Every one of her actions - whatever its direct purpose or motivation - is also read as an indication of how she would like to be treated. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.Įvery woman's presence regulates what is and is not 'permissible' within her presence. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear.

Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

John berger ways of seeing 1972