TOCQUEVILLE, MILL, and ARENDT on WOMEN's ROLE a Dissertation

Home , Liberal feminism, Manliness (book), Separate spheres

FREEING WOMEN: TOCQUEVILLE, MILL, AND ARENDT ON WOMEN’S ROLE

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Government

Lorraine E. Krall, M.A.

Washington, D.C. August 28, 2012

FREEING WOMEN: TOCQUEVILLE, MILL, AND ARENDT ON WOMEN’S ROLE

Lorraine E. Krall, M.A.

Thesis Advisor: Patrick Deneen, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

As modern democracies pushed to expand suffrage, they encountered the gendered public/private split, eliciting new theories about the role of women: Alexis de

Tocqueville advocates women restricting themselves to the home in order to have a stronger, indirect political impact. John Stuart Mill conversely maintains that women should be equal to men and free to participate in public life; he largely leaves out the family in his analysis. After women’s suffrage was an established fact, women began to seek not only political rights, but also social equality, asking if sexual difference was natural and how separate public and private ought to be. Hannah Arendt brings the concerns of Mill and Tocqueville to bear on the developing question of the role of women. She argues that public and private spheres should remain separate, but ungendered: women, like men, should participate in politics; however, they should not seek equality in every sphere of life. In the process of considering what it means for women to be free and the limits of their freedom, Tocqueville, Mill and Arendt draw upon and adjust the categories of nature and custom, sometimes discarding them altogether. They see freedom as situated within both political participation and other

iii associations, including the family. Insight into this modern question of women’s role can be found by looking back to the ancients: Aristotle understands the need for a plurality of interrelated associations in society, including the polis and the household.

He also sees that human nature, habits, and freedom are interwoven. And he recognizes that despite the private role of women in his age, they nevertheless shared in human nature and political potential in the same way men do. These concerns continue to be relevant in contemporary life: civic republican recognition of a need for political participation has much to offer liberalism. The best advocates of public freedom praise it without denigrating private life, affirming the family and other forms of civil association. For both women and men, sustainable freedom is bounded—situated within civic and political associations and shaped by nature and custom.

iv To my family, in spite of all your graduate school teasing,

especially Kathryn, who always gives the best advice, and to Lewis--no one should have to date someone who is writing a dissertation.

v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The process of writing this dissertation has given rise to many debts, which it is my privilege to acknowledge. First, I am grateful for the work of my committee members,

Patrick Deneen, Joshua Mitchell, Jean Elshtain, Peter Lawler, and Arlene Saxonhouse, for reading this dissertation and for your frequent conversations with me about its contents. Your insights have stimulated my own thinking.

In addition, I want to thank my colleagues at Georgetown, many of whom have read various pieces of this dissertation and been part of the conversations from which these ideas arose. Particularly, I want to thank Paula Olearnik, Mihaela Czobor-Lupp, Julia

Schwarz, Karen Rupprecht, and Lewis McCrary.

I am grateful to Kathryn Krall for reading, editing, and discussing the entire dissertation with me. Thanks also to John Lee, Joe Prever, and Emily Krall for your editorial assistance.

I want to thank the organizations whose generous funding eased that financial burdens of graduate school and permitted the timely completion of this dissertation: the

Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the Tocqueville Forum, the Earhart Foundation, and the

Acton Institute.

vi Many thanks to my family for your patience and support during this project and for always offering me a room with a view in which to work.

vii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1 Tocqueville: Democracy and the Domestic ...... 19

Chapter 2 Mill’s Woman: Mind, Individuality and Equality ...... 63

Chapter 3 Women in Dark Times: Natality, Plurality, and the Pariah in Hannah Arendt……… 102

Chapter 4 The Ancient Answer to the Contemporary Problem: Aristotle on Women, Nature, Custom and Reason………………………………………………………………….. 140

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………… 186

Works Cited ...... 192

viii INTRODUCTION

“The freedom of society is thus made necessary by the fact that human vitalities have no simply definable limits. The restraints which all human communities place upon human impulses and ambitions are made necessary by the fact that all man’s vitalities tend to defy any defined limits. But since the community may as easily become inordinate in its passion for order, as may the various forces in the community in their passion for freedom, it is necessary to preserve a proper balance between both principles, and to be as ready to champion the individual against the community as the community against the individual.”

—Reinhold Niebuhr1

Today women’s political and social rights are mostly established, although discrimination and the force of public opinion still hinder women from pursuing some vocations and activities. Nevertheless, women are engaged in both public and private life. Couples pursue creative solutions to balance their public and private commitments; sometimes men stay at home or work part-time to contribute to the care of the children. These developments are laudable, but women’s role is not by any means settled. Contemporary debates over issues like attachment parenting and breast-feeding show that how women balance their public and private roles is still at the forefront of the public imagination.

This dissertation examines women in their private and public roles, asking what can be done to ensure freedom for women. I examine the move of women from subject to citizen through political participation and the broader implications of this transition for politics.

Given the potential for changes to the democratic political order to be disruptive, I examine the reflections of Tocqueville and Mill on who should enter politics, as well as Arendt’s reflections on how women ought to engage in political life once they are there. My concern,

1 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1960), 76–78.

1 also a priority of Tocqueville, Mill, and Arendt, is ensuring that once women gain political freedom, they not be transformed from citizens back to subjects. The insights that these three thinkers offer regarding the transition to the right of women to participate in politics, and the change in what the content of that political participation includes, are applicable today as we ask how to preserve women’s citizenship. Because public and private cannot be completely and neatly separated, understanding what women’s public freedom involves requires defining women’s role in the family and the good of the individual.

There are two primary elements present in this dissertation: first, a consideration of the accounts of women’s freedom seen in Tocqueville, Mill, and Arendt; second, an examination of the theoretical underpinnings of their position. These two elements are mutually enlightening: the foundations of these thinkers’ positions enlighten their view of women; in addition, looking at something as concrete as their view of women provides an entry point for us to better understand their theoretical grounds for freedom. Moreover, critically examining their theoretical foundations allows me to propose an alternative basis for women’s public participation.

I am attentive to the way in which Tocqueville, Mill, and Arendt found their notions of women’s freedom on nature and history. Freedom, even in the most laissez-faire of political systems, is never entirely unrestricted. There are limits on human freedom, including from non-political sources. One of these limits is from what we call “nature,” which refers to restrictions on our freedom that are rooted in the order of things that exists apart from human intervention. James Ceaser writes of nature, “Roughly speaking, a foundation in nature provides justification by reference to something in the structure of reality as it can be

2 accessed by reason.”2 This involves “something unchanging or permanent, which can provide a standard of right.”3 “History” is also a restriction on human freedom: “A foundation in History offers ultimate explanation or justification by situating things in the flow of time.”4 History has been understood in a variety of ways. Ceaser identifies three forms of history: sacred history, customary history and philosophy of history.5 I focus primarily on customary history and philosophy of history, as these are the forms of historical thinking that arise in Tocqueville, Mill and Arendt.6 Customary history, according to Ceaser, looks to the past and tradition in order to determine what is right. Philosophy of

History, on the other hand, looks to the future and to progress: it sees history as moving in a particular direction and praises whatever accords with that movement.7

Unlike Ceaser, I am interested in not only the descriptive importance of these categories, but also their normative importance. To that end, I look at the way in which these categories can overlap with one another and support each other. I also critique these categories where I find them to be flawed. Nature without history, for instance, cannot serve as a strong theoretical foundation: nature is revealed in particular historical circumstances. In addition, both Customary History and Philosophy of History are flawed. The past alone cannot determine what is right as pernicious customs may arise; rather, custom must be connected

2 James W. Ceaser, Nature and History in American Political Development: A Debate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 6. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 7. 5 Ceaser, Nature and History in American Political Development: A Debate. 6 While I follow Ceaser in focusing on nature and history as foundations that Tocqueville, Mill and Arendt appeal to or discard in their arguments regarding women’s freedom, there are differences between Ceaser’s approach and my own. Ceaser focuses on texts that are more closely connected to practice than to theory, reflecting on the types of political action that are incited. For instance, Ceaser considers the way in which an appeal to foundations encourages the development of unity (86). I, on the other hand, attend primarily to theoretical texts. 7 Ceaser, Nature and History in American Political Development: A Debate, 7.

3 to and evaluated by a conception of human nature. Philosophy of History is even more pernicious, especially when entirely disconnected from nature—a belief in unbounded progress results.

I also consider the way in which these thinkers theorize the relationship among individual, associational, and political freedom. When invoking individual freedom, I refer to a theory that focuses on the freedom of the individual to act without interference by the state or society. This is similar to Isaiah Berlin’s negative freedom—freedom from intervention or obstruction. Associational freedom refers to the ability of individuals to associate with one another, forming groups that are recognized by the state. This requires that various groups and civil associations have the power to act in the public sphere, as recognized by a political system that allows space for associations to act unimpeded. Political freedom recognizes that one crucial aspect of individual freedom is the ability to participate in political processes. This requires a political system with at least some democratic elements. When considering the views of Tocqueville, Mill and Arendt on women’s freedom, I look at the way they understand individual freedom, whether it includes the freedom of individuals to participate in associations, politics or both. None of these thinkers advocates only negative freedom, which simply seeks freedom from the intervention of the government and society.

Associational freedom involves the recognition that groups have a will of their own. The action of that group should be recognized by the political authorities, which is to say that politics does not only involve isolated individuals, but also accounts for groups. Moreover, associations ought not be assigned “a place in a frictionless, organic state devised by the

4 rational lawgiver.”8 Rather, associations need a wide range of freedom to establish their own position and actions. Associational freedom ought to be guaranteed for a wide range of groups. The focus of these groups is wide ranging: philanthropic and volunteer organizations, religious groups, recreational associations, and families. Families are the associations that I focus on in this work. There are several reasons for this: first, this is the association that Aristotle, Tocqueville, and Arendt focus on. In addition, families traditionally include men and women in a relationship in which their sex matters insofar as they want to produce children. These children are closely connected to women’s bodies in their gestation and for the first few months of their lives (although this close connection is no longer required due to technological developments, including formula). In addition, it is within families that generation occurs, not only physically, but also politically: children are often created and born within families; they are also educated within families to participate as adults in the world.9

Political freedom can be argued for on either for pragmatic or principled grounds. A pragmatic defense of political freedom argues that it is necessary, given the differences among individual political positions and the importance of citizens having political power in order to protect their rights. The principled defense of political freedom affirms that political participation is a good that is appropriate to humans. I argue the latter. If political participation is appropriate to humans, then the best form of government will incorporate democratic elements. In addition, political freedom requires a certain type of citizen. As

8 Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958), 41. 9 Certainly the picture of family life that I articulate here has many exceptions that range from accidental to intentional: families lose parents to death and desertion, and children are born outside of marriage. In addition, the face of marriage and family life is rapidly changing in the contemporary world due to the legalization of gay marriage and to technological developments, such as surrogacy and in vitro fertilization, that allow gay partners and single parents to bear and raise children that are biologically related to one of the parents.

5 Tocqueville argues, it requires people who are prepared to defend themselves from attempts to infringe on their freedom, an ability that is strengthened through involvement in civil associations. Maintaining political freedom requires that people practice governing; if they stop participating in government and in other organizations, they may become increasingly isolated and increasingly less able to link their individual interest to the common interest.

Thus, political freedom and associational freedom are closely related: the fecundity of political freedom relies on people engaging in both political and civil associations; associational freedom relies on a political system that recognizes the good of and the need for freedom for civil associations. In using the term, “public freedom,” I follow Dana Villa in referring to both associational and political freedom. Both associational and political participation educate citizens to care for and contribute to the common good.10

I reflect on the work of Tocqueville, Mill, and Arendt for two primary reasons: first, for their commitment to democracy and public freedom at times in which democratic participation is being reconceived, particularly with regard to women; second, for their insights into the potential problems of democracy, which must be taken into account when considering women’s role. Tocqueville, Mill and Arendt all argue for the value of democratic participation. They wrestle with how individual freedom for women relates to participation in politics and intermediary institutions. They consider how political liberty— ruling and being ruled in turn—relates to individual freedom, the negative freedom to act how you will.11 These authors are attentive to the importance of practicing citizenship:

“refraining from political doing could result in a deterioration of the citizens’ sense of the

10 Villa writes that the ‘public’ is an “institutional and associational space, one that cuts across the state/civil society distinction” (Villa, Public Freedom, 20). 11 Nadia Urbinati, Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 6.

6 public and the corruption of political liberty.”12 This commitment to political involvement is articulated in the context of two significant shifts in democratic participation: first, the expansion of male suffrage and subsequent voting rights for women in the nineteenth and early twentieth century; second, the mid-twentieth century shift in feminism from a concern with suffrage to a political push for economic and social equality.

Not only are all three thinkers committed to democratic participation in times of social change, but they also fear democracy that is improperly implemented. Their concerns about democracy vary, but they build on and draw from each other. Tocqueville is concerned that people’s love of equality in the democratic age may win out over their love of liberty. In order to preserve liberty, according to Tocqueville, people must maintain the art of linking together in associations, including political associations. What threatens to rob people of liberty in the democratic age is soft despotism, where individuals who have lost the art of associating are unable to fight the incursions of a strong central government. This loss of the power of association leaves people in the democratic age not only vulnerable to attacks on their freedom in the political sphere, but also in the cultural sphere: people may prize equality over liberty, seeking to pull other citizens down to their level, rather than allowing for the expression of individual difference. According to Tocqueville, society in the democratic age is less able to tolerate people stepping outside of accepted social conventions. Tocqueville is thus attentive to the ways in which focusing on guaranteeing individual liberty may lead to citizens relinquishing their public power and political liberty too easily. He is concerned that citizens, who participate in ruling themselves, may be replaced by subjects who are ruled and take no share in ruling.

12 Ibid., 167.

7 Mill is influenced by Tocqueville’s perceptions of the dangers of democracy, which results in him advocating representative democracy in Considerations on Representative

Democracy. He writes in his autobiography about the influence of Democracy in America on his thought:

In that remarkable work, the excellencies of Democracy were pointed out in a more conclusive, because a more specific manner than I had ever known them to be even by the most enthusiastic democrats; while the specific dangers which beset Democracy, considered as the government of the numerical majority, were brought into equally strong light, and subjected to a masterly analysis, not as reasons for resisting what the author considered as an inevitable result of human progress, but as indications of the weak points of popular government, the defenses by which it needs to be guarded, and the correctives which must be added to it in order that while full play is given to its beneficial tendencies, those which are of a different nature may be neutralized or mitigated.13

Tocqueville influences Mill in his exploration of democracy—in both its strengths and its weaknesses. Mill follows Tocqueville in identifying the strength of democracy as putting the government in the hands of the people, which most effectively protects their political rights and apprentices them in the practice of ruling. But Mill differs from Tocqueville in his emphasis on the important role played by the few and the wisest in ruling and on representative democracy.14 Mill again follows Tocqueville in identifying potential weaknesses of democracy: collective mediocrity, the tyranny of the majority, and the weakening of the individual. Mill does not, however, follow Tocqueville on the implications of democracy and democracy’s limitations for women’s public role. Their solutions to the problem of democracy differ: Tocqueville advocates linking people through associations, including politics. While Mill acknowledges the importance of politics, it is for its power to

13 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger, vol. I, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). 14 John Stuart Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, ed. John M. Robson, vol. XVIII, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).

8 defend individual rights, rather than for its power to create connections among people; nor does he focus on the linking capacity of other sorts of associations. Rather, he advocates encouraging the development of eccentric individuals in order to counteract the pressures of the masses. He also suggests rule by elites, those best equipped to rule in a representative democracy. Thus, it is individual geniuses, rather than the education of the common man through associations, on which Mill relies.

Like Tocqueville and Mill, Arendt recognizes certain dangerous democratic proclivities. In a democracy that does not recognize the appropriate separation between public and private, according to Arendt, the social sphere could develop from the merging of the two. The social sphere is pernicious because the space for political action disintegrates as personal concerns invade it. Equality, which is proper to the public sphere, becomes pervasive: this pervasive leveling destroys even proper difference, threatening the possibility of political action.15 This means that when the public and private spheres do not remain separate, human freedom, the ability to participate in politics, is attacked, because the political sphere itself does not remain intact. Arendt explains her agreement with Tocqueville on equality, as well as the dangers that equality may lead to, when she writes:

Tocqueville saw over a century ago that equality of opportunity and condition, as well as equality of rights, constituted the basic ‘law’ of American democracy, and he predicted that the dilemmas and perplexities inherent in the principle of equality might one day become the most dangerous challenge to the American way of life. In its all-comprehensive, typically American form, equality possesses an enormous power to equalize what by nature and origin is different—and it is only due to this power that the country has been able to retain its fundamental identity against the waves of immigrants who have always flooded its shores. But the principle of

15 While for Tocqueville, the equality of conditions can give rise to the pressures to conform to the mass of disconnected individuals, for Arendt the causality is different: it is the rise of the social, which results from the disintegration of difference between the public and private spheres, that leads to inappropriate equality.

9 equality, even in its American form, is not omnipotent; it cannot equalize natural, physical characteristics. This limit is reached only when inequalities of economic and educational condition have been ironed out, but at that juncture a danger point, well known to students of history, invariably emerges: the more equal people have become in every respect, and the more equality permeates the whole texture of society, the more will differences be resented, the more conspicuous will those become who are visibly and by nature unlike the others.16

Arendt sees the benefits and weaknesses of American democracy—equality allows America to maintain its identity, but also threatens to leads to resentment of difference.

The solution that Arendt offers in the face of this equality is two-fold: keeping the public and private spheres separate and maintaining difference. First, in her argument for the separation of public and private, Arendt follows Tocqueville. She sees the organization of the family as providing a necessary contrast to political equality. Unlike Tocqueville, however, Arendt does not see the public and private spheres as intrinsically gendered: she does not ask women to restrain themselves from entering into the public and political world; nor does she suggest that men have a lesser role in the home. Arendt also sees maintaining difference, including the differences among the sexes, as a crucial precursor to political action. According to Arendt, both individual differences (the difference that Mill praises) and difference that is developed and encouraged through participating in groups (the difference that results from linking, which Tocqueville praises) are important. Arendt argues that women ought to act politically, but that they neither ought to gloss over their difference from men, nor attempt to erode the separation of public from private. Arendt’s solution is something of a via media between the solutions of Tocqueville and Mill.

16 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 200.

10 Roger Boesche’s description of tyranny also gives some insight into what freedom involves and also what unites the thinkers treated in this dissertation. Tyranny makes community disappear, eroding the “sense that people must work together toward the common goal of a good life”; “tyrants try to transform citizens into subjects by eliminating public and political life” and by “confining them and isolating them in the private household.”17 Furthermore,

“all the relations in tyranny are marked by selfishness, exploitation, enmity, suspicion, and ultimately loneliness, which both Tocqueville and Arendt saw as key components of tyranny.”18 One element of political freedom is the presence of a political community, a space where citizens can engage with one another. Mill, like Tocqueville and Arendt, is attentive to the presence of tyranny, especially with regard to women. However, while both

Mill and Arendt learn from Tocqueville regarding the threats of tyranny, they employ his concerns in two very different directions. Mill argues that women should not only be allowed equal political and economic rights, but that they should also be equal rulers in the private sphere; Arendt, on the other hand, sees the problem not as a lack of ubiquitous equality, as Mill does, but rather as the presence of it. For Arendt, men and women ought to be equal in the public sphere, but equality is not necessarily appropriate in private. It is not the case that Arendt seeks the mistreatment of women or even the domination of the man in private; rather, she emphasizes the role of difference, including sexual difference, in the private sphere.

17 Roger Boesche, Theories of Tyranny: From Plato to Arendt (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 72, 83. 18 Ibid., 72.

11 The attention Tocqueville, Mill, and Arendt bring not only to individual liberty, but also to public and political liberty, is an important antidote to the modern tendency to reduce liberty to solely individual liberty. As Dana Villa writes in Public Freedom, including Benjamin

Constant among those who articulate a complex understanding of liberty, “What Constant,

Tocqueville, and Mill saw as essential components of modern liberty—namely, the protection of individual rights and the recognition of individual interests—has become, in twenty-first century America, a defining creed and epistemological limit.”19 Villa points out that in contemporary life political liberty is commonly viewed as only instrumental, as something that can be used to acquire more rights, rather than being recognized as a means by which citizens are educated in the use of their freedom.20 Tocqueville, Mill, and Arendt walk a delicate tightrope: they develop a civic republican concern with the public good in the context of the modern world, which is concerned above all else with individual liberty; they also moderate the call for unity that often characterizes civic republicans by striving to protect difference within social and political life.21

While Tocqueville, Mill and Arendt share certain family resemblances, particularly in their critical commitment to democracy, these thinkers are worth considering individually for their unique contributions to the conceiving of women’s freedom. Tocqueville teaches us much about women’s freedom. He argues that women should commit themselves to the family, educating children in religious mores; this will allow women to take advantage of the power that they have as a result of their difference from men. This linking of individuals in the family will also benefit society by educating the participants in the art of association.

19 Dana Villa, Public Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 5. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 12.

12 Tocqueville understands freedom to be limited by a need for order. Women contribute to this order through their promulgation of mores and through their cultivation of harmony in the home. It is precisely these limits that allow freedom to flourish. Additionally, this idea of freedom as limited is rooted in a Puritan understanding. Tocqueville articulates this limited freedom in his description of the township, an ubiquitous institution in Puritan New

England:

The New Englander is attached to his township because it is strong and independent; he has an interest in it because he shares in its management; he loves it because he has no reason to complain of his lot; he invests his ambition and his future in it; in the restricted sphere within his scope, he learns to rule society; he gets to know those formalities without which freedom can advance only through revolutions, and becoming imbued with their spirit, develops a taste for order, understands the harmony of powers, and in the end accumulates clear, practical ideas about the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.”22

The New England township illustrates the Puritan view of freedom. In the institution of the township, which, like the family, is a place in which freedom is practiced and association is cultivated, man learns to rule. There is not unlimited freedom: the township is limited in scope; in addition, the township operates through certain established processes. Thus, the freedom practiced in the township is quite different from the freedom gained through revolution—it is ordered freedom.

This limited freedom developed in the family also generates affection. Whereas the tendency of the democratic man is toward isolation, which allows for despotism, a strong democracy encourages the linking of individuals, which results in affection. Tocqueville writes about a quality of local government that is also seen in the family: “Local liberties, then, which induce a great number of citizens to value the affection of their kindred and

22 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), 70.

