Theme
Women and gender
25 philosophers, 5 traditions
Do women and men differ in nature, and what follows for how they should live? Greek, Islamic and modern European philosophers disagreed, and feminist philosophers now reread them all.
Philosophers have long asked whether women and men differ in nature, and what that would mean for their place in the family and the state. Aristotle held that women are inferior to men, their courage lying in obeying where a man’s lies in commanding. Averroes, commenting on Plato’s Republic, held instead that women share the same nature as men and could serve as guardians, philosophers and rulers, and he blamed the cities of his own time for leaving their abilities undeveloped.
Rousseau, for all his commitment to freedom and equality, gave women no voice in the general will, an inconsistency that Mary Wollstonecraft soon pointed out. She argued that marriage had become a property relation and that the education given to women all but guaranteed them unhappy lives. John Stuart Mill held that character is formed by upbringing, so supposed natural differences between the sexes could not justify women’s subjection.
In the twentieth century Simone de Beauvoir argued that woman had been made the Other, with man as the essential being, and answered with a feminism of freedom. Feminist historians of philosophy now reread the canon, asking whether the great philosophers’ views of women shape their wider theories, and restore women philosophers to it.
Through time
4th century BCE
Aristotle
Women are inferior to men: a man’s courage lies in commanding, a woman’s in obeying, and a female is, as it were, an incomplete or deformed male. Feminist readers also find his theory of matter and form gendered, linking form, the better partner, with the male and matter with the female.
About 400 years later
1st century CE
Ban Zhao
Virtue differs by role, and a woman’s virtues as a wife differ from a man’s. Yet Ban Zhao’s own life, as a leading scholar, stepped across the line between women’s and men’s spheres.
About 1100 years later
12th century
Averroes
Commenting on Plato’s Republic, he held that women share men’s nature and are suited to the same activities, as guardians, philosophers and rulers. In the cities of his day those capacities went undeveloped, so women “frequently resemble plants” and, as a burden on men, were one cause of poverty.
Drew on Aristotle
About 400 years later
16th century
Luo Rufang
Women are at least as capable of virtue and wisdom as men, and arguably more reliably virtuous; they deserve education and play the deeper part in cultivating virtue.
Li Zhi
Women have the same capacity for virtue and wisdom as men, and so should be educated. Li Zhi is admired today, with Luo Rufang, for defending women’s education against the Confucian norms of his time.
17th century
Marie de Gournay
Men and women are equal, as classical, biblical and Christian authorities show, and women should have the same access as men to education and to public office.
Lucrezia Marinella
Women are not merely men’s equals but their superiors: their souls are better from the start and their bodies better suited to reason and virtue. Misogynist writing serves to keep women out of public life.
Angélique Arnauld
Nuns, and women generally, have a right to theological learning, to govern themselves, and to follow their conscience against the silence that throne and altar demanded.
Madeleine de Scudéry
Women can possess every virtue, in their own ways, and deserve a place in public life and political authority; marriage as practised is a form of their repression.
Margaret Fell
Women and men are spiritually equal, since the divine light is in everyone; Scripture rightly read does not forbid women to preach.
Marquise de Lambert
Women have a dignity that misogynist stereotypes deny; their virtues may differ from men’s, but they are not lesser.
18th century
Mary Astell
The faults ascribed to women, such as weak reason, vanity and pride, are not natural but the product of an education that fixes their attention on their bodies and on praise. Vices have no sex, and with the right method any woman can perfect her reason.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
His free and equal citizens are men alone: women are subject to the state’s authority but have no voice in the general will. At times his writing casts women as necessarily inauthentic, living in a world of appearance and deception, and he never applied his argument about unjust subjection to them.
Im Yunjidang
Men and women differ in body, but the nature they receive from principle is the same. Women therefore have the same moral potential as men, and sagehood is open to them through self-cultivation.
Olympe de Gouges
A declaration that speaks of universal rights while leaving out women contradicts itself. Women share the burdens of citizenship, even the scaffold, and so must share its rights, the rostrum included.
Drew on and argued against Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Mary Wollstonecraft
Marriage was usually no more than a relation of property, and the education women received left them unable to meet society’s expectations and all but guaranteed them unhappy lives. Her account of women’s condition belonged to a wider critique of a civilisation increasingly ruled by acquisitiveness and consumption.
Drew on and argued against Jean-Jacques Rousseau
19th century
Sarah Grimké
As moral beings, women have the same rights as men; nothing in Scripture rightly read makes them subordinate. Their exclusion from education, like that of the enslaved, is then used to call them inferior.
John Stuart Mill
Character is formed entirely by upbringing, so no one can say whether women’s nature, left as free to develop as men’s, would differ at all. Differences between the sexes come from upbringing into stereotypes and cannot justify them. In Parliament he campaigned for women’s suffrage.
Harriet Taylor Mill
Women deserve equality in every right, political, civil and social, not merely the vote; keeping them from public life and education damages men and society as well as women.
Margaret Fuller
Masculine and feminine qualities are found in every person. The ideals of Man and Woman each contain both, and women should be free to take up any occupation that rouses their powers.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Women’s equality cannot wait for the vote. Property rights, education, work, marriage, divorce and custody all need reform now, and the churches’ teaching about women must be examined critically too.
Drew on Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill
Anna Julia Cooper
Black women face racism and sexism at once, and are ignored by white women, white men and Black men alike. Their standpoint lets them see the interlocking systems of oppression clearly, and the progress of the race should be measured by their condition, not by an elite of men.
20th century
Edith Stein
Women should be admitted to every profession and branch of education, and are not a “weaker sex”. Yet, since, as Aquinas taught, the soul gives the body its form, women and men differ in soul as well as body, and the drive for equality should not deny women’s distinctive nature and calling.
Simone de Beauvoir
Woman has been made the Other, and man the essential being. Myths of femininity, above all the “eternal feminine”, trap women in a passive, repetitive realm of immanence and deny them the transcendence of world-making activity. Her answer to this oppression is a feminism of freedom.
Luce Irigaray
There is not yet true sexual difference in Western culture: women can be subjects only by becoming like men. A subject position of women’s own has still to be made.
Sources
- Charlotte Witt, Lisa Shapiro, Christina Van Dyke, Lydia L. Moland and Marcia Robinson, Feminist History of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy