Feminist Theory and the Philosophies of Man

Andrea Nye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134567027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In the past decade there has been an explosion of feminist theory - in many cases depending on theoretical foundations borrowed from men. Andrea Nye critically examines the ambivalent relationship between feminists and male theory.

1

Introduction:
The Designs of Feminist Theory

Contemporary feminist theory is a tangled and forbidding web. Familiar slogans of equality and freedom have been replaced by the intricate embroidery of Marxist economics, the hermetic mysteries of psychoanalysis, and inaccessible theories of the signifier. Practising feminists — struggling with abusive marriages, pay scales that devalue the work of women, repressive laws against homosexuality, lack of funding for social services — approach the proliferation of feminist theory with an acute sense of frustration. Constantly confronted with the defeat or neutralisation of feminist projects, wearily seeking fresh insights into mechanisms that perpetuate women’s oppression, searching for the new vision needed to begin again, women urgently require the answers that feminist theory promises. Faced, however, with multiple volumes of Marx’s Capital, Lacan’s Ecrits, or Irigaray’s Speculum of the other woman, a woman may easily decide that theory is a luxury which she cannot afford. It will take years, she might say, years, to understand all this; and in the meantime, there is a meeting of women employees, a class to teach, a court date, a child to pick up at school, or an urgent call on the woman’s hot line. And Marx goes back to the library unread. Maybe there will be time next week.

Is it such a loss? Does a practising feminist need theory? Perhaps she does not, she consoles herself: her convictions, her energies, her relations with other women are enough. Philosophy is a luxury for ivory tower intellectuals. At other times, however — when her efforts, and other women’s efforts, fail, when she feels herself drawn back into destructive relationships, when the court refuses to mandate comparable worth, when her lover is fired from her teaching job for coming out as a lesbian, when the funding for the rape centre is withdrawn — she goes to the library and checks out the books again. She must understand, she tells herself, how to confront a government bureaucracy that takes no account of human needs, an education system that denies knowledge, a constitution that allows discrimination, a sexual ethics that sets different standards for men and women. There are also choices she must make. Who is she to listen to? — the Marxist feminist who tells her she has abandoned poor women in her drive for equal democratic rights?; the radical feminist who tells her she has compromised her primary commitment to women in her involvement with leftist politics?; the lesbian feminist who tells her she is a collaborator because she lives with a man?; the French feminist who tells her that in being rational she denies her femininity?

In thinking about these conflicting prescriptions — for equal rights, socialist revolution, sexual revolution, women’s writing — we cannot avoid either our sexist past or the various ways women have tried to escape from the past. Any theory we might use to understand our situation already has a history, a history in which its meaning was shaped in feminist and non-feminist practice. There can be no fresh start that analyzes sexism authoritatively into discrete units with scientific precision in order to infer the correct feminist intervention. There is no infallible logic that avoids the constant and painful adjustments between what one is doing and what one thinks one is doing that characterise any progressive action. Women, becoming aware of their exclusion from a male culture in which they have little power, in which women’s values are not expressed, in which they may not be considered persons or even God’s creatures, find no pure feminist theory.

Nor will they find it in feminist history. Matrifocal culture lies deep in prehistory, accessible only when mediated through male archaeologists who had their own reasons for searching for the White Goddess. To women struggling with property law, prostitution, wife beating, homophobia, and racism, the story of a feminist Golden Age remains a myth not substantial enough to be translated into any insights that can guide current practice. Instead, feeling the injustice everywhere around them, looking for some way to make sense of their experience and to project an effective programme for future action, women have adopted theories, systems, and categories invented by men to rationalise and justify men’s activities. Perhaps in these theories which men devise to regulate their relations, they reasoned, there might be something that women could adapt to feminist purposes. Women could take their opponent’s own argument, turn it against him, and generate a human society inclusive of women.

The first systematic justifications of women’s rights in the nineteenth century were borrowed from liberal and democratic theory. The democratic panacea of the vote was the focus of feminist struggle. Locke, Rousseau, and the utilitarians had fashioned a world in which men could be free and equal, a civil society in which men would determine their own fates. These ideas, which were never meant to be applied to women, were taken up by reformers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Taylor. At the same time, socialists attacked liberalism. Capitalism, they charged, did nothing to change the economic and social degradation of women, and the bourgeois family provided only domestic servitude. Marxist analysis of class relations and economics became the focus of a more radical feminism. However, feminists also found Marxist theory inadequate. The failure of Marxist revolutions to change substantively the position of women, or to bring about, even for men, the Utopia promised by Marx, led feminists like Simone de Beauvoir to a deeper study of the existential relations between self and other described by philosophers such as Hegel and Sartre. Feminist psychoanalysts, in turn, went beyond existential relations to a study of the feminine psyche generated in family structures that survived even a Marxist revolution. Finally, structuralist theories of language located sexism at the very origins of culture. If the language that women speak, in which they must speak, is tainted with sexism, a sexism deeper than a revisable lexicon, if the grammar of language is itself reflective of male thought, then nothing women can say or write in existing language can ever be truly feminist.

