Postscript: Feminist Revisions of Political Thought

Political Studies, 1986

When the contemporary wave of feminism swelled in the early 1970s, it was one of the avowed tasks of the movement to retrieve for women their own historical and cultural heritage. Turning to the history of political thought, feminists discovered that there was a tradition of women's political writing dating from at least the late 17th century whose concern was with social and gender relations. Many such thinkers have been subsequently unearthed and it has indeed been possible to publish large tomes on the their work.' A few of these women, like Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), were already well known although rarely taught. Others, such as Harriet Taylor, were often referred to because of their 'influence' on the males with whom they were associated, although little effort was made to distinguish their actual contribution. Many writings by women had been simply suppressed and marginalized, but there are also obvious sociological reasons why the majority of their sex had been simply excluded from the genre of political writing. Feminists were thus able to retrieve some visibility for women and to rediscover some of the 'founding mothers' of their own movement although the latter had, it seemed, made little impact on the tradition itself. For these early women writers had relied on pre-existing theoretical frameworks-liberal, utilitarian, socialist-and sought only their more consistent application to women, whilst accepting the basic assumptions of those frameworks, such as the distinction between private and public and the sexual division of labour. If the history of political thought has not been especially fertile ground for the retrieval of a feminine culture, however, feminists have discovered that the men who authored the tradition actually had a great deal to say about women and the family. It is only their exegetes who have ceased to pay attention to such topics.2 Now, while such subjects are of course treated within a masculine perspective, they are not irrelevant to feminists, since political thought has itself played a key role in justifying women's subordination and public invisibility. Politics has been consistently presented as a male preserve3 and reasons 1 See for example, Dale Spender, Women of Ideas (and whar men have done to them): from 2 Mary O'Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). p. 11. 3 S h o n e de Beauvoir argues that powers ascribed to women have always been outside of the human realm, to which they have been described as 'other'. 'Society has always been male; political power has always been in the hands of men. Public or simply social authority always belongs to men, declares Levi-Strauss at the end of his study of primitive societies.' The Second Sex(trans1ated by H. M. Parshley) (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972). p. 102.

2015

Since the inception of modern political thought, philosophers and social constructivists have been troubled by the apparent inequality between men and women in Western political society. Questions about differences of men and women's' natures have been raised, as well as questions about the nature of our political system, namely the right to vote and participate in legislative bodies. Philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Millicent Fawcett have made problematic the presupposition that women's faculties and capabilities are naturally inferior to those of men. Philosophers like Julia Cooper and Jane Flax have made problematic the assumption that the Western political system is inherently liberating in its structure. Of the two strategies for achieving equality between the sexes, one premised upon challenging women's nature and the other on challenging the nature of politics, the strategy of challenging women's natural capacity for reason has been the forerunner since Mill wrote, "On the Subjection of Women," in 1869. Indeed, political bodies in America and Europe have seen an increase in women's participation in the 20 th century. The loud voices of American suffragettes and astute reasoning of modern political philosophers have paved the legacy to progress that Western political society prides itself on today. These advancements, however, are not self-evident of Western society's acceptance of women's political participation because the writers did not interrogate Western society's notion of personhood. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to compare the strategies that modern suffragettes and philosophers have used to gain political rights for women against the ever-broadening definitions of personhood, progress, and liberation. The strategy of this paper will be to analyze and fragment the unquestioned presupposition of natural personhood that politically Enlightened philosophers employed in their efforts to make men and women equal in our political society. The result of this paper will be a more liberating framework of personhood and political freedom than our fore-mothers-and-fathers ever intended western political philosophy to be.

Studier i Pædagogisk Filosofi, 2018

What one decides fit for appearance through writing and speech bears a political signifi cance that risk being distorted through both language, reception in the public, and through calls for gendered representations. How can work of female philosophers be interpreted as a concern for the world from that of having to respond to a male-dominated discourse through which speech becomes trapped into what one might represent as ‘other’? In this paper, I explore the public reception of two female thinkers who question, in diff erent ways, the dominant notion of the author or philosopher as a male subject; what kind of limitations does the relative notion of ‘female’ pose political action, and how can privilege constitute a hindrance to feminist solidarity?

