THF. SUBJECTION OF WOMEN
327
On
the average she is shorter than the male and lighter, her skeleton
is more delicate ... muscular strength is much less in woman ... she
has less respiratory capacity, the lungs and trachea being smaller ...
The specific gravity of the blood is lower . . . and there is less hemoglo–
bin; women are therefore less robust and more disposed to anemia than
are males. Their pulse is more rapid, the vascular system less stable . . .
Instability is strikingly characteristic of woman's organization in gen–
eral ... In comparison with her the male seems infinitely favored.
There is a kind of poetry in this description which might move a flighty
person to tears. But it goes on:
These biological considerations are extremely important . . . But I deny
that they establish for her a fixed and inevitable destiny. They are in–
sufficient for setting up a hierarchy of the sexes ... they do not condemn
her to remain
in
a subordinate role forever.
Why doesn't this "condemn her to remain in a subordinate role
forever"? In my view this poor endowment would seem to be all the
answer one needs to why women don't sail the seven seas, build bridges,
conquer foreign lands, lay international cables and trudge up Mount
Everest. But forgetting these daring activities, a woman's physical in–
feriority to a man is a limiting reality every moment of her life. Because
of it women are "doomed" to situations that promise reasonable safety
against the more hazardous possibilities of nature which they are too
weak and easily fatigued to endure and against the stronger man. Any
woman who has ever had her wrist twisted by a man recognizes a fact
of nature as humbling as a cyclone to a frail tree branch. How can
anything
be more important than this? The prodigious ramifications
could occupy one for an eternity. For instance:
At eighteen T.
E.
Lawrence took a long bicycle tour through France
by himself; no young girl would be allowed to engage in any such
escapade, stilI less to adventure on foot in a half-desert and dangerous
country, as Lawrence did a year later.
Simone de Beauvoir's use of "allow" is exasperating; she stresses
"permission" where so often it is really "capacity" that is involved.
For a woman a solitary bicycle tour of France would be dangerous,
but not impossible; Lawrence's adventure in Arabia would be suicidal
and so a woman is nearly unimaginable as the author of
The Seven
Pillars of Wisdom.
First of all the Arabs would rape this unfortunate
female soldier or, if they had some religious or practical reason for
resisting temptation, they would certainly have to leave her behind on
the march, like yesterday's garbage, as the inevitable fatigue arrived.
To say that physical weakness doesn't, in a tremendous number of ac-
