Reading Nietzsche

Themes · Specific Topics

Women, Marriage, and Gender

Cluster Specific Topics Writing period 1878–1888 First encounter 6 readings

Most readers meet this subject through a quotation — usually one sentence, usually the worst one — and through an argument about whether it can be explained away. The purpose of this page is to make it possible to read the passages instead.

The textual situation is not in serious doubt. Nietzsche wrote things about women that were contemptuous by any modern standard and by many standards of his own century, he was hostile to the women's emancipation movements of his day, and he made sweeping claims about what "woman as such" is and wants. Beyond Good and Evil §238 says that a man of depth must think of woman as a possession, as property that can be locked up, as something predestined for service. That sentence is in the published work, in a book Nietzsche saw through the press, and no account of him is honest if it does not include it.

The same corpus also contains sustained analysis of how the demands made on women were produced, what chastity and modesty have done to the people required to have them, and where the moralism of his century has fallen hardest. Nietzsche contradicts himself on this subject more openly than on almost any other. Both halves are his; neither cancels the other; and a reading that quotes only one has selected rather than read.

This page does not choose between apology and prosecution. It tells you where the passages are, what they say, what kind of claim each one is making, and where the interpretive disagreements lie. The section on four kinds of claim is the tool to use throughout: most of the confusion on this subject comes from treating a piece of polemic as a historical thesis, or a nineteenth-century social observation as a metaphysical doctrine, or a modern judgment as though it were a finding about the text.

Essential first encounter

Six assignments, read in order, following publication chronology from 1878 to 1888. Reading in series matters more here than anywhere else on this site: nearly every individual aphorism on this subject misleads in isolation, in both directions. Several of these assignments contain material that is hostile and, in places, demeaning; they are assigned in full rather than excerpted, because excerpting is what produces the two standard misreadings.

  1. Earlier formulation · 1878

    Human, All Too Human Volume I, §§377–437 — "Woman and Child"

    The middle-period register, at length

    Zimmern's free edition titles the chapter "Wife and Child"; the preferred edition and this site's book guide give it as "Woman and Child." Roughly sixty short aphorisms; the book guide gives the range as Volume I, §§377–437.

    Question: Read the chapter straight through. How many of the aphorisms are claims about women, and how many are claims about the arrangements women live under?

    Why it belongs: The first sustained treatment in the corpus, and the one most people have not read. The chapter is uneven by design — short aphorisms in rapid succession, some analytic, some conventional, some dismissive, several attentive to how marriage and upbringing produce the qualities that are then attributed to nature. Read as a unit it establishes the register that Daybreak and The Gay Science continue, and it makes the later polemic legible as a change rather than as a constant. Read one aphorism at a time it will supply evidence for whatever the reader already believes, which is the reason it is assigned whole.

    Read alongside: Daybreak §346; The psychology of morality.

    Online edition: Open Volume I (trans. Helen Zimmern; use the contents for "Wife and Child," Zimmern's title for this chapter) · Preferred edition.

  2. Development · 1881

    Daybreak §346

    The other side of the corpus, in its own voice

    The free edition is The Dawn of Day (trans. J. M. Kennedy). Aphorism titles differ between translations; use the section number.

    Question: Does the section make a claim about women's nature, or only about what has been demanded of them?

    Why it belongs: A section from the book where Nietzsche is most consistently reading moral demands as historical productions. It is assigned here because the standard account of this theme — that Nietzsche is uniformly hostile — does not survive it, and because its content is analytic rather than complimentary: the point is not that he admires women but that he treats what is required of them as something made rather than found. Note the limits. This is one section in a book of nearly six hundred, and nothing in it retracts anything said elsewhere. It establishes that the corpus contains more than one register, which is a smaller claim than either side usually wants.

    Read alongside: The Gay Science §§59–75; Beyond Good and Evil §§231–239.

    Online edition: Book IV (trans. J. M. Kennedy; opens nearby — use the contents or Find for the section number) · Preferred edition.

