Naguib Mahfouz: A Western and Eastern Cage of Female Entrapment ...

Interestingly, Monique Wittig shows in “One is Not Born a Woman,” most of the “feminists…in America and elsewhere still believe that the basis of women’s oppression is biological as well as historical” (249). In her sweeping oversimplification, she credits the female with responsibility for the development of the human race and explains that “women created civilization while the coarse and brutal men hunted,” a prehistory similar to the way that history has been biologized (249). Wittig makes it clear that “matriarchy is no less heterosexual than patriarchy” because she claims that the “beginning of society lies in heterosexuality,” a concept that is trapped in “sex (woman and man),” as she explains it, and she adds “the capacity to give birth (biology) is what defines a woman” (250). Wittig’s attempt to “naturalize history” makes sense if we attempt to put the division of men and women on a table of the same equality. Simply stated, both have existed and will always exist. So Wittig argues that because “we naturalize history, we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression”—an interesting idea that helps one to understand how a woman’s birthing capability has historically defined her as one who takes care of the child and the home. Even female animals nurture their young by nature. Nancy Hartsock puts it simply: “[T]he fact that women but not men are primarily responsible for young children means that the infant first experiences itself as not fully differentiated from the mother and then as an I in relation to an It that it later comes to know as female” (297). Hartsock adds that woman has been objectified even by the child who has been nurtured by the mother if we understand that the child’s object of affection and nourishment comes directly from the mother, herself. These ambiguities in the way children differentiate their mothers from “woman” indicate just how complex the roles of female as subject versus object have been and continue to be.

The complexity of women’s roles moves the woman beyond the object position and influences us to address related issues. In considering the entire realm of feminism, we should also consider a question relatively close to the heart of why certain feminists have become actively engaged in addressing the inequalities that women face in comparison to men.