Ewen and Ewen

Jennifer:

Photo courtesy of sitemaker.umich.edu

In Ewen and Ewen’s Male and Female He Created Them, the words of Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, are the cause of debate. Lawrence suggested that “women were inherently inferior to men.” However, he was not alone in this idea at the time. This statement was representative of a vast majority of men. It was even backed by religious doctrine. Catholicism declared women as a now tainted sex which began with the suppression of female worship. Women were created for the sole purpose of satisfying male desire and according to Linnaeus’ schema of all living things, they are a lesser subspecies. Even Rosseau convicted women of being “innately passive and incapable of systematic thought”(366).

In Chapter 25, we see that starting in the 19^th century, the idea of sexual ambiguity began to develop. In his book, Weininger first introduces the idea that sexual identity is fluid. Although his ideas still favored the side of the male, his thoughts proved much more modern. He suggests that humanity is quite variable, which today we know to be true. 

The varying opinions of Kraft-Ebing, Weininger, and Freud on bisexuality are expressed in the article. Kraft-Ebing saw bisexuality as a developmental stage in the embryo, while Weininger saw it as morally problematic and Freud saw it as an ongoing and powerful force in the body and psyche of all people. Freud took his theory a bit further. He claimed that everyone’s gender identity at birth is the same and that any bodily function that gives pleasure is experienced as desirable. He suggests that the identity which society considers acceptable is the identity in which people are more likely to try to claim.

Carpenter describes what he considers to be the “Uranian woman” as the start of a transformation in society, one in which imposed oppositions of gender will vanish. He saw it as “an opportunity to recognize sexuality in ways that society has, until then, effectively submerged.” The psychologist, Beatrice M. Hinkle, adds to his argument by saying that “women’s affections were now free to develop”. She brings up a point that also quickly grasped my attention. “As long as women were dependent on men for the support of themselves and their children there could be no development of a real morality, for the love and the feeling of the woman were so intermingled with her economic necessities that the higher love impulse was largely undifferentiated from the impulse of self-preservation” (392). She speaks as if it is an attitude of the past. However, this is not true. I have recently had a family member of mine ask me who is going to take care of me and provide me with economic security. I was astounded when I learned that these ideas were still in existence. Of course, they were implying that it needed to be a male. However, once they realized that may not be an option, they implied it should at least be someone with a male gender. Hmm…