LITERATURE: Flatland – On Genital Bias

Gender, sure, but what’s the difference when the physical difference is so surely the reason in Flatland:

To my readers in Spaceland, the condition of our Women may seem truly deplorable, and so indeed it is.  A Male of the lowest type of the Isosceles may look forward to some improvement of his angle, and to the ultimate elevation of the whole of his degraded caste; but no Woman can entertain such hopes for her sex.  "Once a Woman, always a Woman" is a Decree of Nature; and the very Laws of Evolution seem suspended in her disfavor.  Yet at least we can admire the wise Prearrangement which has ordained that, as they have no hopes, so they shall have no memory to recall, and no forethought to anticipate, the miseries and humiliations which are at once a necessity of their existence and the basis of the constitution of Flatland.  (p. 14)

Abbott is of course hyperbolizing the condition of women’s status in society at his time of the late 1800s and yet there seems to be a poke at religion here as well.  What is the real reference for "wise Prearrangement" when seen as a plan to keep women in their place?  Does the "necessity of their existence" refer to bearing the mark of original sin? 

There’s more than human rights at the core of story here.  Even as one reads this over a century later there is a twinge in this woman’s non-feminist mind of rebellion and so I must wonder what the women–if they’d read it–of Abbott’s time would think?  Did they, as I, swallow back the gall of memory and laugh?  A polite titter perhaps?

I doubt it.