Susan Sontag
THE THIRD WORLD OF WOMEN
Note: The following text was written in July
1972
in response
to a questionnaire sent to me and five other women (includ–
ing Simone de Beauvoir and the Italian Communist deputy
Rossana Rossanda) by the editors of
Libre,
a new Spanish–
language political and literary quarterly with a loosely Marx–
ist orientation, edited in Paris. It was published in the October
1972 issue of
Libre, No.3,
in a translation by the Spanish
novelist Juan Goytisolo. Most of the readers of
Libre
live in
Latin America, which explains the painstakingly explicit char–
acter of what I wrote. The nature of the magazine's reader–
ship explains as well my fre edom to assume, when writing my
answers, that a revolutionary socialist view of the subject is,
at the very least, something to contend with. In the United
States, where militant feminism is a livelier and much more
widely heard point of view right now than it is anywhere else,
discussion tends to be less and less explicit about the root ques–
tions, and rarely even alludes to the Marxist analysis. Never–
theless, because the formulation of a political perspective is
still everywhere in its early stages, that seems to me to justify
printing here what I wrote for a quite different audience.
A few paragraphs first, a sort of prologue, a response to a
more general question which you don't ask:
At what st.age now is the
stmggle for women's liberation?
For thousands of years, praoticaHy everyone in lIhe world assumed
that it lay in Itbe "nature" of the human species that some people were
superior (and should be masters) and other people were inferior (and
should be slaves). Only about a hundred and fiftty years ago did ele–
ments of the ruling classes begin to suspect that slavery was not really,
after all, "n<litural," and that the undeniably servile and culturally under–
developed character of slaves could be eJGplained by the very fact that
these people were slaves, were brought up to be slaves - instead of
proving that they deserved to be slaves.
Support for
,the
emancipattion of women stands today approxirnate-
