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Home , Mary Astell, Simone de Beauvoir

Feminist Emancipatory Discourse from Astell's `Hog-Tending' through de Beauvoir's `Complicity' to Nussbaum's `Human Capabilities'

Helen Wishart and Viki Soady

WOMEN'S STUDIES PROGRAM, VALDOSTA STATE UNIVERSITY, USA

Although the western philosophical tradition is notoriously misogynistic, since the early Enlightenment women philosophers have urged that the evolving emancipatory discourses include the embodied consciousness of females in their liberatory projects. Philosophers such as Mary Astell, and Simone de Beauvoir honed their skills at using `the master's tools', male-created and male-de®ned language and rhet- oric, in order to articulate their resistance to the constraining de®nitions of `human nature' and `natural '. In their efforts to ®nd legitimacy of representation as speaking subjects within the public discourse of en- lightenment and modern , such thinkers struggled to chal- lenge the epistemological and ontological frameworks within which they spoke on behalf of women. In `Women's Time', alludes critically to such `®rst gener- ation feminists' and `existentialist feminists' who `took up the egalitarian and universalistic spirit of Enlightenment Humanism, the idea of a necessary identi®cation between the two sexes as the only and unique means for liberating the ``second sex'' ' (Kristeva, 1986: 205). Without naming de Beauvoir directly, Kristeva is openly critical of those who

The European Journal of Women's Studies Copyright # SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 6, 1999: 281±290 [1350-5068(199908)6:3;281±290;009602] 282 The European Journal of Women's Studies 6(3) regard `the desire to be a mother . . . as alienating and even reactionary' (1986: 205). Further allusion to de Beauvoir might be read into Kristeva's description of the `struggle of suffragists and of existential feminists who aspired to gain a place in linear time as the time of project and history' (1986: 193) with their willingness to reject `the attributes traditionally considered feminine or maternal insofar as they are deemed incompatible with insertion in that history' (1986: 194). De Beauvoir, like Astell and Wollstonecraft before her, accepted with- out question the Enlightenment assumption of a single, sovereign subject, gendered male, distanced from the bodily and material, as well as, in Susan Hekman's words, `an existentialist epistemology grounded in a conception of the subject as rational, autonomous and self-constituting' (1991: 46). Man, according to de Beauvoir, . . . is de®ned as a being who is not ®xed, who makes himself what he is . . . man is not a natural species: he is a historical idea. Woman is not a completed reality, but rather a becoming, and it is in her becoming that she should be compared with man; That is to say, her possibilities should be de®ned. (1989: 142) These `possibilities', as yet undetermined, are limited by her bodily `situation' and customary role as man's `', through whose accommo- dation his transcendence and recognition are facilitated. To free herself from this status of the `other' and to begin to progress from en soi to pour soi ( to selfhood), de Beauvoir wrote that woman must actively reject her socially forged role of orthodox , including the pur- suit of motherhood, in favor of the transcendent occupations normally engaged in by the male. Woman can, only by this means, enter the Hegelian public realm and participate in the progress of history. As de Beauvoir writes, with the arrogance of a chiding schoolmarm: When she is productive, active, she regains her transcendence; in her projects she concretely af®rms her status as subject, in connection with the aims she pursues, with the money and the rights she takes possession of, she makes trial and sense of her responsibility. (1989: 680) In the future, it would appear, woman could also be de®ned by the existent patriarchal criteria of economic clout and the rights that she could wrest from, and therefore, claim within ± male virtues valorized in male terms ± the usual list of `activities in accordance with virtue', the aged locus classicus, delineated in 's Nichomachean . For de Beauvoir, as for Sartre, within this regime each man (and woman if she chooses the path of transcendence) achieves his liberty and selfhood through competition with other equals: There is the tragedy of the unfortunate human consciousness: each separate conscious being aspires to set himself up alone as sovereign subject. Each tries to ful®ll himself by reducing the other to slavery. (1989: 140) Wishart and Soady: Feminist Emancipatory Discourse 283

De Beauvoir accepts Sartre's contention that man creates himself by aggression and competition and that his `others' are servile, and as Hegel had contended ± objects of utility that must be managed, but that will not subtract from the pour soi of the superior being. Women are not servile by nature, but have been socialized into to men, their eternal objecti®cation existing as part of an obligatory Mitsein, or partnership with men in which they have never really challenged male sovereignty. Of the role of women in male transcendence, de Beauvoir writes:

