34
PARTISAN REVIEW
female principle into a 'private' retreat-we want to rediffuse it-for
the first time creating society from the bottom up ." And Mary Daly
continued, in 1973:
Only radical feminism can act as the 'final cause', because of all
revolutionary causes it alone opens up human consciousness
adequately
to
the desire for non-hierarchal, non-oppressive soci–
ety, revealing sexism as the basic model and source of oppres–
sion.
(I
hope my use of 'final cause' is clear: In 'tradition' the
final cause is 'first', it is motivating purpose, an insight which
elicits seeking, movement.
It
is 'first in the order of intention',
opening the subject
to
action... . To say this is
to
see a priority
for the women's movement as catalyst, as
the
necessary catalyst
-hardly
to
see it as a self-enclosed system.) [Personal communi–
cation, Spring 1974]
The core intellectual vision of the feminist movement has been
equivalent
to
that urged on the human species by E.M. Forster in
1910: Only connect.
Where the two powerful shapers of contempor–
ary
Western thought, Marx and Freud, had completed-as if by some
tacit collaboration-the centuries' process of dichotomizing "man"
into mind/body, psychological/political, Simone de Beauvoir, in
1949, was bringing a phenomenological approach to bear on "dis–
covering woman' ,:
So . . . we reject for the same reasons both the sexual monism of
Freud and the economic monism of Engels. A psychoanalyst will
interpret all social claims of women as phenomena of the' 'mas–
culine protest"; for the Marxist, on the contrary, her sexuality
only expresses her economic situation in more or less complex,
roundabout fashion. But the categories of "clitorid" and "va–
ginal", like the categories of "bourgeois" or "proletarian" are
equally inadequate to encompass a concrete woman. Underlying
all individual drama, as it underlies the economic history of
mankind, there is an existential foundation that alone enables us
to understand in its unity that particular form of being which we
call a human life .
What de Beauvoir is really suggesting is that masculine intellectual
systems are inadequate because they lack the wholeness that female
consciousness, excluded from contributing
to
them, could provide. In
dominating, and then having to justify and rationalize their domina–
tion of women, the masculine systems-makers have created mutilated
systems; in taking the "otherness" of the "second" sex for granted