  3. Core · Book II (1882)

    The Gay Science §§59–75

    The most analytically careful stretch in the corpus

    The free edition is The Joyful Wisdom (trans. Thomas Common). Book II; §§59–75 run consecutively.

    Question: §71 argues that a particular demand has put women in an impossible position. Is the argument available to someone who rejects everything in Beyond Good and Evil Part VII?

    Why it belongs: A run of consecutive sections on women, love, sexuality and the theatre, and the closest this subject comes to sustained argument rather than assertion. §71 on chastity is the centre: Nietzsche describes women brought up in ignorance of sexuality and then delivered into marriage, and treats the resulting situation as a knot tied by the demand itself. §75 registers women whose form of life does not fit the arrangement of his society. The stretch is also where the contradictions are closest together, and reading it consecutively is the point — the same pages contain observations that later readers have found acute and remarks that are conventional for a European man of 1882.

    Read alongside: Daybreak §346; The Gay Science §§362–363.

    Online edition: Book II (trans. Thomas Common; use Find for the section numbers) · Preferred edition.

  4. Complication · 1883

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra Part I, "On Little Old and Young Women"

    The whip, and the frame around it

    Common: "Old and Young Women." Read the following chapter, "On Child and Marriage," immediately afterwards.

    Question: The closing line is given to an old woman, inside a speech Zarathustra reports. Does the nesting change what is being asserted, and how would you tell?

    Why it belongs: The most quoted sentence on this subject — the old woman's advice that one should not forget the whip when going to women — and one of the least read chapters. The speech contains a series of claims about what men and women are for, presented as Zarathustra's, which are then capped by a remark he attributes to an old woman he has met. Interpreters divide over whether the frame distances Nietzsche from the content or is a rhetorical device that delivers it more safely, and the text does not settle it. What can be said is narrower and worth holding: the sentence is not Zarathustra's own, the surrounding claims are, and the surrounding claims are the part almost never quoted.

    Read alongside: Zarathustra I, "On Child and Marriage"; Aphorism and style.

    Online edition: Open the free edition (trans. Thomas Common; use the contents for Part I, "Old and Young Women") · Preferred edition.

  5. Core · 1886

    Beyond Good and Evil Part VII, §§231–239

    The chapter that has to be read whole

    Part VII, "Our Virtues." Section numbers run continuously across the book's nine parts.

    Question: §231 announces that what follows are only "my truths." Elsewhere in the book, what does Nietzsche think a philosopher's own truths are worth?

    Why it belongs: The central text, and the harshest. §231 prefaces the chapter by saying that at the bottom of every person is something unteachable, and that what follows are his truths about woman as such. §232 attacks women's self-enlightenment and the emancipation movement as symptoms of a general coarsening of Europe. §233 dismisses the example of accomplished women as proving nothing. §§234–237 range from remarks on cooking to a set of short epigrams. §238 is the worst formulation in the published corpus: that a man of depth must conceive of woman as a possession, as property that can be locked away, as something predestined to serve. §239 argues that woman is losing ground as her position in Europe changes, and closes on the "eternal feminine."
    Read it whole and slowly, and do not skip §231. The disclaimer is real, it is doing rhetorical work, and it does not neutralize what follows: Nietzsche elsewhere treats a philosopher's own truths as the most serious thing about him. Both facts are part of the evidence.

    Read alongside: Beyond Good and Evil §144; The herd and the last man.

    Online edition: Part VII (trans. Helen Zimmern) · Preferred edition.

  6. Development · 1888

    The Antichrist §48

    Woman as something a priesthood needed

    Free translation by H. L. Mencken; the course follows Kaufmann.

    Question: This section is about a construction rather than about women. Does that make it a different kind of claim from Beyond Good and Evil §238, or the same claim in a different costume?

