THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 596
that the women's movement, even where it is replaced by the proletarian one, is still only postponed. That is to say: woman the sexual being, so little clarified in previous
male societies and so little defined beyond the mere family, emerges as a problem again even beyond economic and social liberation. The very decline of female
oppression does not create, per se ipsum, the decline of female content. Lover, mother, even objectified worker have never yet shaped this content let alone exhausted
its utopian possibilities. It is not even shaped in the categories of lover and mother, however poetically condensed; not to speak of new, previously unknown and yet
possible categories. The levelling of sexual differences which appeared in the Soviet Union during the first urgent general programme of construction did not go very
deep. Precisely where it depended on less regimented intervention, specifically female attitudes and energies appeared and are proving themselves over and over again.
The mother, as Gorky presents her in his realistic novel, knew how to do her revolutionary work differently from her male comrades; the nature of her kindness, of her
hatred and of her understanding could not be replaced by a man. On the whole, the difference between the sexes lies in a different field to the artificial differences which
the class society has produced; thus it does not disappear with the latter. Sexual difference disappears so little that female nature can only become clear in socialism.
Enough of it remains in any case to refurbish it in its content, to have it as Eve in search of her form. The largely ambiguous element remains, the fermenting halfdecisive,
wrongly decisive, indecisive muddle and tangle in woman, as the previous society delivers it to a coming one. It is something gentle and wild, destructive and
compassionate, it is the flower, the witch, the haughty bronze and the efficient life and soul of business. It is the maenad and the ruling Demeter, it is the mature Juno, the
cool Artemis and the artistic Minerva and all sorts of other things. It is the musical capriccioso (the violin solo in Strauss' ‘Heldenleben’) and the prototype of the lento,
of calm. It is finally, with an arc which no man knows, the tension between Venus and Mary. All this is incompatible, but it cannot be corrected let alone abolished with
a stroke of the pen through the problem of the content of woman. This is even less the case with that which has not yet been announced in woman up to now, that
utopian­indefinite element which caused the great variety of previous definitions in the first place. As if they were mere attempts and experiments with names, in which
the main thing has still not been named and revealed at all. Has not been nearly as revealed as in the case of man and his predicates; although the latter