The Emancipation of Women

Abstract

This perception of the "right" to the individual pursuit of happiness, as rooted in the soul of modern man as any other fundamental change of perspective has had its unintended consequences; none, perhaps more revolutionary, than that of the accelerated emancipation of women from the subordinate position to which she had always been delegated with greater or lesser rudeness. This is a fascinating story, about which we are still far from being able to make a definitive judgment, because the drama is still in full development.
In the effort to understand what is happening, it is often more useful for me to turn my eyes back, to the starting point, well aware, on the other hand, that in human things the past is never a guarantee of the future. Female emancipation can be seen as another variant of the division of labor process. Of course, this, in turn, does not exclude many other possible angles, such as the rise of moral conscience, the best education of women, or the simple fact of their greatest longevity beyond their fertile years. But I believe that, within the most abstract of social parameters, that of the division of labour, can give us a more appropriate view of the whole.
Paleontologists tell us that life on this planet is more than three billion years old. But they also tell us that reproduction was done for the first two billion in the way of algae, that is, asexual. This implies that sexual reproduction, that is, the combination in halves of the two series of chromosomes that would do the whole (the fertilized egg), was the decisive step that opened for terrestrial life the range of almost infinite molecular chain reactions that unfold in its wonderful variety of colors, complexity of design and geographical dispersion.