daughter an identity that she was largely denied in her own lifetime—her daughter was a writer, Dorothy Moran insisted.

Today, there is the slick hardcover edition of the SCUM Manifesto with hot-pink endpapers and a more recent paperback (which, oddly, also uses hot pink in its design), but that radical identity Solanas dared to claim—writer—has survived in other ways, less pinkified and "girly," as witnessed by graffiti images captured by passersby and shared online.

One image, posted in December 2006 on Flickr, the popular photo-sharing website, is from a bathroom stall somewhere in New York City. On the grimy, mustard-yellow door (underneath "buns, not guns"), near the hinge, is scrawled, “Read the SCUM Manifesto.” Another photo, this one part of a series of “Ivy League” graffiti images, was posted online in 2008. It offers first a command, in large letters, “♀—read the SCUM MANIFESTO.” In smaller letters, below, the writer offers her rationale: “our justified rage can be hilarious!” And then there’s the photo of another piece of graffiti, found outside a sex shop in Gothenburg, Sweden, and posted in 2009. This image is in stark black and white, black italic script, slightly blurred, on a white stucco wall: “Valerie Was Right.”

Eva the Weaver's flikr image

In fact, I put together a visual presentation for my students in spring 2013, the last time I taught Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. I collected dozens of such graffiti images posted online, including photographs taken on the campus of Evergreen State College, in my home state of Washington, others from places as far away from one another as New Orleans and Barcelona, and  recent  stencil graffito found "earlier this year" on a wall in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

There are comic books, art school projects, blog posts (like this one), cartoons, and reimaginations posted on Facebook. And there are tons of products--jackets, "Valerie was right" barettes, t-shirts, even baby onesies. I love these memorials—testimony to the enduring nature of Solanas’s work as a writer and to the survival of her anger and her humor. 

More recently, Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto do seem to be making their way back into history. Solanas is included in both the 2004 Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century (Harvard) and in the 2005 Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography. Breanne Fahs has just published the first biography of Solanas, Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol), published by the Feminist Press. 

There are several print editions of the SCUM Manifesto available for sale on Amazon, but I first encountered the text in one of its many online iterations. For once, in the spirit of Solanas, who distributed her work on the streets of New York, I'll suggest reading it online--it's becoming increasingly difficult to find it there (free, as opposed to buying someone's version of Solanas)--but, for now, you can find the SCUM Manifesto by clicking this link. (It is a transcription done in 1994 by a writer who had a UK version of Solanas's text.)

*Parts of this post have been adapted from Reading Women's Worlds: Six Centuries of Writing by Women Imagining Rooms of Their Own. 

Arcangela Tarabotti: Anger and Indictment

Arcangela Tarabotti (born 24 February 1604)

"Arcangela" Tarabotti inhabits the kind of all-female world that Christine de Pizan imagines as a safe space for women. Tarabotti is a Benedictine nun, living in the convent of Sant’Anna in Venice.* But she’s not there because she wants to be. In the opening passage of Paternal Tyranny, she tells us who has put her there and why:

Men’s depravity could not have devised a more heinous crime than the wanton defiance of God’s inviolable decrees. Yet day in and day out, men never cease defying them by deeds dictated by self-interest. Among their blameworthy excesses, pride of place must go to enclosing innocent women within convent walls under apparently holy (but really wicked) pretexts. 

Men “force women to dwell in life-long prisons, although guilty of no fault other than being born the weaker sex. . . .” The man whom she indicts--the man who has enclosed this angry young woman in a convent, which she compares to being buried alive--is her father.

Paternal Tyranny,
retitled La Semplicita Infannata,
published after Tarabotti's death

Born Elena Cassandra Tarabotti, the eldest of nine children, Arcangela has spent most of her life physically confined by the time she writes Paternal Tyranny. Tarabotti inherited a disability from her father, a limp, which enabled him to make her disappear, for all practical purposes. As her editor Letizia Panizza notes, Tarabotti’s lameness gave her father a reason for deciding she was “unmarriageable, fit therefore only for the convent”—although the “same condition had not prevented him from marrying.”

Tarabotti was first sent to the convent of Sant’Anna as a boarder when she was eleven, but she was forced to remain there after she reached marriageable age. With no way out, she became a Benedictine nun, in 1623, when she was nineteen.

The three monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience determined the way she would live inside the walls of the convent for the rest of her life. She died in 1652, just four days after her forty-eighth birthday. The additional Benedictine vow of stability meant that she would not only remain inside the same convent for life but also that she would remain inside its walls after her death—the vow of stability required her burial inside the walls of Sant’Anna.

Thus, for Tarabotti, the all-female world of the convent, forced upon her, became both a prison and a tomb.

