Duden 21: "The category 'woman' [...] is a produce of nineteenth-century natural science, comparable to other categories with a naturalistic appearance, such as 'family,' 'reproduction,' 'kinship,' and 'sexuality.'"
this category had the effect of defining 'woman' "in such a way that her second-class status, her usefulness as housewife and mother, and her need for dependence were naturalistically inscribed in her body and justified through her anatomy and physiology" (23)
"One of the great achievements of women's studies is that it uncovered and critiqued the ideological implication of this intellectual construct. 'To unravel the ideological conflations that underlaid apparently empirical categories' is one of the central tasks of women's studies, according to Olivia Harris" (22) (see "Households and their Boundaries" in History Workshop 13, 1982)