Dr Anna Fitzgerald, biological scientist, talks about
“the true liberation of women” that understanding of
the human condition brings

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I came across these explanations 15 years ago whilst I was in the middle of finishing my PhD in biological sciences in New Zealand—I’m now a Science Program Strategist, I coordinate large molecular science collaborations in Australia.

When I heard this explanation of our human behaviour all those years ago, its power to explain the world was just SO totally accountable, it captivated me—so I moved to Australia to help promote these critically important understandings.

As a woman, this explanation was both very arresting and confronting, because it’s fearlessly honest about humans’ contradictory nature. It makes sense of what it means to be a woman — our nurturing instincts and compassion, as well as our neuroses and vanity and emotionality—it goes so far as to make sense of why we have developed our feminist streak, to counter the baffling and oppressive egocentricity of men. But what’s really astonishing is that we can now understand why this egocentricity in men was actually necessary.

Until we could explain the human condition we couldn’t acknowledge the differences between men and women because it only led to prejudices, so all we could ask for, or in fact even demand, was equality. But because Griffith’s work establishes the equal worth or goodness of all humans we can now understand the different roles that men and women have traditionally played in the human journey and this is actually the unlocking point, this is what brings about deep empathy for each other, it heals the divide. As a scientist, I find the evolutionary biology underpinning the explanation of these roles absolutely fascinating.

There’s a powerful quote about women’s plight in Griffith’s book FREEDOM (see par. 798) from the South African writer Olive Schreiner and this encapsulates every woman’s hope and that is ‘to be born a woman’ ‘in the future’ is ‘not to be born branded’, but to be valued, loved for their real self—and that’s essentially what can happen now that the human condition has been explained. This explanation brings about the true liberation of women and the reconciliation of the sexes, which is truly extraordinary. 

I really implore everyone, especially women to look into this because to be able to understand why men and women have behaved the way they have behaved was nothing short of life-changing for me.