Woman thus seems to be the inessential who never goes back to being the essential, to be the absolute Other, without reciprocity. . . . Thus she ap- peared in the guise of privileged prey. She was nature elevated to trans- parency of consciousness; she was a conscious being, but naturally submissive. And therein lies the wondrous hope that man has often put in woman: he hopes to ful®ll himself as a being by carnally possessing a being, but at the same time con®rming his sense of freedom through the docility of a free person. (1989: 140)

Passages such as this, and there are many, present feminists with a conundrum since, on ®rst reading, they seem to establish de Beauvoir as a harsh critic of women's behavior and to convey a fundamental hope- lessness about women's situation. Should they simply be read ironically as is often necessary in the case of emancipatory discourse? Is the under- tone of biting sarcasm actually aimed at her male philosophical colleagues and predominantly male audience? Rooted as she is in the existential philosophical tradition, de Beauvoir is bound by the framework of her time as ®rmly as her predecessors, even criticizing women for the `immanent complicity' that they engage in to entrap men in the static, repetitive, non-creative ac- tivities of species reproduction. She accepts a model of human conscious- ness that is oppositional, confrontational and dualistic, in which women achieve human `being' only in so far as they can detach from the functions of their own bodies and act like men. Linda Zerilli, in her article com- paring the views of de Beauvoir and Kristeva on maternity, suggests that de Beauvoir employs a discursive strategy that is devious and subversive, so shocking in such places as her description of pregnancy as to constitute a ` of horror' (1992: 113). Zerilli suggests that de Beauvoir's discursive aim is `not a rearticulation of masculinist values' but `a sophisticated and underappreciated feminist discursive strategy of de- familiarization, a highly charged, always provocative, and at times enraging restaging of the traditional drama of maternity' (1992: 112). Perhaps. De Beauvoir admits that women do not have the discursive authority to bring to consciousness their own version of a metahistory in order to counterbalance the mythological and pseudo-historical grand narrative of the dominant discourse: 284 The European Journal of Women's Studies 6(3)

We sometimes say `the sex' to designate woman; she is the ¯esh, its delights and dangers. The truth that for woman, man is sex and carnality has never been proclaimed because there is no one to proclaim it. Repre- sentation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth. (1989: 143) Woman, to de Beauvoir, is not a subject able to speak but merely an object that exists to receive the gaze of man, to ®ll his lack and, hence, to enable his achievement of recognition. Some French feminists, with whom de Beauvoir was less than sympathetic, believe that phallogocentric lan- guage cannot represent women's experiences and they prefer to focus on ®nding a way to speak differently rather than on working women into the symbolic systems as they are currently structured. They are interested in the radical, uncontrollable aspect of language that continually breaks free and breaks up phallogocentric or binary logic, what Julia Kristeva calls `desire in language', and Helene Cixous and term `eÂcriture feÂminine'. This is a post-gendered feminine that is the excess, the over¯ow which cannot be structured and is theoretically based on the psycho- analytic reframing of Freud by . Like de Beauvoir, however, many Anglo-American feminists from Mary Astell to the present have tended to approach the issue of women's subordination pragmatically, within a more traditional notion of liber- ation; the goal is to create a female subject position and, thus, to get women speaking so that the female experience might be wholly repre- sented in societal institutions. In addition to concentrating on the material issues of social allotment of resources and opportunities for self-advance- ment, they spotlight the ideological reasons for language practices that keep women alienated from power (Code, 1995; Fraser, 1997; Walker, 1998). Because only what we can name can be discussed and because what we say becomes what we see, obtaining the power to name one's reality is critical. identi®es this `social pragmatic conception of language' as a heuristic tool for recognizing that: Discourses are historically speci®c, socially situated, signifying practices. They are the communicative frames in which speakers interact by exchang- ing speech acts. Yet discourses are themselves set within social institutions and action contexts. (1997: 185) Even Sartre pointed out that `words wreak havoc when they ®nd a name for what had up to then been lived namelessly' (1971: 783). A phallocratic language structure is, therefore, not the only problem. A primary focus for furthering the emancipatory discourse must be to get the full resources of language to women so that they might begin to alter language usage as they speak themselves into full legal and social adulthood. Early feminists fought ®rst to establish the rational properties of women and then to argue for their rights to basic literacy and education in order that they Wishart and Soady: Feminist Emancipatory Discourse 285 might come to better understand the world and its ways, arguments often centered on the improvement this would effect in their roles as wives and mothers. Mary Astell, a 17th-century contemporary of and an early commentator on his theory, derived her belief in the intellectual equality of women directly from her devotion to Cartesian theories of the self as knower and agent of knowledge. Of the paradox of political inequality between the , she wrote in Some Re¯ections Upon Marriage: `If all men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves?' (1986: 76). She theorized that the inhibitions on women's reason and its proper exercise were societally orchestrated by males in order to reduce women to `silly fools', sex objects and reproductive entities. There are many af®nities between her ideas and those of de Beauvoir, but Astell's rhetoric is keenly witty, colorful and never ambiguous. This tireless advocate of education for women also had no patience with women who were complicit in their own oppression and maintained that women could exercise some choice concerning their respective fates. Like de Beauvoir, Astell was aware that women were frequently so oppressed by the force of `Custom' that when it came to the question of marriage, `A Woman can't properly be said to Choose; all that is allow'd her, is to Refuse or Accept what is offer'd' (1986: 29). Astell identi®ed the excesses of men and would have agreed with de Beauvoir's statement that `When a woman begins to doubt men's superiority, their pretensions serve only to decrease her esteem for them' (1989: 692) but Astell, as an article of religious faith, nonetheless, accepted men's earthly authority over women and children within the domestic as well as the public context. In spite of the political sovereignty of men, however, Astell saw nothing `natural' about the married state. Astell's best advice to women was to not marry and hand themselves over ± body and mind ± to the hegemony of a morally inferior male. If, in spite of the dangers, they so chose, Astell expected women to honor their commitment as they would a business arrangement. She, in fact, compares marriage to any other obnoxious duty, freely chosen, such as Hog-tending: The Service she . . . becomes oblig'd to pay to a Man, is only a Business by the Bye. Just as it may be any Man's Business and Duty to keep hogs; he was not made for this, but if he hires himself out to such Employment, he ought conscientiously to perform it. (1986: 101) Although she rejected the reduction of women to their reproductive functions, once the refusal to conform to the societal expectation of marriage was made, living embodied female never included the physical expression of heterosexual desire. Passionate energies were to be dissi- pated either in religious fervor or channeled into social good works, much as de Beauvoir describes in the chapter entitled `The Mystic', concerning women who retreat into religion and spirituality. 286 The European Journal of Women's Studies 6(3)