But her life in the convent did provide her the opportunity to educate herself, and it allowed her to become a writer. Denied a more conventional role as a mother, Tarabotti referred to her literary productions as her children. She calls Paternal Tyranny her “first offspring,” and she asserts its legitimacy—it is her “true offspring”—even while she acknowledges that it will be dismissed as “the offspring of a deranged mind.”

In a preface addressed to her readers, published in the 1643 Convent Life as Paradise, Tarabotti mentions having completed Paternal Tyranny, and in the same volume her printer advises the reader that he will soon be publishing it. Despite her hopes and his confidence, however, the work did not appear. As an indication of the many difficulties she faced in trying to get her work published, Tarabotti ultimately decided to rename her firstborn, and Paternal Tyranny became Simplicity Betrayed.

Despite her problems getting her "first born" into print, she published her Convent Life as Paradise in 1643, her Antisatire in 1644, a collection of letters in 1650, and a defense of women, Women Are of the Human Species, in 1651, the year before her death. The renamed Paternal Tyranny was eventually printed, in 1654, two years after Tarabotti’s death. Even then, it was published not in Italy but in Leiden, and not under Tarabotti’s name but an anagrammatic pseudonym, Galerana Barcitotti.

Tarabotti's first published work,
Convent Life as Paradise,
a more politically and socially
acceptable work than Paternal Tyranny

Tarabotti's Paternal Tyranny is a blazing indictment of male dominance in all its forms. She exposes “fathers” in all their manifestations—and their overwhelming hypocrisy. “What liars you men are!” she rails, “You cruel, inhuman men, forever preaching that evil is good and good is evil.” Men “glory” in their strength while they “wage war among [themselves], killing one another like wild beasts.” “This”—that is, killing one another—is “where [their] strength lies.”

She writes out of her situation but does not focus on her own situation. Instead she condemns all fathers like her own (and there are plenty of them) who similarly enclose their daughters against the daughters’ wishes, denying them what she regards as their God-given free will and forcing them to live as perpetual prisoners. Nothing is worse than the “utter barbarity of fathers against their own daughters,” she writes, although they “veil their baseness with lying phrases.” 

Fathers deceive their daughters by saying “they would only too gladly bestow generous dowries on them, but they could never be sure that their daughters would be happy . . . for so many untoward events could befall them, of which this evil world is only too full.” But all this is “pretense and open prevarication,” words pronounced by a “lying, flattering tongue.”

Fathers are only too happy to shut their daughters away and forget about them. And then Tarabotti observes: “He would never think, of course, of shutting himself up among monks, even if he were beaten black and blue. . . . [H]e preaches withdrawal and chastity for the ones he compels to enter. At the same time, footloose and fancy-free, he strives to enjoy every possible delight, drowning himself in a thousand vices.”

Her condemnation of fathers extends to the “fatherland” and to the fathers who govern Venice—they “defile” Venice, complicit in this “hideous iniquity of immuring women against their will.” They act solely out of “political expediency”—state authorities are complicit in the sacrifice of women in the economic and political interests of their families.

Tarabotti also condemns priests—in their roles as “fathers”—as well as the institutional church itself, controlled by those “holy impeccable fathers, gathered in the sacred consistory,” and the Fathers of the Church, like St. Jerome, who provided the theoretical framework for women’s “inferiority” and warned about the “dangers” they pose to men.

She condemns all male-dominated social institutions, in fact. Men conspire to deny women an education—“So shameless are you that while reproaching women for stupidity you strive with all your power to bring them up and educate them as if they were witless and insensitive.” Men deny women the legal rights they have “usurped over them so presumptuously.” And women have no economic rights whatsoever, defrauded of their rightful inheritances and denied any share in family wealth.

Tarabotti also suggests that men may act because they are afraid of women, recalling the Amazons: “Are you afraid of women in our world multiplying? What cowards!” But she cannot find strength or comfort in this memory of fearsome, warrior women: “These are no longer the times of the brave Amazons, who discreetly killed their male children so as not to be their subjects,” she admits. There is an “intricate labyrinth enclosing [women],” and Tarabotti can find no way out.

A biography of Tarabotti is available online, from the University of Chicago's Italian Women Writers website; to read it, click here. The entry for Tarabotti offers a complete bibliography and access to digitized editions of her texts in Italian.

Letizia Panizza's English translation of Paternal Tyranny is an amazing read--I can't recommend it enough. You will never forget Tarabotti's distinctive voice. Or her anger.

*This post has been adapted from Reading Women's Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing: A Guide to Six Centuries of Women Writers Imagining Rooms of Their Own.