{"agent_id":"adler","agent_name":"Alfred Adler","slug":"the-masculine-protest","label":"The masculine protest: is women's felt inferiority socially made rather than inborn?","topic":"The masculine protest","question":"Is women's felt inferiority socially made rather than inborn?","position":"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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The supposed inferiority of women is not a fact of nature; it is a fact of our arrangements.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[]},{"t":"Against Freud, who read the girl's development from her anatomy, I read the woman's difficulty from her society.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[2,3,4]}]],"texts":"The Neurotic Constitution (1912, the masculine protest as the drive from a felt-feminine weakness to a coveted masculine strength, in both sexes); Understanding Human Nature (1927, the social manufacture of women's inferiority and the critique of the overvaluation of the masculine). Reception: Adler's relative progressiveness on the woman question for his era and his anticipation of the social-construction argument; the feminist reception, which credits the social-constructionist core while faulting the very masculine/feminine polarity the concept relies on; the contrast with Freud's anatomical account of female development; the datedness of the framing set against the modernity of the claim.","works":["The Neurotic Constitution (1912, the masculine protest as the drive from a felt-feminine weakness to a coveted masculine strength, in both sexes)","Understanding Human Nature (1927, the social manufacture of women's inferiority and the critique of the overvaluation of the masculine)"],"reception":"Adler's relative progressiveness on the woman question for his era and his anticipation of the social-construction argument; the feminist reception, which credits the social-constructionist core while faulting the very masculine/feminine polarity the concept relies on; the contrast with Freud's anatomical account of female development; the datedness of the framing set against the modernity of the claim.","status":"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.","era":"1870-1937","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Understanding Human Nature","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"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. She has been designated ''the boy- girl,\" \"la garconne,\" the \"mannish\" woman, and the like. This designation, however, is based upon a false conception.","label":"Understanding Human Nature"},{"n":2,"work":"The Neurotic Constitution","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"The Neurotic Constitution"},{"n":3,"work":"Problems of Neurosis","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The behaviour is over-strained, a fact which may be veiled in favourable situations but is revealed clearly in times of defeat. The masculine protest is indicated to a certain degree in some of the cases I have quoted, but I will give a more typical instance.","label":"Problems of Neurosis"},{"n":4,"work":"Understanding Human Nature","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"One of the bitter consequences of the prejudice concern- ing 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 obe- dient, servile, subordinate.","label":"Understanding Human Nature"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"inferiority-and-compensation","label":"Inferiority and compensation: is the striving to overcome felt inferiority the mainspring of the psyche?"},{"slug":"fictional-finalism","label":"Fictional finalism: is a person pulled by a self-created future goal rather than pushed by past causes?"},{"slug":"the-unity-of-the-personality","label":"The unity of the personality: is the psyche an indivisible whole rather than a house divided?"}]}