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VI Emancipated Women Following directly from the application of the principle of intermediate sexual forms in differential psychology, I must now deal for the ¤rst time with the question that this book is above all else intended to solve in theoretical and practical terms, insofar as it is not a theoretical question of ethnology and political economy, i.e., social science in the broadest sense, or a practical question of the legal and economic order, i.e., social policy: the Woman Question. However, the answer given to the Woman Question in this chapter will not solve the problem for my whole investigation. Rather, it is only a provisional answer, since it is unable to deliver more than can be concluded from the principles I established so far. Moving exclusively in the lowly sphere of individual experience, it makes no attempt at rising to any general concepts of deeper signi¤cance. The practical instructions supplied by it are not maxims of moral behavior that should, or could, regulate future experience, but only rules for technical social use, abstracted from past experience. The reason is that I make no attempt as yet to examine the male and female type, a task which I leave to the second part. This provisional examination is designed to present only those characterological results of the principle of intermediate forms that are of importance for the Woman Question . How this application of the principle will turn out is rather obvious in the light of what I have said so far. It culminates in the notion that a woman’s need for emancipation, and her capacity for emancipation, derives exclusively from the proportion of M in her. However, the concept of emancipation is ambiguous, and those who, with the help of this word, have pursued practical intentions that could not stand up to theoretical insights have often had a vested interest in increasing its lack of clarity. By the emancipation of a woman I mean neither the fact that it is she who gives the orders in her house while her husband no longer dares to contradict her, nor her courage to walk in unsafe areas at night without the protection of an escort; neither her disregard of social conventions, which all but forbid a woman to live on her own, which do not allow her to visit a man, and which prohibit any reference to sexual topics either by her or by others in her presence, nor her desire to earn an independent living, whether she chooses to attend a commercial school or a university, a conservatory or a college of education for that purpose. There may be many other things hiding behind the large shield of the emancipation movement, but these will not be discussed for the time being. Further, the emancipation that I have in mind is not a woman’s desire for external equality with a man. The problem that I wish to solve in my search for clarity in the Woman Question is that of a woman’s will to become internally equal to a man, to attain his intellectual and moral freedom, his interests and creative power. And what I will argue now is that W has no need and, accordingly, no capacity, for this kind of emancipation. All those women who really strive for emancipation, all those women who have some genuine claim to fame and intellectual eminence, always display many male properties, and the more perceptive observer will always recognize in them some anatomically male characteristics, an approximation to the physical appearance of a man. Those women of the past and present whom the male and female champions of the emancipation movement constantly name as proof of the great achievements of women come exclusively from the ranks of the more advanced intermediate sexual forms, one might almost say, from the ranks of those intermediate sexual forms which are barely classi¤ed as “women.” To start with, the very ¤rst of them in historical order, Sappho, is a sexual invert, from whom the designation sapphic or lesbian love, for a sexual relationship between women, is derived. Here we see how we can bene¤t from the discussions of the third and fourth chapters to arrive at a decision concerning the Woman Question. The characterological material at our disposal with regard to so-called “eminent women,” that is, women who are de facto emancipated , is so scanty, and its interpretation subject to so many contradictions, that we cannot use it with any...

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