13 neighbors, bring men constantly into contact, despite the instincts which separate them, and force them to help one another.”23 Just as participating in free institutions helps citizens develop affection for their neighbors, so participating in the family helps individuals develop affection for other members of the family. This linking helps prevent despotism.

In addition to conducing to ordered freedom through linking people together, women’s role in the family, according to Tocqueville, shows the importance of generation, of creating new humans who will contribute to the development of civilization. Family is crucial to generation in two related senses in Tocqueville—family is both the place in which children are conceived and born, as well as the place in which they are educated to participate in political society.24 The biological and political generation of children, future citizens, are tied to the family. In this sense, the family is an eminently influential institution in the political realm. It is in the family that nature and custom are most closely tied—children are born and then raised with particular habits and mores. In the family they learn the habits, including association, that prepare them to become citizens.

Underlying Tocqueville’s understanding of women and the family and politics in the democratic age is a particular understanding of history. History moves both by forces outside of human control that push it toward the democratic age, and by human forces that choose how exactly the democratic age will look through the particular institutions they enact. There is, as a result, a certain amount of progress that happens in history, although

23 Ibid., 511. 24 Clearly Tocqueville was aware of single mothers; however, his policy recommendations for taking care of single mothers were oriented to encouraging fathers to take responsibility and to encouraging a society in which families care for their children.

14 Tocqueville is forthright about the transition from the aristocratic age to the democratic age: there are strengths and weaknesses of both. In the midst of this progress, Tocqueville also sees a remaining place for human nature. Humans do not change the sort of being that they are in the move from aristocracy to democracy. Rather, it seems that a stable human nature underlies the transition.

Mill goes farther than Tocqueville in unmooring history and progress from nature.

According to Mill, we ought to ensure political and economic equality for women because this best conduces to progress. Freedom is beneficial, contends Mill, including the freedom of women to participate in politics, because freedom leads to progress. Nature can tell us nothing about how to evaluate progress because nature is nothing more than the good and bad, that exists without human intervention. On the importance of guaranteeing women equal freedom, Mill was prescient; he argues that women ought to be given freedom to show how they can contribute to public life. On the disruptions involved in welcoming women into political and economic life, however, Mill was surprisingly unperceptive. Part of Mill’s blind spot comes from his disinterest in the family and in children. Mill does assume that women would choose the home or the public world, but his interest in the role of the family only extends to insisting that it would embody an equality that parallels that of the public world. Mill is not attentive to the political implications of the family and children because, rather than emphasize the associations and linking, as Tocqueville did, Mill’s proposed solution relies on the individual exerting himself against the mass. He did not learn from Tocqueville’s insight that the individual will not succeed in his exertions against the mass unless he links together, practicing the art of associating with his friends,

15 neighbors, and family members. The individuals that Mill most respects are the geniuses and the elites. These few will be able to distinguish themselves from the mass, given the freedom to do so. And they will be best able to encourage progress.

Like Mill, Arendt rejects nature, but it is not in favor of history and progress; rather, she relies on free action unrestrained by the bonds of nature and of history. History and custom restrains freedom in part, but not absolutely—humans themselves form the history and customs that later restrain them. Arendt’s human person is absolutely free. In this sense, progress is not guaranteed. Man can act freely in radical ways, perhaps even to eliminate his own freedom. Arendt’s extreme position is moderated by her idea of “givenness,” which advocates a respect for what is given. Thus, Arendt is open to the idea that simply by virtue of their birth, humans have the capacity for action, which, though it may be temporarily removed, is never permanently absent. The presence of givenness in her thought is important, because for Arendt, the preservation of sexual difference is crucial—it is part of the plurality that is a necessary condition for action. In addition, it is relevant to the private sphere, and particularly to the family, in order to provide a place for both biological and political generation: in the family, as a result of sexual difference, children are born and prepared for public and political life. Maintaining sexual difference is also one of many differences that protect the individual person against absorption into the mass: the private realm—centered around the family, emerging from sexual difference, and separate from the public realm—prevents the rise of the social, which Arendt fears may lead to the mass.

While sexual difference is important to Arendt, she also limits its public and political impact: while women ought to participate in politics, they should not attempt to change it by

16 bringing private concerns to the public sphere. Equality, according to Arendt, is proper to the public sphere, but the private should remain the site of difference. Thus, Arendt theorizes about sexual difference and the human ability to participate in politics, reflecting on women’s role within the context of a democratic political order that she hopes to protect from the rise of the social.

After considering the modern problem of how women can participate in a democracy and turning to the insights of Tocqueville, Mill and Arendt, this dissertation turns back to

Aristotle for a ancient solution to the modern problem. While many readers of Aristotle take his refusal to overtly criticize the order of his society as a praise of the patriarchal order, I offer another understanding. On the contrary, Aristotle is attuned to the ability of women to participate in political life. He does not lobby for radical change, however, preferring instead to subtly question the norms of his day. Aristotle implies that women have wisdom, even more than men at times. He implies that apparent differences in ability to rule may be constructed by men. Because he sees the importance of habits and customs, though, he does not advocate tearing society apart and reconstructing it. Rather, he is attentive to women’s role in the family and the way in which women can act excellently there. In short, Aristotle not only offers insights about women’s abilities, but also about the way in which nature and custom root and limit freedom—and we can learn much from his understanding of the interconnectedness of the individual, the family, and politics.

The solution that I offer to the question of how best to preserve women’s freedom is a pluralism that discusses the common good; this pluralism includes not only a protection of

17 individuals’ freedom to pursue different goods, but is also an affirmation of the plural structure of society. This pluralism does not stop with the assertion that people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Rather, it includes the idea that the best pursuit of happiness incorporates a pursuit of the common good within the context of political society. It combines protecting the minority with encouraging conversation, discussion, and discourse about the common good. This takes into account both the need for unity and the need for difference: as Tocqueville points out, people need some common basis for action if they are to act together; in addition, maintaining difference is crucial to prevent people from turning into a mass that does not tolerate difference. Unity and difference are not, as Tocqueville teaches, at odds with one another; rather, some unity is a prerequisite for difference: linking people together is necessary in order to preserve difference and prevent them from becoming a mass in which no difference is tolerated. This means that both politics and intermediary associations are important. The ways that Tocqueville and Mill articulate this point are very different: Tocqueville focuses on fostering common beliefs, while Mill emphasizes encouraging individual liberty. We need both of these things—we need certain common beliefs, but we also need liberty to protect the existence of different perspectives about the good that we ought to be pursuing.25

25 Villa, Public Freedom, 26.

18 CHAPTER 1

Tocqueville: Democracy and the Domestic

Jennifer Pitts describes Tocqueville’s position on empire, and its importance to his work as a whole, in her introduction to her translation of his Writings on Empire and Slavery:

To dismiss his writings on empire as a mere anomaly in the context of his work as a whole, however, is to ignore important implications of his struggle, as a liberal political thinker, with one of the key questions of nineteenth-century politics. How were European societies to make the transition from the old autocratic regimes to republics without succumbing to anarchy or state terror? Tocqueville’s writings on Algeria imply that this transition required the exploitation of non-European societies, that nation- building legitimated the suspension of principles of human equality and self- determination, and that French glory justified any aggression the nation could muster. His writings on empire show, as no other aspect of his work does, the tremendous pressure French liberals found themselves under as they tried to carry out the work of refounding the nation in the postrevolutionary age.26

Pitts moves Tocqueville’s writings on empire from the far edges of an interpretation of

Tocqueville toward the center. Similarly, I argue that Tocqueville’s writings on women ought not be marginalized nor ignored in an interpretation of Tocqueville’s thought. I argue, as Pitts does with regard to empire, that Tocqueville’s emphasis on the good of the democratic polity as a whole causes him to understand the good of women in a way that differs starkly from that of contemporary liberalism, which focuses on equality. Pitts points out the threats of anarchy and state terror that Tocqueville sees and attempts to pre-empt in the transition from the aristocratic age to the democratic age. I emphasize, over anarchy and state terror, Tocqueville’s attention to the threat of soft despotism. It is against the threat of soft despotism that he seeks to shore up sex difference, encouraging different roles for men

26 Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, xxxv.

19 and women. Just as Pitts asks her readers not to dismiss Tocqueville’s writing on empire from the start, I maintain that while Tocqueville’s understanding of women fits uncomfortably with our contemporary liberal ideals, his position on women cannot be marginalized with respect to the rest of his thought. In addition, the commitments and priorities that give rise to his position on women offer important insights that contribute to a more robust conception of women in the contemporary world.

Tocqueville maintains that women ought to confine themselves to the private sphere, in order to support the health of the family and of society as a whole, and for the benefit of individual women, as well, who will, ironically, be able to exercise more social power from a position in the private sphere. Through their role in the family, women will promulgate the mores of religion, as well as engender love and stability in their homes. Tocqueville’s understanding of the close relationship between nature and custom, which has been misunderstood by later thinkers as a denial of nature, forms the basis for his reliance on a gendered division of labor to ensure the maintenance of sex difference. In addition, because

Tocqueville understands associations broadly, rather than specifically political associations, to be natural, he has no reservations in asking women to forgo their individual ability to engage in political associations. He maintains that women’s freedom to engage in other forms of association, such as the family, is sufficient to fulfill women’s natural right to associate.27 He asks women to sacrifice their ability to participate in politics in order to

27 A note here at the beginning about my use of the terms, “gender” and “sex”: Tocqueville does not write about gender. What he writes about is not exactly sex difference either (for instance, as Delba Winthrop notices, there is a noteworthy absence in Tocqueville’s discussion of actual sex difference, such as women’s ability to bear children [Jill Locke and Eileen Hunt Botting, Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville, 183]). Tocqueville explores whether or not these differences are a result of nature or custom. He concludes that nature and custom are closely related and constantly influence one another. Neither “sex” nor “gender” is adequate to Tocqueville’s meaning. In the absence of a more fitting term, I use the term, “sex,” here, for this is

20 protect against the erosion of sex difference; this helps prevent the spread of a pernicious form of equality that furthers the individualism that is characteristic of the democratic age.

In order to fully understand Tocqueville’s position with regard to women, we must consider both the groundings of his position—particularly his understanding of freedom as limited by nature and custom—as well as the ends toward which he aims—particularly his understanding of the goals of politics, and the way in which the family and the individual person contribute to those goals.

Tocqueville’s position regarding women assumes a version of freedom that is limited by nature and custom. He sees women as naturally different from men, although custom’s support for this difference is crucial to maintaining that difference; he does not trust nature to take care of herself. Nature’s fragility is due, at least in part, to nature’s close connection to custom. Unlike many readers of Tocqueville, however, I do not think that this means he sees sex difference as only customary. New customs can reform a nature that is not reducible to custom. The fact that new customs can reform nature means that we ought to adopt customs that accord with and support nature, such as the gendered division of the public and private spheres. What Tocqueville sees as natural to humans gives tremendous insight into his position: he sees sex difference, religion, and association as natural to humans. The first of these, sex difference, permeates the rest—women relate more closely than men do to religion. Additionally, it is through the associations of family and religion that Tocqueville encourages women to commit in order to propagate the mores that benefit

where, according to Tocqueville, the difference between men and women begins, even though it may be up to custom to reinforce and maintain that difference. In addition, Tocqueville himself refers to “the sexes.” I do not use “sex,” but rather use “gender,” when I am writing about the gendered division of labor or about gender roles. I use “gender” in these instances because this is a more typical usage. In addition, Tocqueville strongly implies that the division of labor is a result of customs, which may or may not be based on nature.

21 society, exercising their power over men and society most strongly. Politics is not on this list of what is natural, except insofar as it is a type of association. This allows Tocqueville to argue that women ought to restrict themselves to the private sphere, for they may still be part of the associations of marriage and family. While Tocqueville affirms the existence of freedom, both in humans’ ability to impact the course of the democratic age itself, as well as with regard to women’s ability to choose who they marry, he also maintains that this freedom of individuals ought to be limited and used in the service of the good of society as a whole.

Tocqueville is admirable insofar as the ends toward which he points us are not solely the ends of individual freedom. Not only is freedom limited by human nature and custom, but the individual’s freedom is also limited by and located in political freedom and associational freedom. According to Tocqueville, individual freedom becomes irrelevant if it is not protected from the incursions of government and of social forces by individuals who have learned the art of association. The art of association is taught by both civil associations, including the family, and political associations, such as through participating in local government. While Tocqueville’s understanding of the complexity of freedom is praiseworthy, at times he subsumes certain freedoms into the good of society. Because

Tocqueville’s recommendations regarding women’s role are oriented toward the good of society as a whole, he is more concerned with women’s faithfulness in marriage—which he maintains is crucial to the home as a place of order that balances man’s chaotic political world—than with whether or not men are virtuous. Additionally, Tocqueville is more concerned that the family benefits the public sphere than that it be a place in which the

22 happiness of its members may be cultivated. For instance, he hints that love may be missing in American families, and that this is a great loss. However, while the loss of love is a personal loss to the participants of American marriages, it is a benefit to the stability of society.

In order to study Tocqueville’s understanding of women and their role in society, I will first consider the treatment of women in the secondary literature, which is often dismissive and lacking in subtlety. In order to present a fuller understanding of Tocqueville’s understanding of women, I first sketch Tocqueville’s strong, independent, sacrificing woman. Then I turn to the groundings of Tocqueville’s understanding of freedom in nature and custom. I will examine Tocqueville’s conception of nature with regard to women, including the three things that Tocqueville maintains are natural: sex difference, religion and association, all of which he considers with regard to women. In addition, I will consider Tocqueville’s understanding of custom, which he closely ties to women’s ability to transmit society’s mores. Finally, I will turn to Tocqueville’s complex understanding of the need for freedom of individuals to be cultivated within the institutions of the family and politics. He lets individual women’s freedom slip away in preference to the freedom of society.

In the secondary literature, there are some political thinkers who write about Tocqueville and ignore his understanding of women and the role that it plays in his thought as a whole.

John Stuart Mill was an early reader of Tocqueville who simply maintained that his analysis

23 of the family lacks “any considerable value.”28 Those who do write about Tocqueville and women often fall into one of two camps: First, there are those, often conservative readers, who think that Tocqueville’s comments on women are spot on, that women should primarily be focused on the family. Thinkers who work from this position tend not to emphasize the tensions and contradictions between Tocqueville’s view of women and the rest of his thought, such as his affirmation of politics. In addition, they tend to highlight

Tocqueville’s hesitations regarding the democratic age over his affirmation of its strengths.29 Perhaps the best example of this is Dorothea Israel’s dissertation, The

Superiority of American Women: Tocqueville’s Teaching on Women, Marriage and the

Family. She argues that Tocqueville is insightful because he saw ahead to the way that the family would disintegrate in democracy; he foresaw the problems of the Women’s

Liberation Movement. This perspective downplays the great goods that Tocqueville also sees in the democratic age.

28 John Stuart Mill, “M. d Tocqueville on Democracy in America,” Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical and Historical (New York: Henry Holy and Company, 1874), cited in Laura Janara, “Democracy’s Family Values: Alexis de Tocqueville on Anxiety, Fear and Desire,” 124. 29 One example is John Koritansky’s “Alexis de Tocqueville’s Hopes for the Education of Democratic Women” (in Tocqueville’s Defense of Human Liberty, ed. Peter Augustine Lawler and Joseph Alulis [New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993], 283-296]). Koritansky praises Tocqueville’s affirmation of American women’s chastity and, in the end, maintains that Tocqueville leads us to question the efficacy of democracy itself (295). Delba Winthrop is the great exception here—she is both sympathetic to Tocqueville’s view of the family and highlights the tension between Tocqueville’s writing on women and the rest of his thought, reconsidering the rest of his thought in light of his writing on women: she maintains that his position on women’s role shows the limits of democracy itself. Allan Bloom also sees a tension in Tocqueville, but he picks the culturally conservative side of Tocqueville to praise. Bloom writes, The reason of women has not been persuaded that dedication to the family is their natural lot or that chastity is a compelling maxim of prudence. Perhaps American love novels have not been morally persuasive, but the dulling of moral sensibility has not seemed too great a price to pay for erotic arousal. … It is even possible that Rousseau’s and Tocqueville’s encouragement of the free and romantic element in marriage, their insistence on the goodness of the inclination as such, may have contributed to the current result. However that may be, they are indispensible aids in making us aware of the character and extent of our problem. (Bloom, “The Relation of the Sexes: Rousseauan Reflections on the Crisis of Our Times,” 243-244).

24 There are, on the other hand, thinkers who praise Tocqueville’s position on democracy, but maintain that he did not take his thought to its logical conclusion, which would free women from their private role. This position downplays Tocqueville’s own praise of sex difference and his belief that sex differentiation was particularly important in restricting a democracy from its own potential excesses. For instance, Jon Elster maintains that Tocqueville’s view on women is the result of prejudice: “The only case in which he seems to be completely and consistently the prisoner of prejudice is when he refers to women.”30 Another example of this position is Laura Janara’s in “Democracy’s Family Values: Alexis de Tocqueville on

Anxiety, Fear and Desire.” Janara writes:

On the one hand, ‘equality’ as a principle raises hope for the genuine elimination of sex-based inequalities. On the other, paradoxically, democracy’s ideology of equality does not translate in any simple way into equality between the sexes but, instead, stimulates an anxious reaction against the idea of leveling the sexes, because it seems to contribute to a deep loss of order and meaning—the fall into the abyss. … In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville fears an abyss of disorder; so too do his Americans. Thus they lean on gender relations for ordering democracy. For his part, de Tocqueville offers us many insights, and grounds for insight, into what this says about democracy, family and gender.”31

30 Elster, Political Psychology, 112. Elster’s position is a reasonable one: The increased liberty of the democratic age, which Tocqueville praises, he does not extend to women with regard to their role in society. Democracy cannot think about a part of mankind, according to Tocqueville, without widening it to think about the whole. Tocqueville sees this as an innovation: “The profoundest and most wide-seeing minds of Greece and Rome never managed to grasp the very general but very simple conception of the likeness of all men and of the equal right of all at birth to liberty” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 439). Additionally, he writes, Jesus came “to make all members of the human race understand that they were naturally similar and equal” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 439). Ironically, Tocqueville himself does not apply this natural similarity and equality to women’s role. However, Elster’s position does not at all capture Tocqueville adequately. I argue, contra Elster and others, that Tocqueville’s position on women is not simply a vestigial prejudice, but rather a reasoned position, responding to the threat of soft despotism. 31 Janara, “Democracy’s Family Values: Alexis De Tocqueville on Anxiety, Fear and Desire,” 559–560. Cheryl Welch takes a position similar to Janara’s in her work, De Tocqueville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). She maintains that Tocqueville’s position on women is an aspect of the underlying moral anxiety Tocqueville felt about society as a whole: “Considered in the company of the other parameters that, in his view, prevent a people from swirling into collective excess and transgression, Tocqueville’s belief in the need to confine women within the family looks less like discrete prejudice and more like part of a larger web of cultural apprehension.” (191).

25 Janara maintains that Tocqueville and the American people about whom he writes both respond to the possibility of equality, which Janara views favorably, with anxiety and fear;

Tocqueville and the Americans try to construct for themselves order and meaning by relying on a gender role differentiation that maintains sex difference, a sex difference that equality very well might eliminate. Janara understands Tocqueville to be parroting the responses of

Americans to democracy, rather than providing a commentary on American society.

Tocqueville articulates “the paradoxical desires for equality and inequality, freedom and constraint” that are typical of American citizens.32 This way of understanding Tocqueville misses some of his most important insights, ones that I attempt to recover: it misses his ability, albeit not perfectly, to see the interconnectedness of the good of the individual, the good of the family, and the good of society as a whole. It also misses the importance that he places on natural sex difference, and the resulting role of women in the family as cultivators of mores, in order to prevent soft despotism.

Women’s Role

Tocqueville’s woman is a hardworking, sacrificing woman. She is intelligent and strong.

The freedom that she experiences is bounded freedom. What Tocqueville sees as natural— sex difference, association and religion—are all closely related to women’s role: sex

32 Ibid., 573. Interestingly, Janara misquotes Tocqueville when she writes, “Hence de Tocqueville’s ambivalent conclusion that democracy’s sexual norms, while leading ‘to deplorable individual wretchedness,’ do ‘not prevent the body social from being strong and alert’” (Janara 576-577). When Tocqueville says that the equality of conditions leads to “deplorable individual wretchedness,” he is not saying something about women being unhappy when restricted to the private sphere (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 598). Rather, he means that while gender difference discourages vicious action, especially with regard to people who do not desire such action, but are pushed toward it, equality of conditions will not make man virtuous in itself (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 598). Viciousness will still be prevalent on an individual level. On the communal level, however, society will be strengthened.

26 difference and association meet in the institution of the family; the family and religion meet at the habituation of mores, which falls to women. Women’s role, then, is to contribute to the family through the dual activities involved in generation: first, literally giving birth to children; second, raising them to maturity, when they, too, will learn to associate. In addition, women contribute to the family by creating a stable home, which is based in a notion of marriage as binding. This is the context in which women elicit love from their spouse. While couples may join together based on reason more than on passion, this passion solidifies the marital relationship. Women also cultivate virtue and mores in their husbands and the other men in society through their chastity. Women’s role both protects against excessive liberty in the democratic age, and provides women with the most power possible over their husbands and children.

Tocqueville’s woman is independent and strong. She is the moral and intellectual equal of men, or even superior to them. She is hardworking: not only is bearing children hard, but so is raising them and caring for the household. She is keenly aware of her duty and makes many sacrifices for her family. She is almost manly, but she retains her difference from men in spite of her similarity to them. Tocqueville writes, “American women, who are often manly in their intelligence and in their energy, usually preserve great delicacy of personal appearance and always have the manners of women, though they sometimes show the minds and hearts of men.”33 Tocqueville’s woman’s freedom is bounded as a result of her own will—she has chosen her husband and with that choice commits herself to the domestic life. Tocqueville writes of the frontier woman, perhaps his most detailed description of the

33 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 601.

