It is very easy to supply an inventory of classical opinion on the inferior status and capacities of women. 1 will restrict myself to one quotation from Aristotle. Speaking of the animal kingdom he writes: The females are softer, more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive, and more considerate in rearing the young. The males, on the other hand, are more spirited, wilder, more simple and less scheming. Traces of these characters occur more or less everywhere. They are specially evident in those whose characters are more developed. Most of all in man, for he has the most perfected nature and so these dispositions are more evident in humans. Hence, woman is more compassionate than man, more tearful, and again more envious and more querulous, more given to railing and to striking out. The female is more dispirited, more despondent, more shameless and lying. More given to deceit, more retentive in memory, more wakeful, more shrinking, and in general more difficult to rouse to action than the male, but she needs less nourishment'. I would like to make two points about this passage, beyond any simple issue of its misogyny. The first is, that the attributes of man and woman are established by an almost point to point polarity. Men are spirited, wild and simple. Women are dispirited, despondent and disingenuous. The prefix of the disserves as an index that we are not simply dealing with different attributes, but with, as it were, positive and negative poles. Moreover, this polarity is of a special kind. The two poles represent, as it were, principles which are the negation of each other. They are in modern parlance mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. The attributes of men and women can be formalised as two principles: Male and Female. They stand in polar opposition to