Abstract

Are women human? A puzzling, even bizarre, question, yet one raised by many philosophical theories regarding human nature and women. Human beings are a species, and species are defined, albeit in a very complicated way, by their biological attributes. Women, of all groups that have ever been oppressed, are most clearly and undeniably differentiated by their bodies. Since men have always been taken as the norm, the question was posed as to the implications of women's differences from this norm. Although few philosophers seriously questioned whether women were a distinct species from men, many explicitly denied that women had the properties they defined as human, or else they designated traits historically more true of men as characteristically human. Aristotle referred to the female character as “a sort of natural deficiency.”