Aristotle (384-328 BC): The male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity extends to all mankind…. Females are weaker and colder in nature, and we must look upon the female character as being a sort of natural deficiency. ….A woman is as it were an infertile male; the female, in fact, is female on account of inability of a sort, viz., it lacks the power to concoct semen out of the final state of nourishment … because of the coldness of its nature…. The male provides the "form" and the "principle of the movement," the female provides the body, in other words, the material…. The female contains all the parts of the body potentially, though none in actuality; and "all includes those parts which distinguish the two sexes. Just as it sometimes happens that deformed offspring are produced by deformed parents, and sometimes not, so the offspring produced by a female are sometimes female, sometimes not, but male. The reason is that the female is as it were a deformed male; and the menstrual discharge is semen, though in an impure condition; i.e. it lacks one constituent, and one only, the principle of Soul.

An animal is a living body, a body with Soul in it. The female always provides the material, the male provides that which fashions the material into shape; this, in our view, is the specific characteristic of each of the sexes: that is what it means to be male or female. Hence, necessity requires that the female should provide the physical part, i.e. a quantity of material, but not that the male should do so, since necessity does not require that the tools should reside in the product that is being made, nor that the agent which uses them should do so. Thus the physical part, the body, comes from the female, and the Soul from the male, since the Soul is the essence of a particular body…. Once birth has taken place everything reaches is perfection soon in females than in male – e.g. puberty, maturity , old age – because females are weaker and colder in their nature; and we should look upon the female state as being as it were a deformity., though one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature. While it is within the mother, them, it develops slowly on account of its coldness, since development is a sort of concoction, concoction is effected by heat, and if a thing is hotter its concoction is easy; when , however, it is free from the mother, on account of its weakness it quickly approaches its maturity and old age, since inferior things all reach their end more quickly.

Galen (131-201): … man is more perfect than the woman… her workmanship is necessarily more imperfect, and so it is no wonder that the female is less perfect than the male by as much as she is colder than he… the woman is less perfect than the man in respect of the generative parts. For the parts were formed with her when she was still a foetus, but could not because of the defect in the heat emerge and project on the outside, and this, though making the animal itself that was being formed less perfect than one that is complete in all respects, provided no small advantage for the race; for thee needs must be a female. Indeed, you ought no to think that our Creator would purposely make half the whole race imperfect, and , as it were, mutilated, unless there was to be some great advantage in such mutilation…. This is the reason the reason why the female was made cold, and he immediate consequence of this is the imperfection of the parts, which cannot emerge on the outside on account of the defect in the heat, another very great advantage for the continuance of the race. For, remaining within that which would have become the scrotum if it had emerged on the outside was made in the substance of the uteri, an instrument fitted to receive and retain the semen and to nourish and perfect the foetus.

Thus, from one principle devised by he creator in his wisdom, that principle in accordance with which the female has been make less that perfect than the male, have stemmed all these things useful for the generation of the animal: that the parts of the female cannot escape to the outside; that she accumulates an excess of useful nutriment and has imperfect semen and a hollow instrument to receive the perfect semen; than since everything in the male is the opposite of what it is in the female.

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74): It is the father who ought to be loved more than the mother. For one’s father and mother are loved as principles in our natural origin. But the father, as the active partner, is a principle in a higher way than the mother, who supplies the passive or material element…. In human generation, the mother provides the matter of the body which, however, is still unformed, and receives its form only by means of the power which is contained in the father’s seed.

Tertullian (160-225 AD): Woman is "a temple built over a sewer." addressing women)…. You are the gateway of the devil; you are the one who unseals the curse of the tree, and you are the first one to turn your back on the divine law; you are the one who persuade him whom the devil was not capable of corrupting; you easily destroyed the image of God, Adam. Because of what you deserve, that is, death, even the Son of God had to die…. You should know that in order to achieve perfect, that is, Christian, chastity you must no only not seek to the object of desire, but also despise the very idea of being. One…. A man is lost as soon as he desire your beauty, and he has committed already in his mind what he desired and you have become his sword,

St. Jerome: (342-420): woman’s love in general is … insatiable – put out, it bursts into flame; give it plenty, it is again in need; it deprives a man’s mind of its fiber, and engrosses all thought except for the passion which it feeds.