Journal of the Early Republic, 2015

What I value most about David S. Shields and Fredrika J. Teute's series of remarkable essays is the example of scholars willing to investigate important questions in unexpected places and to push our collective conversation in different directions. More specifically, they challenged me, and many others, to rethink our conventional sense of the ''rights of woman'' as a political problem and contemplate its cultural dimensions. Rather than frame the question of women and power in terms of citizenship, Shields and Teute approached it within a social context. Their republican court is a variation on the monarchical courts of early modern Europe as much as the salons of eighteenth-century Paris. Renowned for lavish entertainments, costumes, meals, and patronage of artists, musicians, and the occasional writer, courts were theaters of intrigue where the common goal was access to the body of the princess. In this patriarchal world, women exercised influence but they rarely exercised power. Elizabeth Tudor was the exception that proved the rule. Women mattered to the extent of their attachment to powerful men; young women mattered even more because their bodies, in particular their wombs, mattered. Court politics revolved around marriage, that is, an alliance among rival families. Gossip about women's virginity, fertility, and sexuality facilitated and destroyed dynastic dreams. Fathers, uncles, and brothers chose suitors, negotiated the exchange of property, and dispensed patronage; mothers and other post-menopausal women supervised the

Australian Journal of Politics & History, 2010

Feminist political thought challenges the absence or subordination of women in the theory and practice of politics. This course offers an introduction to feminist political theory by asking questions like: what is patriarchal political power? how does the modern state conceive of the place of women in social, political, and economic life, and to what extent can the state be utilized to improve the condition of women? what is the relation between feminism and other struggles for social, economic, and racial justice? how does feminist political thought vary across diverse ideologies, cultures, and ethnicities? what is queer feminism, and how does it interpret and engage in contemporary political processes? Students will read, discuss, and write about historical and contemporary texts that address these and other questions. The course proceeds through various thematic units. We begin by studying ancient representations of women in politics by reading perhaps the oldest and most enduring “feminist” text, Sophocles’s Antigone, alongside Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata. We then examine foundational texts in the liberal-humanist tradition of feminist thought. Next, we move into the twentieth century by reading key sections of Simone de Beauvoir’s classic The Second Sex and exploring how this text inaugurates more radical feminist accounts of the state and revolution. After a unit on feminist accounts of the place of women’s work and the body in the polis, the course concludes with investigations of feminism’s intersections with racial politics; the emergence of queer theory and its impact on feminist politics; and how transgender politics expands the scope of feminist thought and action today.

Syllabus, 2020

This course examines feminist interventions to political theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It starts with the introduction to feminist epistemology and the feminist interrogations of malestream knowledge production practices, and moves on to the feminist readings of major issues in contemporary politics, including the political, state, citizenship, agency, private – public interface, patriarchy. The connection and breaks between political thinking and political practice stands as the constant theme in all the topics that are covered within the scope of the course.

Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, 2006

This article describes the connection between feminist theory and the canon of political thought. It explains that feminist approaches to the canon of political theory are characterized by deep ambivalence and the majority of canonical authors have mostly dismissed women as political beings in their own right and casted them instead as mere appendages to citizen man. The article suggests that the question of how to make political judgments about other cultures and practices that deeply affect women is particularly important for feminist theory today. Globalization and the weakening of nation states have also pressed feminists to raise political demands with an eye to their multicultural and transnational significance.

Feminist theory is assumed to be political by definition, but this view tends to occlude the different ways in which feminists think about politics. This essay discusses competing understandings of politics and examines how it is that things come to count as political within feminism. To think of relations of subordination of political, it is argued, is not simply to discover a relation of power that was already there but to constitute that relation as unjust and subject to change. This is the predicative moment of feminist practice that brings the political into being.

Revisioning Democracy and Women's Suffrage. Critical Feminist Interventions, 2024

Gender Studies developed alongside and emerged out of feminist movements and critical theorizing of the 20 th century. Today they are both recognized as a discrete teaching and research area and an integral part of various disciplines. Gender Studies analyze how gender constitutes social order and power relations past and present. It is in this respect that gender is not understood as a biological or natural constant but as a historically and culturally specific, life-long process of differentiation and becoming and as a way of existence. Gender is thus always also an effect of social and individual processes. The book series "Gender Issues" unites theoretical and empirical work in the field of Gender Studies in the humanities and the social sciences. The series is open to different disciplines and languages. It may thus be understood as bridging the gap between different research sensibilities and language cultures. The series "Gender Issues" is edited by the Swiss Association for Gender Studies. The series is peer-reviewed and open-access.