27 American woman, although the frontier woman is not the most common sort of American woman:

Her dress still shows an ill-suppressed taste for clothes but time has pressed heavily on her. By her features worn before their time, by her wasted limbs it is easy to see that existence has been a heavy burden for her. … Her nuptial couch was on the bare ground of the wilds. To devote herself to austere duties, to submit to privations once unknown to her, to embrace an existence for which she was not made, such has been the work of conjugal union. Want, suffering and boredom have changed her fragile frame but not broken down her courage. Amid the deep sadness engraved on her delicate features it is easy to see something of religious resignation, a profound peace and I cannot say what natural firmness and tranquility that faces all the trials of life without fear or boast. …To see their [her children’s] strength and her weakness one would say that she has drained herself to give them life and does not regret what they have cost her.34

Tocqueville observes that the pioneer woman has been lifting heavy burdens and devoting herself to austere duties; she has seen much want and suffering, but she bares it with grace, because of her firm commitment to her husband and family. The frontier woman seems almost more manly than feminine. Tocqueville explicitly notes that there are aspects of sex difference that remain, however—the frontier woman he describes has devoted herself to her family, giving them her life; she has a taste for clothes, even on the frontier; she has a religious resignation and peace.

American women show this remarkable commitment to their family because they have entered into marriage as a result of their own choice. Their freedom is bounded freedom, bounded as a result of their own decisions. American women are educated from childhood to be free and independent. Tocqueville writes, “[A] democratic education is necessary to protect women against the dangers with which the institutions and mores of democracy

34 Tocqueville, Journey to America, 341.

28 surround them.”35 It is from this position of freedom and independence that they enter into a marriage; as a result, their will is as stubborn and forceful as before, but now it is directed to the good of the family. Tocqueville explains, “In America a woman loses her independence forever in the bonds of matrimony. While there is less constraint on girls there than anywhere else, a wife submits to stricter obligations. … One may say that it is the very enjoyment of freedom that has given her the courage to sacrifice it without struggle or complaint when the time has come for that.”36 American women have been educated in the freedom and independence to have the strength to endure the austere duties of marriage:

“She suffers her new state bravely, for she has chosen it.”37

Now that we have an idea of the character of Tocqueville’s woman, let us turn to an examination of what women’s role involves in Tocqueville. There are three things that

Tocqueville tells his reader are natural and that are all related closely to women’s role: sex difference, association, and religion. Sex difference and association are both present in the family, which Tocqueville identifies as women’s particular domain, in contrast to men’s role in political and economic life. Women also have a closer relationship to religion, according to Tocqueville. As a result, women are the cultivators and transmitters of mores through the family.38

35 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 592. 36 Ibid., 592–593. 37 Ibid., 593. 38 Tocqueville maintains that religion is natural to humans and that those who do not embrace any religion belief do “moral violence to their own nature” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 297). Religion “is as natural to the human heart as hope itself”; in addition, religion is connected to “the longing for immortality equally tormenting every human heart” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 296-297). It corresponds to taste in man “for the infinite and love of what is immortal” that is “embedded in nature” and which man “may hind and distort,” but not destroy (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 534-535).

29 Women’s role in the family is two-fold: First, women have an impact on their spouses in the family.39 The conception of marriage upheld by American women was one stemming from the Puritan influence, which emphasized a binding covenant. This marriage encourages the stability of the family, benefiting the man with a peace that contrasts public chaos. It encourages virtue in men. It also develops love, which draws men out of the individualism that they tend toward. Second, women have an impact on their children. The end of the family, according to Tocqueville, is the generation of children, both their physical generation, as well as their generation into civilization and politics. In the family, virtues and mores of religion, which are beneficially to civil society, are cultivated.

Women’s role in Tocqueville is set within a particular conception of marriage. Tocqueville writes, “The Americans are both a Puritan and a trading nation. Therefore both their religious beliefs and their industrial habits lead them to demand much abnegation on woman’s part and a continual sacrifice of pleasure…”40 Tocqueville points us back to the

Puritans in order to understand the American conception of marriage. The Puritan understanding of liberty, and one that would certainly apply to their marriages, is liberty as including subjection to authority. Tocqueville quotes Cotton Mather:

Nor would I have you to mistake in the point of your own liberty. There is a liberty of corrupt nature, which is affected by men and beasts to do what they list; and this liberty is inconsistent with authority, impatient of all restraint;

39 Tocqueville privileges the traditional family in his analysis, which is to say a husband/father who works in the public sphere, and a wife/mother who works in the private. The point of gendered division of labor, as we will see, is to maintain sex difference and, through that difference, to contribute to the health of the society. This raises the question of whether other non-traditional types of family would work for Tocqueville’s purpose. Tocqueville leaves open the possibility that different gender roles would create some difference even in couples of the same sex. However, Tocqueville sees it most likely that customary sex differences are connected to and emerge from natural sex differences. Whether or not polygamous relationships would comply with Tocqueville’s arguments regarding the family would depend on whether or not they adhered to the public/private split. 40 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 592.

30 by this liberty, Sumus Omnes Deteriores, ’tis the grand enemy of truth and peace, and all the ordinances of God are bent against it. But there is a civil, a moral, a federal liberty, which is the proper end and object of authority; it is a liberty for that only which is just and good; for this liberty you are to stand with the hazard of your very lives. … This liberty is maintained in a way of subjection to authority; and the authority set over you will in all administrations for your good be quietly submitted unto, by all but such as have a disposition to shake off the yoke, and lose their true liberty, but their murmuring at the honour and power of authority.41

Liberty, then, in the Puritan understanding, is not the liberty to do whatever you like, which is the enemy of truth and peace and the teaching of God. Rather, Mather advocates freedom as doing the just and good, subject to authority. Freedom for American women involves willingly choosing their yoke; it involves submission to the authority of their husbands. The marriage that they entered into was not simply a contract, but rather it was a sort of covenant, much like the early Puritan covenants.42 The Puritan covenants have religious overtones and derive explicitly from biblical precedents; they are a solemn agreement, often made “in the presence of God,” and “for the glory of God.”43 It is this marriage covenant that American women freely choose and in which they submit themselves to authority. In this submission, Tocqueville identifies freedom, because the authority is oriented toward their good.

In the context of this marriage covenant, American women encourage in their marital relationships love and stability. The democratic age does not appear to esteem love—the strong, independent, almost manly women would not seem to elicit loving marital

41 Ibid., 46. He is quoting Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana. 42 Ibid., 39. Tocqueville quotes from Morton’s New England Memorial an early Puritan covenant: We “do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one another, convenant [sic] and combine ourselves together into a civil body politics, for our better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid …” 43 Ibid.

31 relationships. While the American woman may not marry out of whirlwind romances, but out of plodding rational calculations, the love that results from their unions changes the men that they marry, as well as the women themselves. The individualism and isolation that characterizes the democratic age lends itself easily to despotism: “A despot will lightly forgive his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love one another.”44 Marriage and family life, conversely, cultivate precisely such love. Just as engaging in political associations points out the connection between a man’s private profit and the general interest, so engaging in family life points out the connection between a man’s interests and the interests of the family as a whole.45 However, understanding this as only an enlightened self-interest undersells what is occurring. It may be self-interest that motivates many of a man’s interests, but it does not motivate all of them: “At first it is of necessity that men attend to the public interest, afterward by choice. What had been calculation becomes instinct. By dint of working for the good of his fellow citizens, he in the end acquires a habit and taste for serving them.”46 In his discussion of the affection that results from political participation, Tocqueville conveys a truth about family life: marriage turns a duty of caring for the family into an impulse, connecting people who might otherwise remain in individualistic isolation.

Stability is another benefit of family life. Tocqueville maintain that women’s role in the family is to provide a calm and ordered environment from which women’s husbands can have a reprieve from and then reenter the tumultuous public world. Tocqueville writes about the order generated by women in the family, which serves as a balance to the turmoil of

44 Ibid., 509. 45 Ibid., 511. 46 Ibid., 512–513.

32 politics: “When the American returns from the turmoil of politics to the bosom of the family, he immediately finds a perfect picture of order and peace.”47 In a letter, Tocqueville writes about the equilibrium that his wife helped to bring him, although it was temporary:

Vague restlessness and an incoherent agitation of desires have always been a chronic malady with me. … I live, however, beside a person whose contact should long ago have sufficed to cure me of this great and ridiculous misery; and indeed, this contact has been very salutary for me for twenty years, enough to fortify my mind in my condition, not enough to produce regular and complete equilibrium. … Thus a serenity is established in our home that overtakes me now and then, but which soon escapes me and abandons me to this turmoil that is without cause or effect, which often makes my soul turn like a wheel that has fallen out of gear.48

Tocqueville talks almost idealistically about women’s ability to provide peace and stability and order for their husbands.49 Conversely, where families are not esteemed and stable, society is harmed as a result. Tocqueville writes, “In Europe almost all the disorders of society are born around the domestic hearth and not far from the nuptial bed. It is there that men come to feel scorn for natural ties and legitimate pleasures and develop a taste for disorder, restlessness of spirit, and instability of desires.”50 Women have the potential to cultivate stability in the home; where they do not, society as a whole suffers.

Not only does women’s role in the family develop love and stability, but it also provides for the generation of children, both for their physical generation and for integration into society.

In raising their children to participate in associations, including political association, women

47 Ibid., 291. 48 Tocqueville, Selected Letters on Politics and Society, 348–349. This is from a letter to Sophie Swetchine dated February 11, 1857. 49 Women’s ability to create a realm of stability for their families is not without qualification, however. Tocqueville writes in the letter above that his contact with his wife “should long ago have sufficed to cure me of this great and ridiculous misery”—notably it did not actually cure him. Tocqueville maintains that it did do him good and bring him some peace, although turmoil continued to haunt him. 50 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 291.

33 have a significant impact: they encourage their children to develop religious mores and habits, which are conducive to a free society. In this way, the generation of children contributes to the regeneration of society. While democratic society tends to think only about the present, the institution of the family and the generations that it contains encourage man to expand his thinking and to care for the future.

We see the importance of generation at the beginning of Democracy in America when

Tocqueville points us to infancy in order to understand a man and a society alike:

Go back; look at the baby in his mother’s arms; see how the outside world is first reflected in the still hazy mirror of his mind; consider the first examples that strike his attention; listen to the first words which awaken his dormant powers of thought; and finally take notice of the first struggles he has to endure. Only then will you understand the origin of the prejudices, habits, and passions which are to dominate his life. The whole man is there, if one may put it so, in the cradle. Something analogous happens with nations. People always bear some marks of their origin.51

Tocqueville then proceeds to consider the Puritans and their enduring impact on the national character. The early moments of the child’s life are crucial and the habits in which he is raised will affect his whole life. Tocqueville perceives the significance of the process of generation and formation, a process to which women are closely tied in the context of child- rearing. Generation is the unique moment at which nature and custom intersect: generation includes both the purely physical act of procreation, as well as the socializing aspect of introducing the child into the world, including the social and political world.

This dual sense of human generation—mankind’s civilizing force, which relies on the continuation of human life through new birth—is what distinguishes humans from animals.

51 Ibid., 31.

34 Man is different from the natural world insofar as he cultivates and civilizes it. Tocqueville deals with both of these aspects of generation when he writes about his visit to Lake Oneida, where a couple had previously moved. They had since moved away, disappearing with barely a trace: because there were only two of them, separate from society, and because they did not bear children, their ability to create and sustain civilization was hindered, and nature took over again. Creation of civilization is important, for Tocqueville, and it requires children and society in order to sustain it.52 Tocqueville’s description of what he found at

Lake Oneida is telling—nature, like man, relies on the connection of generations:

There generations of trees have succeeded one other there without interruption down through centuries, and the earth was littered with their debris. Some seemed to have been felled only yesterday. Others, already half buried in the earth, were reduced to but a hollow and spindly surface, while still others had turned to dust that served as compost for the last of their offshoots. Interspersed among them, a myriad of diverse plants vied for the light. They slithered among the motionless cadavers, crept across them, made their way under decaying bark, and displaced or dispersed their powdery remains.53

Human civilization battles nature, clearing nature out of the way in order to create a place for itself. In order to maintain its presence, human civilization must renew itself constantly.

Likewise, nature’s generations build on each other where man’s civilization has not triumphed. The physical, natural world gives us insight into what generation involves: the trees show us that life and death are tied up together, that new life is fed by and emerges from what precedes it.

52 Creation and generation are important ideas for Tocqueville. This overlaps with Arendt’s emphasis on natality. 53 Ed. Olivier Zunz; Trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Alexis De Tocqueville and Gustave De Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels, 397.

35 The regeneration of culture requires the transmission of habits and mores that provide a common basis for action. Women are well-suited to transmitting habits and mores, given their close connection to religion.54 Tocqueville sees mores as crucial to free societies, and women as crucial to mores: “There have never been free societies without mores, and as I observed in the first part of this book, it is women who shape these mores. Therefore everything which has a bearing on the status of women, their habits, and their thoughts is, in my view, of great political importance.”55 Here, we see that it is through women’s role in forming the mores of their families that religion is able to affect culture.56

The chastity of American women also encourages the formation of religious mores and supports women’s affirmation of marriage. Americans hold marriage in high regard, according to Tocqueville—“Certainly of all countries in the world America is the one in which the marriage tie is most respected and where the highest and truest conception of conjugal happiness has been conceived.”57 This is due to women internalizing and cultivating religious mores by practicing chastity. Women are better equipped to encourage chastity in the context of American equality: Tocqueville points out that in America there are no barriers that separate men and women and prevent their marriage—this makes it harder to persuade “a girl that you love her when you are perfectly free to marry her but will not do so.”58 As a result, it becomes harder for men to convince women to sleep with them outside of the context of marriage; chastity becomes easier to uphold.

54 Tocqueville defines mores as “the whole moral and intellectual state of a people” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 287)—the “habits, opinions, usages, and beliefs” (Ibid., 308). 55 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 590. 56 Ibid., 291. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 595.

While Tocqueville praises the strength and self-sacrificing of American women, and while he understands good morals to depend primarily on women rather than on men, this does not mean that all women are more individually virtuous than all men, nor does it mean that women’s practice of chastity will necessarily make men choose to be virtuous.59

Tocqueville is more interested in establishing institutions that result in the best possible health of the public realm, than that each individual citizen is virtuous.60 Thus, he praises

59 Tocqueville, Journeys to England and America, 62. Tocqueville maintains that men cannot be stopped from attacking, so women must be made to resist. He puts responsibility for morals on women, which at least partially decreases men’s responsibility. In fact, he disapproves of laws that permit enquiry into paternity in the case of children conceived out of wedlock—“it greatly diminishes the strength of resistance among the women, which must be avoided at all costs” (62-63). This observation results from Tocqueville’s attendance at the sitting of the county’s Justices of the Peace (52). Sheldon Wolin’s interpretation is different than the one that is offered here, although Wolin comes to a similar conclusion: he sees women’s virtue as an external, rather than internal, force. Wolin writes, “The American woman crystallizes a shift in emphasis, from the dangers of majority rule as conceived as conformism to the passions of the demos. His concern is to find means of control that rely upon internal rather than legal or institutional checks. In reality, they prove to be externally generated and orchestrated” (Wolin, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life, 330.). Women do not act as a legal check on men; however, as Wolin points out, women offer an external check on men, rather than serve as cultivators of internal virtue. My position that Tocqueville does not argue that individual women are more moral than men is not universally held. Many thinkers, including Allan Bloom, William Mathie and Joshua Mitchell disagree, often citing Rousseau’s influence on Tocqueville. Allan Bloom, in his essay, “The Relation of the Sexes: Rousseauan Reflections on the Crisis of Our Times,” describes Tocqueville’s position on women as the formation in democratic practice of Rousseau’s sexual teaching, and so sees Tocqueville’s teaching as affirming the higher virtue of individual women (Bloom, “The Relation of the Sexes: Rousseauan Reflections on the Crisis of Our Times,” 238.). He sees in Tocqueville the view that women are “the cause of the goodness or badness of morals,” which is also a Rousseauan theme. William Mathie also takes the position that it is the superiority of individual American women on which Tocqueville depends (Mathie, “God, Women, and Morality: The Democratic Family in the New Political Science of Alexis De Tocqueville,” 10). Mathie writes, “To recognize the role Tocqueville attributes, or assigns, to women in the preservation of democratic liberty will be to see, I believe, how his remark that the superiority of American women is the primary cause of the Americans’ strength and prosperity is fully justified as a statement of the central teaching of Democracy in America.” He sees the impact of the move from the aristocratic age to the democratic age as a move from paternal influence on the family to maternal influence on the family (12). Joshua Mitchell compares Tocqueville’s view of women’s morality to that of Augustine: “Woman brings the soul of man back to God from its errancy in the world” (8). I maintain, in contrast to these thinkers, that Tocqueville relies less on the virtue of individual women to make men virtuous, and more on the way in which certain institutional orderings (such as women’s role in the private sphere) benefit society as a whole. 60 As one of the men Tocqueville interviewed replies to Tocqueville’s inquiry regarding the chastity of men before they marry, “[T]hey are like the English too, coarse in their tastes, but, like them, they make a complete distinction between the society in which they habitually live and that which serves for their pleasures. They

37 the fact that the equality of conditions allows women who wish to insist on marital chastity.

He does not anticipate that this will eradicate all vice, but rather that it will be a societal improvement.

The women in New Orleans are an example of the very limited way in which Tocqueville understands American women to be an influence for moral good—the women of New

Orleans show that women’s moral influence is limited to women’s role in marriage and the family. The concubine class of women in New Orleans do not provide a moral influence on men, according to the categories Tocqueville provides. While these women play an important role in his journals, interestingly, he does not mention them in Democracy in

America. In his notebooks, he records a conversation about these women:

We spoke of New Orleans where he lived for twenty years. He said to me: “At New Orleans there is a class of woman dedicated to concubinage: they are the coloured women. Immorality is for them in some sort a professional duty which they perform faithfully. A coloured girl is destined from her birth to be a white man’s mistress.” “That,” I said, “is a state of affairs very contrary to nature; it must cause disruption in society.” “Not as much as you would suppose,” answered Mr. Brown. “The rich young men are very dissolute, but the immorality is restricted to the sphere of coloured women. The white women of French and American extraction are very chaste in their ways. They are virtuous because, in the first place, I suppose, they like virtue, and then because the coloured women are not so; to have a lover would be to become like one of them.”61

Tocqueville’s lack of concern with this border case—the concubine class of New Orleans; the women who are not white—is disconcerting. They seem to critique Tocqueville’s thesis: these women do not contribute to the cultivation of mores in America. In another sense,

are as two worlds which have nothing in common one with the other. They do not try at all to seduce honest women” (Tocqueville, Journey to America, 55-56). Women’s ability to shore up men’s morals only extends to these women’s interactions with their husbands and families—men in America may still sleep with women who are not their wives. 61 Tocqueville, Journey to America, 71–72.

38 however, the New Orleans women reinforce Tocqueville’s position: New Orleans is a more

European, aristocratic portion of the country; precisely because class differences still exist in New Orleans, women are mistreated and immorality is permitted. In this reading, it would be possible to see Tocqueville as hoping for an elimination of the class distinctions in

New Orleans as the democratic age’s equality of conditions takes root there.

The case of women in New Orleans highlights a haunting problem of Tocquevillian democracy—that democratic equality is not and perhaps cannot be absolute. For

Tocqueville, pervasive equality might be even darker. Tocqueville does not praise the women of New Orleans, but neither does he criticize the existence of this concubine class:

Tocqueville’s silence on the women of New Orleans indicates his own practical realization that we are unable to fully instantiate what is just. Those who are outside of democratic equality—and there are always people outside of it—may be ignored or mistreated or, in the case of American women, asked to sacrifice themselves for the good of society. Tocqueville sees that equality within a society still leaves areas of inequality on the edges of that society.

This is an injustice that he perceives, but does not attempt to fully remedy. Rather, he asks us to lower our expectations of what government is able to accomplish. Tocqueville’s treatment of the women of New Orleans forces us to ask whether attempts to slow the spread of the equality of conditions is indeed desirable, or whether the resulting inequality creates more problems and ought to be avoided.

Tocqueville expresses a very specific role for women in the family as cultivators of mores.

Let us now consider why Tocqueville praises this role for women: First, it protects society

39 from the excesses of the democratic age, countering equality and individualism with linking and love. Second, it provides women with more power than they would have were they to fill the same roles that men do.

Tocqueville’s praise of women’s role is, together with his praise of religion and of local government, a response to a potential problem of the democratic age. Tocqueville maintains that forces outside of human control are leading to democracy and the equality of conditions that accompanies it. While humans cannot control the fact that mankind is moving toward democracy, there are some things that humans can control—they can influence the way in which democracy takes root. What Tocqueville fears is the possibility that the democratic age will allow for a new form of despotism that takes advantage of democracy’s de-linking in order to act as an absolute, controlling, gentle power. Tocqueville writes, “Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest. … [T]hey are near enough, but he does not notice them. He touches them but feels nothing.” 62 The solution to this de-linking requires women: it requires women who, through the family, encourage men to broaden their interest to include their families; it requires women to pass down the mores and habits of religion, which in America supports liberty.

Tocqueville maintains that women have greater power in their difference from men than they would if they exercised power in the same way that men do. Tocqueville provides a picture of women rejecting their role in his notes on (in his words) the “Shameful servitude of the Assembly to the fishwives on the night of 5 to 6 October.”63 He writes that a “troop of

62 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 692. 63 Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, 2:161.

40 women and some miserable scoundrels who accompanied them entered the Assembly, mingled with the deputies, and forced them to withdraw.”64 When the president of the

Assembly returned, he “found a fishwife in his chair and others on the benches.”65 This is, for Tocqueville, a picture of the upheaval of society—the women chase the men out of their political position and need to be bargained with before they will leave. While some readers of Tocqueville see this as simply an expression of his anxiety over the upheaval of society, I understand this to be Tocqueville’s articulation of the dangers of pernicious changes to customs that are rooted in nature.66

This difference between men and women, when respected, affords significant power to women. Tocqueville’s description of women’s power is revealed in his response to a French pro-governmental brochure with which he agrees. The brochure was published in 1788 to influence high society and to respond to the “Very Humble Remonstrances of the Women of France,” where “the women demand their right to govern the state.”67 In this pamphlet, women attack a monarchist clergyman, “who, treated as a traitor and a vile slave, is obliged to flee as fast as he can.”68 Tocqueville describes the content of the brochure:

The author rightly says to the women: But don’t you know that what you are asking for is the destruction of your own power! Do you want, instead of being the arbiters of all things, to be reduced, as in England, to the department of tea? Business, honors, everything is in your hands. If that Anglican sap which is fermenting in people’s minds pushes us into the depths of politics, in middle-class fashion duchesses will be transformed into mothers of families, and will become pure reproductive machines … 69

64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 2:161, 175. 66 For instance, Laura Janara in “Democracy’s Family Values: Alexis de Tocqueville on Anxiety, Fear and Desire.” 67 Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, 2:403. 68 Ibid., 2:404. 69 Ibid. Tocqueville notes the ineffectiveness of these brochures.