    Why it belongs: One of the few late passages where the gendered material is doing analytic work. Nietzsche reads the opening of Genesis as a priestly device — woman as the route by which knowledge enters and therefore as the first danger to a priesthood whose authority depends on ignorance — and treats the story as evidence about the people who told it rather than about anyone in it. It is assigned last because it shows the theme's most useful distinction in operation: an argument about how a culture constructed "woman" is a different sort of claim from an assertion about what women are, and Nietzsche makes both. Keeping them apart is not a way of rescuing him; it is a way of seeing that the corpus contains two different things.

    Read alongside: Critique of Christianity; Genealogy as method.

    Online edition: §48 (trans. H. L. Mencken) · Preferred edition.

Four kinds of claim

Almost every dispute about this subject turns on a confusion between four different things. Sorting a passage into one of them before arguing about it saves a great deal of trouble.

1. What the text says
The textual claim: this sentence, in this section, in this book, in this year. It is settled by looking. Beyond Good and Evil §238 says what it says; the whip line is spoken by an old woman inside Zarathustra's report; §231 contains a disclaimer. Disagreement at this level is usually a sign that someone has not read the passage.
2. What Nietzsche is asserting about the world
The historical or empirical claim: that women's position in Europe has changed in a particular direction, that the demand for chastity has had particular effects, that emancipation movements have particular causes. These can be assessed like any other claim about nineteenth-century Europe, and several of them are poorly supported. They are also the claims most often waved through as though calling them "Nietzsche's view" settled anything.
3. How the passage is framed
The editorial question: who is speaking, in what genre, with what qualification. A speech inside a narrative, an epigram in a chapter of epigrams, a claim prefaced by "my truths," a note never published — these are not equivalent, and the differences matter for what the text commits its author to. They do not make the content disappear, and treating framing as a solvent is the characteristic error of the apologetic reading.
4. What a reader today concludes
The modern evaluation: that the material is objectionable, that it damages the surrounding philosophy or does not, that it should change how the rest is read. These are the reader's judgments and this site does not make them for you. What it does insist on is that they be kept separate from 1–3, so that a verdict is not smuggled in as a description of the text.

The two standard failures are mirror images. The apologetic reading moves from 3 to 4 without passing through 1: because a passage is framed or ironic or of its time, it is treated as not meaning what it says. The prosecuting reading moves from 1 to 4 without passing through 3: because a sentence exists, every question about genre, speaker and context is treated as evasion. Both skip the work.

Fuller route: tests and complications

Four investigations to take after the first encounter. Each assignment opens its full explanation and reading links in the work survey below.

1. The analytic register, followed through

Where Nietzsche treats gendered expectations as something produced. Ask at each step what the argument would look like if the subject were any other moral demand.

  1. Human, All Too Human — Volume I, §§377–437, "Woman and Child"
    The middle-period register established, unevenly and at length.
  2. Daybreak — §346
    Moral demands read as historical productions rather than as discoveries.
  3. The Gay Science — §§59–75
    Chastity, marriage and what the demand for both has created.
  4. The Antichrist — §48
    A gendered figure analysed as an instrument of somebody else's authority.

2. The polemic, and what it is against

The hostile material, read for its targets. Nietzsche's opposition to emancipation is connected to his opposition to equality generally, and the connection is worth establishing rather than assuming.

  1. Beyond Good and Evil — §§231–239
    The chapter whole, including §238.
  2. Beyond Good and Evil — §§144–146
    The epigrams, including one of the harshest single lines.
  3. The Gay Science — §§362–363
    The Book V material, contemporaneous with Part VII and in the same register.
  4. Twilight of the Idols — "Skirmishes" §§13–14, 27
    The late compressions, adding volume rather than argument.

3. Framing, speakers, and figures

Where the question of who is speaking actually arises — and where it does not.

  1. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — I, "On Little Old and Young Women"
    A line inside a speech inside a narrative.
  2. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — I, "On Child and Marriage"
    The chapter immediately after, and the most positive account of a couple in the book.
  3. Beyond Good and Evil — Preface
    "Supposing truth is a woman": a gendered image doing structural work in a book's argument.
  4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra — III, "The Other Dance Song"
    Life addressed as a woman, where the figure is the philosophy rather than decoration.

