Sir William Golding’s Words of Wisdom About Women-Authorship Confirmed!
Summary of eRumor:
William Golding once said, “I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.”
The Truth:
William Golding made this comment about the superiority of women in an introduction to an unabridged audiobook version of “Lord of the Flies.”
The quote was taken from an explanation from Golding about why “Lord of the Flies” was a story about little boys and not little girls (you can hear an audio recording of Golding’s full introduction here):
“Girls say to me, very reasonably, ‘why isn’t it a bunch of girls? Why did you write this about a bunch of boys?’ Well, my reply is I was once a little boy – I have been a brother, a father, I am going to be a grandfather. I have never been a sister, or a mother, or a grandmother. That’s one answer. Another answer is of course to say that if you – as it were – scaled down human beings, scaled down society, if you land with a group of little boys, they are more like a scaled-down version of society than a group of little girls would be. Don’t ask me why, and this is a terrible thing to say because I’m going to be chased from hell to breakfast by all the women who talk about equality – this is nothing to do with equality at all. I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been. But one thing you can’t do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilisation, of society. The other thing is – why aren’t they little boys AND little girls? Well, if they’d been little boys and little girls, we being who we are, sex would have raised its lovely head, and I didn’t want this to be about sex. Sex is too trivial a thing to get in with a story like this, which was about the problem of evil and the problem of how people are to live together in a society, not just as lovers or man and wife.”
So, Sir William Golding’s words of wisdom about women has been correctly attributed to him.