St. Augustine: (354-430): And just as in man’s soul there are two forces, one which is dominant because it deliberates and one which obeys because it is subject to such guidance, in the same way, in the physical sense, woman has been made for man. In her mind and in her rational intelligence she has a nature the equal of man’s, but in sex she is physically subject to him in the same way as our natural impulses need to be subjected to the reasoning power of the mind…. Even before her sin woman had been made to be ruled by her husband and to be submissive and subject to him. … Woman has limited understanding, and also perhaps she is living according to the spirit of the flesh and not according to the spirit of the mind.

Pliny (1^st century): Contact with [menstrual fluid] turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren … the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air.

S. Weir Mitchell (1887): The man who does not know sick women does not know women .. no group of men so truly interprets, comprehends, and sympathizes with woman as do physicians, who know how near to disorder and how close to misfortune she is brought by the very peculiarities of her nature, which evolve in heath the flower and fruitage of her perfect life.

The woman’s desire to be on a level of competition with man and to assume his duties, is, I am sure, making mischief, for it is my belief that no length of generations of change in her education and modes of activity will every really alter her characteristic. She is physiologically other than the man. I am concerned with her now as she is, only desiring to help her in my small way to be in wiser and more healthful fashion and what I believe her Maker meant her to be, and to teach her how not to be that with which her physiological construction and the strong ordeals of her sensual life threaten her as no contingencies of man’s career threaten in like measure or like number the feeblest of the masculine sex.

As the woman is normally less full-blooded than the man, she is relatively in more danger of becoming thin-blooded than he …. If we see that our girls are not overtasked at the age of sexual evolution, that the brain is not overtrained at bitter cost of other developments as essential, we escape a part of this peril … As a girl grows older, we ask and expect some measure of restraint in emotional expression as regards any of the physical or moral troubles which call out tears in the child; for the woman who is wise understands that unrestrained emotional and outward expressions of pain or distress are the beginnings of that loss of self-rule which leads to habitual unrestraint, and this to more and more enfeeblement of endurance, and this again, to worse things. … there are in the woman’s physiological life disqualifications for such continuous labor of mind as is easy and natural to man.

19^th century doctor: It will have to be considered whether women can scorn delights and live laborious days of intellectual exercise and production, without injury to their functions as the conceivers, mothers, and nurses of children. For, it would be an ill thing, if it should so happen that we got the advantage of a quantity of female intellectual work at the price of a puny, enfeebled, and sickly race.

In speaking of English Renaissance drama, medical texts, iconography, and proverbs, Gail Paster says:

This discourse inscribes women as leaky vessels by isolating one element of the female body’s material expressiveness – its production of fluids – as excessive, hence either disturbing or shameful. It also characteristically links this liquid expressiveness to excessive verbal fluency. In both formations, the issue is women’s bodily self-control or, more precisely, the representation of a particular kind of uncontrol as a function of gender. This ascription of uncontrol is further naturalized by means of the complex classification of bodily fluids to which Galenic humoralism was committed both in theory and in practice. Thus the conventional Renaissance association of women and water is used not only to insinuate womanly unreliability but also to define the female body even when it is chaste … as a crucial problematic in the social formations of capitalism – an instance of corporeal waste of the female body…. That women’s bodies were moister than men’s and cyclically controlled by that watery planet, the moon was a given of [Renaissance] scientific theory. Their bodies were notable fore the production of liquids – breast milk, menstrual blood, tears…. Both popular and medical discourse, moreover, conceptualized all these fluids as related forms of the same essential substance. Breast milk was the purified form of menstrual blood, "none other thing than blood made white [Ambroise Pare, 1634]. It changed color according to function by means of a process that occurred in two veins – "occult passages" – which carried the fluid back and forth between the breast and the womb…. Tears and urine also may have seemed interrelated in nature and function, flow from one orifice drawing off flow in another. (from The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England, by Gail Paster)

Sigmund Freud, from "Femininity" (1933): The anatomical distinction [between the sexes] must express itself in psychical consequences … girls hold their mother responsible for their lack of a penis and do not forgive her for their being thus put at a disadvantage…. The castration complex of girls is also started by the sight of the genitals of the other sex. They at once notice the difference and, it must be admitted, its significance too. They feel seriously wronged, often declare that they want to ‘have something like it too’, and fall victim to ‘envy for the penis’, which will leave ineradicable traces on their development and the formation of their character and which will not be surmounted in even the most favourable cases without a severe expenditure of psychical energy…. The wish to get the longed-for penis eventually in spite of everything may contribute to the motives that drive a mature woman to analysis, and what she may reasonable expect from analysis – a capacity, for instance, to carry on an intellectual profession – may often be recognized as a sublimated modification of this repressed wish….

