Chesterton would have sided with me against the representative of his own sex. I grant that, even so, he and I should disagree ferociously about the eating of meat-but that is not a difference between the sexes-on that point, that late Mr. Shaw and I should probably find we had more fundamental interests in common than either of us had with my charwoman. Bernard Shaw on the other hand, in a discussion about art and literature, Mr. There is a sense in which my charwoman and I have more in common than either of us has with, say, Mr. There is a fundamental difference between men and women, but it is not the only fundamental difference in the world.
We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served. “Accepted as a human being!”-yes not as an inferior class and not, I beg and pray all feminists, as a superior class-not, in fact, as a class at all, except in a useful context. “Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopædia, an ideal or an obscenity the one thing he won’t accept her as is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.” He said in one of his Assorted Articles : Lawrence, who certainly cannot be accused of underrating the importance of sex and talked a good deal of nonsense upon the subject, was yet occasionally visited with shattering glimpses of the obvious.
You know that this is so with yourselves-why will you not believe that it is so with us. What form the occupation, the pleasures and the emotion may take, depends entirely upon the individual. “What,” men have asked distractedly from the beginning of time, “what on earth do women want?” I do not know that women, as women, want anything in particular, but as human beings they want, my good men, exactly what you want yourselves: interesting occupation, reasonable freedom for their pleasures, and a sufficient emotional outlet.
Sayers gave the " Are Women Human?" address to a Women's Society in 1938:
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