IN 1911, THE BERLIN SOCIOLOGIST and cultural commentator Georg Simmel published an essay entitled “Weibliche Kultur” (Female Culture). Written against the background of the increasing public impact of the women's movement and widespread debate on the so-called “Woman Question,” Simmel's essay set out to consider the specific contribution that women might be expected to make to the shaping of human culture in the future. The objective manifestations of culture had — on this point he was unequivocal — hitherto been exclusively the creation of men: “It is men who have created art and industry, science and commerce, the state and religion.” The belief, he wrote, that there was a purely “human” culture for which the difference between men and women was irrelevant had its origins in the same premise from which it followed that such a culture did not exist — “the naïve identification of the ‘human’ with ‘man’” (67). What was needed, he argued, was the acknowledgement of the completely different basis of female existence: “The naïve conflation of male values with values as such can give way only if the female existence as such is acknowledged as having a basis fundamentally different from the male and a stream of life flowing in a fundamentally different direction: two existential totalities, each structured according to a completely autonomous rule” (72).