Sex & Character / Authorised Translation from the Sixth German Edition

by Otto Weininger

[6] Hysteria is the principal cause of much of the intellectual activity of many of the women above mentioned. But the usual view, that these cases are pathological, is too limited an interpretation, as I shall show in the second part of this work.

There remain the interesting and not infrequent cases where the talent of a clever family seems to reach its maximum in a female member of the family. But it is only talent that is transmitted in this way, not genius. Margarethe van Eyck and Sabina von Steinbach form the best illustrations of the kind of artists who, according to Ernst Guhl, an author with a great admiration for women-workers, “have been undoubtedly influenced in their choice of an artistic calling by their fathers, mothers, or brothers. In other words, they found their incentive in their own families. There are two or three hundred of such cases on record, and probably many hundreds more could be added without exhausting the numbers of similar instances.” In order to give due weight to these statistics it may be mentioned that Guhl had just been speaking of “roughly, a thousand names of women artists known to us.”

This concludes my historical review of the emancipated women. It has justified the assertion that real desire for emancipation and real fitness for it are the outcome of a woman’s maleness.

The vast majority of women have never paid special attention to art or to science, and regard such occupations merely as higher branches of manual labour, or if they profess a certain devotion to such subjects, it is chiefly as a mode of attracting a particular person or group of persons of the opposite sex. Apart from these, a close investigation shows that women really interested in intellectual matters are sexually intermediate forms.

If it be the case that the desire for freedom and equality with man occurs only in masculine women, the inductive conclusion follows that the female principle is not conscious of a necessity for emancipation; and the argument becomes stronger if we remember that it is based on an examination of the accounts of individual cases and not on psychical investigation of an “abstract woman.”

If we now look at the question of emancipation from the point of view of hygiene (not morality) there is no doubt as to the harm in it. The undesirability of emancipation lies in the excitement and agitation involved. It induces women who have no real original capacity but undoubted imitative powers to attempt to study or write, from various motives, such as vanity or the desire to attract admirers. Whilst it cannot be denied that there are a good many women with a real craving for emancipation and for higher education, these set the fashion and are followed by a host of others who get up a ridiculous agitation to convince themselves of the reality of their views. And many otherwise estimable and worthy wives use the cry to assert themselves against their husbands, whilst daughters take it as a method of rebelling against maternal authority. The practical outcome of the whole matter would be as follows; it being remembered that the issues are too mutable for the establishment of uniform rules or laws. Let there be the freest scope given to, and the fewest hindrances put in the way of all women with masculine dispositions who feel a psychical necessity to devote themselves to masculine occupations and are physically fit to undertake them. But the idea of making an emancipation party, of aiming at a social revolution, must be abandoned. Away with the whole “woman’s movement,” with its unnaturalness and artificiality and its fundamental errors.

It is most important to have done with the senseless cry for “full equality,” for even the malest woman is scarcely more than 50 per cent. male, and it is only to that male part of her that she owes her special capacity or whatever importance she may eventually gain. It is absurd to make comparisons between the few really intellectual women and one’s average experience of men, and to deduce, as has been done, even the superiority of the female sex. As Darwin pointed out, the proper comparison is between the most highly developed individuals of two stocks. “If two lists,” Darwin wrote in the “Descent of Man,” “were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music—comprising composition and performance, history, science, and philosophy, with half a dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison.” Moreover, if these lists were carefully examined it would be seen that the women’s list would prove the soundness of my theory of the maleness of their genius, and the comparison would be still less pleasing to the champions of woman’s rights.

It is frequently urged that it is necessary to create a public feeling in favour of the full and unchecked mental development of women. Such an argument overlooks the fact that “emancipation,” the “woman question,” “women’s rights movements,” are no new things in history, but have always been with us, although with varying prominence at different times in history. It also largely exaggerates the difficulties men place in the way of the mental development of women, especially at the present time.[7] Furthermore it neglects the fact that at the present time it is not the true woman who clamours for emancipation, but only the masculine type of woman, who misconstrues her own character and the motives that actuate her when she formulates her demands in the name of woman.

[7] There have been many celebrities amongst men who received practically no education—for instance, Robert Burns and Wolfram von Eschenbach; but there are no similar cases amongst women to compare with them.

As has been the case with every other movement in history, so also it has been with the contemporary woman’s movement. Its originators were convinced that it was being put forward for the first time, and that such a thing had never been thought of before. They maintained that women had hitherto been held in bondage and enveloped in darkness by man, and that it was high time for her to assert herself and claim her natural rights.