You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
By the time this review will appear in print, many of the readers of This QUARTERLY probably will have formed their own opinions about this much-talked-about but disappointing book. It is the more disappointing because the author, translator, and publisher promise the reader an encyclopedic biological, sociopsychological and economic treatise which will account for the status of womankind throughout the history of Western culture, where she stands in our present civilization and what she could become in the future. This work, however, gives no scientific analysis of the factors which, in continual interaction, mold human destiny but presents only a distortion of them. This is the result of the author's attempt to encompass all of life in terms of the existentialist philosophy of Sartre. According to this, the male of the species is in possession of 'transcendence', a quality which equals activity, mobility, free will, and probably, as the author would like to make us believe, omnipotence. Woman, encased in her basic quality of 'immanence', which means immobility, passivity and servitude to the species, cannot escape her destiny: she can only hate it.
One cannot avoid the assumption that what follows in this book