ABSTRACT
The author distinguishes between female and male, terms that refer to biological classes, and feminine and masculine, complementary terms that refer to social constructs that have governed and interpreted those biological classes. The author applies her questions to a copy of the Ladies Home Journal. The Journal has some ideas about the cause of sexual differentiation. A feminist editor, associating herself with her readers through their common training in appropriate gender roles, blames socialization. The Golden Notebook names aspects of sexual discrimination that make women second-class citizens. The modern woman feels "emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment". In theory, a woman writer ought to express them. Following John Stuart Mill, preceding Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf explores men's apparent psychic need to dominate women. Like Woolf, Adrienne Rich offers women her text as a weapon in the struggle for consciousness, in their review of patriarchal culture that serves as a life-saving prelude to abandoning it.
