Why Should Women Want to Know about Aristotle?

.....Take, for example, the very usual reproach that women nowadays always want to "copy what men do."  In that reproach there is a great deal of truth and a great deal of sheer, unmitigated and indeed quite wicked nonsense.  There are a number of jobs and pleasures which men have in times past cornered for themselves.  At one time, for instance, men had a monopoly on classical education.  When the pioneers of university training for women demanded that women should be admitted to the universities, the cry went up at once: "Why should women want to know about Aristotle?" The answer is NOT that all women would be the better for knowing about Aristotle -- still less, as Lord Tennyson seemed to think, that they would be more companionable wives for their husbands if they did know about Aristotle -- but simply:  "What women want as a class is irrelevant.  I want to know about Aristotle.  It is true that most women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him -- but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him." [pages 26- 27]

-- more from, Are Women Human? by Dorothy L. Sayers, who wrote the excerpted essay in 1947