A dog's life

"Every dispassionate investigator of the subject has agreed that woman's comparative lack of accomplishment cannot be entirely due to her not having enjoyed such opportunities, as in music, the arts, philosophy, spiritual leadership, invention, and science; yet until recently their accomplishments in these fields have been far from startling. Why have there been so few outstanding representatives of the female sex in these fields? There are many reasons....

"The truth is that if it is continually being reiterated that the individual belongs to a group that has never achieved anything and never will, and that everything ever achieved in the world has been accomplished by persons of another kind;... if you make laws to prevent her from owning property as well as laws that assign her to an inferior position in the hierarchy of statuses; if you exclude her from all activities except those limited to the menial tasks of domesticity and executing the will of her superior in looking after children; and if you conduct yourself as if you were her natural lord and master, you will succeed, have no doubt of it, in convincing her that such is the natural order of things. You may, in fact, succeed to such an extent as to engender a doglike fidelity and an utter devotion to the principle that dog is dog and master is master, each occupying the station to which God and nature have called them."

(from “Women and Creativity” in The Natural Superiority of Women, Fifth Edition, 1999 by Ashley Montagu [original edition published in 1953]; p. 204)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins