Mermaid and the Minotaur
Dorothy Dinnerstein
Language: English
Pages: 332
ISBN: 1892746255
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"A seminal text in the womenís movement."
–Ethel S. Person, author of The Sexual Century
"Still the most important work of feminist psychoanalytic exploration, its re-release is a celebratory occasion."
–Eli Sagan, author of Freud, Women and Mortality
"[The Mermaid and the Minotaur] continues to astonish us with the depth and wisdom of its psychoanalytic approach even as its major ideas have become as unobtrusively essential to psychoanalytic feminism as the atmosphere."
–Jessica Benjamin, author of The Bonds of Love
“Some Evolutionary Aspects of Human Gender” for a lucid theoretical discussion of them.) Empathy is more useful for history-making now than belligerence is. People of both sexes who had this “female” trait would enjoy a survival advantage in the future both for this reason and because it would help qualify them as child rearers. In any case, what we must not do is justify our present male-female symbiosis on the basis that tampering with it could possibly mean tampering with important,
first to Chapter 9. That chapter starts with a summary of those aspects of the preceding exposition which must be grasped if the central statement it then adds—a statement of what I see as the broadest societal implications of our gender arrangement—is to be understood. To most readers the content of Chapters 4–8, however distressing it may be, will probably seem relevant in an immediate personal sense, quite apart from its bearing on our chances of reversing history’s present deadly direction.
(or—to use the term broadly—religious) impact of their physical maleness, is on the whole underplayed in our life. Mead suggests that it is the more visible, sustained drama, the more conspicuous mystery, of woman’s role in procreation that makes her concrete presence seem so much more a center of magic non-personal force than man’s. To Hays, the superstitious awe, often loathing, that surrounds menstruation and parturition, and links them to wider natural events, expresses the human male’s
pride as only she is in a position to do: she can point up, dwell upon, the child’s early failures instead of minimizing and smoothing them over; she can make the child knuckle under again as it has done before instead of acknowledging its growing strength, and its right to win sometimes, by compromising with its wishes. But on the other hand she can give way too far: she can leave the child in possession of an empty field; she can abandon it to a hollow victory, bereft of its mighty sponsor.*
until we start outgrowing the original dependency, the original terror of eternal helplessness, instead of trying all our lives to keep it at bay. And we will take on this emotional task only when we no longer have the option, at the beginning, of shirking it by running for refuge from the first tyrant to another of a new gender. When we can not run away from the task we will face it: we will then put tyranny in its place instead of trying to keep woman in hers. The project of brotherhood cannot