Each time in the continuing struggle for coherent practice and revolutionary theory, there is a spinning out, a drawing of conclusions, an expansion of hope and of conviction, and then a disappointment, a painful drawing up at the limits of a theoretical orientation, which in turn forces a new beginning. Will these borrowed ideas ever work? Can feminists take the thread offered by the collaborating Athena and the male gods to whom she has pledged allegiance and make it into an escape?; or will such a thread always lead back to unreflective collaboration? Is it possible to discern among the complex patterns of feminist thought a re-occurring design of male supremacy which makes feminist theory ultimately self-defeating?

This is the dilemma that feminists confront. A sporadic, reactive, unthinking response to injustice has little practical force. There must be a centre from which to begin weaving feminist theory, a foothold from which action can be initiated and take on meaning and strength. At the same time, that ideological foothold may have to be borrowed from the only ideas available. If culture is sexist culture, feminist theory may have to be generated out of whatever lifelines that culture concedes. This borrowing, this adaptation, this continual outgrowing of a theoretical stance that restricts feminist practice, that leaves too much of what remains alien to feminine experience intact and untouched by women’s thought and action, is the history of feminist theory. It is also a history re-enacted each time women begin again to repair the damaged web of understanding that must support any meaningful feminist action.

What follows is not objective. I write from a particular position in space and time that I share with other women. Nor is it disinterested. I do not pretend to assess fairly all previous feminist theories from a position of removed authority. My project is a personal one, to think through a concrete, immediate problem. What should we/I do now? What is the adequate understanding of women’s situation that will inform that practice? The point is not to make a catalogue of mistakes but to learn to own the past, to remember how we thought a certain way for the first time, and went on thinking that way, and the difficulty we had in acting on that thought. This, it seems to me, is the only way to learn to be the past and at the same time not to be it, as each new attempt at understanding what was thought and done creates a new past and a new future.

2

Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité:
Nineteenth-century Liberalism and Women’s Rights

The philosophical inheritance

When a woman in the United States or Western Europe first identifies herself as a feminist, it is often as a liberal feminist, asserting her claim to the equal rights and freedoms guaranteed to each individual in democratic society. In doing so she follows those nineteenth-century feminists who found in the democratic ideals of equality and liberty, that marked the change from feudal Europe to an industrial economy, a coherent systematic body of doctrine from which to argue for women’s rights. These ideals, reflected in and inspired by bourgeois revolutions in the United States and France, took shape in the political writings of philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Bentham. All men were to have the same rights; all men were to be equal before the law which would only be imposed with the consent of those who were to obey it. Although contract theorists such as Rousseau might differ from utilitarians such as Bentham over the terms of political participation, the vote pragmatically represented for all aspiring groups the minimal sign that their members were fully functioning and self-determining in the new civil society. Accordingly, in the first great wave of feminist activity in the nineteenth century, the primary issue was suffrage. Other issues such as property rights, marriage reform and sexual freedom were discussed, but democratic theory encouraged feminists to see the vote as the correct and most practical way of achieving their goals. When suffrage was granted, women would be able to vote for the legislation that would correct injustice to women. Unfortunately, there was much in the theorising of the founding fathers of democratic theory that stood in contradiction to this feminist logic. Philosophers such as John Locke, who argued against the absolute power of the king and for free contractual relations between men, did not include women as participants in civil society. Although Locke argued against Adam’s absolute monarchy and also against the eternal inevitable submission of Eve, it was still the case that when there was a dispute in the family, a ‘different understanding’ between husband and wife, ‘the last determination, i.e., the Rule . . . naturally falls to the man’s share as the abler and stronger’.¹ Although for the contrac-tualist Locke there are limits to the rule of the husband, the elements constituting civil society are households with male heads. The woman’s place is in the home where she is subordinate to the better judgement of the man. Although the possibility is left open that there might be exceptional women (God did not give man universal authority), still in his punishment of Eve (‘and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over you’ — 3 Gen. 16), God foretold woman’s lot. It has, Locke pronounced with some satisfaction, worked out in fact that women are subject and also that there is a foundation in nature for their subjection.²

David Hume, the defender of the virtues of sympathy and rapport with other’s suffering, also took a traditional view of women’s place. Men are the natural rulers in the home.³ Women do not participate in the moral relations established between men in which natural sympathies are replaced by rules of justice. Men are the proper spokespersons for the family. As Aristotle before him, Hume argued that there are different virtues for women. Modesty and chastity are virtues for women but not for men. Women are the ‘fair sex’ with ‘female virtues’. Because men must know when they are fathers if they are to take on the responsibilities of supporting a child, these restraints on women are necessary. It is therefore shameful for a woman to invite adultery or even to allow herself to be approached.⁴

