have been deprived of their privileges, the right of every human being to enjoy those opportunities, equally with all other human beings, which would enable them to realize their potentialities to the optimum degree. This statement does not, of course, imply anything so idiotic as that men should be given the opportunities to give birth to babies, or that they should enjoy the freedom to suckle babies, and that women should be free to grow beards with mustaches, but what it does imply is that men and women should be given equal opportunities to realize their natural potentialities within the social milieu. These opportunities have never been fully afforded women or men; but if they haven't been fully afforded men, they have been afforded women to an even lesser extent. Even today, when there are now more women in the professional specialty occupations than there are men, discrimination still exists.
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Women have always been treated as the inferior ''race" by the masculine world. Everything that has been said by racists about blacks has been said by men about women: that they have smaller brains, less intelligence, are of limited abilities, unclean, incapable of achievement, lacking in creativity, and so on. The parallel between sexism and racism is deadly. The same impediments to self-fulfillment that have traditionally been placed in the way of blacks have been operative for a much longer time in the case of women. In the eighteenth century men claimed that no woman had produced anything worthwhile in literature, with the possible exception of the Greek lyric poet of the sixth century B.C., Sappho. Since women had failed to do so up to that time, it was argued, it was a fair assumption that they would never do so. But within the first half of the nineteenth century the supremacists were to be proven wrong, for women writers of genius commenced the break into the literary world: Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ann Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, George Sand, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And they were followed by such distinguished writers as Emily Dickinson, Mary Webb, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Pearl Buck, Doris Lessing, Sigrid Undset, Selma Lagerlauof, Grazia Deledda, Nadine Gordimer, Mary McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and many others. No one any longer doubts that women can write, and that what they have to say is worth reading. Nevertheless arguments are still heard to
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