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The Semi-Colon
Unfortunately, this problem is not strictly a twentieth century one, as Mary Wollstonecraft remarks in 1792 that “Whilst [women] are absolutely dependent on their husbands, they will be cunning, mean, and selfish” (62). Because society teaches Woman that she requires a man in order to be whole, some women will do anything to gain that completion. Though de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in 1952, and Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963, they could have just as easily written their works in 1792. The questions that Wollstonecraft discusses in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) about woman’s subjectivity and how society differently instructs men and women are the same questions with which de Beauvoir and Friedan deal, leading de Beauvoir to remark that “These questions are not new, and they have often been answered” (152). Wollstonecraft identifies a fundamental flaw in society that has persisted for centuries: that the difference between men and women “arises from the superior advantage of liberty” (62), and not from any biological causes as patriarchal society often argues. In their efforts to keep women subjected, male “voices of tradition” (Friedan 162) have provided various arguments over the years to suggest inherent differences between men and women. De Beauvoir states that the dominant class for a long time has been men, and when the dominant class creates any argument for the subjugation of Others, it “bases its argument on a state of affairs that it has itself created” (153). Men have created a set of customs that teach men and women to behave differently, then use the results of this education, women as passive and housewives and men as active and career-oriented, to prove there is a difference between women so that they may continue the paradigm of gendered education. Harriet Taylor argues in Enfranchisement of Women (1851) that even if a custom is based “on some universal practice,” its history “is no presumption of its goodness when any other sufficient cause can be assigned for its existence” (72); however, men have constructed a system of instructing women on how to become passive Others that is predicated solely upon archaic customs. In a world that seems to be constantly innovating itself it seems