41 Here we see an even more rhetorical articulation of Tocqueville’s position—women have a unique contribution to society that will be eliminated if they move into the political sphere.

In that case, they would be reduced to a reproductive role, instead of what Tocqueville argues is their contemporary position of significant power over every aspect of life.70

Tocqueville describes this phenomenon in Democracy in America:

In Europe there are people who, confusing the divergent attributes of the sexes, claim to make of man and woman creatures who are, not equal only, but actually similar. They would attribute the same functions to both, imposes the same duties, and grant the same rights; they would have them share everything—work, pleasure, public affairs. It is easy to see that the sort of equality forced on both sexes degrades them both, and that so coarse jumble of nature’s works could produce nothing but feeble men and unseemly women.71

Giving women the same functions as men, including a role in public affairs, would jumble nature. It would degrade them both and would decrease women’s power, since their power derives from their role within the family.72 This power includes the power of promulgating virtue and so contributing to the regeneration of society. It includes the power of contributing to the stability of society through the institution of the family. It includes the power of eliciting love within the context of marriage and awakening men’s social instinct.

These great benefits of women on society would be lost should women seek to directly enter politics.

70 Mitchell, The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion , Democracy, and the American Future, 137. Mitchell writes of women’s role, “On Tocqueville’s view, the passive aspect must have preeminence over the active.” 71 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 600–601. 72 Ibid., 601.

42 Freedom in the Context of Nature and Custom

Women’s freedom, according to Tocqueville, must be limited in order to allow for the freedom of society as a whole. An exploration of Tocqueville’s conception of freedom, as well as of nature and custom will give insight into Tocqueville’s position on women’s role.

Freedom itself for Tocqueville is always restricted and bounded. It is simply not possible to be entirely free; rather, freedom requires the presence of authority. In addition, limitations on freedom include the limits of nature and the limits of custom. Tocqueville understands men’s “freedom” to participate in politics to be a mixed blessing, as the public world includes a pernicious and unsettling chaos. Consequently, Tocqueville asks women to sacrifice their freedom to participate in the public sphere in order to benefit the freedom of society as a whole.

Tocqueville maintains that freedom and equality do not always go hand in hand. Rather, an excess of equality may hinder liberty. He fears an inordinate love of equality, which is possible in a democracy: “The passion for equality seeps into every corner of the human heart, expands, and fills the whole. It is no use telling them that by this blind surrender to an exclusive passion they are compromising their dearest interests; they are deaf. It is no use pointing out that freedom is slipping from their grasp while they look the other way; they are blind, or rather they can see but one thing to covet in the whole world.”73 The single- minded love of equality can threaten people’s freedom. Tocqueville writes, “They want equality in freedom, and if they cannot have that, they still want equality in slavery.”74

73 Ibid., 505. 74 Ibid., 506.

43 Tocqueville explains two sorts of movements toward equality: the first is the laudatory sort, in which the move toward equality is accompanied by the continued existence of difference and of authority; the second sort is the pernicious sort, in which equality erodes difference.

It “makes the weak drag the strong down … prefer[ring] equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.”75 In this form of equality, men “are isolated and then dropped one by one into the common mass.”76 An equality that does not respect difference would harm the family: women might lose the power that exists as a result of their difference from men; the peace and stability of the household, which provides a contrast to the chaos of politics, might be lost; religious mores, which women primarily propagate, might disappear. Ensuring freedom, then, must take into account not only the immediate freedom of individual persons, but also the freedom of society as a whole.

Tocqueville is careful to specify that women should sacrifice their own freedom for the good of their family and society as a whole; he does not argue that laws should force women to remain in the private sphere. Tocqueville talks about the role required of women in terms of sacrifice: “The Americans are both a Puritan and a trading nation. Therefore both their religious beliefs and their industrial habits lead them to demand much abnegation on the woman’s part and a continual sacrifice of pleasure for the sake of business.”77 He writes of the benefits of the American practice of educating their daughters in freedom: “it is the very enjoyment of freedom that has given her [the American woman] the courage to sacrifice it without struggle or complaint when the time has come for that.”78 When they

75 Ibid., 57. 76 Ibid., 87. 77 Ibid., 592. 78 Ibid., 593.

44 marry, then, they consciously give up that freedom, choosing over the independence of the girl, the confinement of the woman. Tocqueville describes the life of the married American woman: “her husband’s [home] is almost a cloister.”79 The fact that the woman herself has chosen this role for herself is crucial to her ability to bear these restrictions on her freedom.80

Nature and custom are tightly connected in Tocqueville’s understanding. A human nature exists, but is profoundly influenced by custom. Nature’s expression is influenced by the particular context: nature acts in particular ways, given certain facts and customs; if you change those facts, people will act differently. What is fundamentally natural to man may be veiled by the manners and customs of a certain age, but may be revealed in another time, under new manners and customs. Tocqueville maintains that nature is never divorced entirely from custom. This is the reason why Tocqueville advocates separate roles for men and women—if their roles were the same, it may erode the natural differences between them, leading to the triumph of an equality that seeks to make everyone the same.

Key to Tocqueville’s treatment of this custom-influenced nature is his description of the transition from the aristocratic age to the democratic age and its impact on nature.

Tocqueville seeks to determine the best means of transitioning to democracy through his consideration of American society. It is this concern that drives Tocqueville to consider

79 Ibid., 592. 80 Barbara Allen writes of this restriction on women’s freedom: “Tocqueville suggests that republican virtue demands particular forms of sacrifice and particular expressions of courage and honor that are in tension with democratic existence. Nothing reveals the contradictions of democratic life and republican ideology more clearly than Tocqueville’s analysis of the democratic family and women within it” (Allen, Tocqueville, Covenant, and the Democratic Revolution: Harmonizing Earth with Heaven, 197).

45 women’s role and to the importance of the family. Tocqueville argues that while the move to the democratic age erodes many differences, the difference between men and women is a fundamental and natural difference that ought to be respected through the construction of customs that support it. Tocqueville maintains that Americans are to be praised in their preservation of sex difference in the democratic age, and that this shows the true conception of democratic progress. Americans esteem women’s intellectual and moral equality to men, but simultaneously affirm a separation of roles.

Tocqueville sometimes describes the stark differences between the aristocratic and democratic ages as if there are two natures: “They are like two distinct kinds of humanity, each of which has its peculiar advantages and disadvantages, its good points and its bad.”81

Nature is so connected to custom and so influenced by particular circumstances that it almost looks entirely different in the democratic and aristocratic ages. Tocqueville writes further about the constant changes of the democratic age, which make it appear that even nature has changed: “[f]ortunes, ideas and laws are constantly changing. Immutable Nature herself seems on the move, so greatly is she daily transformed by the works of man.”82

However, Tocqueville’s use of “seems” is crucial here: nature is immutable, and yet appears to change. This is not to say that Tocqueville is particularly optimistic about our ability to know exactly what “immutable Nature” includes. Also, Tocqueville tells us something further about the aristocratic and democratic age’s ability to convey what is natural.

Tocqueville maintains that the democratic age, in its disregard for castes, professions and

81 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 704. 82 Ibid., 614.

46 families, gets “closer to what is essential in man, and that is everywhere the same.”83 In the aristocratic age, manners show one aspect of human nature, and that aspect is most attractive. However, the aristocratic age does not show the whole of what human nature is.

Pierre Manent perhaps best captures nature’s relationship to the aristocratic and democratic ages. He writes, “[I]t is nature that puts nature in danger. This paradox goes to the heart of the very nature of democracy, in Tocqueville’s view.”84 He explains that democratic nature threatens aristocratic nature:

The false idea of nature [aristocratic nature] elevates the nature of man and stimulates exalted achievements—in thought and politics, above all. The true idea of nature [democratic nature] dulls the nature of man and makes him incapable of exalted enterprises that are proper to his nature—elevated thought, in particular. It seems then that in the Tocquevillian analysis, the idea of nature is somehow divided. … It is as if there were two radically different and therefore incompatible modalities of human nature.85

Manent’s characterization of aristocratic nature and democratic nature as two “incompatible modalities of human nature” is apt. Both of these modalities of human nature, however, express, at least partially, the underlying human nature.

According to Tocqueville, then, nature and custom are inextricably intertwined—nature influences custom, and custom reveals nature selectively. Sex difference is a good example of Tocqueville’s understanding of the relationship between nature and custom: while sex difference is natural, according to Tocqueville, it is also influenced by the customs of the particular society. In fact, the customs may be so pernicious that they erode natural sex

83 Ibid., 615. 84 Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, 69. 85 Ibid., 74.

47 difference itself. Customs, then, play an important role in Tocqueville’s thought. This is why Tocqueville is so adamant in encouraging societies to embrace the gendered division of labor—Tocqueville believes that the gendered division of labor will protect natural sex difference in an age of increasing equality that tends to eliminate differences.

Although the American philosophical method is one that calls custom into question,

Tocqueville defends custom, maintaining that it forms an essential basis for common action.86 A society requires common action, and that action requires common ideas, which are created in part through customs. Americans tend to critique tradition and past customs, attempting to work only off of reasons that they themselves have established. However, “it can never happen that there are no dogmatic beliefs … [N]o society could prosper without such beliefs, or rather that there are no societies which manage in that way.”87 Tocqueville maintains, then, that customs are necessary, as man cannot evaluate and critique all past action and establish everything from scratch.88 Custom is a form of “a salutary bondage, which allows [man] to make good use of freedom.”89 Once again, women are particularly connected to customs through their role in the formation of mores and their connection to religion, which provides humans with “[f]ixed ideas about God and human nature.”90 Not only are women a key force in the creation and maintenance of customs and mores, but customs are also crucial in influencing women’s role in politics and society.

86 Tocqueville writes that the American philosophical method attempts “[t]o escape from imposed systems, the yoke of habit, family maxims, class prejudices, and to a certain extent national prejudices as well; to treat tradition as valuable for information only and to accept existing facts as no more than a useful sketch to show how things could be done differently and better; to seek by themselves and in themselves for the only reason for things” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 429). 87 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 433. 88 “If man had to prove for himself all the truths of which he makes use every day, he would never come to an end of it” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 434). 89 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 434. 90 Ibid., 443.

Sometimes Tocqueville’s high view of custom’s importance makes it unclear whether custom even makes nature irrelevant. Tocqueville questions nature when he writes: “I have shown how democracy destroys or modifies those various inequalities which are in origin social. But is that the end of the matter? May it not ultimately come to change the great inequality between man and woman which has up till now seemed based on the eternal foundations of nature?”91 Here, in offering this question, which he does not explicitly answer, Tocqueville asks us to consider whether the inequality between men and women is indeed based in nature, or whether it is only a social convention. Such a high view of custom makes Tocqueville’s position on nature less clear in much the same way that his language when talking about human nature in the transition from the aristocratic to the democratic ages makes it almost appear that there are two different natures. While

Tocqueville maintains that custom may prevent the best expression of nature, he does not back away from appealing to nature as an argument for critiquing particular customs. I find his trust in nature as a foundation to be earnest, although humble: while Tocqueville believes that he has an understanding of what truths nature conveys, and himself makes arguments from nature, he is also humble about his ability to know nature. For instance, what seemed to be human nature in the aristocratic age may turn out not to be natural in the democratic age.

Some readers of Tocqueville cling to this praise of custom and maintain that it is only custom and convention and not nature that are relevant to Tocqueville. One of the most insightful and important readers of Tocqueville’s understanding of women is Delba

91 Ibid., 600.

49 Winthrop, particularly in her essay, “Tocqueville’s American Woman and ‘The True

Conception of Democratic Progress.’”92 She maintains that Tocqueville’s argument regarding women’s role comes down entirely to convention, noting that Tocqueville does not mention, on their behalf, the most obvious and relevant natural difference, namely, that women bear children: “He barely suggests that women are less suited for hard physical labor.”93 She maintains that this silence over natural differences indicates that it is convention, rather than nature, that implies the role that women should have in society. “If so,” Winthrop writes, “then it is fair to press the issue: why should women rest content with what might be conceived of as an arbitrary designation?”94 In Winthrop’s reading,

Tocqueville’s conception of women’s role is entirely reliant on conventions and customs— nature is not what Tocqueville’s arguments are founded on. Winthrop concludes by maintaining that society may have to be radically transformed in order to liberate both men and women from the roles that Tocqueville advocates. Winthrop does not imagine what that transformation will look like; this leads the reader to question whether a total transformation that improves society is even possible, or whether we must, with Tocqueville, simply do the best we can with the society that we have.95

92 Similarly to Winthrop, Bloom maintains that Tocqueville’s appeal to various supports for his position that women ought to take a private role shows that sex difference was not natural, and that one has to appeal to custom to defend it. Bloom writes, “What he saw in America may have been the fortuitous coincidence of traditional, and hence groundless, restraints and democratic liberties” (Bloom, “The Relation of the Sexes: Rousseauan Reflections on the Crisis of Our Times,” 243.). The very groundlessness of restraints and limits on, for instance, sex, according to Bloom, requires that we establish strong customs to perpetuate sex difference, lest it be eliminated. Certainly Tocqueville was ambivalent about whether or not sex difference would maintain itself; however, he clearly saw sex difference as something that was natural and had normative implications, even if that nature required beneficial customs in order for it to continue. 93 Winthrop, “Tocqueville’s American Woman and ‘The True Conception of Democratic Progress,’” 179–180. 94 Winthrop, “Tocqueville’s American Woman and ‘The True Conception of Democratic Progress,’” 183. 95 Ibid., 194.

50 Winthrop’s reading of Tocqueville, while it offers some important insights, is lacking insofar as it downplays the role of nature in Tocqueville’s understanding of the role of women, and insofar as it misses the close relationship between custom and nature that

Tocqueville articulates. For Tocqueville, nature and custom are connected.96 Through both of these things together, according to Tocqueville, God speaks: “God does not Himself need to speak for us to find sure signs of His will; it is enough to observe the customary progress of nature and the continuous tendency of events; I know, without special revelation, that the stars follow orbits in space traced by His finger.”97 Here, Tocqueville uses a traditional distinction between special revelation, or truth revealed directly through a sacred text, and general revelation, or truth revealed in nature and available to us through reason. He says that we can understand God’s will through general revelation. General revelation is not nature only, however. Rather, general revelation is “the customary progress of nature and the continuous tendency of events.” Tocqueville does not mean that whatever happens is

God’s will—we know this because he suggests ways to channel and restrict the movement of equality in history; rather, he means that the general tendency of events tells us

96 Ceaser, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 162–163. James Ceaser offers a similar, although not identical understanding of the way in which nature and custom are related in Tocqueville. He sees Tocqueville as keeping nature and custom more closely connected than many other authors do: Tocqueville introduces here a key distinction between the natural (in the sense of organic) and the conventional (that which people make by the application of their own intelligence). His final standard is not the natural in the organic sense, but rather nature or natural right as discovered by human reflection on the world and its possibilities. In contrast, however, to the fabricated human ideas propagated by philosophe intellectuals, Tocqueville’s understanding of natural right does not depart entirely from the organic idea of nature. A satisfactory modern regime must combine a rationally constructed principle of rule with a respect for the natural foundations of community that are found in the communes (162-163). While we can distinguish between nature and convention (or custom), what Ceaser maintains Tocqueville ends up with is a combination of both: it is human reason reflecting on what is given in the world. Ceaser, furthermore, maintains that Tocqueville has a respect for nature with regard to regimes, although Ceaser does not himself come down on whether that respect is fitting. In The Fragility of Freedom, Mitchell writes insightfully about Tocqueville’s connection between nature and custom (or industry): “Put otherwise, Mother nature must be appended by industrious labor (which derives and is authorized by God the father) for nature to be bountiful. Mother is passive; father is active” (135). 97 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 12.

51 something about the work of progress, which is providentially ordained. The connection of custom and nature in revealing a continuous unfolding of God’s will is crucial. Tocqueville does not appeal to nature as something entirely separable from custom, but rather sees custom and history as the place in which nature is revealed.98

We can see Tocqueville’s understanding of the interconnectedness between custom and nature in what he writes about the treatment of women in Europe and America. Tocqueville writes disparagingly about the attempt of some Europeans to give women the same roles and duties that men have. He sees this as degrading to both men and women, making “so coarse a jumble of nature’s works” that it produces “feeble men and unseemly women.”99

Here we see that sex difference is natural in Tocqueville’s conception and gives him a basis by which to critique particular customs that do not support that nature.100 Americans, on the other hand, who “have wonderfully understood the true conception of democratic progress,”101 understand that “nature, which created such great differences between the physical and moral constitution of men and women, clearly intended to give their diverse faculties a diverse employment.”102 The difference between men and women, physically and morally, implies different functions; nature implies certain customs. Labor should be

98 Tocqueville shows the way in which nature and custom are connected when he writes that manners are “sometimes the result of an arbitrary convention agreed between certain men. They are both natural and acquired” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 606). It seems that Tocqueville does not only mean that some manners are natural, while others are acquired. Rather, manners may be solely the result of an arbitrary convention that is agreed upon. Or, they may result from natural impulses; even these manners, however, involve convention in the way in which the natural impulse is expressed. 99 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 601. 100 While Tocqueville here worries that gender roles could be confused and that this could affect men’s “manliness” and women’s “femininity” (which implies that nature indicates certain gender roles over others), elsewhere in his description of men and women in the democratic age, he describes the democratic woman in masculine terms; this is seen most clearly in his description of the frontier woman from his travel diary (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 731). 101 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 603. 102 Ibid., 600.

52 divided according to sex difference, and this will benefit men and women and society, according to Tocqueville.

The Levels of Freedom

In addition to considering the conceptions of nature, custom and freedom that underlie

Tocqueville’s position on women, we ought to reflect on the ends toward which Tocqueville is aiming in advocating his particular view of women’s role. Tocqueville aims at freedom at several levels—at the level of the individual, at the level of the family, and at the level of society as a whole. Because he focuses on, above everything else, ensuring the good of society as a whole, he is willing to ask for sacrifices at other levels. The good of society as a whole involves protecting it from the threat of soft despotism, which he fears will emerge from the delinking of individuals in the democratic age.

Why, then, does Tocqueville take the position that he does with regard to women?

Tocqueville focuses not only on the individual person, but also on the strength of intermediary institutions, as well as on the strength of society as a whole.103 For him, freedom for individuals cannot be separated from preserving the spaces in which that freedom can be exercised—whether that space be the family, other associations, or politics.

Public freedom itself is not only each individual in a polity being permitted to participate in

103 Mitchell, The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion , Democracy, and the American Future, 24– 25. My point here is simply that Tocqueville connects and attends to all of these three aspects of society. Mitchell goes further: “One of Tocqueville’s important contributions was to have incorporated into social and political theory, perhaps more than anyone else, the insight that while the spheres of life may be distinct, habits of thinking in one realm spill over onto another without regard to the borders that logic might wish to impose” (24). These spheres are mutually reinforcing: “Religion supports family; family bolsters religion; both encourage democratic freedom; local politics nourishes civil society, and so on” (25).

53 that polity in the same way, but is also concerned with the health and the smooth functioning of the society.104 Indeed, in one sense, Tocqueville’s writing on politics seems to be a contradiction: politics is important in the democratic age to connect the individual person’s interest to the interest of the whole; however, fully half of the polity—women—is not welcome to engage in politics. From another perspective, however, Tocqueville is more reasonable: if women’s entrance into the public sphere would destroy or significantly harm the public sphere by preventing women from exercising their own crucial role in shoring up the mores that permit the existence of the public sphere in the first place, then there may be reason to delay or to ask women to restrain themselves from engaging in that sphere. In addition, if other forms of associations do the same work in connecting the interest of the individual to the interest of the whole that Tocqueville praises politics for doing, then participating in politics becomes a less crucial form of association. Tocqueville does imply that women can, through their involvement in the family and in religion, gain benefits similar to those that men gain through their involvement in politics.105

However, this private role for women is somewhat ironic, given the importance of the public sphere, and in particular of politics, for Tocqueville. Politics serves to link individual

104 Villa, Public Freedom, 4. Villa describes the relation between public and individual freedom in relation to Constant: “Unlike ourselves, the choice for Constant is not between political or public freedom (on the one hand) and individual freedom (on the other). The latter may, in fact, be the ‘true modern liberty,’ but the former ‘is its guarantee’” (4). He proceeds to articulate Constant’s warning that our individual liberty not cause us to surrender our political liberty. “This warning,” he continues, “—echoed by Alexis de Tocqueville and J.S. Mill in the nineteenth century, and by Hannah Arendt in the twentieth—has largely fallen on deaf ears in America, and never with more disastrous results than in the present” (5). In the conception of public freedom that Villa articulates in his book, he overemphasizes the importance of the political for Tocqueville, and underemphasizes the importance of society. 105 Tocqueville explicitly compares the family to politics, when he describes Americans as thinking that “in the little society composed of man and wife, just as in the great society of politics, the aim of democracy is to regulate and legitimatize necessary power and not to destroy all power” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 601). The family, like politics, is an association that legitimizes power.

54 interest to the interest of the country. Tocqueville fears the tendency of democratic man to withdraw into his family and friends—“he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself.”106 As a result, Tocqueville turns to participation in government as a means of counteracting the danger of man being “shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”107 The way to link self-interest to the interest of the whole is by encouraging people to take a share in government.108 Involvement in government also makes Americans more enlightened and active and more energetic, according to Tocqueville.109 This high view of political involvement in the democratic age makes Tocqueville’s exclusion of women from a direct role in politics curious. It is ironic that Tocqueville desires exactly such withdrawal from women into the private sphere and the “little circle of petty domestic interests” that he fears in men.110 Tocqueville slips out of this apparent contradiction, however, by defining association, and not specifically political association, as natural: “The most natural right of man, after that of acting on his own, is that of combining efforts with those of his fellows and acting together. Therefore the right of association seems to me by nature almost as inalienable as individual liberty.”111 Women’s other associations, then, including religion and the family, can provide the same benefits of linking them with others that politics can.