A century later, Mary Wollstonecraft theorized about a woman's right to express her own sexuality and to her sexual emancipation even within marriage by positing that man, too, should respect his mate by exhibiting sexual moderation and domestic care. The professional political writer Mary Wollstonecraft, like de Beauvoir, maintained a rhetorically rational, asexual voice that some have interpreted as condescending to women and critical of their bodies (Poovey, 1984: 80); as an example, she stated that because of lack of meaningful education, marriage is `the only way women can rise in the world' and yet childbirth `make[s] mere animals of them' (Wollstonecraft, 1989b: 76). As did de Beauvoir, Wollstonecraft believed that emancipation for women must ultimately come about through a political and social that would dissolve class bound- aries. This class analysis is an integral part of the The Wrongs of Women: or, Maria 1978 (1989a), an un®nished work in which she directly links class and in her treatment of marriage as legalized prostitu- tion, especially in the portrayal of the character Jemima. Wollstonecraft understood that the plight of women would not be improved by the mere substitution of men of the commercial middle class, the , for the former ruling aristocracy when she wrote: `If the aristocracy of birth is leveled with the ground, only to make room for that of riches . . . the morals of people will not be much improved by the change, or the rendered less venal' (1989c: 444). Her sympathies with the French working class and her often straitened personal circumstances allowed her to see clearly the connections between women's economic dependence, their lack of education and their lack of political voice. Since she died of puerperal fever in 1797 at the age of 38, she did not live long enough to witness the complete failure of the French Revolution to accomplish its self-proclaimed aims of equality and fraternity, nor to formulate her own coherent revolutionary . Wollstonecraft described human sexuality as so male-de®ned as to deny woman any unique expression of her desire. Each woman, from wanton to restrained wife, was a creation of male desire, unable to express her own. For Wollstonecraft, as for de Beauvoir, woman's greatest hope lay in the achievement of a friendly heterosexuality, a `fraternity' with men, a recognition of mutual humanity that could include the sexual but would also establish woman as a rational existent. On the need for such , she wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman:

There must be more equality established in society or morality will never gain ground, and this virtuous equality will not rest ®rmly even when founded on a rock, if one half of mankind be chained to its bottom by fate, for they will be continually undermining it through ignorance or pride. (1989b: 211)

