The History that is written has, in general, the intention of relating and interpreting human experience in time. In time, the human creature that is the protagonist and that lives through history does not present itself as an abstract being or person, but rather as a woman or a man; because the human creature is sexed, always and everywhere.

That in the world, there are and there are only women and men, little girls and little boys, we learn upon learning to speak. On teaching us to speak –that is, on teaching us the mother tongue-, the mother teaches us to refer to little girls in the feminine and to little boys in the masculine. Perceiving the fact of sexual difference, we learn to observe and appreciate history as a whole, given that the world is enriched by the interpretations and free expressions of being woman and being man: a human and irreducible, human quality, which marks everything.

However, when we read a scientific work of History, we see that its author or its authoress almost never speaks in feminine and in masculine but rather in neutral: in that supposedly universal neutral that feminism, so strongly and so rightly denounced and which the positivism of the nineteenth century has imposed as scientific language. They are works of history that do not register –separating themselves thus from the mother tongue learned in infancy- the fundamental historical fact which is that history is made and lived through by women and men. Because of this their books have titles such as Medieval Man or The Philosophy of Man or The Indian Men of the Caribbean or The Little Boy in Renaissance Literature.

They do not do so out of a matter of economy of language nor lack of space, since generally they are works that extend themselves in all kind of details of only moderate interest, but rather because of a political question: from Humanism and the Renaissance, the culture that is called western has persistently hounded the free expressions of the difference of being woman in history; trying, on the other hand, against all evidence of the senses, to make the neutral language include women as well. But, as by chance the neutral language is not neutral but rather coincides with masculine language, when a woman reader approaches a scientific work of history with the hope of knowing something about her past, the opaqueness is total. In it, women do not see themselves because masculine language deprives us of our own infinite.

There is, then, today, between history and scientific books of history, between life and historiography, a fundamental disconnection, a hole though which many things escape: so many, that more and more people prefer to read a historical novel rather than an essay in order to know an episode of the past. The disconnection consists in the fact that the foundation of living history is the relationships of the sexes, and, on the other hand, the foundation of the scientific works of history is the actions of a supposedly universal neutral man: a strange man, who is, in reality, neither man nor woman.

However, outside the places governed by scientific positivism, women have always written history taking into account the free sense of their being woman. They have done so above all in the amongst-women, be this in the convents and monasteries, in the institutions of canonesses, in the world of the beguines and beatas, in the feminine courts of royalty, of the nobility and of the bourgeoisie, in feminist groups, in dual relationships embarked upon and sustained in any place and time, in the cultural, educational foundations or feminine politics, etc. The texts of the troubadour Anonymous 2, of Christine de Pisan and of Teresa de Cartagena, are a few examples of it.

In their tales of lived histories, they wrote in feminine in order to refer to women and in masculine to refer to men. With this political gesture expressed in language, they left open to both women and men their own infinite dimension, an infinite dimension in which freedom is possible.

To say that each sex has its own infinite means to understand that in the world there existtwo infinites, the feminine and the masculine. This clashes with the present day custom of taking for granted, without thinking much about it, that the infinite is only one, as God is only one or only one the peak or only one the president or the principle of thought or of being. And yet, the cosmogony of feudal Europe was formed around two creating principles, each one of which was understood as being of cosmic reach. These creating principles were the feminine principle and the masculine principle. This way of seeing the world expressed itself, for example, in a theory which is called the the doctrine of the two infinites. This doctrine said that in the world there are two infinites, which are: the primary material or materia prima and God. The primary material is the feminine creative principle, God is the masculine creative principle.

This theory, attached to life in its sexuation, was persecuted from the thirteenth century by the catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy, which used for it the scholastic, the universities, torture and the death penalty.

Some women made of themselves, however, the depositaries of the memory of the doctrine of the two infinites and, in different ways according to their historical circumstances, they remembered it in their writings throughout the following centuries, until the present-day.

With the objective of perceiving the up-to-date nature of the theory or doctrine of the two infinites, it could be interesting to read and discuss a fragment of the novel of Clarice Lispectorentitled Cerca del corazón salvaje (1944)), in which she relives the memory of the primary material as the feminine creative principle of cosmic reach. Because the theory of the two infinites helps to unravel an enigma of the politics of our time, an enigma that is expressed with the metaphor of the “glass ceiling”. The glass ceiling appears when a woman cannot achieve something –something that she desires- because it happens that she is not a man: something –being a man- that she could not, in substance, become, although she may emulate it or seem it. In a politics that coincides with the theory of the two infinites, there is no glass ceiling, given that neither the woman is understood as the measure of the man, nor is the man understood as the measure of the woman: she would have her own infinite, he, his.