A LEVINASIAN CALL FOR ASSERTING THE FEMININE
Keywords:
Women: “Il y a” and “Conatus Essendi”, Epiphany of the Face and the Epiphany of the Feminine, Other: Man or Woman?, Justice and the affirmation of the FeminineAbstract
A village school teacher once asked a class of girls and boys to punctuate the following sentence: “Woman without her man is a savage.” The boys in the class punctuated the sentence as follows: “Woman, without her man, is a savage.” When the girls, in their turn, punctuated it, the sentence read: “Woman! Without her, man is a savage.” The honest truth is that both man and woman are each a savage without the other. Both are only halves of an integrated human personality. It is neither ethically desirable nor possible to determine which of the two sexes is superior. It is a historical fact that women have been suppressed and subjected to indignities for generations. Both in the family and in the society their status has been secondary; many a time they have been treated at best as secondary human beings if not as pieces of movable property. She is the most depressed of all depressed classes. Even among the untouchables or the Negroes the wives are not treated equal.
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