The Frankfurt School likened women’s oppression structurally to anti-Semitic hatred

Evidence

Woman, however, is marked out by her weakness; her weakness puts her in the minority, even where women are numerically superior to men. As with the oppressed aboriginal inhabitants in early national states, or the colonial natives whose organization and weapons are primitive compared with those of their conquerors, or the Jews among the `Aryans’, women’s defenselessness is the legal title of their oppression … The signs of powerlessness, sudden uncoordinated movements, animal fear, confusion, awaken the thirst for blood. The justification for hatred for woman that represents her as intellectually and physically inferior, and bearing the brand of domination on her forehead, is equally that of hatred for Jews. Women and Jews can be seen not to have ruled for thousands of years. They live, although they could be exterminated; and their fear and weakness, the greater affinity to nature which perennial oppression produces in them, is the very element which gives them life. This enrages the strong, who must pay for their strength with an intense alienation from nature, and must always suppress their fear. They identify themselves with nature when they hear their victims utter over and over again the cry that they dare not themselves emit. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1424

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This dense passage frames women and Jews as structurally parallel: perennial oppression produces a greater affinity to nature that victims cannot shed, and their very defenselessness provokes the strong’s bloodlust — an intricate psychological-medical model of domination.
• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School’s broader domination-over-nature thesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment and to Simone de Beauvoir’s later parallels between women and colonized/native subjects in The Second Sex.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does this passage’s claim that women’s affinity to nature ‘gives them life’ sit alongside the school’s later, more egalitarian feminist positions? Did any Frankfurt School figure push back on this naturalizing account?
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ article’s themes of structural oppression and the legal ‘title’ of defenselessness as the warrant for domination.
• SEED: The claim that an oppressor ‘identifies with nature’ when hearing victims utter the cry they suppress themselves is a strong lens for an essay on projection and scapegoat dynamics in contemporary politics.