Women: an inquiry by Willa Muir

Description

Women: an inquiry by Willa Muir is a philosophical feminist essay written in the early 20th century. The book explores whether there is an essential difference between women and men beyond social conditioning, proposing that women’s distinctive creative power lies in fostering human growth and moral life, while men excel at shaping conscious systems and forms. The essay moves from exposing men’s contradictory view of women (feared and revered) to a core hypothesis drawn from motherhood: women’s energy is more engaged with unconscious life (growth, intuition, emotion), while men’s is more engaged with conscious life (form, reason, abstraction). From this, it argues that women create individuals and inner harmony, and men build systems—both necessary and complementary. It critiques conventional morality as a masculine tool for preserving systems through impersonal codes and punishment, urging women to develop independent, psychological, and religiously grounded values rooted in creative love and a fearless grasp of human experience. The book calls on women to know themselves, reject restrictive “purity” ideals, and carry their womanhood into public life where systems touch individuals (e.g., welfare, justice, reform). It considers art as a meeting of unconscious vitality and conscious form, suggesting women thrive in arts close to lived personality and concrete experience, and closes by urging a rethinking of women’s aims and education so that both sexes can cooperate as equal, complementary creators of human life and its institutions. (This is an automatically generated summary.)