Journey · 11 stops
Feminist Philosophy
An argument over six centuries: what is a woman, and what follows for justice?
Stops
Stop 1 of 11: Christine de Pizan
Around 1405 Christine de Pizan, a widow living by her pen at the French court, reads the learned authorities on women and despairs – until three allegorical ladies, Reason, Rectitude and Justice, help her build a city. “The Book of the City of Ladies” refutes misogyny by the authorities’ own method, citing examples of learned, just and brave women. The claim that women’s inferiority is a prejudice of the learned, not a fact of nature, is on the table.
Stop 2 of 11: Mary Astell
Three centuries later Mary Astell gives the claim a Cartesian foundation. Reason belongs to the mind, and the mind has no sex; what women lack is education, and she proposes a college for them. Then she turns Locke’s own contract theory against his readers: “If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?” Absolute power is rejected in the state and accepted in the family – the inconsistency that feminist political thought will keep exposing.
Stop 3 of 11: Mary Wollstonecraft
The Revolution makes the inconsistency public. Olympe de Gouges rewrites the Declaration of 1789 for women and is guillotined; Mary Wollstonecraft, in “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792), argues against Rousseau that women appear frivolous because they are educated to be so, and that a society which denies them reason corrupts both sexes. Rights, she argues, follow from a rational nature that women share.
Stop 4 of 11: Harriet Taylor Mill
Harriet Taylor Mill moves from rights to economics. “The Enfranchisement of Women” (1851) demands the vote, education and every profession, and argues that women’s economic dependence is the root of their subjection: a wife should earn, not be maintained. John Stuart Mill, her companion and then husband, called her co-author of “On Liberty”; his “Subjection of Women” carried her argument into liberal political theory, though in a milder form.
Stop 5 of 11: Anna Julia Cooper
Anna Julia Cooper, born into slavery, shows what the argument had so far left out. The suffrage movement speaks for white women; the Black leadership speaks for men. “A Voice from the South” (1892) insists that race and sex are suffered together and that the Black woman’s position measures a people’s progress. From here on, feminist thought must ask which women it speaks for – a question that returned a century later under Kimberlé Crenshaw’s name for it, “intersectionality” (1989).
Stop 6 of 11: Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir reframes the whole question. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”: femininity is not a nature but a situation, produced by upbringing, myth and economics, in which woman is constituted as the Other of the male subject. “The Second Sex” (1949) brings Hegel’s dialectic and the existentialism she developed alongside Sartre, with her own stress on situation and oppression, to bear on the tradition from Astell to Mill – and asks not for inclusion in the existing world but for a freedom that transforms it.
Stop 7 of 11: Luce Irigaray
Luce Irigaray objects that Beauvoir’s equality still takes the male subject as the model. Western philosophy and psychoanalysis, she argues in “Speculum” (1974), know only one sex and its mirror; the feminine has never been thought in its own terms. Sexual difference is the task: a female subjectivity and symbolic order with a language of its own. Critics saw essentialism; she saw the alternative as assimilation.
Stop 8 of 11: bell hooks
bell hooks takes up Cooper’s question for the movement of her own time. American feminism, she argues in “Ain’t I a Woman” (1981), was shaped by white middle-class women and ignored Black women, who faced sexism and racism at once. In “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center” (1984) she redefines feminism as a movement to end sexist oppression – for everybody – and names its enemy as one interlocking system. In the same year as “Ain’t I a Woman”, Angela Davis drew a similar conclusion from the history of slavery and suffrage in “Women, Race & Class”.
Stop 9 of 11: Judith Butler
Judith Butler radicalises Beauvoir. If one becomes a woman, there is no “sex” prior to the becoming: gender is performative, produced by the repetition of acts that cite a norm, and the body itself is read through that norm. “Gender Trouble” (1990) criticises Irigaray and Kristeva for presupposing a binary difference and turns to Foucault for the power that produces it. The subject of feminism – “women” – becomes a question rather than a given.
Stop 10 of 11: María Lugones
Then the question turns to whether the category was ever universal. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí argues that pre-colonial Yoruba society was ordered by seniority, not gender, and that “woman” arrived with colonial rule. María Lugones builds on her and on Quijano: colonialism imposed a binary gender system – the “coloniality of gender” – and a decolonial feminism must start from the worlds of colonised women.
Stop 11 of 11: Talia Mae Bettcher
Today the question “what is a woman?” is argued over in courts and parliaments as well as in journals. Sally Haslanger proposed in 2000 to define gender by social position – to be a woman is to be subordinated in some respect because one is perceived as female – choosing the concept that best serves the fight against injustice. Talia Mae Bettcher starts from trans lives and communities, in which “woman” includes trans women as a matter of course; gender-critical philosophers such as Kathleen Stock hold that it means adult human female. Six centuries after Christine de Pizan, the argument is about its own first term – the debate “What Is Gender?” sets out the positions.
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