Women in Political Theory

Jane Duran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781134775767
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The first volume to explore comprehensively the intersection of feminism, politics, and philosophy, Women in Political Theory sheds light on the contributions of women philosophers and theorists to contemporary political thought. With close attention to the work of five central thinkers-Sarah Grimké, Anna Julia Cooper, Jane Addams, Rosa Luxemburg and Hannah Arendt-this book not only offers sustained analyses of the thought of these leading figures, but also examines their relationship with established political theorists of the past, such as Locke, Machiavelli, and the ancients. Demonstrating that each of the figures covered was indeed a political theorist of her time, whilst highlighting the strength of her thought and the reasons for which it has not been accorded the attention that it merits, Women in Political Theory offers a fascinating overview of the political thought of five theorists whose work is central to an understanding of modern thought. As such, it will be of interest to scholars and students of sociology, philosophy, political and social theory, feminist thought, and gender studies.

PART I COMMENCING THE PROJECT

DOI: 10.4324/9781315546735-1

Chapter 1 An Overview

DOI: 10.4324/9781315546735-2

An investigation into the thought of women philosophers who have made inroads in political theory forces us to cover a great deal of new ground, and not all of it easily traversable. Much has been made recently of the differing styles employed by women thinkers, and of the extent to which history and the academy have often failed to recognize or do justice to the theorizing of the female writers involved.¹But if it is the case that women working in a philosophical vein have often written in ways that were less than theoretically straightforward, questions of categorization or labeling become more intense when matters political come to the fore, since politics itself is a liminal area.

1 Jacqueline Broad has made this point in her Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and similar lines of argument have been adduced in more standard compendia done by women philosophers working with an historical bent. See, for example, individual chapters of Karen J. Warren, An Unconventional History of Western Philosophy, Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.

Although the ancients clearly recognized political theory as one of the core areas of philosophy—and we make this clear in undergraduate teaching—in recent years politics has endured a discipline-straddling place somewhere between the social sciences and the humanities, and frequently has been an underemphasized area in philosophy itself. Perhaps this is because it is clear from the outset that political questions, although susceptible to a priori formulation, somehow seem to call out for greater advertence to the natural and the empirical, and perhaps that, in and of itself, has often translated into work that is not deemed philosophical.

Whatever the case, our task here will be to examine the work of five thinkers, all of whom have made contributions to political theory in some form, and at least some of whom are standardly recognized as philosophers. Indeed, employing the new criteria that have made their way into the more recent anthologies and edited volumes, it is safe to say that every thinker in this group has been addressed philosophically in some way or other in the past decade or so. Our five thinkers, Sarah Grimké, Anna Julia Cooper, Jane Addams, Rosa Luxemburg, and Hannah Arendt, span a chronology of approximately 150 years, two continents, and at least two major ethnicities, depending on how one wants to view the category of “Europeanization.” Of these thinkers, two—Luxemburg and Arendt—have long been recognized as political philosophers, and so their inclusion in such a list is comparatively uncontroversial. More recently, Addams and Cooper both have been recognized as early American women philosophers, with books published detailing philosophical contributions on both Addams and Cooper, and with at least one issue of a philosophy journal devoted to Cooper, a nineteenth century Black American woman.² Although Sarah Grimké is not as well known to some as her sister Angelina, both sisters were crucial to the development of the abolitionist movement, and both sisters left extensive written records of their arguments with respect to the extension of Enlightenment political thought to women and Blacks.³

2 A recent issue of Philosophia Africana (2008) was devoted entirely to Cooper. 3 With respect to Sarah and Angelina Grimké, the central work on their thought remains Gerda Lerner’s The Grimké Sisters of South Carolina, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lerner is careful to note that Angelina is probably better known because she gave more public speeches, and because we have records of those made by other prominent abolitionists in attendance.

If we can say that political thought is already somewhat marginalized within philosophy, and if it is clear that the work of women thinkers is still now very much in the process of being resuscitated and brought to attention, it should be obvious that the intersection of these two areas is one that will require great and careful excavation. Although it might be argued that the importance of political theory to the ancients would militate against its later becoming marginalized, one of the artifacts of the political thought of the ancients has been a lack of advertence to women’s roles in the polis, or to the roles, in general, of anyone other than adult males. This, combined with the fact that more contemporary political thought has often been quasi-empirical, has tended to leave political philosophy to one side of the canon, and it has only been in the past few decades or so that there has been a resurgence of interest in this area.

Susan Moller Okin has probably done more than any other single thinker to promote an examination of the political thought of 2,000 years ago with respect to women’s issues, and in her classic work on the notion of a “philosopher queen” and her later work on development and women she achieved the feat of meshing contemporary feminist concerns with political theory. Because political theory starts with Plato, so to speak, it is somewhat difficult to discern the particular nature of the problem. Could it be said that the difficulty with political theory is simply that women’s roles are never expanded upon? Since Plato did leave us with the notion of female Guardians, it is not fair to claim that the roles of women were never alluded to at all. By the same token, the procession of thought from Aristotle onward leaves us with little room for women within civil society until at least the time of the Renaissance, and more properly the Reformation. As Moller herself has written:

I shall broach two subjects … first, the reluctance of many excellent scholars of political theory to spell out, explicitly, the policy implications that follow from their political conclusions; and second, the issue of why feminist interpretation of political theory is so marginalized, in comparison with feminist work in many fields.⁴

4 Susan Moller Okin, “Feminism and Political Theory,” in Philosophy in a Feminist Voice, Janet Kourany ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998, pp. 116–144. This citation p. 117.

