SdB says that the male's role is "creation" (p. 25, par. 2) whereas the female's role is "maintenance."  Don't the parents "create" a child together?  Does she mean that the male initiates sex?

I was also a bit surprised by her not particularly feminist language here. On one hand, I think it's important to point out that many of the more shocking things she says about women are descriptive rather than prescriptive, i.e. she isn't saying women "must" be a certain way but simply trying to describe the state of affairs of her time.

But it does seem here that even if she is suspending judgment, by using this loaded language she is encouraging a certain old idea of the roles of procreation, namely that men's role is to be the spark of inspiration and women's role is to be the incubator. Some proponents even go so far as to say the woman is nothing but a vessel, and the entire soul of the child comes from the sperm. This philosophy gets explicitly tied up with sexual reproduction, but as you can imagine it has a never ending series of corollaries in intellectual life, emotional life etc for those so inclined. Its religious proponents see an analogy in the interaction between the divine and the mundane. Of course, at other times in history, people were supposedly not aware that men had any role in conception, and thought pregnancy was a matter of parthenogenesis. Maybe this is the backlash. (It's safe to say, I think, that creating life is something for which anyone would be happy to take credit.)

Still, even if her descriptions are not particularly objective, they're quite compelling. This strange business of what she calls

the most striking conclusion of this survey: namely, that woman is of all mammalian females at once the one who is most profoundly alienated (her individuality the prey of outside forces), and the one who most violently resists this alienation.

What's one to make of this? Not the definition of woman one might expect.

Well, these are all deep questions, and there is a lot here to think about. For the moment I wanted to just remark that it's funny how many different threads from different discussions on the site are coming together. For instance, the quite brilliant discussion on identification and the identity we receive from others, the related issue of what it means to do something alone, the question of what is specifically personal (in that identity, in those relationships, even in our intimate relations to others). There is a certain feeling of building up understanding from many different pieces....though those of you who know me will see the resonance of that remark in my life at the moment. Maybe there's something in the air -- though these are all supposedly old questions, the way in which they interact seems to point at something new. It does feel as if we're starting to brush up against major issues for what it means to be a person of the twenty-first century. Anyway, will be interesting to see how this plays out. William, your word "species" is probably crucial here. And Mia, this is a very curious and significant point about how she tries to describe woman as fundamentally alienated, and the creation of another person in her own body as alienating for her. Why does she describe it this way? What does she mean to say?

So I was thinking about these issues, and picked up a book on the shelf at a friend's house; and thought I should write this down.  Eric Williams, in his influential "Capitalism and Slavery," a study of the slave trade and its relation to the industrial revolution, wrapped up his introduction without detectable irony:

"...Dr Vincent Harlow, now Rhodes Professor of Imperial History in the University of London, supervised my doctoral dissertation at Oxford and was always very helpful. Finally, my wife was of great assistance to me in taking my notes and typing the manuscript."