ABSTRACT
The 20th and 21st centuries have been marked by an extraordinary amount of discussion, within Western academia, about the nature of womanhood: not just in the sense of examining the varying social meanings of womanhood but also in the more basic metaphysical sense of questioning what conditions have to be fulfilled for someone to count as a woman at all. Although in previous centuries, it was taken as truistic that ‘woman’ referred to a stable, materially determined category – namely the adult female members of the sexually dimorphic human species – in the 20th century, a variety of philosophical, medical and feminist influences converged to complicate this narrative. Broadly speaking, what these influences had in common were two related beliefs: first, that the material world is not as stable or well-defined as used to be assumed and, second, that the structure of the social world is much more metaphysically significant than used to be assumed. In the 21st century, as they hit the mainstream, these views were transmuted into the currently popular view that possession of an inner ‘female gender identity’ is what makes you a woman. In this chapter, the author traces the influences that have led us to this point and subjects them to trenchant philosophical critique.
