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In his 1851 essay “On Women”, Schopenhauer expressed opposition to what he called “Teutonico-Christian stupidity” of “reflexive, unexamined reverence for the female (abgeschmackten Weiberveneration)”.[83] He wrote: “Women are directly fitted for acting as the nurses and teachers of our early childhood by the fact that they are themselves childish, frivolous and short-sighted; in a word, they are big children all their life long—a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the full-grown man.” He opined that women are deficient in artistic faculties and sense of justice, and expressed his opposition to monogamy.[84] He claimed that “woman is by nature meant to obey”. The essay does give some compliments: “women are decidedly more sober in their judgment than [men] are”, and are more sympathetic to the suffering of others.

Schopenhauer’s writings influenced many, from Friedrich Nietzsche to nineteenth-century feminists,[85] and continue to inspire sexist views today. His biological analysis of the difference between the sexes, and their separate roles in the struggle for survival and reproduction, anticipates some of the claims that were later ventured by sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists.[86]

When the elderly Schopenhauer sat for a sculpture portrait by the Prussian sculptor Elisabet Ney in 1859, he was much impressed by the young woman’s wit and independence, as well as by her skill as a visual artist.[87] After his time with Ney, he told Richard Wagner’s friend Malwida von Meysenbug: “I have not yet spoken my last word about women. I believe that if a woman succeeds in withdrawing from the mass, or rather raising herself above the mass, she grows ceaselessly and more than a man.”[88]