106 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 506. 107 Ibid., 508. “If the citizens continue to shut themselves up more and more narrowly in the little circle of petty domestic interests and keep themselves constantly busy therein, there is a danger that they may in the end become practically out of reach of those great and powerful public emotions which do indeed perturb peoples but which also make them grow and refresh them” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 645). “I fear that the mind may keep folding itself up in a narrower compass forever without producing new ideas, that men will wear themselves out in trivial, lonely, futile activity, and that for all its constant agitation humanity will make no advance” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America 645). 108 Ibid., 244. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid., 645. 111 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 193.

55 While Tocqueville argues for a society in which women are primarily concerned with the private sphere, and men are primarily concerned with the public and political sphere, he does note that even women have an interest in politics in the democratic age. He writes,

“[E]ven the women often go to public meetings and forget household cares while they listen to political speeches. For them clubs to some extent take the place of theaters.”112 However, he maintains that even the way in which men and women engage in political concerns is different—while men are involved in government, women observe.113

Not only is association, including political association, natural and beneficial to humans, but

Tocqueville is also keenly aware of the importance of the family as a form of association that draws people outside of themselves and connects them with others. The family is, according to Tocqueville, the most “natural” institution and, therefore, the institution least likely to disintegrate in the democratic age. In this sense, it is well-positioned to serve as an antidote to democratic individualism. The family changes, though, in the democratic age—it has increasingly soft and gentle relationships. Tocqueville writes about the potential for people in the democratic age to treat their family as if it is an extension of themselves:

“Even his feelings for his family have become merged in a vast egotism, and one cannot be sure whether he regards his wife and children as anything more than a detached part of himself.”114 This sort of family would be less useful to facilitating the linking function that

Tocqueville intends for the family to have to counter the delinking that is characteristic of

112 Ibid., 243. 113 In addition, when describing the fifteen years preceding the French Revolution, in which man was turning toward what is abstract, women, too, “[e]ven those whose habits and business are normally most foreign to these kinds of ideas took them up passionately as soon as they had the time … Women, amidst their petty household tasks, sometimes dreamed about the great problems of existence” (Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, 2:31). 114 Tocqueville, Journey to America, 339.

56 the democratic age. The association of the family ought to be one of several associations each person enters into. Tocqueville is seeking not the ideal family in the democratic age, but rather the best possible family.

Tocqueville’s admirable attempt to simultaneously affirm the freedom of the individual, of society, and of smaller associations is not without its weaknesses, however: both the individual and the family have restricted freedom as a result of the role that women are asked to take in order to benefit society. Tocqueville asks individual women to sacrifice their political freedom. While there are many benefits to this sacrifice, one thing American women lack is romance. In one sense he seems to praise the American system:

I confess that from a certain point of view, this country is the El Dorado of married men, and that one can find perfect happiness here if one has no romantic imagination and asks nothing of one’s wife other than to make tea and raise one’s children, which, as everyone knows, is the most fundamental of the duties of marriage. In these two respects, American women excel. They are reasonable people who stick to the basics, as people say, who confine themselves to their teapots and never leave their homes once they have uttered the famous “yes.”115

He also, however, articulates reservations: While American women contribute to the tranquility of society, they do not contribute to the greatness of which man is capable—a greatness which includes the capacity for love. While he sees this capacity for love as present in American women—they flirt, like European women (only American women’s flirtations are limited to the time before they marry)—he writes that they miss out on “love in the strict sense.”116 Missing out on love in the strict sense greatly benefits society’s

115 Ed. Olivier Zunz; Trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Alexis De Tocqueville and Gustave De Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels, 174. From a letter from Tocqueville to his sister-in-law, Émilie, November 28, 1831. 116 Ibid.

57 tranquility: “I have not heard of a single person hanged or drowned anywhere in the Union since the Declaration of Independence.”117 On the other hand, democracy leads women away from this natural expression of love, as he writes in a letter to his sister-in-law: “[T]he fact is that married women in America are nearly all languid and feeble. I am not far from thinking that they are all ill, afflicted with repressed flirtatiousness. … But I’ve said enough to prove that, all things considered, it’s still better to live in France than in America.”118

While American women meet the two fundamental duties of marriage—they make the food and raise the children—they are not as passionate and full of love and flirtation as European women. While Tocqueville praises the stability of families in American democracy, he sees the loss of passion and love as a serious one. He writes in another letter:

I did not argue that American households were places ruled by great tenderness of feeling. What I wanted to say was that they are places of great order and purity, and that this is an essential condition of order and tranquility in political society itself. I felt that this was due in part to the principles and characters that American women brought to marriage, and it was in the sense that I said that women exerted considerable indirect influence on politics.119

The absence of tenderness of feeling in the marriage relationship is not an improvement, according to Tocqueville. While the family in America is important for providing a domestic order that benefits politics, the passion of marriages may suffer as a result.

Conclusion

Tocqueville is important because he is complicated: he is an early liberal thinker who contemplates women’s role. He does not affirm the equality of roles that is accepted in

117 Ibid. 118 Ibid., 175. 119 Ibid., 570. From a letter from Tocqueville to Captain Basil Hall, June 19, 1836.

58 liberalism today. However, liberal thought today would be foolish to reject Tocqueville unreflectively, or to ignore as irrelevant this aspect of Tocqueville’s thought, maintaining that we can still praise Tocqueville, but quietly cut out his references to women, just as

Jefferson cut the miracles out of the Bible. Tocqueville’s position on women actually fits seamlessly with the rest of his thought. Precisely because Tocqueville’s understanding of women straddles the aristocratic and democratic ages, situated just before American women’s push for suffrage and the revolution in understanding women’s role that resulted, his attempts to reconcile traditional and revolutionary views are worth attending to.

Tocqueville attempts to balance equality and liberty, while pointing out an underlying tension between them.

Tocqueville praises politics for its ability to tie individual self-interest to the common interest. However, he argues that women ought to sacrifice the political role that they are capable of navigating. Restricting themselves to the home has several benefits: it benefits their husbands by conducing to the stability of the family and by encouraging love; it benefits their children insofar as women are the ones who bear and raise them in the home; it benefits the family as a whole by encouraging religious habits and mores. By filling a role in the home, women exercise an indirect political power that Tocqueville fears would fade should women’s difference from men be eroded. So, while Tocqueville argues against a political role for women, he praises the other ways in which women associate—especially through religion and the family. This art of association in women and which women encourage in others helps to prevent against the tyranny of equality that threatens in the democratic age.

To understand Tocqueville’s position on women’s role, we must not only consider the ideas of nature, custom and freedom that inform it, but also the various levels of freedom with which Tocqueville is concerned—freedom of the individual, exercised through civil associations, as well as through political associations. Tocqueville sees nature and custom as so connected that they cannot be fully separated; both nature and custom are essential to sex difference and play a crucially important role in society and politics functioning well.

Tocqueville’s observation that nature is always revealed in the context of particular customs is a rare and significant observation. Contexts and customs always affect the way that nature appears, to the extent that it appears that nature has changed, as Tocqueville describes with regard to human nature in the aristocratic age and the democratic age. Because of nature’s close connection to custom, it is possible for nature to be corrupted by custom. Given this truth, Tocqueville is right to be most intensely concerned with developing customs and contexts that are conducive to revealing the best aspects of human nature. We ought to reason about what nature is and then develop customs that reinforce nature. Consequently,

Tocqueville argues for the gendered division of labor: because men and women are different by nature, this difference ought to be upheld. He maintains that women ought to sacrifice their freedom in order to prohibit an equality that eliminates difference from diminishing the freedom of society as a whole.

Tocqueville supports the gendered division of labor, not because the gendered division of labor is itself natural, but because it is the custom that Tocqueville believes will best protect natural sex difference and the family. Because knowing nature, for Tocqueville, requires not

60 only observing what is given, but also reflecting on it and reasoning about it, there is space in Tocqueville to reason otherwise—to argue, for instance, that asking women to sacrifice their freedom gives up one natural good, the good of political society, in pursuit of another.

Instead, the negative freedom of the individual should be balanced with public freedom and the freedom of the family, and none of them should be sacrificed entirely to another.

Tocqueville’s insight regarding the close relationship between nature and custom has implications for women’s role. Because custom and nature are quite closely related, it is not sufficient simply to rely on abstract nature as indicating the best role for women. Rather, we must attend to the particular contexts and customs in which this nature is revealed, attentive to the way that these customs influence nature, and making certain, as best as possible, to encourage customs that permit women’s nature to be fully expressed. We should also be aware that custom is not something that we can reason about fully. We cannot know everything about ourselves through reason; there is always something that we cannot comprehend. Custom is not reducible to our reflection on and analysis of it. It precedes our ability to reason about it and surpasses that ability. This does not mean that we should not attempt to understand custom, but we should be humble about our ability to control and understand custom.

One of Tocqueville’s most significant contributions to a consideration of the role of women is his understanding of the importance of freedom, not only for the individual person, but also of religion and the family and other intermediary institutions, as well as for the individual through political participation. While contemporary liberal thought often focuses

61 on the freedom of the individual person, Tocqueville understands that freedom for the individual person is impossible without an attention to the health of society as a whole, and without an attention to the smaller institutions within that society that benefit it, such as religion and the family. He is concerned with creating a space for public freedom and defending that space against the individualism and isolation that lead to soft despotism. This leads us to the question of how to apply Tocqueville in a contemporary context, which is to say, is there a way to affirm individual women’s freedom without disintegrating family and society? This would require, first, a faith in the endurance of sex difference even without a gendered division of labor. In addition, it would require seeking other ways to encourage the persistence of the sex difference in an age that seeks to erode it, as well as to encourage the persistence or return of the peaceful, stable family.

62 CHAPTER 2

Mill’s Woman: Mind, Individuality and Equality

Mill is an early, outspoken advocate of equality for women, both in the home and in society more widely; he advocates, above everything else, political rights for women.120

Understanding Mill’s idea of what it means for women to be free requires, first, an exploration of Mill’s grounding of freedom, including arguments for where and how that freedom should be practiced. In formulating these, Mill attempts to jettison both the despotism of custom and the tyranny of natural foundations. Rather, he argues for freedom as a way to achieve progress, which will be revealed in history.

Secondly, we must consider Mill’s arguments for individual freedom, for freedom within associations, including the family, and for political freedom. Mill acknowledges the need for women to have the right to participate in political and economic life, both to guarantee the maintenance of their other rights and to enrich and educate them as individuals.

Individual freedom, then, cannot be separated from political freedom. Mill does not advocate eliminating marriage and the family, but rather uses the family as a school for virtue by having the home express the same democratic equality as the public sphere. Mill’s freedom downplays women as sexual beings, emphasizing instead women’s intellects and marital friendship. He looks to individual geniuses to put forth the ideas that transform

120 Mill is not referring to natural rights here. He writes in On Liberty, “It is proper to state that I forego any advantage which could be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right, as a thing independent of utility. I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions: but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.” Rather, Mill looks to a combination of justice and utility as a grounding for the political rights that he defends (John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], 15).

63 society: while he is aware of potential problems within democratic society, he neglects what

Tocqueville shows us is the way to protect the individual from the mass—linking individuals together in groups, such as the family. Mill acknowledges some beneficial connections among individuals, which are expressed in his praise of marital friendship, but he fails to articulate a theory of how to develop such bonds. Not only does Mill under- theorize civil associations, however. His understanding of freedom is also one-sided, subsumed entirely into the service of progress; it is not a good in itself. It is also overly idealistic: Mill assumes that where freedom is assured to the proper people, progress will inevitably result.

Women’s Role

Mill advocates political and economic equality for women, in addition to an equality within the home. As he writes in the beginning of The Subjection of Women,

The principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.121

Here Mill advocates perfect equality over the legal subordination of his day. The family ought not act as a contrast to political life, creating a place of rest from the chaos of the public world; rather, the family ought to mirror democratic political mores in order to prepare its members to participate in political life. Mill turns to both utility and justice as the foundation for position on women’s role, arguing that not only would individual women benefit from entering political and economic life, but society as a whole would prosper as

121 Mill, Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, XXI:261.

64 well. As he wrote in the selection above—“the legal subordination of one sex to the other— is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.” Mill’s view of women’s roles, then, is based on a two-pronged critique of inequality–it is inherently unjust and it hinders progress. And without an equal role in the home, women would not be respected in political life. He sees free competition, including the free competition of women in public, as conducing to progress. He appeals to reason to elucidate the true benefits of women’s public role and denigrates the despotism of custom, which he maintains prevents the march of progress.

Mill asserts that women’s nature is obscured in his day: because of unjust customs, it is not clear what women are capable of. In fact, it is these unjust customs that have resulted in the deformed nature of women that exists in his day. For instance, he maintains that it is because women are not allowed to participate in politics that they instead seek to manipulate their husbands: “Women are schooled into suppressing [their feelings of liberty] in their most natural and healthy direction, but the internal principle remains, in a different outward form. An active and energetic mind, if denied liberty, will seek for power: refused the command of itself, it will assert its personality by attempting to control others.”122

Rather than argue that women ought to take an alternative position of power in society through differentiated roles, Mill argues that they will turn to manipulative wiles unless they have the same power—that is, political power—that men have. Moreover, he argues that educating women to fulfill all that they are capable of will not only prevent them from manipulating men, but will also conduce to men’s pleasure. Mill states that men will be

122 Ibid., XXI:338.

65 happier with a well-educated partner who is an equal to himself; it is in this equality and friendship that the ideal of marriage exists.

When writing about Mill’s understanding of women, one must say something about Harriet

Taylor’s relationship to Mill and her influence on his work. Mill’s esteem for, relationship with and, later, marriage to Harriet Taylor informs his work as a whole, and perhaps especially his writings on women. Mill enjoyed an intellectual friendship with his wife, which he called “the most valuable friendship of my life” and proceeded to recommend such a relationship to others.123 He raved about her: “[H]er fiery and tender soul and her vigorous eloquence would certainly have made her a great orator, and her profound knowledge of human nature and discernment and sagacity in practical life, would, in the times when such a carrier was open to women, have made her eminent among the rulers of mankind. … What I owe, even intellectually, to her, is in its detail, almost infinite …”124

While Taylor was not the reason for his opinions on women, nor were their opinions on women identical, Mill maintains that Taylor read and commented on his work, and that this exchange impacted and developed his opinions.125 There are certainly differences between

John Stuart Mill’s and Harriet Taylor’s writings on women. Regardless, writing and thinking about, as well as practically working for, women’s rights was important to both

Mill and Taylor throughout their lives. In fact, after Taylor died in 1858, before Mill wrote

The Subjection of Women in 1861, her daughter Helen worked with Mill on women’s issues.

123 Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, I:193. 124 Ibid., I:195–197. 125 Ibid., I:251.

66 Progress and History

Mill grounds his conception of women’s role in progress, the end of mankind fulfilled in the movement of history. He maintains that nature contains no telos; rather, the telos of mankind is found in progress. Custom does not serve as the place in which nature is revealed; rather, it is in the movement of history that progress is unfolded. The freedom of the individual, women as well as men, is a prerequisite for this progress. Progress, which results in a recognition of people’s social duties, leads people to continue to desire and defend their freedom, rather than wiping it out in favor of a top-down administration of those social duties.

In a letter to Harriet Taylor, Mill writes of misguided theories regarding women and what must be done to combat them:

The badness consisted chiefly in laying down the doctrine very positively that women always are & must always be what men make them—just the false assumption on which the whole of the present bad constitution of the relation rests. I am convinced however that there are only two things which tend at all to shake this nonsensical prejudice: a better psychology & theory of human nature, for the few; & for the many, more & greater proofs by example of what women can do.126

Mill is writing to contradict and undermine the influence of those in his day who see women’s nature as identical with what women had become in his day. Mill claims that what women had become in his day is the result not of their natures, but of corrupt customs that maligned their natures. In order to combat this view of women, Mill maintains that two approaches are required: for the general population, proofs of what women can do are needed; for the few, the elite, “a better psychology & theory of human nature” are needed.

126 Mill, The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1849-1873, Part I [1849], 12–13. 21 February 1849.

67 Here, Mill maintains that, in order to show what political rights women ought to hold, we need not only explore women’s nature, but also develop a better general theory of human nature. However, his writing on human nature and on women’s nature is tension-filled and, at times, contradictory. From amidst the contradictions, we can determine both what Mill rejected in the idea of nature, as well as the idea of nature that he wanted to preserve. Mill’s nature is divorced from custom; rather, it is attached to progress and development.127

Mill maintains that nature, or what exists outside of human intervention, cannot give any indication of how mankind ought to act. In his essay, “On Nature,” Mill explores exactly what is meant by “nature” and critiques the idea that nature has normative implications.

First, he maintains that there are two possible understandings of nature: it could refer to the whole system of things, or it could refer to things that happen without man’s intervention.128

In the first conception, “Art is as much Nature as anything else … Art is but the employment of the powers of Nature for an end.”129 So in one sense “nature” means anything that is possible; in another sense, it means only the things that happen without man.130 Mill then explores and argues against the claim that nature is normative. According

127 Julia Annas explores the apparent contradiction in Mill’s work with regard to nature. On the one hand, we cannot determine the content of woman’s nature from her present state. On the other hand, Mill does say that it is natural to women to have freedom (Annas, “Mill and the Subjection of Women,” ed. Maria H. Morales [Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005], 189). She writes, “So we are to be stopped from arguing that it is natural for women to be passive, but we must argue that it is natural for them to want to be free and self- determining in the way that men are” (Ibid.). Annas argues that these two positions are not necessarily incoherent. She proposes an understanding of nature that allows for both of these positions: “What is needed is a distinction between the facts about human nature that can be supported by some very general theory, and supposed facts that are merely superficial inferences from what happens to be observed” (Ibid.). So we can deny that particular facts straightforwardly describe women’s nature without throwing the idea of nature away altogether. It is a very general theory of nature that Annas says Mill provides. 128 Mill, Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society [1833], X:375. 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid.

68 to Mill, if nature refers to the entire system of things, then to say that man ought to obey nature does not mean anything since man cannot do anything else.131 If, on the other hand, nature refers to things that exist without man’s intervention, then to say that man should follow nature is

equally irrational and immoral. Irrational, because all human action whatever, consists in altering, and all useful action in improving, the spontaneous course of nature: Immoral, because the course of natural phenomena being replete with everything which when committed by human beings is most worthy of abhorrence, any one who endeavoured to imitate the natural course of things would be universally seen and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men. The scheme of Nature regarded in its whole extent, cannot have had, for its sole or even principle object, the good of human or other sentient beings. What good it brings to them, is mostly the result of their own exertions. Whatsoever, in nature, gives indication of beneficent design, proves this beneficence to be armed with only limited power and the duty of man is to co-operate with the beneficent powers, not by imitating but by perpetually striving to amend the course of nature—and bringing that part of it over which we can exercise control, more nearly into conformity with a high standard of justice and goodness.132

Mill maintains that it is dangerous to obey nature for, though advocates of following nature tend to see nature as good, that good is always mixed with evil: “Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death …” and the list goes on.133 Mill argues that because good and evil are both present in nature, nature cannot be a guide for our actions.

Because nature contains within it both good and bad, Mill maintains that nature must be corrected by man. He writes, “Nor can any such person, whatever kind of religious phrases he may use, fail to believe, that if Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of perfect

131 Ibid., X:401–402. 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid., X:385.

69 goodness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by Man.”134

He maintains that many of the virtues, including justice, are not natural, but rather are an overcoming of nature.135 Man shouldn’t follow, but should amend, his nature.136 Mill writes, against those who look to nature for guidance, “Conformity to nature, has no connection whatever with right and wrong.”137 Mill is right to draw this implication from his definition of nature as either what exists or what exists without man’s interference in the natural world. Certainly our natural environment as it exists is not unreflectively to be taken as normative. This highlights the difference between Mill’s definition of nature as what exists from Aristotle’s understanding of nature, in which nature has a telos that can be fulfilled or thwarted.

Nicholas Capaldi, in his biography of Mill, agrees that Mill’s explanation of being human does not follow Aristotle’s human nature; rather, Mill articulates a human condition in which humans create and define and enact themselves.138 Capaldi takes seriously the ways in which Mill deviates from classical conceptions of human nature. He does not, however, take seriously the way in which Mill attempts to hold onto the term, “human nature.” I find

Mill to be articulating something less existential than Capaldi discovers: Mill wants to keep, but redefine, the category of ‘nature’. He wants to include within the definition of nature that which humans cultivate and that which corresponds to justice. Progress is achieved when human nature is truly revealed; this requires human freedom to act unencumbered by

134 Ibid., X:391. 135 Ibid., X:393–396. 136 Ibid., X:397. 137 Ibid., X:400. 138 Ibid., X:230–231.

70 custom. The telos of humans, then, can best be found in progress, in the hope that human nature will change over time, due at least in part to man’s intervention.

We cannot know women’s true nature or potential, because pernicious customs have developed women’s nature in ways that deemphasize the good that is possible and have emphasized what is evil. Mill maintains that when those customs are eliminated, women’s nature will have a chance to reveal itself. Through the freedom that results from the destruction of custom, Mill is confident that women’s nature will progress toward its telos.

The end of woman’s nature is found not in the nature that exists outside of human intervention, but rather in historical progress.

Mill is right to note that the customs of his day do not allow for the full expression of women’s nature and the capabilities and potentialities that it contains. He also is perceptive in recognizing the force of custom in shaping the expression of nature. This is possible because of, as history teaches us, “the extraordinary susceptibility of human nature to external influences.”139 However, Mill takes this too far when he pronounces the complete separation of nature and custom from one another. He writes, “I deny that anyone knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. … What is now called the nature of woman is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.”140

He emphasizes human nature’s malleability and downplays the persistence of human nature in a consistent form over time.

139 Mill, Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, XXI: 277. 140 Ibid., XXI:276. According to Mill, men’s relationship of domination over women appeared to be natural to men because all domination appears natural to those who possess it (Mill, Essays on Equality, Law and Education, XXI: 269).

Mill emphasizes reason over custom in both The Subjection of Women and On Liberty.141

Mill reacts against a view of custom that does not allow for custom to be critiqued. Rather than critiquing a particular interpretation of custom and replacing it with a custom adjusted to new circumstances, Mill dismisses it altogether. Mill argues that custom has come to hold an unduly high place:

I do not therefore quarrel with them for having too little faith in argument, but for having too much faith in custom and the general feeling. It is one of the characteristic prejudices of the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, to accord to the unreasoning elements in human nature the infallibility which the eighteenth century is supposed to have ascribed to the reasoning elements. For the apotheosis of Reason we have substituted that of Instinct; and we call everything instinct which we find in ourselves and for which we cannot trace any rational foundation.”142

Here he observes the reaction of Romanticism against the Enlightenment. Instead of praising both reason and instinct—or “everything … which we find in ourselves and for which we cannot trace any rational foundation,” which would include custom—Mill proceeds to praise reason and critique custom, particularly for custom’s role in perpetuating and engraining in culture the unequal treatment of women.143 Mill firmly sides with reason.

According to Mill, adhering to custom does not fulfill people’s human abilities. He writes,

“to conform to custom, merely as custom, does not educate or develop in him any of the qualities which are the distinctive endowment of a human being. The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference,

141 By grouping custom and instinct together and setting them in opposition to reason, Mill implies that custom, like instinct, is passive. 142 Mill, Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, XXI:263. 143 Ibid., XXI:271.

72 are exercised only in making a choice.”144 Here he maintains that conforming to custom emphatically does not educate man in that most human of actions: choice. In fact, freedom to choose is something that is set in opposition to custom. Mill’s notion of custom here is truncated: custom is something that is fixed and unchanging, rather than something that gradually changes over time. By creating a very narrow definition of custom, Mill sets up a strict opposition between custom and progress, which he describes when he writes,

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement. … The progressive principle, however, in either shape, whether as the love of liberty or improvement, is antagonistic to the sway of Custom, involving at least emancipation form the yoke; and the contest between the two constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind.145

Custom encourages people to be content with the status quo, rather than to aim at progress or improvement. Progress or improvement, according to Mill, is antagonistic to custom. All of mankind’s history hangs on whether progress and liberty succeed, or whether custom does. Again, he writes about the way in which custom hinders progress, arguing that custom and progress, respectively, represent the old and new orders of society:

For what is the peculiar character of the modern world—the difference which chiefly distinguishes the modern institutions, modern social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past? It is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable. Human society of old was constituted on a very different principle. All were born to a fixed social position…146

144 Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, XVIII:262. 145 Ibid., XVIII:272. 146 Mill, Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, XXI: 272–273.

73 Progress and the new order of society are characterized by the freedom of the individual to act. Again, this freedom to act involves freeing oneself from custom. Mill advocates a freedom for all women that is unrestricted by custom.

Mill critiques custom because it impedes progress; Mill is particularly concerned that custom has destroyed equality with regard to women. He describes the role of women in his society as the one remaining foothold of inequality: “The social subordination of women thus stands out an isolated fact in modern social institutions; a solitary breach of what has become their fundamental law …”147 This fundamental law of modern social institutions is equality. The role of women violates that law. Mill here portrays the family as the one holdout of inequality in a world in which the progressive movement is pushing toward equality. According to Mill, it is proper to evaluate women’s role, not according to nature or according to past custom, but rather according to the future: by noticing and tracing the movement of history.

While nature is not normative for Mill, he finds something like a human nature, a telos or purpose, in progress; it is not a human nature that is stable over time, but rather a human nature that evolves in history. Custom, which he understands to be inflexible and dogmatic, opposes progress. Instead of emerging through custom, progress emerges in the movement of history. Unlike custom, Mill’s history is dynamic and changing; it is consistently moving forward. The telos of mankind that is revealed through progress, according to Mill, includes not only the equality of all people, including men and women, but also humans’ recognition of their social duties to others. This always involves, though, human freedom to act. Mill

147 Mill, Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, XXI: 275.

74 believes that when freedom is ensured, progress will result. In order to progress, it is important that people exert their individuality against the mass; Mill looks at elites to bring about progress. Achieving progress will lead to humans’ recognition of their duties to others, but without giving up that liberty. In fact, future humans will be even more jealous of their freedom. Mill has a dual notion of progress; we are both makers of and made by progress. We make it in the sense that we act on our own initiative, but progress also has a telos within it that Mill sees unfolding in history, in some way independent of individuals’ decisions.

The possibility of man correcting nature leads us to Mill’s affirmation of the possibility of continued progress. Mill argues that as society progresses, this progress may affect and improve man’s very nature. For instance, man currently does not have sufficient fellow- feeling or unity with other people, but Mill hopes that in the future this fellow-feeling will become part of human nature.148 Mill states that natural man is a savage, whereas through civilization, man progresses and develops into an increasingly social being, which becomes his nature: “The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that, except in some unusual circumstances or by an effort of voluntary abstraction, he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body; and this association is riveted more and more, as mankind are further removed from the state of savage independence.”149

Man’s nature becomes, through cultivation and artifice, social. This social nature is superior to the savage, independent nature. He articulates this idea again when he writes, “…the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason the less natural. It is

148 Mill, Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society [1833], X:227. Here, Mill’s idea of progress and its impact on human nature is quite similar to Marx’s species being. 149 Ibid., X:231.

75 natural to man to speak, to reason, to build cities, to cultivate the ground, though these are acquired faculties. The moral feelings are not indeed a part of our nature, in the sense of being in any perceptible degree present in all of us.”150

Here Mill appropriates for his theory the word “natural.” Moral feelings are not, according to Mill, natural, in that they are not present in all people. In addition, they are not natural in that they do not occur without the involvement of man. However, moral feelings are natural insofar as they are a capacity of the world and of man and insofar as they become habitual.151 Here, Mill is reworking a classical conception of what is natural, defining

“nature” to include a capacity that human nature does not have at one time, but that it is possible for human nature to gain as it progresses. Mill gives us a criterion according to which we can distinguish between an acquired capacity that is an outgrowth of our nature and an acquired capacity that is not: the latter “yield by degrees to the dissolving force of analysis”; the former do not.152 Here, Mill maintains that through reason we can distinguish between changes in man’s capacities that accord with our nature and those that do not.

This adjusted idea of nature, which defines nature as something that is unfolded over time, rather than stable and unchanging, introduces a component to nature that is not present in classical thought: history. According to Mill, progress requires changes in human nature over time. History is both the context in which the changes of human nature are revealed, as well as the force external to man that is driving to a particular end—the end of moral feeling and equality. Just as Tocqueville describes the move from the aristocratic age to the

150 Ibid., X:230. 151 Ibid., X:374. 152 Ibid., X:230–231.

76 democratic age as containing both an aspect of inevitability and an aspect that human decisions can control, so Mill sees the historical forces pushing toward progress as both outside of man’s control and within his control. Progress is within man’s control in the sense that the advance of progress requires the existence of freedom so that competition can allow geniuses to emerge. Without this freedom, progress will be thwarted. On the other hand, Mill’s progress is also outside of man’s control. Mill defines the end toward which progress is aimed as including equality and the development of fellow feeling. The end of progress, then, is not simply what mankind makes of itself; the end of progress in this sense exists outside of human action or self-determination.

In addition to fellow-feeling being a marker of future progress, the equal treatment of women is also an aspect of progress: “Good treatment of women, we have already observed, is one of the surest marks of high civilization.”153 And again Mill writes, “Every step in the progress of civilization has similarly been marked by a nearer approach to equality in the condition of the sexes.”154 Mill clarifies that good treatment of women does not include idolizing women, nor does it include “shutting them up like jewels in a case, removed from the light of the sun and the sight of men.”155 A mark of a high civilization is esteeming women, but not in such a way that separates them from the public realm. Good treatment of women is equal treatment of women, rather than either exalting them above men or denigrating them as inferior beings to men. While in the past men may have lorded their physical strength over women, humans must cultivate themselves to embrace equality, which includes perceiving the decreased importance of physical strength. As civilization

153 Mill, Essays on French History and Historians, XX:46. 154 Mill, Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, XXI:42. 155 Mill, Essays on French History and Historians, XX:46.

77 progresses, mankind learns to govern itself through a recognition of its social duty, rather than the strong ruling over the weak. Mill sees increasing equality as the result of progress; this equality with regard to women means that relations between the sexes ought not result from power and strength. Rather, the fellow-feeling and recognition of social duties among humans extends to sex relations, bringing equality there, as well.

In opposition to custom and in order to encourage the development of progress, Mill praises individuality and the emergence of geniuses, the one man sticking out from the rest of society.156 He objects to the pressures to conform to custom because he favors capable individuals rising out of the mass. Mill writes, “In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. … That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”157 Mill encourages individuality in order to maintain the existence of difference in a society that threatens to absorb difference; he sees custom as complicit in this threat. Maintaining this difference is crucial to Mill because it allows competition among different ideas of the good life, which is necessary to a vital, thriving, and free democracy because it is the best way to ensure progress.158 Wendy Donner emphasizes Mill’s connection between individuality and the social duties that progress reveals. She maintains that in Mill, individuality and social duty

(which she calls ‘sociality’) are complementary, rather than contradictory. She writes,

156 Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, XVIII:267. 157 Ibid., XVIII:269. 158 Tocqueville, on the other hand, does not call for the emergence of geniuses; rather, he seeks ways to link people together as a solution to the threat of people being absorbed into the mass. It is through linking people, primarily through civil associations and the family, according to Tocqueville, that it is possible to maintain real difference in the face of increasing democratization. In Tocqueville’s alternative of encouraging connections among people, custom and habit are not the enemy, but rather inevitably result from the development of civil society that such connections and linking encourage.

78 Mill claims the dualism set up by critics between individuality and sociality is incorrect. These values are complementary, not contradictory, and development of individuality not only must be balanced by the development of sociality, but it is essentially tied to it such that one of these values, properly understood, cannot be achieved without the other. They are two sides of the same coin, two aspects of one whole, a flourishing human being, and must grow together and balance each other at every stage.159

The flourishing human being that results from the movement of progress is both an individual, in his uniqueness and difference, as well as a member of society with well- developed social instincts.

Not only does progress engender fellow feeling and equality, but it also requires freedom in order that progress may continue. But, as progress continues, freedom itself becomes part of human nature. Mill writes:

After the primary necessities of food and raiment, freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature. While mankind are lawless, their desire is for lawless freedom. When they have learnt to understand the meaning of duty and the value of reason, they incline more and more to be guided and restrained by these in the exercise of their freedom; but they do not therefore desire freedom less; they do not become disposed to accept the will of other people as the representative and interpreter of those guiding principles. On the contrary, the communities in which the reason has been most cultivated, and in which the idea of social duty has been the most powerful, are those which have most strongly asserted the freedom of action of the individual— the liberty of each to govern his conduct by his own feelings of duty, and by such laws and social restrains as his own conscience can subscribe to.160

Freedom, then, is not something that will disappear as the telos of progress is revealed.

Rather, people’s freedom will be used to fulfill their duty in light of reason. In fact, where progress is most advanced, people will most strongly defend the freedom of action of the individual.

159 Morales, Mill’s The Subjection of Women: Critical Essays, 6. 160 Mill, Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, XXI:336.

79 Freedom, for Mill, involves both a political liberty from unjust laws, as well as a liberty from the force of custom. Because custom hinders the expression of women’s nature and because we cannot know women’s nature in advance of women’s expression of it, Mill must advocate women’s liberation from custom. By ensuring liberty for its citizens, a country will best ensure the continuation of progress. As different individuals pursue different ways of life, they can compete against each other, revealing which is best. Freedom allows women to reveal their abilities through their actions unimpeded by custom and by political restraints, according to Mill. While progress finally results in a social consciousness and a recognition of equality, according to Mill, this social consciousness and equality will be consistent with human freedom: humans will freely fulfill their duties toward others. While

Mill connects the ultimate telos or purpose of mankind with freedom, freedom is not the end, but rather the means to the end. It is the means of liberating us from custom and from politically supported inequality in order to progress to our true nature as social beings.

Mill attempts to isolate freedom from not only custom, but also nature: he tells us that we can know nothing about nature as it is given because nature is deformed by custom.

Women, according to Mill, must be freed from custom in order that their nature might be known. Mill does not suggest that men and women ought to be free on account of a natural right to freedom; rather, freedom is appropriate for those in developed countries, and not necessarily appropriate for those who have not yet become “capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.” He writes of the applicability of freedom:

It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being

80 taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end by their improvement. And the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.161

Here we see that freedom is certainly not a human right which one possesses merely by virtue of being human. Because human nature evolves and changes in history, the appropriate degree of freedom also evolves and changes. Mill compares young societies that he calls ‘barbaric’ to children—its members have not come into their fullness as human and do not yet require the freedoms appropriate to humans. In fact, Mill says that despotism, as long as it leads to their improvement, is appropriate for such societies. Nadia Urbinati writes: “liberty—or rights—needs to be conceived of historically and progressively, as a process of gradual (and sometimes revolutionary) change within a system of social and political relations.”162

Women’s Freedom in Politics and the Family

Mill’s arguments for women’s freedom are illuminated not only by reflecting on their foundation in progress and history, but also by attending to the ways in which that freedom is exercised, whether by individuals alone or in associations, such as the family and politics.

Mill sees individual and public freedom as closely connected. He balances a concern with

161 Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, XVIII:224. 162 Urbinati, Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government, 178–179.

81 ensuring the freedom for every person to participate in politics with a realization that the health of political society might require or benefit from more significant contributions to politics from some people than from others. As part of ensuring freedom for every person,

Mill argues for allowing women to participate in politics, as he believes that this would benefit both politics as a whole and women individually.

For Mill, the freedom of the individual requires the possibility of political freedom, but does not require the actual use of that freedom. For instance, Mill still maintains that single women may participate in public life, while married women have chosen to devote themselves to their families. He maintains that most women will choose a private life in the family, which is not compatible with a public life of engagement in the economic realm.

Mill does not maintain that all women must work outside the home, but rather that they must not be prohibited by law from doing so. This coincides with Mill’s idea that liberty is crucial—that government ought not force people to choose what it perceives to be the good for its people. Rather, people are better off when various ideas of the good can compete with each other. This is important, because it recognizes the advantages of all different forms of life; in addition, it recognizes that participation in public and private life simultaneously may not be possible.

Mill argues for women’s freedom in intermediary associations when he argues that the marital relationship should be one of friendship, downplaying the physical aspects of the relationship. Mill says strikingly little about the child-parent relationship with regard to the family, focusing instead on the spousal relationship. Perhaps this is the case because

82 children are not fully matured individuals, which is the basic unit of his analysis; children do not experience freedom, nor equality, nor fellow feeling. Rather, they are under the authority of their parents. Mill focuses on the freedom of individuals within the family, but not on the freedom of families to experiment with different organizational structures. He argues instead that one organizational structure is appropriate to all families, and that structure is equality. However, he does not seek to attack the existence of the family itself.

Instead, he argues for adjustments to the form of the family to make it more equal and just.

Part of Mill’s argument for the interconnection of individual and public or civic freedom is his argument for the interconnection of justice and utility. Justice and utility are the two motivating forces in Mill’s position on women.163 A public role for women is beneficial for the whole of society—it is useful. In addition, a public role for women is just—it is what women deserve.164 The overlap of justice and utility can be seen in Mill’s assertion that “It is not only for their own sake that women ought to have the suffrage, but also for the sake of the public.”165 He bills this as a win-win situation:

Thus far, the benefits which it has appeared that the world would gain by ceasing to make sex a disqualification for privileges and a badge of

163 Mill, Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society [1833]; Morales, Mill’s The Subjection of Women: Critical Essays, 54–55. In Utilitarianism, Chapter V, “On the Connection Between Justice and Utility”: “… I account the justice which is grounded on utility to be the chief part, and incomparably the most sacred and binding part, of all morality” (255). And later, “It appears from what has been said, that justice is a name for certain moral requirements, which, regarded collectively, stand higher in the scale of social utility, and are therefore of more paramount obligation, than any others” (259). Justice, then, is a moral requirement that is critical to social utility. In her article, “John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor on Women and Marriage” Susan Mendus argues that Mill is aimed at moral regeneration, which is an even stronger argument than that he is motivated by concerns with justice. Mendus writes that for Mill “the moral health of society is the highest good” (Maria Morales, Mill’s The Subjection of Women: Critical Essays [New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005], 290). Utility is concerned with this moral regeneration. 164 Mill, Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, XXI: 323–324. Here Mill emphasizes that giving women political rights is just. He maintains that the injustice of the marriage relationship in his day harms others, including children. He establishes the connection of justice to utility. 165 Mill, Public and Parlimentary Speeches: July 1969-March 1973, 404.

83 subjection, are social rather than individual; consisting in an increase of the general fund of thinking and acting power, and an improvement in the general conditions of association of men with women. But it would be a grievous understatement of the case to omit the most direct benefit of all, the unspeakable gain in private happiness to the liberated half of the species; the difference to them between a life of subjection to the will of others, and a life of rational freedom.166

Here Mill refers to the social benefits of women participating in politics—the increase in people who can benefit political society and the potential for strong friendships between men and women; he also refers to the individual benefits to women who can participate in politics—the gain in happiness and the existence of rational freedom for women.

Because individual justice for women and utility for society as a whole are interconnected,

Mill is optimistic about the simultaneous benefit of political freedom for women to both the individual and to society. While Mill has hesitations about immediately implementing universal suffrage immediately for all men, he goes out of his way to respond to arguments that women’s participation in politics would hurt the family or politics or men. In fact, quite the reverse: he has high hopes for immediate benefits to which women’s entrance into politics would lead.

Individual freedom requires political freedom. 167 While Mill concedes that certain people should be excluded from the suffrage for a time, for certain reasons, he writes, “No

166 Mill, Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, XXI: 336. 167 Donner, “John Stuart Mill’s Liberal Feminism,” 158–159; Urbinati, Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government, 6. Urbinati writes about the connection between individual and political liberty in Mill. She maintains that he saw that the classical interpretation of democracy, corroborated in Pericles’ Funeral Oration, contemplated both the principle of political liberty (citizens’ ‘ruling’ and ‘being ruled’ in turn) and the principle of individual freedom (that everyone has the liberty of ‘living as [he] likes’).

84 arrangement of the suffrage, therefore, can be permanently satisfactory, in which any person or class is peremptorily excluded; in which the electoral privilege is not open to all persons of full age who desire to obtain it.”168 Political involvement is clearly a great good for Mill: political involvement promotes “the virtue and intelligence of the people themselves.”169

While that ought not be forced on people, it should made available to all. The thrust of

Mill’s work on women is simply to object to basic inequalities in the political treatment and role of men and women.170 The Subjection of Women explains:

This attention to political rights is, in part, because the political inequalities of his day were radical. In addition, Mill argues that without political rights, women will not be able to fight for other social rights: “[It puts] women in the position which will make their interest the rulers’ own interest.”172 Women’s political freedom ensures not only that they will be educated through their political involvement, but also that they will be able to push for increased social freedoms.

Mill writes in a letter:

It would be a very superficial view that could suppose that the permanent improvement of the social, industrial, and economic condition of women can be altogether separated from their claims to political rights. At all times

According to Urbinai, for Mill these two liberties feed into and ensure each other. Liberty from subjection is, in some sense, a negative liberty, but it challenges “certain distributions of power, not external power per se”—the point is not to leave people alone, but to let them live together as equals (154). Mill communicates the importance of the practice of citizenship: “refraining from political doing could result in a deterioration of the citizens’ sense of the public and the corruption of political liberty” (167). 168 Ibid., XIX:470. 169 Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, XIX:390. 170 Goldstein, “Mill, Marx, and Women’s Liberation,” 327. 171 Mill, Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, XXI:261. 172 Mill, Public and Parliamentary Speeches: July 1969-March 1973, 403.

85 political rights have been the only real security for the permanence of progress in social, industrial, and economical matters: and in the present age, the grant of political rights to any class, or even the demand for their admission to those rights, is the most effectual way of securing better consideration for their interests in all other respects.173

Political rights are the security for and means to attaining progress in other aspects of society. As Mill explains in a letter to Florence Nightingale, “…political power is the only security against every form of oppression.”174

Not only is political power a means to progress and a form of security, it is also a form of education—Mill has a high view of politics’ ability to improve those who engage in it. Mill follows Tocqueville in highlighting politics’ contribution to the cultivation of its citizens when he writes, “For political life is indeed in America a most valuable school …”175

Politics is “an equal right to be heard—to have a share in influencing the affairs of the country—to be consulted, to be spoken to, and to have agreements and considerations turning upon politics addressed to one.”176 According to Mill, as a newspaper covering one of his speeches reports, such politics

tended to elevate and educate the self-respect of the man, and to strengthen his feelings of regard for his fellow-men. (Cheers.) These made all the difference between a selfish man and a patriot. (Hear, hear.) To give people an interest in politics and in the management of their own affairs was the grand cultivator of mankind. (Cheers.)177

173 Mill, Additional Letters of John Stuart Mill, xxxii:204. Letter to Josephine Butler, March 22, 1869. 174 Mill, The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1849-1873, Part III [1865]. December 31, 1867. 175 Ibid., XIX:468. 176 Mill, Public and Parliamentary Speeches, Part I, November 1850-November 1868 [1850]. Speech given on July 8, 1865, published in Daily Telegraph, July 10, 1865, p.6 “Election Intelligence/Westminster.” 177 Ibid. Speech given on July 8, 1865, published in Daily Telegraph, July 10, 1865, p.6 “Election Intelligence/Westminster.”

86 This list of the benefits of political participation is as applicable to women as it is to men— women, too, need to be formed into patriots and citizens interested in the public good. Their feelings of regard for their fellow-men ought to be strengthened.

Mill does not, however, emphasize the need for women’s political rights at the expense of their other rights: In Principles of Political Economy, Mill focuses on the importance of women’s economic independence from men. In addition, throughout his letters, Mill emphasizes the need for women to be admitted to all forms of education. In expressing these and other concerns, Mill hardly constricts himself to a concern with women’s political rights.178

While Mill praises the potential that political participation offers in terms of educating citizens, he is also aware of potential problems of democratic government. Collective mediocrity is one potential problem of democratic government: “The natural tendency of representative government, as of modern civilization, is towards collective mediocrity: and this tendency is increased by all reductions and extensions of the franchise, their effect being to place the principal power in the hands of classes more and more below the highest level of instruction in the community.”179 Mill shows himself to be anything but an unreflective democratic with regard to collective mediocrity. Mill also fears the tyranny of the majority, both politically and socially, and worries that the individual will weaken in the face of it: “The evils are, that the individual is lost and becomes impotent in the crowd, and

178 Skorupski, Cambridge Companion to Mill, 405. In fact, Mary Shanley praises Mill for challenging the traditional distinction in liberal theory between the public and private, between law and society. She writes, “Resolution of ‘the women question’ would only come through changes in the lived relationships between women and men” (409). 179 Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, XIX: 457.

