Next Meeting: "About a Woman President"

When: (Meeting date has been changed from October 7 to October 21, 2007.)

Where: (Please sign up with http://groups.yahoo.com/group/opar-announce/ for time and location details.)

What?: Discussion of essay: "About a Woman President" by Ayn Rand (found in The Voice of Reason


Questions (Please print out):

1) What is the theme of this essay?


2) What is “Objectivism”? “What is “philosophy”? Can this essay be considered “Objectivism” or a “philosophical essay”?


3) What is “psychology”? How is it different from “philosophy”?


4) Ayn Rand says that to understand her position on this issue, one should “…study the basic motivation of the heroines in my novels, particularly Dagny Taggart.”(pg. 267) What was the basic motivation of Dagny Taggart and the other major female characters in her novels (Dominique Francon and Kira Argounova)?

5) Ayn Rand said in the same essay that she *did* think that a woman could rationally want to have any other job available (including Congresswomen, Judges, and CEO’s). What is it about the job of the President that she thought (rightly or wrongly) was so different?


6) Is Ayn Rand’s view regarding why a rational woman wouldn’t want to be president based on the fact that most of a woman's subordinates in the executive branch of government are men? Would it make any difference, if, for some reason, that the majority of her subordinates in the executive branch were also women?

7) How did Ayn Rand define “masculinity” ? (“…the object of her [a woman’s] worship is specifically his masculinity, not any human virtue she might lack.” Pg. 268, 2nd full para. down) How did Ayn Rand define “feminine”? (pg. 268, 3rd full para. down) Is the following assumption by the author of these questions incorrect?: There is no difference between a male and a female mind. The only differences between men and women are in terms of their physical traits, specifically, their genital/reproductive organs, and the hormones that those different organs produce. These hormones (testosterone and estrogen?) create other physical differences between men and women, but there is no such thing as a “female mind” or a “male mind”, there is only a “human mind”, which operates within the physical parameters of its body, which is either male or female. If this assumption by the author of these questions is correct, then what is “femininity” and “masculinity”, other than our different sexual/reproductive organs?

8) What is Ayn Rand’s definition of a “matriarch”? (pg. 269, first full para. down) Was Queen Elizabeth I a historical example of this? (You might want to do some Internet research in answering this question. http://www.sparknotes.com/biography/elizabeth/section5.rhtml)


9) What does this essay say, if anything, about the desire of Hillary Clinton to be the President of the United States in 2008?

10) Ayn Rand also liked stamp collecting (http://www.ellensplace.net/ar_stamp.html). Does this mean you must like stamp collecting to be an Objectivist? In the same book that you can find the article “About a Woman President” (The Voice of Reason), there is another article advocating “Tax Credits for Education”. Is advocating tax credits for education, strictly speaking, “Objectivism”, such that one must agree with it to consider oneself an “Objectivist”? It is this author’s understanding that Miss Rand also opposed the death penalty. Does this mean an Objectivist must oppose the death penalty?

11) If you think that Ayn Rand was simply mistaken in this case, does this say anything about her stature as a historical figure in the history of philosophy? (To help you think about this question consider some other, somewhat similar questions: Does the fact that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves make him any less great as a proponent of the rights of man and for the liberties that everyone, of every race, has today? Does the fact that Isaac Newton believed he could transmute lead into gold [alchemy] make him any less important or great of a figure in the history of physics? )