Well, Sartre, I want to probe your views on the woman question. Mainly because you have never expressed yourself on the subject, and this in fact is the first thing I want to ask you about. How is it that you have talked about all the oppressed groups—workers, blacks in Orphée noir, Jews in Réflexions sur la question juive—but have never mentioned women? How do you explain that?

Ithink it comes from my childhood. As a child I was mostly in the company of women: my grandmother and mother gave me a lot of attention, and then I was surrounded by little girls. So that to some extent girls and women were my natural milieu, and I have always thought that there was some sort of woman inside me.

Your having been surrounded by women cannot have prevented you from grasping their oppression as an important phenomenon.

I used to sense that my grandmother was oppressed by my grandfather, but I did not really work out what it meant. As a widow, my mother was oppressed by her parents, but as much by her mother as by her father.

But you are an adult! Why have you neglected the oppression of which women are victims?

I was not aware of it as a general phenomenon. I only saw individual cases. Lots of them, of course. But each time, I saw the imperialism as an individual fault in the man and a certain submissiveness as a character trait of the woman.

Could one not say that many men—and women as well, I was like that for a long time myself—have a sort of blind spot about women? Relations between men and women are taken so much as given that they seem natural, and in the end are not noticed. It rather reminds me of what used to happen in ancient Greek democracy, where people professing ideas of reciprocity nevertheless did not find slavery remarkable. It seems to me that in future centuries people will regard the way in which women are treated in our society today with as much astonishment as we regard slavery in the Athenian democracy, for example.