It's ironic that this pamphlet is as totalising as Hegel's system of thought.

It begins with statements that essentialise men as oppressors of women, claims bereft of arguments or evidence (which isn't to say there is no evidence, Lonzi just provides none). There's no historical analysis of gender oppression, just philosophical musings through the universal identities of Man and Woman.

The pamphlet then considers Hegel (women have no history), Lenin (questions of sexuality are bourgeois) and Freud (girls are just boys without dicks), and it's good stuff, if a bit basic now, and none of it connects back to the start.

I too would like to spit on Hegel, but I don't think sloppy, unfocused scholarship is the way to do it. Kudos to Lonzi for kickstarting second-wave feminism in Italy, but this pamphlet is not worth reading. It's gender essentialist, trans-exclusionary and race-blind.

p.s. I genuinely liked Lonzi's few posthumanist/ecofeminist moments of stressing a return to immanence (the earth, the body, the present) through the rejection of transcendental linear trajectories (existential, psychoanalytic or capitalist). But hey, you can just read Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway or Karen Barad for that.