"Psychologists have set about describing the true nature of women with a certainty and a sense of their own infallibility rarely found in the secular world"
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Weisstein skewers a particular kind of scientific swagger: the moment psychology stops studying women and starts pronouncing on them. The line lands because it targets not sexism as crude prejudice, but sexism as credentialed certainty. “True nature” is a tell. It’s the language of essences and inevitabilities, a way of smuggling cultural expectations into the lab and then calling the result objective.
The bite is in the comparison to religion. By saying this confidence is “rarely found in the secular world,” Weisstein frames mainstream psychological claims about women as quasi-theological: a priesthood of experts delivering doctrine, not hypotheses. It’s a devastating inversion for a field that sells itself on skepticism and measurement. The subtext is that the problem isn’t just bad conclusions; it’s the posture that makes those conclusions feel unchallengeable. If you’re “infallible,” you don’t need to listen, revise, or notice who’s missing from your samples.
Context matters: Weisstein was a feminist psychologist whose work (“Psychology Constructs the Female”) challenged mid-century research that treated women as deviations from a male norm and read social roles as biological destiny. Her sentence is a warning about how easily “data” becomes a ventriloquist’s dummy for the era’s assumptions - especially when the people being described have little power to dispute the description. It’s also a meta-critique of expertise itself: not anti-science, but anti-complacency. She’s demanding humility as a methodological requirement, not a personality trait.
The bite is in the comparison to religion. By saying this confidence is “rarely found in the secular world,” Weisstein frames mainstream psychological claims about women as quasi-theological: a priesthood of experts delivering doctrine, not hypotheses. It’s a devastating inversion for a field that sells itself on skepticism and measurement. The subtext is that the problem isn’t just bad conclusions; it’s the posture that makes those conclusions feel unchallengeable. If you’re “infallible,” you don’t need to listen, revise, or notice who’s missing from your samples.
Context matters: Weisstein was a feminist psychologist whose work (“Psychology Constructs the Female”) challenged mid-century research that treated women as deviations from a male norm and read social roles as biological destiny. Her sentence is a warning about how easily “data” becomes a ventriloquist’s dummy for the era’s assumptions - especially when the people being described have little power to dispute the description. It’s also a meta-critique of expertise itself: not anti-science, but anti-complacency. She’s demanding humility as a methodological requirement, not a personality trait.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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