Scumgrrrls^.org

As criticism against the Enlightenment ideas that women were inherently inferior to men, Mary Wollstonecraft proclaimed ‘If you give women the rights of men, she will also develop the virtues of men’. As a criticism to the early 20th century ideas of women as natural mothers, home-makers and hysterics, Simone de Beauvoir proclaimed that ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman’. What neither Mary nor Simone knew was that they positioned themselves in what later would become one of the most heated debates of contemporary feminisms : Does being a woman mean that we are essentially different from men (biological essentialism) or are the differences between women and men a cultural invention (social constructivism) ? That is, does nature make women into women or is it culture that forces women into their women’s costumes ?