Work · Political Philosophy & Ethics (20th–21st c.)
Let’s Spit on Hegel
Rejects the dialectic of master and slave and the Marxist promise of liberation as foreign to women’s experience and calls for a separate path of women’s self-consciousness.
Introduction
Lonzi wrote “Let’s Spit on Hegel” in 1970, shortly after founding Rivolta Femminile, and published it in the group’s own series of small booklets; in 1974 it was collected with other texts in a single volume. The essay is aimed at the Hegelian and Marxist culture that dominated the Italian left. Hegel had placed women in the family and outside history, and the dialectic of master and slave, Lonzi argues, describes a conflict between men in which women do not appear. Marxism inherits this frame when it treats women’s oppression as a side effect of class rule that the revolution will end. Against this, Lonzi rejects equality as integration into a male world and asks women to find their own meaning through autocoscienza, speaking among themselves. The text became a founding document of Italian difference feminism; an English translation appeared in “Italian Feminist Thought” (1991).
Connections
Criticizes
- Phenomenology of Spirit1807 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Sources: Wikidata
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