the spheres and this is the sense in which women have equality
with men under this model. There need not be equality of rights,
for instance; indeed, it is counterindicated. Since the sexes are not
the same, they should not be treated the same, and something is
wrong when a common standard is applied to both. In this social
model, separation by sex class is viewed as the only basis for equality; sex segregation is the institutional expression of this egalitarian ethic, its program in fact. With sex as with race, separation is a
fact; equality is a chimera or a lie.
The woman-superior model of antifeminism is found in two apparently opposing realms: the spiritual and the sexual. In the spiritual realm, the woman is superior to the male by definition; he worships her because she is good; her sex makes her moral or gives
her the responsibility for a morality that is sex-specific. Being
female, she is higher, by nature closer to some abstract conception
of good. She is credited with a moral sensibility that men are hard
put to match (but then, they are not expected to try): she is ethereal, she floats, her moral nature lifts her up, she gravitates toward
that which is pure, chaste, and tasteful. She has an instinctive, sex-
based knowledge of what is good and right. Her moral sensibility
is unfailingly benign, always an influence toward the good. Her
sex-class business includes the business of being virtuous— a
strange assignment by sex, since the Latin root of the word
means “strength” or “m anliness, ” which perhaps shows the futility
of the project for her. T his goodness of her sex is essentially based
on a presumed chastity, a necessary chastity— of behavior but also
of appetite. She, as a woman, is not supposed to know sexual desire. Men lust. As one who by her nature does not lust, she is the opposite of man: he is carnal; she is good. There is no notion of
female m orality or of a woman’s being good in the world that is not
based largely on chastity as a moral value. The great female tragedies are stories of sexual falls. The tragic flaw in a female hero—
H ardy’s Tess or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina— is sexual desire. All
the drama of a female life, in great or in banal works, basically
replicates the biblical fall. Seduction (or rape) means knowledge,
which is sexual desire; sexual desire means descent into sin and
inevitable punishment. As a cultural symbol, the good female is
innocent: innocent of sex, innocent of knowledge— chaste in both
ways. H istorically, ignorance has been a form of grace for the good
woman; education was denied women to keep them morally good.
The elevation of a woman requires that she have this innocence,
this purity, this chastity: she must not know the world, which men
embody. The worship of a woman or a female religious symbol is
often the unmediated worship of chastity. The virgin is the great
religious symbol of female good, the female who is by nature (in
her body) good, who embodies the good. The awe and honor accorded the chaste female by men are frequently pointed to to show that men do not hate or degrade women, that men worship, adore,
and admire women. The m orally superior nature of women is honored mostly in the abstract, and women are worshiped mostly in the abstract. The worship is worship of a sym bol— a symbol ma
nipulated to justify the uses to which fallen women are put. The
morally good woman is put on a pedestal—a small, precarious,
raised stage, often mined, on which she stands for as long as she
can—until she falls off or jumps or it goes boom.
In the secular world, women are also credited with having a
sense of good that is intrinsically female, a sense of good that men
do not have. This is a frequent feature of contemporary environmentalist or antimilitarist movements. Women are seen to have an inborn commitment to both clean air and peace, a moral nature
that abhors pollution and murder. Being good or moral is viewed
as a particular biological capacity of women and as a result women
are the natural guardians of morality: a moral vanguard as it were.
Organizers use this appeal to women all the time. Motherhood is
especially invoked as biological proof that women have a special
relationship to life, a special sensitivity to its meaning, a special,
