“The forest must be planted all at once”

Stendhal’s maxim, “The forest must be planted all at once,” gives a memorable image to the argument that women’s equality cannot be produced by individual effort alone. A girl raised differently in an unequal society remains marked as an exception; only a broader transformation of social relations can make equality ordinary and sustainable.

The Image and Its Argument

The forest is a society, and planting it all at once means changing the conditions surrounding individuals together. The maxim appears as support for the claim that no single teacher can shape a girl into the exact counterpart of a boy while the surrounding world continues to distinguish and rank them. A girl raised like a boy would still experience herself as exceptional, and that very exception would impose a new form of difference.

The image therefore shifts the argument from personal reform to collective change. Individual upbringing matters, but it cannot independently undo the social meanings that make one child’s freedom seem normal and another’s anomalous. Equality must be present across the environment in which a person grows, not offered as a solitary exception to its prevailing rules.

Equality in Everyday Formation

The passage imagines girls receiving from earliest childhood the same demands and honors, severity and freedom, studies and games, and expectations of a future as their brothers. They would grow among women and men treated unambiguously as equals. Under those conditions, inherited interpretations of the Oedipus and castration complexes would be altered, because a girl’s attachment to her father could include emulation rather than a sense of weakness.

The imagined change reaches family authority as well as childhood education. A mother would have the same lasting prestige as a father if she carried equal material and moral responsibility for the couple. The child would then inhabit an androgynous, rather than exclusively masculine, social world; a boy, too, would have no natural basis for superiority if esteem for women were equal to esteem for men.

Consequences for Selfhood and Development

Equal opportunities to demonstrate ability in work and sports would change the significance assigned to bodily difference. The passage argues that the absence of a penis would not by itself produce an inferiority complex if girls could actively rival boys and had meaningful futures available to them; correspondingly, male superiority would not arise as a natural fact if it were not taught.

In this more coherent social setting, girls would have less reason to seek compensation through narcissism and dreams or to treat themselves as fixed objects. Their attention could turn toward what they do and the pursuits they choose. Puberty, menstruation, and youthful eroticism would also be easier to meet if adolescence opened toward a free adult future rather than seeming to announce a restrictive destiny; coherent sexual education would help a girl pass through the crisis.

Literary and Thematic Significance

By invoking Stendhal, the passage condenses its social argument into a natural image: a forest cannot be remade tree by tree while its overall conditions remain unchanged. The maxim is not merely a call to educate girls differently; it insists that education, family responsibility, social esteem, opportunity, and expectations must change together. Its force lies in making collective equality the condition for individual freedom, rather than treating exceptional individuals as proof that an unequal order has already been overcome.