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来看看阿西莫夫87年对于女性生存的看法和呼吁：FEMINISM FOR SURVIVAL

知蛛養殖與按摩 2018-08-27 23:38:56

《FEMINISM FOR SURVIVAL》

因为这篇文章年代久远，ggl也找不到文字版，只能找到出处。

http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/Essays/women.html

我只下载到这本《 Past, Present, and Future》阿西莫夫的文集，djvu格式，转换为mobi之后失去了分段，是连在一起的。下载链接：http://libgen.io/search.php?req=On+the+Past%2C+Present+and+Future+ASIMOV&open=0&res=25&view=simple&phrase=1&column=def

原文如下：（原文后面贴了我做了生词注释和分段的版本）

It is easy to argue for women's rights as a matter of justice and equity. Easy, but often useless, for such things as justice and equity are not convincing to those who profit by their absence. Without in any way denying that there is justice and equity in the concept of women's rights, I prefer to argue for it on the basis of necessity. It seems clear to me that if we continue to maintain a social system in which half the human race is compelled by reason of irrelevant anatomy to labor at tasks that do not include science, the chances for civilization to endure into the twenty-first century will be sharply reduced. This should not be difficult to see. We are now facing numerous and weighty problems, and it is obvious that with human numbers growing daily, with the energy supply becoming more precarious daily, with food reserves shrinking daily, with gathering uncertainties producing social unrest and violence that is increasing daily—we are facing a massive crisis which represents life or death to world civilization. The precise solutions that will help resolve the crisis are not easy to foresee, but we can feel pretty safe in arguing that they will come about, if at all, through advances in science and technology. We must have alternative sources of energy, and these will not come about just because someone has made up a song that is chanted to the strumming of a guitar. That may create an appropriate atmosphere for the change, but it will still require a great deal of scientific thought and engineering design and carefully supervised construction—and people with brains and training will have to do that. Many are convinced that technology is at the root of our problems and claim that our complicated industrial apparatus must be dismantled and replaced by a way of life that is "closer to nature" and more econologically sound. But how can this be done in a world which contains more than four billion people and which never supported more than one billion in the days before industrialization? If we grant that the antitechnology idealists don't want to see the death of three billion people, then we must suppose that as our present technology is dismantled, another one, simpler, less destructive, and even more efficient, must be simultaneously built up in order that the world's population continue to be supported. And that, too, requires scientific thought and engineering design and

238 carefully supervised construction—and people with brains and training will have to do that. It isn't hard to see, is it, that if we want things to work well, there is no substitute for brains and training? And all we have to do is look about us to see that there isn't exactly an oversupply of brains and training. Whatever direction Earth's history now takes; whether we are to opt for bigger and better technology, or smaller and better technology, we will need more brains and training than ever—that is, if we want civilization to survive, if we don't want it to collapse into an orgy of fighting and killing until its numbers shrink to the scattered few who can live by foraging and subsistence farming. With brains and training that necessary, that crucial, isn't it a kind of will- to-suicide to brush off half the human race as a possible source of intelligence and will? Isn't it a kind of maximum stupidity to feel that we can solve the kind of problems we face by proceeding at half-steam? Even at full-steam, we may not make it—but half-steam'! In other words, we need not only have more scientists and technologists than ever, but the very best we can find, wherever we can find them. By what supreme folly, then, do we assume that none of them are to be found among women? Why is it we so arrange our societies that half the human race rarely enters science or technology as a career, and that when some of that half manages to do so they find the path to better pay and leadership blocked step by the often unconscious but sometimes expressed view of the predominantly male subculture of science? It is easy, of course, to sneer and say that women don't make good scientists, that science isn't women's work. The whole concept of "women's work" is a fraud, however, since "women's work" is defined in a way that is convenient to men. If there are jobs men don't want to do and there is no handy minority to wish it on, it can always be given to women—the permanently available downtrodden majority. As for science in particular not being women's work, it would be wearisome to go through the list of women who have contributed importantly to science, from Nobel laureates down—including some you may never have heard of, such as Voltaire's mistress, who was the first to translate Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica into French (and did so with completely successful intelligence), and Lord Byron's daughter, who was one of the first two people to deal in detail with computer technology. It might be argued that these women were exceptions (even exceptions "that prove the rule," to use an idiot phrase that depends on a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word "prove"). Of course, these are exceptions, but not because the vast bulk of women are not meant for science—only because the vast bulk of women can't get over the impossible hurdles placed in their way.

239 Imagine trying to become a scientist when you are constantly told you are not fitted for the task and are not smart enough; when most schools didn't let you enter, when the few schools that did didn't teach real science; when, if you managed to learn science somehow, the practitioners in the field met you with frozen aloofness or outright hostility and did their best to place you in a corner out of sight. If that were a Black I was speaking of, any decent human being would be indignant over the situation and protest. But I'm speaking of a Woman, so many decent people look blank. People who would hotly deny that there is any basic difference in intelligence among the "races" will still blandly believe that men are reasonable, logical, and scientific, while women are emotional, intuitive, and silly. It isn't even possible to argue against this dichotomy sensibly, since the difference between the sexes is so taken for granted that it becomes self-fulfilling. From earliest childhood, we expect boys to act like boys, and girls to act like girls, and pressure each of them into it. Little boys are adjured not to be sissies and little girls are exhorted to be ladylike. A certain indulgence can be pern*tted until adolescence, but woe betides the sissy and the tomboy thereafter. Once the classes in woodworking and home economics start, it is a tough girl who can insist on taking woodworking and an almost impossibly brave boy who can bear up under the universal execration that follows if he takes home economics. If there is a natural division of aptitudes, why do we all work so hard to ridicule and prevent "exceptions"? Why not just let nature take its course? Do we know in our hearts that we have misread nature? Once young people are old enough to grow interested in sex, the pressures of sex-differentiation become excruciating. Young men, having been well-indoctrinated into believing themselves the brainier sex, have the comfort of knowing that they are smarter than half the human beings in the world, however dumber they may be than other men. It would then be unbearable for a man to find a woman who showed herself to be smarter than he was. No charm, no level of beauty, would compensate. Women don't need to find that out for themselves; they are nervously taught that by their mothers and older sisters. There's a whole world of training in the fine art of being silly and stupid—and attractive to boys who want to shine by contrast. No girl ever lost a boy by giggling and saving, "Oh, please add up these figures for me. I can't add two and two for the life of me." She would lose him at once if she said, "You're getting it wrong, dear. Let me add that for you." And no one can practice being silly and stupid long enough and hard enough without forgetting how to be anything else. If you're a woman, you know what I'm talking about. If you're a man, find some woman who has no economic or social need to flatter you and ask her how hard she has to work at times never to seem smarter than her date.

240 Fortunately, I think these things are changing. They are not as bad as they were, say, a quarter-century ago. But there's still a long way to go. With the world badly overpopulated, we no longer need numerous babies. In fact, we must have very few, no more than enough to replace the dying and, for a while, perhaps even fewer. This means we don't need women as baby- machines. And if they are not to be baby-machines, they must have something else to do. If we want them to have but one or two babies at most, we must invite them out into the world, and make it worth their while to be there. We can't just give them menial, low-paying jobs as a matter of course. We must give them their fair chance at every possible branch of human endeavor on an equal basis with the male. And most of all, most of all, women are needed in science. We cannot do without their brains. We cannot allow those brains to rest unused. We cannot, with criminal folly, destroy those brains deliberately, as we have been doing through all of history, on the plea that women must do "women's work" or, worse yet, that they must be "ladylike."