Dorothy Sayers on Feminism

 

Dorothy Sayers lived an amazing life.  She was one of the first women to graduate from Oxford, she was successful at writing in the popular and academic markets, she translated Dante’s Divine Comedy in its difficult terza rima rhyme scheme, and she published theological works.  An interesting question to pose, then, is whether this woman was a feminist. Mary McDermitt Shideler does a great job answering this question: “The liberation of women was not a cause that [Sayers] espoused, but a way of life that she practiced on the premises that male and female are adjectives qualifying the noun ‘human being’, and that substantives governs the modifier” (3-4).

 

Watch the attached video for a look at Sayers’s views on feminism in her speech “Are Women Human?”