The discovery that she is castrated is a turning-point in a girl’s growth. Three possible lines of development start from it: one leads to sexual inhibition or to neurosis, the second to change of character in the sense of a masculinity complex, the third, finally, to normal femininity.

… The effect of penis-envy has a share, further, in the physical vanity of women, since they are bound to value their charms more highly as a late compensation for their original sexual inferiority. Shame, which is considered to be a feminine characteristic par excellence … has as its purpose, we believe, concealment of genital deficiency. We are not forgetting that at a later time shame takes on other functions. It seems that women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have invented – that of plaiting and weaving. If that is so, we should be tempted to guess the unconscious motive fore the achievement. Nature herself would seem to have given the model which this achievement imitates by causing the growth at maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals. The step that remained to be taken lay in making the threads adhere to one another, while on the body they stick into the skin and are only matted together.

The fact that women must be regarded as having little sense of justice is no doubt related to the predominance of envy in their mental life; for the demand for justice is a modification of envy and lays down the condition subject to which one can put envy aside. We also regard women as weaker in their social interests and as having less capacity for sublimating their instincts than men.

Jacques de Vitry about Marie d’Oignies (1177-1213): When a constant outburst of tears gushed forth from her eyes both day and night and ran down her cheeks and made the church floor all muddy, she could catch the tears in the linen cloth with which she had covered her head. She went through many veils in this way since she had to change them frequently and put a dry one on in place of the wet one she had discarded.

Marie d’Oignies: From the horror she felt at her previous carnal pleasure, she began to afflict herself and she found not rest in spirit until, by means of extraordinary bodily chastisements, she had made up for all the pleasures she had experienced in the past. In vehemence of spirit, almost as if she were inebriated, she began to loath her body when she compared it to the sweetness of the Paschal lamb and, with a knife, in error she cut out a large piece of her flesh which, from embarrassment, she buried in the earth.

St. Gertrude the Great (1241-1298): I considered it so unsuitable for me to publish these writings, that my conscience would not consent to do so … the Lord conquered the repugnance of my reason by these words: "Be assured that you will not be released from the prison of the flesh until you have paid this debt which still binds you." And as I reflected that I had already employed the gifts of God for the advancement of my neighbor – if not by my writing, at least by my words – He brought forward these words which I had heard used at the preceding Matins, "If the lord had willed to teach his doctrine only to those who were present, He would have taught by word only, not by writing, but now they are written for the salvation of many." He added further: "I desire your writings to be an indisputable evidence of my Divine goodness in these latter times, in which I purpose to do good to many."These words having depressed me, I began to consider within myself how difficult, and even impossible it would be to find thoughts and words capable of explaining these things to the human intellect without scandal.

Marguerite d’Oingt (??-1310): She thought that if she were to put these things in writing, as our Lord had sent them to her in her heart, her heart would be more relieved for it. She began to write everything that is in this book, all in order as she had it in her heart; and as soon as she put a word in the book, it left her heart. And when she had written everything, she was completely cured. I firmly believe that if she had not put it in writing she would have died or become crazy.
 

The Moment
by Sharon Olds (b. 1942)

When I saw the dark Egyptian stain,

I went down into the house to find you, Mother –

past the grandfather clock, with its huge

ochre moon, past the burnt

sienna woodwork, rubbed and glazed.

body of the house, down below the

level of the earth. It must have been

the maid’s day off, for I found you there

where I had never found you, by the wash tubs,

your hands thrust deep in soapy water,

and above your head, the blazing windows

at the surface of the ground.

You looked up from the iron sink,

a small haggard pretty woman

of 40, one week divorced.

"I’ve got my period, Mom," I said,

glow with joy. "Baby," you said,

coming toward me, hands out and

covered with tiny delicate bubbles like seeds.
 