Both Astell and Wollstonecraft, like de Beauvoir, believed that women Wishart and Soady: Feminist Emancipatory Discourse 287 were not born, but constructed to meet particular social needs, and, with a self-re¯exivity based in education, could liberate themselves from such constraints. The precision with which de Beauvoir scrutinized the socializing pro- cesses by which women became `complements' to men was the spotlight that exposed the inequities inherent in gender once and for all. And yet, the material speci®cities of the female body, its particular nature and bodily cycles ± menstruation, pregnancy, maternity ± remained a limitation on women's access to the rights and privileges a patriarchal society accorded to men, a hindrance to be overcome especially if sexual equality was to be sought in the public sphere. Underlying the rational arguments of all these liberal, humanist feminists, was the same belief held by their male counterparts ± that the female body, biologically determined and fundamentally alien to the cultural and intellectual achievements of men (who were certainly not disadvantaged by their bodies) somehow justi®ed the lesser participation of females in social, political and intellectual endeavors. Always, female biology needed modi®cation, intervention, adjustment. De Beauvoir herself exhibited this schizophrenic attitude to her female- ness as she vacillated between urging women to become freely-choosing rational existents in the manner of men and delineating the constraints that prevent such self-de®nition. Unfortunately, after her thorough and lengthy analysis of women's subordination, de Beauvoir offered women a utopian vision of co-operation and consensus between the sexes but no practical advice on how women were to overcome the oppressive cultural institutions, both external and internal, that in concert with males kept those `embodied female' as `'. The philosophical frame itself, the words and concepts which these humanist feminists appropriated for feminist emancipatory discourse, must be expanded to include the concerns and lived experience of women. French philosopher Michelle Le Doeuff, in The Philosophical Imaginary (1989) describes philosophy as a discipline, `a discourse obey- ing . . . a ®nite number of rules, procedures or operations . . . a delimita- tion which denies the (actually or potentially) inde®nite character of modes of thought; it is a barrage restraining the number of possible (acceptable) statements' (1989: 144). And, what has been historically repressed is the feminine. A small band of women philosophers can be identi®ed through the long history of philosophy but, for the most part, the theoretical discourse was available to women through a male medi- ator, a constraint which often placed the intellectual woman in the position of handmaiden to a learned man, as an admirer or faithful commentator on the master's sacred texts (1989: 125). Although Le Doeuff rejects what she characterizes as the irrationality of Luce Irigaray's position, that of speaking from the place of otherness, as a 288 The European Journal of Women's Studies 6(3)

`fantasy-product of con¯icts within a ®eld of reason that has been assimilated to masculinity' (1989: 116), she believes an alternative project for transforming philosophy exists. Feminists must cease masking the `incomplete nature of theorizing' and voice the repressions that philos- ophy as a discipline has silenced. Yet, Le Doeuff claims that it is not enough to have women speaking from philosophy's domain if they merely mimic its masculine voice. Since she believes that there is no speaking position outside rationality, her project is to expand philosophi- cal discourse beyond the domain of privileged masculinity to include the concerns of those embodied female. Carol Gilligan, the Harvard psychologist who specializes in moral development, challenged the in¯uential approach of her teacher, moral theorist Lawrence Kohlberg. Discarding the role of `handmaiden', she argued against Kohlberg that rather than achieving what was an inferior level of moral development on his scale, women and girls articulated moral dilemmas `in a different voice'. In her ground-breaking work, she recognized that the subject of traditional moral philosophy was based on a masculine model of autonomous selfhood and, consequently, few women could attain the highest stage of moral reasoning on this biased scale, and so were rated as morally inferior. Gilligan opposed Kohlberg's methodology, his results and his interpretations. By listening carefully to how women solve moral dilemmas, she heard voices that had been denigrated for centuries, a subjugated discourse that claimed a moral space and a practice of ethics appropriate to the needs of women in relationships. That women might practice a morality different from men is of secondary signi®cance in her work, however. As Susan Hekman asserts in her book Moral Voices, Moral Selves, what is of paramount importance is the fact that Gilligan captured the articulation of women's moral self-representation, and thus replaced the Cartesian disembodied male subject of moral philosophy with a relational self that produces knowledge from an embodied, embedded location (Hekman, 1995: 30). Like Le Doeuff and other challengers to traditional, oppositional, - sophical disciplines, Gilligan has expanded the conversation to include the voices of those embodied `other'. There are, however, more pressing and pragmatic reasons for including the lived experiences of `the other' in the discourses of the powerful. The world has changed greatly in the 50 years since de Beauvoir wrestled with the problems of . Certainly, a huge and disparate community of disadvantaged `others' has come into public conscious- ness. For , a philosopher currently working for the United Nations with Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, no theory of can ignore the voices of the marginalized in any culture. In a re-visioning of her classical philosophical background, she challenges the hegemony of `the moral tradition' which, following Kant, seeks to Wishart and Soady: Feminist Emancipatory Discourse 289 remove the subject, dispassionate, rational and transcendent, from the `messiness' of human life, and bases her ethical philosophy on a uni- versalized commonality of human experience, what Aristotle called `the feelings of recognition and af®liation that link one human being to every other human being' (Nussbaum, 1995: 69). She argues for the linkage between universals and particulars by eliciting moral principles from attention to the concrete details of everyday human activities. Not only do these `universal essentials' cross national and temporal boundaries, Nussbaum and Sen believe that rather than theoretical abstractions, they are quanti®able concepts useful for public policy decisions. After all, an existence that lacks the most basic of human needs ± sustenance, security, clothing, health care ± is so impoverished that it cannot even be called human. Nussbaum's philosophical ponderings, therefore, begin where de Beauvoir's ended. What can we do to bring about the kind of world de Beauvoir imagines as essential to support human ¯ourishing regardless of race, class or gender? A fully human just society must support the full range of capabilities within each individual citizen, not create partial complements, defective until attached to an `other', equally defective. Seyla Benhabib, a passionate advocate of Nussbaum's cosmopolitan vision, (Nussbaum, 1996) rejects fears of cultural imperialism as justifying detachment from the serious and life-threatening problems in the world. After all, she says, the movement from `ethnocentric ' to an `in®nite community of conversation and a community of interdepen- dence' (Benhabib, 1995: 253) is the logical outcome of those emancipatory discourses, rooted in the Enlightenment, expanded by feminists, and appropriated by increasingly diverse `Others'.