4. The same claims without the gender

A diagnostic. Several of Nietzsche's arguments about women are applications of positions he holds generally. Establishing which are which is the difference between a reading and an opinion.

  1. Beyond Good and Evil — §232
    Emancipation as coarsening: compare with the general hostility to levelling.
  2. The Gay Science — §71
    A demand that produces the condition it then describes: the genealogical move applied here.
  3. The Antichrist — §48
    A priesthood's need for a figure: the same analysis as the rest of the book.
  4. Ecce Homo — "Why I Am So Clever" §§3, 5
    Dismissal and warmth in the same chapter, about the same subject.

Keep these distinctions in view

Published and unpublished
Everything in the first encounter is from books Nietzsche published or prepared for publication. Some of the harshest material attributed to him on this subject circulates from notebooks he did not publish, arranged by other people. See the note on the notebooks; the distinction matters more here than almost anywhere on this site.
"Woman as such" and particular women
The generalizing passages talk about das Weib an sich. The same corpus contains warm remarks about specific women and takes some of them seriously as interlocutors. Neither cancels the other, and noticing the gap is not a defence: a writer who elsewhere attacks abstractions relentlessly is using one here.
Hostility to emancipation and hostility to equality
Nietzsche's objection to the women's movement runs alongside his objection to democratic levelling in general. That connection explains the shape of the polemic; it does not soften it, and the herd and the last man page examines the general position on its own terms rather than assuming it.
A diagnosis of a construction and a claim about nature
The Antichrist §48 analyses how a priesthood needed a figure of woman. Beyond Good and Evil §238 asserts what woman is. These are different operations, and Nietzsche performs both. Reading one as the key to the other in either direction is the commonest move on this subject and the least defensible.
Irony, genre, and content
Framing is evidence and it is not an eraser. A disclaimer, a speaker, an epigrammatic setting all bear on what a passage commits its author to. None of them makes the sentences say something else, and a reading that requires every harsh passage to be ironic has stopped being a reading.
Biography and argument
The Lou Salomé episode, the relationship with his sister, the failure of certain friendships — these are frequently offered as explanations. They are matters of biography, they are contested in detail, and an explanation of why someone wrote something is not an assessment of what they wrote. This page does not use them as either.
What the site is and is not doing
Naming a passage as contemptuous is a description of its content, not a verdict on the philosophy as a whole. Whether the misogyny is detachable from the rest of the late work, or woven into it, is one of the live disputes below, and this page does not settle it.

The interpretive disputes

There is a large secondary literature on this subject and it does not converge. The sketch below is offered for orientation, so that a reader knows which argument they are hearing when they hear one. It is not a survey and it is not an endorsement; the books this site recommends generally are listed under further reading, and none of the positions below is settled.

The detachment reading. Associated above all with Walter Kaufmann's postwar interpretation, this treats the worst passages as personal residue and period prejudice — bitterness, irritation with the movements of his day, the conventional opinions of a nineteenth-century German — and holds that they are separable from the philosophical work. Its strength is that the passages really are unlike Nietzsche's careful writing elsewhere: assertive, unargued, repetitive. Its cost is that separability has to be shown rather than assumed, and §238 arrives in the middle of a chapter on virtues, not in a private letter.

The integration reading. Other readers, Kelly Oliver and Maudemarie Clark among them, have argued in different ways that the material is more closely connected to the philosophy than the detachment reading allows — that the gendered figures in the late work are doing argumentative work, and that the hostility is bound up with positions Nietzsche holds for reasons, not merely with a mood. Its strength is that it takes the texts as texts. Its cost is that it makes the misogyny harder to quarantine, which is uncomfortable in a different direction.

Readings that work against the grain. Sarah Kofman and Luce Irigaray, again in very different ways, have read Nietzsche's female figures — truth as a woman, life as a woman — for what they make possible rather than for what Nietzsche intended by them. These are interpretive projects with their own commitments, and they are not attempts to establish what he believed.