 

From "Sorties," in The Newly Born Woman, by Helene Cixous (1984)

First I sense femininity in writing by: a privilege of voice: writing and voice are entwined and interwoven and writing’s continuity/voice’s rhythm take each other’s breath away through interchanging, make the text gasp or form it out of suspenses and silences, make it lose its voice or rend it with cries.

Her discourse, even when "theoretical" or "political," is never simple or linear or "objectivized," universalized; she involves her story in history.

Every woman has known the torture of beginning to speak aloud, heart beating as if to break, occasionally falling into loss of language, ground and language slipping out from under her, because for woman speaking – even just opening her mouth – in public is something rash, a transgression.

We are not culturally accustomed to speaking, throwing signs out toward a scene, employing the suitable rhetoric. Also, it is not where we find our pleasure: indeed, one pays a certain price for the use of a discourse. The logic of communication requires an economy of signs – of signifiers – and of subjectivity. The orator is asked to unwind a thin thread, dry and taut. We like uneasiness, questioning. There is waste in what we say. We need that waste. To write is always to make allowances for superabundance and uselessness while slashing the exchange value that keeps the spoken work on its track. That is why writing is good, letting the tongue try itself out – as one attempts a caress, taking the time a phrase or a thought needs to make oneself loved, to make oneself reverberate.

Not the origin: she doesn’t go back there. A boy’s journey is the return to the native land … the nostalgia that makes man a being who tends to come back to the point of departure to appropriate it for himself and to die there. A girl’s journey is farther – to the unknown, to invent.

How come this privileged relationship with voice? Because no woman piles up as many defenses against instinctual drives as a man does. You don’t prop things up, you don’t brick things up the way he does, you don’t withdraw from pleasure so "prudently."

Voice! That, too, is launching forth and effusion without return. Exclamation, cry, breathlessness, yell, cough, vomit, music. Voice leaves. Voice loses. She leaves She loses. And that is how she writes, as one thows a voice – forward, into the void. She goes away, she goes forward, doesn’t turn back to look at her tracks.

Voice-cry. Agony – the spoken "word" exploded, blown to bits by suffering and anger, demolishing discourse: this is how she has always been heard before, ever since the time when masculine society began to push her offstage, expulsing her, plundering her….

Voice: unfastening, fracas. Fire! She shoots, she shoots away. Break. From their bodies where they have been buried, shut up and at the same time forbidden to take pleasure. Women have almost everything to write about femininity: about their sexuality, that is

to say, about the infinite and mobile complexity of their becoming erotic, about the lightning ignitions of such a minuscule-vast region of their body, not about destiny but about the adventure of such an urge, the voyages, crossings, advances, sudden and slow awakenings, discoveries of a formerly timid region that is just now springing up. Woman’s body with a thousand and one fiery hearths, when – shattering censorship and yokes – she lets it articulate the proliferation of meanings that runs through it in every direction. It is going to take much more than language for him to make the ancient maternal tongue sound in only one groove.

Woman must write her body, must make up the unimpeded tongue that bursts partitions, classes, and rhetorics, orders and codes, must inundate, run through, go beyond the discourse with its last reserves, including the one of laughing off the word "silence" that has to be said, the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops dead before the word "impossible" and writes it as "end."

To fly/steal is woman’s gesture, to steal into language to make it fly. We have all learned flight/theft, the art with many techniques, for all the centuries we have only had access to having by stealing/flying; we have lived in a flight/theft, stealing/flying, finding the close, concealed ways-through of desire … woman partakes of bird and burglar, just as the burglar partakes of woman and bird … (her) pleasure in scrambling spatial order, disorienting it, moving furniture, things, and values around, breaking in, emptying structures, turning the selfsame, the proper upside down.

What woman has not stolen? Who has not dreamed, savored, or done the thing that jams sociality? Who has not dropped a few red herrings, mocked her way around the separating bar, inscribed what makes a difference with her body, punched holes in the system of couples and positions, and with a transgression screwed up whatever is successive, chain-linked, the fence?

A feminine text cannot not be more than subversive: if it writes itself it is in volcanic heaving of the old "real" property crust. In ceaseless displacement. She must write herself because, when the time comes for her liberation, it is the invention of a new, insurgent writing that will allow her to put the breaks and indispensable changes into effect in her history.