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The “woman question” has been a source of speculation throughout the history of Western thought. That women were morphologically different from men fascinated and puzzled the most sophisticated of early thinkers. Aristotle, the fountainhead of Western thought and its guide through the Renaissance, suggested that a female was formed when the interuterine temperature was too low to produce a male. In other words, a woman is a half-baked man. Judeo-Christian dogma was even less kind, marking woman as the cause of man's downfall, his temptation from contemplation of God. “Among all the savage beasts, none is found so harmful as woman,” said St. John of Chrysostem in 347 A.D. Mary was admitted to the religious hierarchy in order to pacify and convert the worshippers of an ancient goddess, perhaps the remnants of a religious practice constructed before the knowledge of the male role in procreation. This new goddess, Mary, was asexual, submissive, compassionate, and so passive that even her procreative function was disavowed. The ultimate takeover of female power was made manifest in that jewel of Renaissance achievement, the Sistine Chapel, in which creation takes place through the approximation of two male digits (God's and Adam's). Now that's really a miracle!
In Freud's Vienna, the woman question was very much alive in the minds of male thinkers. The two themes, the evil temptress, Eve, and the pure Mary—“the angel in the house”—were personified by the glut of prostitutes on one hand and repressed, neurotic middle-class housewives on the other (discussed in detail in Elizabeth Janeway's (1980) excellent article, “Who Is Sylvia? On the Loss of Sexual Paradigms”). True to Western tradition, not only was it men who were defining, describing, and prescribing what women were, but they, like Aristotle, used man as a synonym for