Getting Your Hands on Schopenhauer's Essay
I've spent years helping people find primary sources without paying for them when they don't need to. Schopenhauer's essay on women is public domain in most of the world, which means there's absolutely no reason to pay for it. The title you're looking for when you search comes down to "Über die Frauen" or "On Women," and it's usually part of larger collections like Parerga and Paralipomena. Finding it shouldn't be complicated, but the internet makes it harder than it should be. The straightforward path is Project Gutenberg. They have the full essay in English translation, along with other works. The file is plain text with some formatting, and the PDF version runs about 40 pages depending on the font settings. I usually grab it there because their files are clean—no injected scripts, no landing pages that try to sell you something, no newsletter signup that blocks the actual content. Archive.org also mirrors a lot of older translations if you want the 1890s versions that some people prefer for academic citation. One thing I ran into last month that annoyed me: several sites were serving "PDFs" of the essay that were actually just web pages wrapped in a PDF converter. The text was unsearchable, the page breaks were wrong, and the footnotes from actual scholarly editions were stripped out. I checked the file metadata and discovered they were using a basic print-to-PDF function on a corrupted HTML source. My workaround was to download the plain text from Gutenberg, open it in Calibre, and convert to PDF with proper kerning and chapter breaks. Takes about three minutes and gives you a actually usable file.
If you need a scholarly edition with commentary, that's a different problem entirely. Those aren't public domain and you'll hit paywalls. But for the raw essay text, which is what most people searching for this actually want, the free routes work fine. Just don't trust sites that ask you to complete surveys or install software to "verify you're human." That's always a red flag. The essay itself is short enough that reading it on screen is manageable, but I'd still recommend the PDF version if you plan to reference it. Page numbers matter when you're citing, and screen readers don't always preserve them correctly across different formats. I've seen too many students get marked down because they cited paragraph numbers from a web version instead of standard pagination. There's also the matter of which translation you're using. The T. Bailey one from 1893 is the most common public domain translation, but it has some archaic phrasing that can be misleading. A more recent public domain effort by R.J. Hollingdale exists but it's harder to find in PDF form. If you're doing this for a class, check what your professor expects before you download anything.