What the corpus supports is narrower than any of these positions. It supports the claim that the material is there, that it is not a single consistent doctrine, that the analytic and the polemical registers are both present and do not reduce to each other, and that the late work is harsher than the middle. Everything beyond that is argument, and a reader is entitled to make their own.

Explore by work

Sixteen assignments across eight works, including the six starting readings. Core identifies the first encounter; development adds a setting or a second formulation; complication tests an apparent answer; extension follows a related question. The survey follows publication chronology, and The Gay Science Book V is marked as the 1887 addition.

Human, All Too Human2 reading assignments

The first sustained treatment, and its continuation in the second volume. Volume II gathers Assorted Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and His Shadow, whose section numbers restart; the free Volume II translation is by Paul V. Cohn and titles the first part Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions.

Back to the work list · Return to the fuller route

Daybreak2 reading assignments

The 1881 book, where Nietzsche is most consistently reading moral demands as things that were made. Preferred translation: Hollingdale; the free edition is The Dawn of Day, translated by J. M. Kennedy. §503, which contrasts ancient friendship with modern sexual love, is worth reading beside these but is not evidence about the demands made of women, and is not assigned as a step.

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The Gay Science3 reading assignments

Book II (1882) contains the most careful stretch in the corpus; Book V (1887) contains the late polemical voice arriving on this theme as on others. The difference of five years is marked on each entry.

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Thus Spoke Zarathustra3 reading assignments

The dramatic register, where the question of who is speaking genuinely arises. Read the two Part I chapters consecutively; they are printed that way.

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Beyond Good and Evil3 reading assignments

The book that contains the central chapter, and two other places where gendered material appears. Section numbers run continuously from 1 to 296 across the nine parts.

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Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist2 reading assignments

The 1888 books. Twilight compresses positions already stated; The Antichrist contains the one late passage that does something different. Section numbers in Twilight restart in each chapter; the free Antichrist is translated by H. L. Mencken.

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Ecce Homo1 reading assignment

Written in 1888, published in 1908. Short, and useful chiefly because the contradiction this page describes appears within a few pages. The free edition titles the later chapter "Why I Write Such Excellent Books."

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The notebooks, and a warning about them

This page assigns no notebook readings, and the decision is not neutral. On this subject more than any other, material that circulates as Nietzsche's is unpublished, and some of it reaches readers through an editorial arrangement he had no part in.

The Will to Power is not a book Nietzsche wrote. It is a compilation of notebook entries assembled after his collapse by editors working in his sister's Nietzsche Archive — Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Heinrich Köselitz (Peter Gast) among them — and published in successive arrangements after his death. Its numbering is the editors' and not Nietzsche's; entries written years apart sit beside each other; and the order in which they appear carries no argument of his. None of that is in dispute.

What is disputed is the extent and character of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's interventions in the Nachlass and in her brother's posthumous reputation. That she controlled the archive, shaped what was published and when, and promoted a reading of her brother congenial to her own politics is widely held; the detail of which alterations she made, and how far the compilation misrepresents the notes as against merely arranging them, has been argued over by editors and scholars for more than a century and is not something this page can settle. It is a live historical question, not a settled fact, and readers will find confident assertions in both directions.

For this theme the practical consequence is simple. Where a striking sentence about women is attributed to Nietzsche, check whether it is from a book he published. If it is, it is on this page or in the survey above. If it is from the compilation, then what you have is a note, of uncertain date, selected and placed by someone else — which is worth reading, and is not the same thing. For the original arrangement and manuscript references rather than the compilation's editorial numbering, consult Nietzsche Source's critical edition, which presents the notebooks as they were written. The drafting material behind Beyond Good and Evil Part VII belongs to the late notebooks of 1885–1888 and is useful for tracing how that chapter was assembled; it is not a separate doctrine.

Related extensions: what might follow?

Choose these after the central questions, according to the direction your reading takes. They return to assignments already explained in the survey.

Connections

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