Rousseau, the great democrat, elaborated on the feminine nature that subjects women to male authority. Women he argued, are naturally weaker, suited for reproduction but not for public life. In Emile in which Rousseau described the ideal natural spontaneous education for a man away from the corruptions of society, the education of his female counterpart, the unfortunate Sophie, is very different. Women are to be educated to please men and to be mothers. They are to be trained in the sexual restraint and chastity that ensures paternity. They must learn to stimulate male desire and at the same time to restrain men’s lusts. Seductiveness suits their nature; they are desiring to please, modest, tolerant of injustice, manipulative, vain, and artistic in a minor way. In the family, men must rule these frivolous creatures.

This view of women’s place was ratified, though in a different tone, by the celebrated Madame de Stael. Writing in 1796, still stunned and horrified by the ‘unleashed passions’ of the French Revolution, she analysed (De) L’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus et des nations,⁵ hoping to make clear the ways in which uncontrolled emotions destroy happiness both for individuals and societies. However, with respect to emotions, women are in a different position from men. Ambition and pride in a man may bring his downfall; in a woman such sentiments are never conducive to happiness. When a woman meddles in politics, if she is young she is considered immodest; if old, disgusting.⁶ If she desires power she is always judged harshly by both men and women, by men because she can no longer be a love object, and by women out of either jealousy or principle. The only acceptable passion for women is love, but even there, true happiness is impossible. She is adored when young and beautiful, only to be inevitably ignored when she loses her beauty.⁷ Love for men is just an episode in their lives, while for women it is everything; and so for women, after a few years of romance, life is finished.⁸

Men in love are bound by no principles of honour or constancy. For them love does not involve obligation: even the best of them only love for the moment. Consequently it is better for a woman when her passionate life is over, when she is no longer tempted to this, in de Stael’s words: . . . ‘devastating feeling that like the burning wind of Africa dries in the flower, knocks down in violence, bends finally to the ground the stem which dreamed of growing and dominating’.⁹ Though love is the province of women it is better not to be loved, because if you give in to the need to be loved, you give yourself over to men, ‘overturning your existence for several instants of theirs’.¹⁰ However, a woman should not hope to escape the misery of love by emulating male ambition. She must, with all of its dangers, be content with being loved. She is irrevocably dependent, and nothing can extricate her from the control of men. Even if she achieves celebrity, like Madame de Stael herself, and produces great works, this can never bring her happiness. She has too much imagination, is too agitated, has too many illusions and fears, is too ‘sensible’, too ‘mobile’, and so any achievement is always at the expense of her happiness.¹¹ As Stael observed, rather surprisingly for a woman whose literary gifts were so obvious, the worst situation is when women reject ‘the distinctive character of their sex’ for literature.¹² The only possible consolation is motherhood where at least a woman’s affections may have some reward.

Madame de Stael, like Rousseau, saw these deficiencies as a result of nature. Women’s nature determines their destiny and they should not go against it. They owe their powerlessness to ‘the route nature has traced for them’. They must accept ‘the insurmountable faculty of their nature’.¹³ However, in Stael’s description of the woman’s proper role, there was a new tone. Women accept a ‘situation in the social order’,¹⁴ and furthermore, the role that women are to play is impossible. In it there is no happiness: from it there is no escape. Not only are women what they are by nature, they are also what men wish them to be; they are judged harshly when ambitious because ‘men do not see any kind of general utility in encouraging the success of women in this career’.¹⁵ In Stael, Rousseau’s mute Sophie begins to speak and in her voice emotions unbefitting a properly feminine woman are already beginning to sound: bitterness, contempt for male values, resentment of her position. The revolution, whose excesses Stael so much regretted, did nothing directly to change the situation of women, but it had initiated in women like Stael a reflection on woman’s lot that would eventually flower in feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Taylor. These women would argue beyond Stael that the logic of the revolution, if properly employed, demanded a radical change in the attitudes of those men who saw no ‘utility’ in female success.

The democratic reforms of the French Revolution were originally theorised as benefiting women only indirectly: women are dependent upon men, therefore, women will be better off because men will be better off. Unsuited to civil responsibility with its necessary rat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The Designs of Feminist Theory
• 2 Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité: Nineteenth-century Liberalism and Women's Rights
• 3 A Community of Men: Marxism and Women
• 4 A World Without Women: The Existentialist Feminism of Simone de Beauvoir
• 5 The Analysis of Patriarchy
• 6 A Woman's Language
• 7 The Theory of Feminist Practice
• Epilogue
• Select Bibliography
• Index