It is often assumed... that women's enemy is the intellect, that their apprehension of life can only wind and unwind around a cooking pot, a baby's diaper, or matters of the heart. Similarly, for centuries and centuries we have been told that primitive mentality belongs to the order of the emotional and the affective, and that it is incapable of elaborating concepts. Primitive man feels and participates. He does not really think or reason. He has no knowledge, 'no clear idea or even no idea at all of matter and soil,' as Lucien Levy-Bruhl puts it. Today this persistent rationale has taken on multiple faces, and its residues still linger, easily recognizable despite the refined rhetoric of those who perpetuate it.'
Trinh T. M. Ha