87 that individual character itself becomes relaxed and enervated. For the first evil, the remedy is, greater and more perfect combination among individuals; for the second, national institutions of education, and forms of polity, calculated to invigorate the individual character.”180 Mill fears the isolation and withdrawal of the individual in a democracy.

While Mill considers in general the dangers of increasing democratization, he does not write about these dangers specifically with regard to women. Rather, in his writings about women, Mill enthusiastically argues for the great benefits that will result from women’s public freedom. He does not consider the possible trade-offs that may be required.

Mill advocates democracy with a degree of elitism, preferring that the most educated in a particular society have the most influence. Expanding the franchise, including to women, carries with it certain threats of increased social leveling. Mill, however, sees a solution in encouraging forms of education that invigorate individuals, as well as connections among individuals. Mill’s solution to democracy’s problems—“greater and more perfect combination among individuals”—is undeveloped insofar as he does not explain what sort of combinations he means or how to encourage those combinations; certainly, however, he envisions that these combinations among individuals will help to develop the recognition of social duty that characterizes progress.

Mill advocates expanding political freedom to include women; he also treats women’s role in the family as a place in which women ought to be free. Mill affirms the family, but seeks to change it from the organization of the family that was typical of his day. Mill envisions a new form of the family that will no longer provide a contrast to political order. Rather, the

180 Mill, Essays on Politics and Society, XVIII:136.

88 family will mirror the political order, and in this way will train children for citizenship. He advocates equality in the family, which he maintains will result in increased marital friendship. His emphasis on marital friendship over romance and love corresponds to a downplaying of sexuality. In addition, Mill deemphasizes the political import of the generation of children that occurs within the family. While some understand this downplaying of sexuality to involve an affirmation of androgyny, I understand Mill to advocate a chastened form of complementarity in which he affirms both reason and emotion without tying them exclusively to men or women.

Mill scholars debate whether his feminism is radical or reformist.181 His position on the family gives insight into this debate: Mill does not seek to eliminate the family; however, he attempts to change the husband/wife relationship from what was being practiced in his day.

In the year that he married Harriet Taylor, Mill released a “Statement on Marriage,” registering his disapproval with the law’s idea of marriage insofar as “it confers upon one of the parties to the contract, the legal power and control over the person, property, and freedom of action of the other party, independent of her own wishes and will.” 182 In the statement, he promises never to use these powers against Taylor.

Mill understands the organization of the family to be relevant to political life, for home and family are a place of training for civic life. Mill maintains that the same equality appropriate to political life is also appropriate to the home. Rather than see the order of the home as a balance to the chaos of political life, as Tocqueville does, Mill maintains that the

181 Morales, Mill’s The Subjection of Women: Critical Essays, 54–55. 182 Mill, Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, XXI: 99.

89 organization of the home that was common in his day, in which many women remained in the domestic sphere, is a significant remnant of injustice that stands against the spread of democratic justice and equality in society.

The family, organized to reveal the equality of men and women, is a school for virtue. Mill writes, “The equality of married persons before the law … is the only means of rendering the daily life of mankind, in any high sense, a school of moral cultivation. … [T]he only school of genuine moral sentiment is society between equals.”183 Not only does he seek equality before the law, but also in daily interactions between men and women Mill advocates marital friendship over the order of command and obedience. To be just, and to teach that justice to future generations, the relationship between a husband and a wife must be one of equality, according to Mill. The family plays a crucial role in moral formation because the family, unlike citizenship, enters into “the daily habits” and “inmost sentiments.”184 What is the equality that the family can teach through daily activities? The best marital relationship would be

a school of sympathy together in equality, of living together in love, without power on one side or obedience on the other. It would then be an exercise of those virtues which each requires to fit them for all other association, and a model to the children of the feelings and conduct which their temporary training by means of obedience is designed to render habitual, and therefore natural, to them.”185

While the relationship between parents and children will always be one of command and obedience, it is important that the children see the relationship between the parents as being

183 Ibid., XXI:292. 184 Ibid., XXI:295. 185 Ibid.

90 one of equality. In addition, the marital relationship of equality is necessary in order to prepare men and women for other forms of association.

According to Mill, the organization of the family in his day does the opposite of serving as a school for moral cultivation. It did not engage in cultivation of the virtues of freedom, but rather “[t]he family is a school of despotism, in which the virtues of despotism, but also its vices, are largely nourished.”186 Mill’s view of women’s role provides a sharp contrast to that of Tocqueville. While Tocqueville argued that the difference between men and women should be emphasized in order to allow women to have power over men in the private sphere, Mill explicitly rejects this along with his rejection of the family order of his day:

“When women were merely slaves, to give them a permanent hold upon their masters was a first step towards their elevation. That step is now complete: and in the progress of civilization, the time has come when women may aspire to something more than merely to find a protector.”187 Mill understands Tocqueville’s portrayal of women’s role as a way to accept the inequality of their day and to give women the ability to cope with it. Mill suggests a more radical alternative—the elimination of what he calls the master/slave relationship in the family. To replace the master/slave relationship, he embraces precisely the equality that Tocqueville cautions his readers against, the equality of having the same public roles.188 This equality of roles has several benefits. Mill maintains that giving women

186 Ibid., XXI:294–295. 187 Ibid., XXI:49. 188 Mill’s reaction to Tocqueville on the family was simply that Tocqueville’s analysis lacks “any considerable value.” John Stuart Mill, “M. d Tocqueville on Democracy in America,” Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical and Historical (New York: Henry Holy and Company, 1874), cited in Laura Janara, “Democracy’s Family Values: Alexis de Tocqueville on Anxiety, Fear and Desire,” 124.

91 direct power, rather than indirect power, will keep them accountable in their use of that power:

It is part of my case that [women] have great power; but they have it under the worst possible conditions, because it is indirect, and therefore irresponsible. I want to make this great power a responsible power. I want to make the woman feel her conscience interested in its honest exercise. … I want her to make her influence work by a manly interchange of opinion, and not by cajolery. … With the acknowledged right to a voice, would come a sense of the corresponding duty. … Make the woman a moral agent in these matters: show that you expect from her a political conscience: and when she has learnt to understand the transcendent importance of these things, she will know why it is wrong to sacrifice political convictions to personal interest or vanity…189

Mill sees keeping power accountable as beneficial to both men and women and the whole of society. Political involvement also directly benefits women, according to Mill, by showing them their public duty and by preventing them from being frivolous. Mill argues that the power that women exert over men when they are not treated as equals is not the main consideration and does not make them happy: “We thus see that the seclusion of women in

Asia, and the idolatry of them in Europe were both marks of the same low state of civilization. The latter, no doubt, gave to some women for a time more power. But we must not overrate the value of this power to their happiness.”190 Whether or not women can foresee it, Mill asserts that they will be happier when they are equal to men.

In addition to equality in the family serving as a school of moral and civil virtue for women and children, Mill also argues that equality in the family will benefit men through the good

189 Mill, “Speech of John Stuart Mill, M.P. on the Admission of Women to the Electoral Franchise: Spoken in the House of Commons, May 20th, 1867,” 13. 190 Mill, Essays on French History and Historians, XX: 46.

92 of marital friendship.191 He writes, “[T]here has taken place around us a silent domestic revolution: women and men are, for the first time in history, really each other’s companions.”192 Mill calls on his readers to enlarge the ground for friendship between husband and wife by establishing equality between them and by allowing men and women to have the same public roles. Marital friendship, at least in the fullest sense, is impossible in conditions of inequality; the spread of equality will allow for more marital relationships to enjoy marital friendship. He writes of the delights of marital friendship:

What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exist that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them—so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and can have alternately the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of development—I will not attempt to describe. … But I maintain, with the profoundest conviction, that this, and this only, is the ideal of marriage; and that all opinions, customs, and institutions which favour any other notion of it, or turn the conceptions and aspirations connected with it into any other direction, by whatever pretences they may be coloured, are relics of primitive barbarism. The moral regeneration of mankind will only really commence, when the most fundamental of the social relations is placed under the rule of equal justice, and when human beings learn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with an equal in rights and in cultivation.193

Marital friendship, then, as an aspect of instantiating equality in marriage, is necessary to ensure the development of progress. Marital friendship contributes to the cultivation of fellow feeling by emphasizing the similarities between men and women. A husband and wife are able to be more sympathetic to each other when they are recognized as equals.

191 Morales, Mill’s The Subjection of Women: Critical Essays, 115–134. 192 Mill, “Speech of John Stuart Mill, M.P. on the Admission of Women to the Electoral Franchise: Spoken in the House of Commons, May 20th, 1867,” 9. 193 Ibid., XXI:336.

93 Some readers see Mill’s emphasis on marital friendship to be regrettably accompanied by deemphasizing sexuality. Mary Lyndon Shanley writes about this topic in “Marital Slavery and Friendship: John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women.” While Shanley does not attack Mill, as some do, for downplaying the role of sex in marriage, she does gently point him toward its benefits:

… Mill had virtually nothing to say about the positive role which sex might play in marriage. The sharp language with which he condemned undesired sexual relations as the execution of “an animal function” was nowhere supplemented by an appreciation of the possible enhancement which sexuality might add to marital friendship.194

Susan Mendus, in “The Marriage of True Minds: The Ideal of Marriage in the Philosophy of

John Stuart Mill,” maintains that, according to Mill, progress leads to a decline in sexuality—toward human characteristics and away from animal characteristics.195 She calls this the “dephysicalizing of human nature” and maintains that this fits with liberalism more broadly.196 Freud famously expressed a similar opinion in a letter to his fiancé:

This is a topic on which one does not find Mill quite human. His autobiography is so prudish or so unearthy that one would never learn from it that humanity is divided between men and women, and that this difference is the most important one. His relationship to his own wife strikes one as inhuman, too. He marries her late in life, has no children from her, the question of love as we know it is never mentioned. … In all his writings it never appears that the woman is different from the man, which is not to say she is something less, if anything the opposite. .. Any girl, even without a vote and legal rights, whose hand is kissed by a man willing to risk his all for her love, could have put him right on this.197

Freud is not satisfied that Mill acknowledges the differences that exist between men and women. While Mill is right to emphasize the benefits of marital friendship, he does not

194 Skorupski, Cambridge Companion to Mill, 128. 195 Ibid., 146–147. 196 Ibid., 154. 197 Freud and Freud, Letters of Sigmund Freud, 75–76. November 15, 1883. Letter 28 to Martha Bernays.

94 balance it with an appreciation of sexuality within marriage. His treatment of marriage is cerebral: it does not touch on sex. Mill does not move past rational calculation to love.

Mill emphasizes equality between men and women in the marital relationship. However, what form of equality does he advocate? Does he see men and women as inherently different, or are the differences between them simply the result of habituation and custom and can therefore be eliminated? I argue that Mill espouses a modified or chastened complementarity.198 Proponents of complementarity see men and women as essentially different; Mill’s chastened complementarity, on the other hand, affirms both reason and emotion and ties them generally, but not absolutely, to men and women. Mill sees some differences between men and women, but maintains that many other apparent differences between the sexes are the result of custom. Mill does make certain generalizations about women. He maintains that they are generally practical and do not run after abstractions:

“But, looking at women as they are known in experience, it may be said of them, with more truth than belongs to most other generalizations on the subject, that the general bent of their talents is towards the practical.”199 And later: “A woman seldom runs wild after an abstraction.”200 These general characteristics of women he praises. These general characteristics are not, however, absolute nor without exception.

In other passages he critiques essentialist ideas about women, maintaining that their actions are conditioned by the way that they are treated by men and by society. For instance, Mill

198 Morales, Mill’s The Subjection of Women: Critical Essays, 148–154. See Susan Mendus’s essay, “The Marriage of True Minds: The Ideal of Marriage in the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill.” She maintains that Mill affirms complementarity, but not a complementarity that is tied to specific sexes. 199 Mill, Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, XXI:305. 200 Ibid., XXI:306.

95 argues against the idea that women are naturally morally superior to men.201 Mill maintains that this moral superiority results from unequal gender relations. Furthermore, he argues that this moral superiority is detrimental to men.202 These differences between the sexes, then, which are not a result of nature but of unequal customs, should be eliminated for the good of women, the good of men, and the good of society.

Mill more strongly criticizes the idea that essential differences exists when he reviews

Grote’s History of Greece. He maintains that the differences that exist naturally are the differences among individuals. Mill writes, “Mr. Grote, in his preface, laments that the religious and poetical attributes of the Greek mind appear thus far in disproportionate relief, as compared with its powers of acting, organizing, judging, and speculating.” He continues in a footnote,

Mr. Grote gives to the first two of these contrasted attributes the epithet of “feminine,” and to the four latter that of “masculine.” [Vol. I, p. xvii.] We regret that he should have unguardedly countenanced a commonplace notion which we do not believe that he would intentionally recommend, on a subject on which just opinions are extremely important; and we reply to him in the words of the Rev. Sydney Smith, originally printed in this Journal: “A great deal has been said of the original difference of capacity between men and women, as if women were more quick, and men more judicious—as if women were more remarkable for delicacy of association, and men for stronger powers of attention. All this, we confess, appears to us very fanciful. That there is a difference in the understandings of the men and the women we every day meet with, every body, we suppose, must perceive; but there is none surely which may not be accounted for by the difference of circumstances in which they have been placed, without referring to any conjectural difference of original conformation of mind. As long as boys and girls run about in the dirt, and trundle hoops together, they are both precisely alike. If you catch up one-half of these creatures, and train them to a particular set of actions and opinions, and the other half to a perfectly opposite set, of course their understandings will differ, as one or the other

201 Ibid., XXI:320. 202 In fact, he finds women’s moral superiority to cause problems because it only applies to the family and does not extend to public affairs (Mill, Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, XXI: 328-330).

96 sort of occupations has called this or that talent into action. There is surely no occasion to go into any deeper or more abstruse reasoning, in order to explain so very simple a phenomenon.” [Sydney Smith, “Female Education,” Edinburgh Review, XV (Jan., 1810), 299.]203

Mill explicitly critiques Grote’s attaching “feminine” to poetry and religion and

“masculine” to acting, organizing, judging and speculating. Instead, Mill maintains that it is circumstances that have influenced the formation of men and women. Through the words of

Rev. Sydney Smith, he asserts that it is because boys and girls are educated differently that the difference between them exists. This implies that were they to be trained in the same way, they would continue to be “precisely alike.” The fact that natural difference is individual and not gendered means that equality of men and women within the family is all the more just.

Nadia Urbinati argues that what I call Mill’s chastened complementarity goes so far as to deny natural difference between men and women and to affirm androgyny.204 She cites

Mill’s oft-quoted question: “is there really any distinction between the highest masculine and highest feminine character?”205 Urbinati maintains that Mill “understood earlier and

203 Mill, Essays on Philosophy and the Classics [1828], XI:275–276. 204 Morales, Mill’s The Subjection of Women: Critical Essays, 157–182. Urbinati’s essay is titled, “John Stuart Mill on Androgyny and Ideal Marriage.” 205 Ibid., 158. Urbinati is citing a letter from Mill to Carlyle, 5 October 1833, in The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill 1812-1848, vol. 12 of Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 184. Here is the relevant quotation: There was one thing in what you said of Madame Roland which I did not quite like—it was, that she was almost rather a man than a woman: I believe that I quite agree in all that you really meant, but is there really any distinction between the highest masculine & the highest feminine character? I do not mean the mechanical acquirements; those, of course, will very commonly be different. But the women, of all I have known, who possessed the highest measure of what are considered feminine qualities, have combined with them more of the highest masculine qualities than I have ever seen in any but one or two men, & those one or two men were also in many respects almost women. I suspect it is the second-rate people of the two sexes that are unlike—the first-rate are alike in both—except—no, I do not think I

97 more clearly than his contemporaries that biological sex should not be the criterion for attributing gender characteristics.”206 Insofar as Mill separates sex from gender or affirms androgyny, however, it is only because he downplays the role of sex altogether, as Shanley and Mendus note. It is because he understands the relevant part of the human being to be the mind. His focus on the mind is present even in his idea of marriage—he praises marital friendship. He only lightly touches on children—he discusses how best to develop them into free citizens; however, he does not discuss the importance of the physical generation of children. The impact of the body on the person, whether man or woman, is not something that he considers; neither does he consider the political import of the body. His highest masculine and highest feminine character seem to not be impacted by the biological facts of their existence. Rather, the telos of progress for Mill seems to involve freedom from the limitations of the body. This gives insight into his recommendations for how the family ought to be structured: because the difference between men and women is primarily the result of custom, rather than of nature, it is even more important that men and women are treated equally, not only before the law, but also in the private realm in the family. Custom perverts the nature of women, impeding progress. Ensuring women’s freedom and equality in both public and private, then, will be both just and useful.

Conclusion

Mill maintains that freedom and equality leads to progress by encouraging the development of fellow feeling. Progress occurs over the course of history: just as a child grows into

can except anything—but then, in this respect, my position has been and is, what you say every human being’s is in many respects “a peculiar one.” 206 Ibid., 163.

98 adulthood, so Mill maintains that barbaric civilizations progress. Mill’s progress has a teleology within it, although that telos requires that freedom is ensured. Human nature is not something that is stable and unchanging; rather, human nature develops over time and in the course of history. Mill critiques custom—custom leads to despotism, thwarts women’s nature, and prohibits progress. Custom is replaced in Mill with the much more dynamic and changing concept of history. Freedom is not limited by and situated within nature and custom, according to Mill; rather, freedom ought to be embraced for the end of progress.

Mill advocates freedom and equality for women, both politically and within the family.

Political freedom benefits both women and political society: political freedom provides women with legitimate power; women are held accountable in their practice of power.

Political freedom allows women to gain for themselves more freedoms and more equality.

Just as politics is a crucial institution in which women ought to be guaranteed equal freedom, so the family is another setting in which the practice of freedom and equality will have a great impact. The family has the potential to serve as a school of virtue, teaching children about equality; conversely, a family that is not organized around equality will, according to Mill, serve as a school of despotism. Family reflects the organization of broader society, rather than serving as a contrast or complement to it. Here, in the midst of his praise of the family, Mill significantly revises what the family is. Mill praises marital friendship, arguing that nothing better conduces to a man’s happiness than to have a partner who is his equal. Both political freedom and familial freedom encourage the development of fellow-feeling, not only on the part of women, but also on the part of men. As equality

99 spreads and individuals see their commonalities with others, fellow-feeling naturally increases.

Mill’s freedom for women is, then, inseparable from equality. In fact, the equality that he advocates is so extreme that it is not clear if natural differences between men and women even exist. Custom interferes with the expression of women’s nature and should, therefore, be eliminated. Mill’s freedom is not compatible with difference, particularly with differences that characterize particular groups. Mill seeks to ensure women’s freedom by questioning whether there are even differences between the highest masculine and feminine characters. In order to claim that the highest masculine and feminine characters are the same, Mill has to de-emphasize—or discard altogether—the body. This is consistent with

Mill’s writings: his description of women in the family focuses on the minds of women, not on women as romantic partners, nor on women as mothers. The only differences that Mill admits of are the differences that make individuals unique.

Mill’s focus on women as minds, rather than as minds with bodies, is also apparent in his description of association. Marriage is about marital friendship, not about the very embodied process of generation, of bearing and raising children. Mill’s husbands and wives have “alternately the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of development …”207

This is a very cerebral activity to characterize the ideal marriage. And it is from precisely this activity that Mill says that moral regeneration will spring “when human beings learn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with an equal in rights and in cultivation.”208 Similarly, it

207 Ibid., XXI:336. 208 Ibid., XXI:336.

100 is not in the difficulty of solving a particular political problem that Mill shows fellow- feeling develop; rather, he sees it almost magically appear wherever human equality is recognized. It is not in working together toward a particular goal, but simply in encountering someone as an equal that leads to fellow-feeling. Mill misses here the importance of custom and habit—of the fact that through repeating one sort of action a feeling or impulse can emerge. Mill’s fellow-feeling remains a mental phenomenon, as it is not rooted in action.

While Mill is attentive to the dangers of democracy in the type of government he praises, he does not consider the dangers of democracy with regard to women. He admits of no potential problems or trade-offs associated with women’s entrance into the public sphere.

He does not worry that the family will suffer—he simply asserts that women will choose either a public or private life, as those two lives are incompatible with one another. He reassures those who fear change that most women will continue to choose a private life in the home. Time has shown, however, that most women do not in fact choose a private life in the home. As women enter the workforce in great numbers, they struggle with how to balance their public and private lives in ways that Mill did not anticipate.

101 CHAPTER 3

Women in Dark Times: Natality, Plurality, and the Pariah in Hannah Arendt

In a footnote to her masterful biography of Hannah Arendt, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl writes:

“At a discussion of Women’s Liberation that took place among the American Scholar’s editorial board members in 1972, Arendt passed Hiram Haydn a note: ‘The real question to ask is, what will we lose if we win?’ This, she told him in a 5 May 1972 letter, was a ‘well- considered wisecrack.’”209 The precise meaning of this wisecrack we must do our best to unravel. Arendt writes about Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish Jew, philosopher and activist:

Her distaste for the woman’s emancipation movement, to which all other women of her generation and political convictions were irresistibly drawn, was significant; in the face of suffragette equality, she might have been tempted to reply, Viva la petite difference. She was an outsider, not only because she was and remained a Polish Jew in a country she disliked and a party she came soon to despise, but also because she was a woman.210

If you replace “Polish” with “German,” this could easily have been written about Arendt herself. Arendt did not like the Women’s Liberation Movement; her mantra was Viva la petite difference—celebrating the little difference between men and women—and she was a pariah, or social outsider, primarily for being Jewish, and also for being a woman.211

Despite the fact that she was one of the most well-known female academics of her time,

Hannah Arendt intentionally avoided engaging with the women’s movement and writing explicitly about women’s concerns; however, her position on women is obliquely present in

209 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 513. 210 Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 44. 211 Arendt never wrote an autobiography and maintains that the story of someone’s life can only be told afterward, by looking back. However, this did not stop her from putting her own life into the lives of those for whom she was a biographer (or, alternately, she may have chosen to write about those who bore a close resemblance to herself).

102 her works. Will the women’s movement lose la petite difference if they win? Will we lose the political realm due to the incursion of private concerns? Will we lose the ability to act if we lose the plurality in which that ability is rooted?

