Are Women Human?

A Note on Dorothy Sayers

It was my birthday last Friday. I ended up being sick the whole weekend, so there was very little I could do other than read. Luckily, my wonderful husband gifted me a copy of Dorothy L. Sayers’ 1938 essay ‘Are Women Human?’ as a birthday present, so I was able to spend some quiet time eating cake and pondering over Sayers’ wisdom. Her thoughts on gender, work, and parenthood have for a while been fascinating to me. I eventually want to write a full-length essay on the topic, but for now, let me simply relate to you the main points she makes in ‘Are Women Human?’ - I’m sure that, like me, you’ll soon be eager to read more of her nonfiction!

Sayers has always seemed particularly prescient to me. In her Peter Wimsey novels, she writes about what we now call ‘euthanasia’ well before any of the current debates about its morality had begun (I wrote about this in a recent piece for Current, if you’re interested). Similarly, through the character of Harriet Vane she is able to write about feminism (even though she refuses to call herself a feminist) in a way that prefigures what a lot of ‘reactionary feminists’ like Mary Harrington are now arguing. Among the deluge of claims about what a ‘woman’ is or is not which plagues the left and the right alike, Sayers’ dry humour is a vehicle for a remarkable and refreshing amount of common sense.

First of all, she points out that there is no use in women ‘imitating’ male behaviour for the sake of being able to do so. Some stereotypically male habits during Sayers’ time, like undergraduates engaging in drunken antics around Oxford colleges, are either morally neutral or reproachable. Women will gain nothing by copying this behaviour for the sake of ‘freedom’ or ‘independence’. Secondly, Sayers is under no illusions that equality of opportunity will or should lead to equality of outcome. She is not like Leslie Knope, the main character in Parks and Recreation (one of my favourite shows, incidentally!) who wants half of her town’s garbage truck workers to be women on a principle. Sayers recognises that there are undeniable and irreversible differences in the distribution of interests and skills between the sexes. Most women, she says by way of example, will never want to become mechanics, and will never be suited to it either. But generalised sex-based differences tell us about the average man and the average woman, not the individual. And if there does happen to be one woman who is a very good mechanic indeed, Sayers argues, then let her become one. If that is what she is most suited to, her labour would be wasted elsewhere.

This is where the crux of Sayers’ argument lies. ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ are real and important categories, but you cannot know everything about an individual human being by simply knowing their sex. Women are women, but they are also human, just like men are men but also human. In saying this, Sayers seems to be in agreement with Edith Stein, who posited that there is a ‘mutuality’ between men and women even though there are significant differences. For Sayers, the lowest common denominator is that both men and women, as human beings, need useful work. This does not mean an office job, or a highly competitive career, or even paid work (at least, Sayers does not suggest this), but simply useful labour, a useful occupation. Much like Mary Harrington in her recent book Feminism Against Progress, Sayers refutes the claim that it’s more ‘traditional’ for women to stay at home and not work, and therefore that it is ‘unnatural’ for them to leave the house or engage in any kind of labour. This is because the Industrial Revolution essentially replaced a tremendous amount of labour that would have been done by women in the home with labour done outside the home by machines. For hundreds of years, anything to do with clothes or food production, and even land management, was the realm of women. All of that was by 1938, and is still now, largely taken care of by machines, which are managed by men.

Modern civilisation has taken all these pleasant and profitable activities out the home, where women looked after them, and handed them over to big industry, to be directed and organised by men at the head of large factories…the home contains much less of interesting activity than it used to contain.

Is it then really surprising that women should be looking for manual or intellectual occupations elsewhere, Sayers asks? Although she does not provide a definite solution to the problem of labour having been taken out of the household, she does argue that space should be made for women to have some kind of occupation which suits their skills. Sayers could not have foreseen the arrival of the digital age. She had no idea that technology, for all of its evils, would one day allow people to do remote work from home, thus at least partially re-integrating labour into the household. As someone who currently considers herself both a stay-at-home mother (in the sense that I do not work outside the home and I look after a small child) and a professional writer (in the sense that I get paid to write things as my part-time occupation), I welcome the opportunity technology has given me to combine domestic and intellectual labour into one. I am a woman and a human. I am pregnant, which my husband can’t be as a man, but I also write on my laptop for a living, which my husband, a man, does as well as myself, a woman. In fact, I’m finishing typing this post during my toddler’s nap time, while my husband is also doing remote work from our home office. I wonder what Sayers would think of our family arrangement. I hope she would be amused by the mixture of books and toys strewn all over our living room floor.