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Friedrich Nietzsche's views on women


Friedrich Nietzsche's views on women have attracted controversy, beginning during his life and continuing to the present.

Ida von Miaskowski remarked in her memoir, published 7 years after his death:

In the eighties, when Nietzsche's later writings containing some of the oft-quoted sharp words against women appeared, my husband sometimes told me jokingly not to tell people of my friendly relations with Nietzsche, since this was not very flattering for me. It was just a joke. My husband, like myself, always kept friendly memories of Nietzsche [...] his behavior precisely towards women was so sensitive, so natural and comradely, that even today in old age I cannot regard Nietzsche as a despiser of women.

Nietzsche wrote specifically about his views on women in Section VII of Human, All Too Human, which seems to hold women in high regard; but given some of his other comments, his overall attitude towards women is ambivalent. For instance, while in Human, All Too Human, he states that "the perfect woman is a higher type of human than the perfect man, and also something much more rare," there are a number of contradictions and subtleties in Nietzsche's thought elsewhere which are not easily reconcilable. He could be both in praise and contempt of women at one time or another. For instance, in the following passage: "What inspires respect for woman, and often enough even fear, is her nature, which is more “natural” than man’s, the genuine, cunning suppleness of a beast of prey, the tiger’s claw under the glove, the naiveté of her egoism, her uneducability and inner wildness, the incomprehensibility, scope, and movement of her desires and virtues." (Beyond Good and Evil, section 239.)

His attitude can sometimes be entirely disparaging: "From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth—her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty." In section 6 in "Why I Write Such Excellent Books" of Ecce Homo, he claims that "goodness" in women is a sign of "physiological degeneration", and that women are on the whole cleverer and more wicked than men- which in Nietzsche's view, constitutes a compliment. Yet he goes on to claim that the emancipation of women, and feminists, was merely the resentment of some women against other women, who were physically better constituted and able to bear children.

Despite Nietzsche's writings being viewed as being misogynistic by many, others, such as Anthony Ludovici, insist that he is only an anti-feminist, not a misogynist. Other writings include:

"Woman's love involves injustice and blindness against everything that she does not love... Woman is not yet capable of friendship: women are still cats and birds. Or at best cows... (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Friend)


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