Alfred Adler, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The supposed inferiority of women is not a fact of nature; it is a fact of our arrangements. In a culture that prizes everything it calls masculine — strength, dominance, activity, the public world — and disparages everything it calls feminine — softness, submission, the private world — a girl grows up under a verdict of lesser worth that has nothing to do with any inborn deficiency and everything to do with the role forced upon her.
What I call the "masculine protest" is the revolt against this: in a woman, the protest against the subordinate, devalued place assigned to her; in a man, the anxious overcompensation by which he strives to prove himself strong, dominant, not-weak, not-feminine, driving himself and often trampling others to escape the coded weakness he fears.
Both are movements from a felt-feminine minus toward a coveted- masculine plus, and both are the products of a false valuation, not of biology. Against Freud, who read the girl's development from her anatomy, I read the woman's difficulty from her society. The cure is not for women to become men but for the culture to stop staking human worth on a masculine standard, so that neither sex need protest against being what it is.1234
She may voice her disinclination directly, or indirectly by disavowing all talent for domestic duties, and constantly give evidence attempting to prove that she has never developed a talent for domesticity. This is the type that seeks to compensate for the evil of the masculine attitude with a ''masculine" response. The defense attitude toward womanhood is the foundation of her whole being.Understanding Human Nature, pp. 134–135
One of the bitter consequences of the prejudice concerning the inferiority of women is the sharp division and pigeon-holing of concepts according to a scheme: thus ' masculine" signifies worth-while, powerful, victorious, capable, whereas "feminine" becomes identical with obedient, servile, subordinate.Understanding Human Nature, p. 133
With that I think the uncertainty and resignation present to-day in woman's work will disappear and with it, that exaggerated desire for recognition that so frequently makes her appear inferior.? IV. This is the case of a ten-year-old boy.The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, pp. 72–73
The dynamics of the neurosis can therefore be regarded (and is often so understood by the neurotic because of its irradiation upon his 100 THE NEUROTIC CONSTITUTION psyche) as if the patient wished to change from a woman to a man.The Neurotic Constitution
One of Adler's most interesting positions and, for its time, strikingly modern: a social-constructionist account of gender inferiority that located women's disadvantage in culture rather than nature and anticipated much later feminist argument, in pointed contrast to Freud's anatomical account of female development. Its reception is twofold: the social-constructionist core is credited as ahead of its time, while the very apparatus it uses — the polarity of "masculine" and "feminine" as the axis of the whole analysis, and the framing of the striving as a "masculine protest" — is faulted by later readers for reinscribing the gender essentialism it means to criticize. The tension between the modernity of the claim and the datedness of its terms is the substance of the debate.