Her Mind Against Her Mind

Conversation at the Wall (1950)
by Wolfgang Hutter (1928 - 2014)

Thanks to my friend Joni
for recommending this book!
And HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

An argument against . . .
The Myth of Female Inferiority

The best slave
does not need to be beaten
She beats herself.

Not with a leather whip,
or with sticks or twigs,
not with a blackjack
or a billy club,
but with the fine whip
of her own tongue
& the subtle beating
of her mind against her mind.

For who can hate her half so well
as she hates herself?
and who can match the finesse
of her self-abuse?

Years of training
are required for this.

by Erica Jong
from the long poem
"Alcestis On The Poetry Circuit"

Murdock includes Jong's poem
in The Heroine's Journey (1990)
and writes in response:
"Because society denigrates feminie qualities a woman is not likely to value herself as a woman. She is seen and sees herself as lacking and operates out of the myth of inferiority. . . . [she observes] cultural attitudes: "Male is better" . . . [and] buys into that myth and evaluates her skills and knowledge through the lens of deficit thinking." (54)

Other names for the gender disparity
identified by Maureen Murdock and Erica Jong:
Simone de Beauvoir calls it The Second Sex (1949):

"If woman discovers herself as the inessential and never turns into the essential, it is because she does not bring about this transformation herself. . . . they have won only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received. . . . The tie that binds her to her oppressors is unlike any other. The division of the sexes is a biological given, not a moment in human history. This is the fundamental characteristic of woman: she is the Other at the heart of a whole whose two components are necessary to each other. One might think that this reciprocity would have facilitated her liberation." (28 - 29; in my copy 10 - 12)

Betty Friedan calls it The Feminine Mystique (1963):

"The problem of identity was new for women then, truly new. The feminists were pioneering on the front edge of woman’s evolution. They had to prove that women were human. They had to shatter, violently if necessary, the decorative Dresden figurine that represented the ideal woman of the last century. They had to prove that woman was not a passive, empty mirror, not a frilly, useless decoration, not a mindless animal, not a thing to be disposed of by others, incapable of a voice in her own existence, before they could even begin to fight for the rights women needed to become the human equals of men." (from Chapter 4; in my book 138)

Germaine Greer calls it The Female Eunuch (1970):

"Maybe I don’t know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. . . . I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate” -- not a female eunuch."

Jane Gallop, in Thinking Through the Body (1988),
calls it "the burden of sexual difference":

" . . . pink: that color which is one of our markers of sexual difference and which, unlike its diacritical partner blue, remains -- way past the nursery -- marked as feminine. If blue, outside the infantile realm, is no longer a particularly masculine color, might not that relate to the phallocentrism which in our culture (as well as in most if not all others) raises the masculine to the univeral human, beyond gender, so that the feminine alone must bear the burden of sexual difference?" (163)

E.g., as with the term "coed"