The Crisis of Gender and Sexuality

Abstract

At a time when even those sympathetic to the women’s movement asserted rigid notions of sexual difference, if only to deflate conservative fears about the sexual anarchy that would follow in the wake of women’s political emancipation, feminists challenged the biological and psychological premise on which the sex/gender equation was based. While in the motto to this chapter women’s claim to citizenship is linked to their inalterable difference from men, New Woman writers, arguing for women’s rights on the grounds of their essential sameness, suggested in their cross-dressing narratives that women could, in fact, become men.

[I]t must never be forgotten that the differences which nature has fixed between the sexes are insuperable … The protectors of ‘true womanhood’ insist on these differences; but the insurgents ought to insist on them too. It is not only useless, it is suicidal to deny them … The perpetual… unassailable differences, organic and functional, biological and psychological, between men and women are just the safeguard which may enable men without scruple and apprehension to make women their political peers. Women may safely be relieved from political disabilities simply because they can never become men.

J. B. Bury, ‘The Insurrection of Women’ (1892)¹