5 D.H. Lawrence — "The Cocksure Women and the Hensure Men"

The essay's conceit: Lawrence opposes two temperaments: cocksureness — assertive, mechanical, wordy, thrusting confidence (his satire of modern businesslike self-assertion, aimed in his time at the "modern woman" and the money-world) — and hensurity — brooding, bodily, patient, attentive being ("the hen doesn't try to do anything… she is sure in a deeper way"). His diagnosis: modernity has made women cocksure and men hensure, inverting natures to everyone's sterility. Reading it critically (the exam's real task): the essay is a period piece ofgender ideology — its "natures" are constructions, its satire of women's emancipation a document of backlash. Read with Unit 1–3 tools: identify the essentialist assumptions (unargued "natures"), the loaded language, the slippery predictions. Then set it beside Sontag (a generation later, dismantling exactly this kind of "nature" talk about women) — the pairing of Lawrence and Sontag is the syllabus's built-in debate. Law connection: how gender ideologies become law and unmake themselves into equality clauses — the arc from coverture-type reasoning (a wife's legal nonexistence in old English law) to Nepal's equal-inheritance and women's-rights jurisprudence (Jurisprudence Unit 4.2's ledger).