Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

When I was young, human beings were routinely described as mankind, and mankind could be described as a singular man, and he, and even men in liberation movements—Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin—fell back on this language, because the absence of women was so absent from our imaginations that few noted that it even could, let alone should, be otherwise. The 1950s brought books like The Family of Man and LIFE’s Picture History of Western Man; the 1960s a conference and book titled Man the Hunter that all but wrote women out of evolutionary history; by the 1970s we got a long BBC series about The Ascent of Man. The current online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary notes, “Man was considered until the 20th cent. to include women by implication, though referring primarily to males. It is now frequently understood to exclude women.” This had real consequences. They are endless but a few come to mind: heart attacks were described by how they affected men, so that women’s symptoms were less likely to be recognized and treated, a situation from which many women died; crash test dummies replicated male bodies, meaning that vehicular safety design favored male survival, and women died at higher rates. The Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 presumed that the behavior of young men at an elite university could be universalized to stand for that of all humanity, and William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, about a group of younger British schoolboys, was also often cit...