If, as Okin has claimed, feminist interpretation of political theory is marginalized, it might come as no surprise that—with the exception of a very few thinkers—it is, if anything, even more difficult for women political theorists to achieve recognition than those whose work might be thought to be more generally philosophical as a whole. This perhaps explains why it is that, of our five thinkers here, only two have been more or less accepted as political philosophers, while it might be said that strong argument would have to be made for the inclusion of the other three. Arendt and Luxemburg, both from the standpoint of the reception of their publications and from the circumstances of their lives, have been so accepted, but Addams, Cooper, and especially Grimké are still very much in the position that their inclusion in a list of political thinkers requires both analysis and buttressing.

Perhaps starting with Plato and his less-than-alembicated notion of the philosopher queen assists us in coming to grips with the intersection of political theory, feminism, and the notion of women theorists as a whole. It is clear in Republic that Plato is willing to allow for the existence of women as potential Guardians (he makes this explicit), but unclear what their role would be. The difficulty is that the conundrum with respect to their role revolves around whether or not they would, at least in some instances, function independently as Guardians, or whether they would be simply Guardian wives. Indeed, it is fair to say that the status of women as citizens of the polis is virtually never straightforwardly addressed in political philosophy until at least the Enlightenment period, and in some cases not even then. Although such thinkers as Astell, a seventeenth-century British author, are clearly concerned about women’s lack of rights, they theorize largely on the basis of Christian belief.⁵ Even Wollstonecraft, writing during the French Revolution, is concerned to make what might at least be thought to be a somewhat negative argument rather than an overtly positive one. In her Vindication a great deal of effort is expended on showing how men’s denigration of women has resulted in women being less able than they ought to be to manifest their true selves.⁶ What Astell and Wollstonecraft have in common, writing centuries ago, is that much of their respective manuscripts must be spent showing what is wrong with the male attitude toward women.

5 Patricia Springborg is the major commentator on Astell, and her work in this area is more than worth perusal. 6 Catriona MacKenzie makes much the same point in her “Reason and Sensibility: the Idea of Self-Governance in the Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft,” in Hypatia’s Daughters, Linda Lopez McAlister ed., Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996, pp. 181–203.

Even today we experience some difficulty, vis-à-vis political theory, with the status of women, because the now global nature of the nation-state seems to demand equal rights for women, as is the case in the developed countries, but the plain facts on the ground are that this has yet to transpire in many areas, and may not happen during the course of our lifetimes. This glaring omission on a global scale undoes much of what the NGOs and other groups that are attempting to assist in development try to accomplish, and certainly goes against the spirit, if not the letter, of many of the written documents compiled by the United Nations. Contemporary commentators on these matters almost always note that it is an inescapable fact that our model for the state comes from the so-called first world nations, but that this model is scarcely applicable to much of the planet. As Carol Gould writes in a recent article on the notion of global democracy:

Many critics dismiss the project of transnational or global democracy on the grounds that it is either impossible, given the current state system, or else undesirable, since it would entail a single government for everyone. It is pointed out that we lack a global demos and a strong global public sphere, both of which are thought to be required for democracy (based on our experience in nation-states).⁷

7 Carol C. Gould, “Structuring Global Democracy: Political Communities, Universal Human Rights, and Transnational Representation,” in Metaphilosophy, vol. 40, No. 1, January 2009, pp. 24–41. This citation p. 25.

Part of the reason that we lack a “global demos” and “strong global public sphere” is that in much of the world women’s voices are almost never heard, and there are, of course, other social constraints that may well prevent sizable portions of the population from participating in any given political structure.

Following the trajectory of political thought on the role of women and the structure of civil society from the time of Plato and Aristotle on, we find that those women who wrote on these matters have received a mixed reception. As stated earlier, some women political thinkers (Astell, Wollstonecraft, Arendt) have more or less passed into the canon, and their work is now acknowledged in most quarters. Other work has either received some, but probably insufficient, acknowledgment, or has been almost completely ignored. This was the case until recently with the Black author Anna Julia Cooper, the resuscitation of whose work owes perhaps more to the burgeoning of Black Studies as a discipline than it does to any other single factor. Receiving a moderate reception as political thinkers, but probably not the amount of attention that they should have are both Grimké sisters, Jane Addams and, oddly, Rosa Luxemburg. For the latter it is no doubt the case that the general decline in interest in Marxism has led to a decline in the interest of thinkers who might receive that label.

The political, as rubric, has a lengthy history, and a mixed one. Some of the most challenging work, and work that has left the greatest impression, is in the tradition that today is called libertarian, or, in another sort of labeling, extremely conservative. It is interesting to note, for example, that Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is still taught to undergraduates 200 years later, but by no means is it the case that work moving in the opposite direction is taught with as great a frequency. Not only is it the case that Burke is outraged by what he regards as the excesses of the revolution, but he writes at length about the treatment accorded Marie Antoinette. It is an irony of the status accorded Burke—and of the work’s durability—that one of the most frequently cited passages in it has to do with what he regards as the failure of chivalry in the Queen’s case: “I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.”⁸

8 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, cited in Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 165.

Casting a backward look at the history of political thought and of its place in the philosophical canon, it is a remarkable feature of such thought that some of the structure of it most firmly entrenched in memory has to do, all too frequently, with the status of women and their place in civil society.

A probable reason for the difficulty in seeing some of our women political theorists as such has to do with the poignancy of Burke’s remark. Burke’s work is considered, in almost all circles, political philosophy; the work of Jane Addams or some of our other thinkers in many cases will receive no such consideration. From Plato and Aristotle on, the status of women in the very societies that produced political commentary has, in general, prevented us from properly seeing the work of women from those societies.

Recapitulating Grimké and Cooper

Our first two political theorists have an area of commonality, despite the fact that their written work is separated by decades, as well as by geography and social class. Both Sarah ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Commencing the Project
• Part II: Nineteenth-Century Thought
• Part III: Politics and the Twentieth Century
• Part IV: Final Views
• Index