REFERENCES

Astell, Mary (1986) Some Re¯ections Upon Marriage. The Third Edition 1706, pp. 67± 134 in Brigit Hill (ed.) The First English Feminist: Re¯ections upon Marriage and Other Writings by Mary Astell. New York: St Martin's Press. Benhabib, Seyla (1995) `Cultural Complexity, Moral Independence, and the Global Dialogical Community', pp. 235±58 in Martha C. Nussbaum and Jonathon Glover (eds) Women, Culture and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Code, Lorraine (1995) Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations. New York: Routledge. De Beauvoir, Simone (1989) The Second Sex, 10th edn, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Fraser, Nancy (1997) Justice Interruptus: Critical Re¯ections on the `Postsocialist' Condition. New York: Routledge. Gilligan, Carol (1982) In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 290 The European Journal of Women's Studies 6(3)

Hekman, Susan J. (1991) `Reconstructing the Subject: , Modernism, and ', 6(2): 44±63. Hekman, Susan J. (1995) Moral Voices, Moral Selves: Carol Gilligan and Feminist Moral Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kristeva, Julia (1986) `Women's Time', pp. 187±213 in (ed.) The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. Le Doeuff, Michelle (1989) The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. (1995) `Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings', pp. 61±104 in Martha C. Nussbaum and Jonathon Glover (eds) Women, Culture and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. (1996) For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Poovey, Mary (1984) The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austin. Chicago. IL: University of Chicago Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1971) L'Idiot de la Famille. : Gallimard. Sen, Amartya (1995) `Gender Inequality and Theories of Justice', pp. 259±73 in Martha C. Nussbaum and Jonathon Glover (eds) Women, Culture and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Walker, Margaret Urban (1998) Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics. New York: Routledge. Wollstonecraft, Mary (1989a) The Wrongs of Women: or, Maria 1798, pp. 75±184 in J. Todd and M. Butler (eds) The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Volume 1. Washington Square: New York University Press. Wollstonecraft, Mary (1989b) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1790), pp. 61± 266 in J. Todd and M. Butler (eds) The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Volume 5. Washington Square: New York University Press. Wollstonecraft, Mary (1989c) Letter on the Character of the French Nation 1798, pp. 439±46 in J. Todd and M. Butler (eds) The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Volume 6. Washington Square: New York University Press. Zerilli, Linda M. G. (1992) `A Process without a Subject: Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva on Maternity', 18(1): 111±34.

Viki Soady holds a PhD in Classical Languages from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and is currently Director of Women's Studies at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia, USA. Her most recent publications include articles on and two entries in Signi®cant Contemporary American Feminists, edited by Jennifer Scanlon (Greenwood Press, 1999).

Helen Wishart is a graduate student in English and Women's Studies at Valdosta State University. Her interests include and cultural criticism. She is a research associate of Viki Soady and editor of the new interdisciplinary journal of Women's Studies ± Contiguities ± which publishes selected papers from the annual Women's Studies Conference at Valdosta State. They have co-authored several conference papers and written reviews for such publications as Off Our Backs and The Newsletter of Gender and Women of the American Philosophical Associ- ation. ^