Much of the early feminist response to Arendt, by women like Adrienne Rich and Mary

O’Brien, was critical—they saw Arendt as a masculine philosopher. Rich writes, “To read such a book, by a woman of large spirit and great erudition, can be painful, because it embodies the tragedy of a female mind nourished on male ideologies. … The power of male ideology to possess such a female body which encloses it and which it encloses, is nowhere more striking than in Arendt’s lofty and crippled book.”212 Mary O’Brien calls Arendt a

“female male-supremacist,” maintaining that “Arendt’s view of the human condition is in fact a view of man in the literal as well as the generalized sense,” and that she neglects to analyze “the human condition of women.”213

Since that time, the feminist response to Arendt has immensely varied, both in their interpretations of Arendt’s work and in which parts of Arendt’s work they identify as central. Seyla Benhabib, among others, reads Arendt as dealing with women’s concerns, despite Arendt’s refusal to identify with feminism or write much about women: “And, surely, it is no accident that the thinker who countered Western philosophy’s love affair with death with her category of ‘natality’—that a child is born to us—was a woman.”214

Mary Dietz understands Arendt’s view of action to be one that transcends gender binaries

212 Adrienne Rich, On Lies Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 212. 213 Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 9, 100. 214 Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, new edition (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.), 135.

103 between laboring, which is feminine, and work, which is masculine: “For an Arendtian, then, the goals of a truly political feminism should be just the opposite of animal laborans feminisms [feminisms that exalt the private over the public sphere]. First, to release

‘women’ from the straitjacket of a universalized and uniform subjectivity, and, second, to free feminist theory itself from its quest for certainty about ‘who you are.’”215 Dietz sees

Arendt’s action as leading to the “overcoming of gender … [and to] ‘[r]esistibility, openness, creativity and incompleteness’” by focusing on unique distinctiveness.216 This, however, according to Dietz, raises the question: “‘Who, then, will tend to the private?’

(Every citizen, it seems, still needs a ‘wife.’)”217

While Arendt rarely writes explicitly about what it means to be a woman, this topic is implicitly present in her work, particularly in The Human Condition and Rahel Varnhagen.

Humans, according to Arendt, are free only when they enter the public sphere. Insofar as they are human, women ought to participate in the public sphere. Difference, including the difference between men and women, is a component of the plurality that is a precondition for the possibility of acting, the trait that characterizes humans. This difference must be protected: the spreading equality of conditions threatens difference. The existence of difference is threatened by two interconnected phenomena: increasing equality of conditions and the erosion of the difference between the public and private spheres. Arendt calls this

215 Mary Dietz, Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002), 115. 216 Dietz, 133-135 and Bonnie Honig, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (Pennsylvania State University Press), 1995. Dietz downplays Arendt’s affirmation of gender difference, but emphasizes the fact that she refuses to ground this difference. Dietz’s deconstructive feminism sees the contradiction that is present in Arendt. However, rather than struggle with or examine that contradiction, Dietz embraces one side of it—the side that offers no grounding in nature for women’s difference and is open to any expression of what woman might be. 217 Dietz, 116. Dietz’s reading of Arendt is problematic for several reasons: first, Arendt avoids gendering labor and work; second, while action is, indeed, based on unique distinctiveness, this unique distinctiveness includes rather than excludes gender.

104 phenomenon the rise of the social. Should women attempt to bring their personal concerns into the political sphere, it would encourage the rise of the social. Therefore, Arendt argues that women must enter politics according to the rules that she posits, including the strict separation of private from public concerns. Men could attempt and have attempted to bring private concerns into politics, as, for example, in the case of the French Revolution, when poverty was treated as a political concern. However, Arendt particularly fears this from women: she is reacting against the second-wave feminist mantra that the personal is political; she calls the introduction of private concerns in public “housekeeping.”

Being a woman has a different relevance in the private sphere than in the political sphere. In the private sphere, being a woman obviously relates to marriage, birth, and family. The body is particularly relevant to the private sphere and allows for reproduction. In politics, being a woman is a bit more complicated: On the one hand, according to Arendt, embracing the fact that one is a woman is part of revealing oneself in the space of appearances that is politics. On the other hand, being a woman is a characteristic of an individual person. It is not a group identity that ought to be cultivated. In fact, Arendt critiques identity politics.

Being a woman is most relevant to political life insofar as it brings the more complicated perspective that comes with being a pariah, a person who may not fit into social norms, given differences of sex, ethnicity, or class, among other things, but who, as a result of their difference, may have a unique perspective to contribute.

After exploring Arendt’s position on women’s role, I will to her conception of freedom, examining in what ways it is limited and rooted in nature and custom. Particularly, I

105 examine Arendt’s simultaneous rejection of human nature and her affirmation of givenness, the idea that the potential for action and one’s very self are gifts that should be respected.

Her rejection of human nature causes problems for her theory, since the very existence of action relies on the continuation of difference, including the difference between men and women. If sex difference is not founded in human nature, then that difference might be eliminate by human action. However, Arendt turns to givenness, a sort of secularized creation, as a way to hope for the continued presence of both difference and action.

Next, this dissertation will consider the way that Arendt’s conception of freedom relates not only to the individual person, but also the family and to politics. Freedom is the disclosure of the individual in the political space through action. Freedom requires both an individual who has the capacity to act, which is present in all humans through natality, or the act of their birth, and the political freedom to act. Therefore, politics must guarantee human rights; without a political guarantee of freedom, innate freedom is ineffective. While the family in

Arendt’s work is in the realm of necessity rather than freedom, it, too, has implications for the individual’s freedom. In the family children are prepared to later participate in public life. According to Arendt, the ordering of the family is quite different from the equality of politics. She writes that children need “concealment in order to mature undisturbed.”218 In

218 Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1968), 188. Jean Bethke Elshtain questions Arendts unmitigated private role for children, maintaining that there is a difference between good and bad political involvement, and that children’s involvement, when necessary, in the public sphere is often to protect childhood’s privacy for others. Additionally, she sees children as apprentice citizens, allowing for some political involvement. She writes, “Perhaps, thinking with Arendt, we can find ways to sustain childhood, not as a time of innocence, but as a time of apprenticeship that occupies a border in between private and public in a sphere or zone that adults bear the heaviest responsibility for sheltering and sustaining, not to protect children from politics but to prepare them for politics, for all the responsibilities of adult life” (Honig, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, 263-283, esp 281).

106 Arendt’s work, then, both public and private, politics and the family, contribute to the freedom of the individual.

Arendt makes several contributions to a theory of women’s role: She advocates a political role for women, while at the same time addressing the threat of the rise of the social that she fears will decrease the space for politics given women’s entrance into the political sphere.

One aspect of addressing that threat is arguing for a separation of public and private without an absolute gendering of those spheres. Another aspect is seeking to maintain the differences that distinguish individuals from each other; with a particular focus on the difference between men and women. The notion of givenness in which Arendt roots difference is a creative replacement of nature.

Arendt’s understanding of women’s role is not, however, without faults. Arendt’s praise of politics is at the expense of private life: she rejects the possibility that a person could achieve excellence in only the private sphere. In addition, her theory of the civil sphere is lacking. In the civil sphere is our right to free association. However, because this association is not political association, Arendt belittles it. Finally, although Arendt’s freedom is limited by custom, it is not limited by nature. In seeking to keep all possibilities for human action open, Arendt goes too far; her freedom is unpredictable, and so cannot be really limited.

The Role of Women

107 Following Tocqueville, Arendt advocates a separation of public and private to counteract the spread of equality; however, she does not gender the public and private spheres. This means that women, like men, ought to disclose themselves in the political sphere, the space for appearing. Being a woman is part of who they are; it is part of the individual identity that they reveal. Arendt is concerned with preserving this difference in the face of forces that push for homogeneity.

Because participation in political life is what makes people fully human, women, like all persons, ought to participate in politics. It is in politics that who we are is revealed to other men and women through political participation and speech, both of which Arendt identifies as action. Action is the supreme human capability—it is our ability to begin or to initiate what is unpredictable, revealing each person’s unique distinctness.219 Arendt writes, “What makes man a political being is his faculty of action; it enables him to get together with his peers, to act in concert, and to reach out for goals and enterprises that would never enter his mind, let alone the desires of his heart, had he not been given this gift—to embark on something new.”220 Action is our ability to begin or to initiate what is unpredictable. In fact,

Arendt compares action to a miracle: “The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable.”221 The ability to act is present in humans due to the fact that they were born: in their birth, which is itself an action, is the capacity to act themselves. Action can establish

219 Arendt, The Human Condition, 1st edition, (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1998), 178. 220 Arendt, On Violence (New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 82. 221 Arendt, The Human Condition, 178.

108 the public realm or, if the public realm is already established, action occurs within it.222

Freedom requires the possibility to act; not only does it require that humans have the capacity of action through their birth, but it also requires that the ability to act is politically guaranteed. A despotic political order, for instance, would not allow the possibility for action. This is the problem with totalitarianism that Arendt addresses in The Origins of

Totalitarianism. In order, then, for women to be free, they need a politically protected ability to act.

Arendt expresses her own dissatisfaction with ancient gendering of public and private spheres. In the ancient use (she refers to Xenophon), labor was divided between man and woman strictly according to the public/private split—“The main division is between a life spent indoors, in the household, and a life spent outside, in the world. Only the latter is a life fully worthy of man, and the notion of equality between man and woman, which is a necessary assumption for the idea of a [modern, public] division of labor, is of course entirely absent.”223 She calls it professional specialization, which happens when society is

222 George Kateb’s explanation of three senses in which Arendt uses action shows some of the ambiguity involved in her use of the term: first, there is political action as performance; second, there is political action as a mask that hids in order to reveal; and, third, there is political action allowing the actor to escape the self by creating and maintaining a role. In this third sense, action frees you from yourself, and defines and concentrates the self. Kateb then critiques Arendt as advocating, like totalitarianism does, the attempt to be released from reality. Totalitarianism asserts “the unnatural or artificial against the natural or everyday. But so in her view [does] political action when rightly done” (Kateb, Hannah Arendt, 29). What Kateb misses in his critique is Arendt’s underlying belief that “the natural” does not exist (only the given facts of existence do— we must replace the non-existent natural with man’s ability to create through action), and that action is the only aspect of humanness that Arendt affirms (whatever attacks that is not human; whatever is consistent with action is human). In addition, when considering political actors and the relationship between their public and private personas, one must take into account Arendt’s assertion that one cannot escape one’s ethnicity or gender, but must make sense of them in both the private and public spheres. For Arendt, then, both what is given in the private sphere is real, as is what is expressed through action in the public sphere (unless that expression of action attempts to destroy action). George Kateb, “Freedom and Worldliness in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Political Theory 5, no. 2 (May, 1977), 141-182, and George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983). 223 Arendt, The Human Condition, 48.

109 conceived of as one subject whose needs are divided among the community, in this case between men and women.224 She writes, “[a]ntiquity seems to have known only professional specialization, which assumedly was predetermined by natural qualities and gifts.”225 Arendt does not support the ancients’ gendering of the public and private spheres, although she recognizes that eliminating this gender division of the public and private creates problems for women and for the institution of the family. Arendt describes the contemporary position of many women who both participate in a profession and care for a household when she writes, “Thus a woman’s freedom to make her own living seems to imply either a kind of enslavement in her own home or the dissolution of her family.”226 Arendt has no solution.

Action occurs among other humans. Difference or plurality is a necessary precondition for action, because revealing oneself to others requires the existence of the other.227 Arendt describes plurality as “the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”228 Plurality includes differences in ethnicity, nationality, and gender, among other things, all of which contribute to human uniqueness. Arendt maintains that if men had a

224 Arendt’s discussion of the sexual division of labor is set within another distinction: a distinction between specialization of work or professional specialization and the division of labor. Specialization of work “is essentially guided by the finished product itself, whose nature it is to require different skills which then are pooled and organized together” (Arendt, The Human Condition, 123). Specialization of work involves the development of specialized skills. The division of labor, on the other hand, implies that “every single member is the same and exchangeable” (123). The division of labor occurs when men of equal capacity divide tasks among themselves that require no special skill. It leads to increased productivity, and it is only possible in the public realm (47). The division of labor, then, is tied to moving labor from the private to the public realm. When Arendt writes about the sexual division of labor, she is actually writing about specialization of work. 225 Ibid., 48. 226 Arendt, “On the Emancipation of Women,” from “A review of Das Frauenproblem der Gegenwart Eine Psychologische Bilanz” (Contemporary Women’s Issues: A Psychological Balance Sheet), by Dr. Alice Rühle-Gerstel, I Die Gesellschaft, 2, 1933. English translation by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl in Hannah Arendt. Essays in Understanding: 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn. (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 67. 227 Arendt, The Human Condition, 7. 228 Ibid., 8. Arendt falsely assumes here that if human nature exists, each human being cannot be different from all other humans. Proponents of human nature do not maintain that all people are the same. Even having like natures, however, for Arendt, restricts the possibilities of action and hence people’s freedom in ways she cannot accept.

110 common human nature, this would preclude plurality and the distinctness that plurality involves. Plurality means that “we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.” This difference is necessary, according to Arendt, in order for plurality to exist.

Arendt’s description of plurality offers some striking insights into her thoughts about women. Her explanation of plurality at the very beginning of The Human Condition turns to the two creation stories in Genesis and their description of the existence of men and women as an explanation for and an example of plurality.229 The existence of men and women, then, is one aspect of plurality. And this difference does not result from human nature, for as we will see, Arendt’s understanding of the possibilities of human action and the extent of human freedom precludes the existence of a human nature in the interest of preserving the diversity of distinct, unique existences. This may be one reason for her hesitation to write about women’s concerns; Arendt is concerned with maintaining the differences among people, not in cataloguing their similarities.

Arendt writes about plurality, connecting it to gender, in the two creation stories of Genesis

1 and 2. In Genesis 1:27, there is a concise articulation of the creation of man: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”230 In Genesis 2:7, there is another telling of man’s creation: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and

229 It is consistent with Arendt’s interest in natality, or actions presence in humans through the action of their birth, that she turns here, at the beginning, to the Bible’s creation story. 230 Bible, King James Version.

111 man became a living soul.”231 Following this, God creates Eve by taking a rib from Adam’s side. About the creation stories and their relevance for her theory of plurality, Arendt writes,

“‘Male and female created He them’ … this story of man’s creation is distinguished in principle from the one according to which God originally created Man (adam), ‘him’ and not them,’ so that the multitude of human beings becomes the result of multiplication.”232

Here, Arendt maintains that in the first telling, men are created as plural—man and woman are created. This is man in his plurality and difference. The second telling, in which Adam alone is first created, and Eve is later created from him, Arendt sees as describing the creation of humans as multiplication—multiplication of the same thing (with the same nature), rather than a creation of very different beings. Multiplication makes action unnecessary, according to Arendt, since it means that general laws of behavior have been established for these men, who have identical natures and essences. The first description of the creation of man better captures man’s plurality and the resulting place for action. Human plurality is certainly not only a plurality of the difference between men and women; this makes it particularly striking that in order to explain plurality, Arendt turns to the creation of men and women, rather than to class difference or ethnic difference.233

231 Ibid. 232 Arendt, The Human Condition, 8. 233 Peg Birmingham writes that man and woman, Adam and Eve, have different meanings in this passage: In Arendt’s reading, the origin is necessarily double. If Adam is the universal dimension (adam: everyman) of humanity, then Eve is the dimension of the singular and unique. She is the origin of the alien and the foreign intrinsic to each human being in his or her singularity. Including the feminine as the alien aspect integral to the double origin allows us to better understand Arendt’s argument concerning one’s relation to the neighbor … (Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 82). I find little in Arendt to reinforce this reading; in fact, it seems to see men as having certain characteristics and women having others in a way that Arendt never does in her writing. Birmingham also suggest that this understanding of woman as alien is reinforced by or derived from Monica in the Confessions: Moreover, she does not remain confined to the household; she is constantly setting out on new journeys to alien and foreign countries. … Monica keeps moving—Carthage, Rome, Milan, Ostia. In the Confessions, the maternal is not a figure of rest, serenity, domesticity;

112

In a footnote, Arendt explores the way in which these two creation stories are referred to in the New Testament: Jesus refers us back to the first story (where men and women are created in their plurality) in Matthew 19 when the Pharisees ask Him if it is “lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause.”234 He answers: “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?

Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”235 In this response to the Pharisees, Jesus emphasizes the plurality of man in man’s creation as male and female. The implications of this plurality, and the high esteem of women that accompanies it, can be seen in his critique of divorce.

In contrast to Jesus, Paul’s instructions regarding women during worship maintain that “the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman: but the woman of the man.”236 Here, Paul is referring to the second creation story. As Arendt points out, he moderates this position: “He then somewhat attenuates the dependence: ‘neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man.”237 Paul does, however, emphasize

she has no fixed or permanent domicile. In the figure of Monica, the feminine origin that accompanies human existence is marked as alien, foreign, wandering. Significantly, she does not die in her own bed but in a strange and foreign land, refusing a return to her homeland even to be buried (82). While the character of Monica and her influence on Arendt’s view of women is very interesting, given Arendt’s frequent returns to Augustine’s insights, she is almost certainly overstating the case for Monica as not domestic, but rather alien and foreign. The resonance that this portrayal of Eve and Monica does have with Arendt’s work is in the idea of the pariah. 234 Verse 3, Bible, King James Version. 235 Verses 4-6, Ibid. 236 1 Corinthians 11:7-8. Ibid. 237 Arendt, The Human Condition, 8.

113 women’s creation from out of man.238 Here we see that the Christian tradition draws on both creation stories; it is significant, though, that Jesus himself refers back to the first. Arendt connects Jesus’s and Paul’s disparate appeals to different creation stories in order to comment on their views on action: “For Jesus, faith was closely related to action ... for Paul, faith was primarily related to salvation.”239 Arendt seems impressed by Jesus’ action, including through His many miracles.

Arendt explains plurality by turning to the creation of man and woman. The fact that man and woman were each created separately, at least in the first creation story, affirms the uniqueness of each person. The difference between men and women is one of many differences that comprise the plurality of mankind. Because this plurality is the condition for action, Arendt is concerned with maintaining this plurality. She explores two threats to plurality and the possibility of action: totalitarianism and the rise of the social; the rise of the social is closely connected to changing roles for women.

Plurality is threatened by the erosion of difference that can result from the excessive equality in the social sphere and from its conflation of public and private. In order to understand the rise of the social in Arendt, we must first consider the public and private

238 In addition to Jesus and Paul on this point, Arendt also considers Augustine’s approach to the creation story. She writes, “To Augustine, the creation story offers a welcome opportunity to stress the species character of animal life as distinguished from the singularity of human existence.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 8. This is evident in The City of God: And therefore God created only one single man, not, certainly, that he might be a solitary bereft of all society, but that by this means the unity of society and the bond of concord might be more effectually commended to him, men being bound together not only by similarity of nature, but by family affection. And indeed He did not even create the woman that was to be given him as his wife, as he created the man, but created her out of the man, that the whole human race might derive from one man. (Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods, [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2009], 406, XII.21) 239 Ibid.

114 spheres. The private sphere is concerned with the household and necessity; it is the realm of labor, the place for daily activities that allow for the continuation of life.240 The public sphere, on the other hand, is the realm of work and action. Politics is part of the public sphere. Work involves making artificial things that are meant to last longer than the one who makes them; it builds civilization. According to Arendt, work ought to create “a place fit for action and speech,” a place for politics.241 Action and speech are the supreme human capability, revealing individuals’ unique distinctiveness in the midst of others.242 The rise of the social occurs when the equality that is appropriate to the public sphere infringes on the rest of life, including private life. The action that ought to occur in politics may be replaced with behavior; rather than politics being a place in which the individual distinguishes himself, politics may become a place of bureaucratic organization and administration in which individuals do not act, but rather conform to certain patterns of behavior. The force of pervasive equality is to encourage people to conform, rather than to act as individuals in ways that might seem to be asocial or abnormal.243 Arendt fears that the rise of the social

240 The private sphere is not only the realm of labor, but also the realm of bodies. It is clear that bodies belong to the private sphere, because biology is connected not with action, but rather with necessity. Arendt refers to life process, which permeates our bodies and keeps them in a constant state of a change whose movements are automatic, independent of our own activities, and irresistible—i.e., of an overwhelming urgency. The less we are doing ourselves, the more forcefully will this biological process assert itself, impose its inherent necessity upon us, and overawe us with the fateful automatism of sheer happening that underlies all human history. (Arendt, On Revolution [New York: Penguin, 1965], 53) Bodies and biology are in tension with freedom; they ought to be restricted to the private sphere and not allowed in to the public sphere. Arendt notes in The Human Condition that the emancipation of women corresponded to the emancipation of bodies from the private realm, something she critiques: “The fact that the modern age emancipated the working classes and the women at nearly the same historical moment must certainly be counted among the characteristics of an age which no longer believes that bodily functions and material concerns should be hidden” (73). This move of bodies to the public sphere, and the move of women to the public sphere, are connected with the rise of the social. At the same time, the body and the private sphere are precursors to the public. Without them, acting would not be possible. 241 Arendt, The Human Condition, 173. 242 Ibid., 178. 243 Hanna Pitkin, in The Attack of the Blob, describes “The Blob,” one articulation of the social in Arendt’s thought, as gendered female (Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the

115 sphere will destroy freedom and the possibility of action. She worries that women’s approach to politics could lead to the rise of the social—“the rise of housekeeping, its activities, problems, and organizational devices—from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere.”244

This rise of the social sphere is a problem because it means that women and the working class could move from one lack of freedom, that of being forcibly excluded from politics, to another lack of freedom, that of a political sphere that does not allow for action. Arendt writes: “[I]t is only by respecting its own borders that this realm [politics], where we are free to act and to change, can remain intact, preserving its integrity and keeping its promises.”245 Women ought to enter politics without bringing the personal to bear; they must enter politics in a way that preserves freedom. Women should participate in the public sphere as it is, and not bring domestic issues, or housekeeping, as Arendt calls it, into politics. Arendt would consider many of the issues of Second Wave feminism in the 1960s and 70s to be social, rather than political.

Being a woman is relevant to the public and private spheres in different ways. In private, being a woman provides the possibility for the creation of new life through physical birth.

In public, it is more complicated. The fact of being a woman is a part of who the person is that she reveals in public. Accepting this fact is crucial to the revelation of one’s self in

Social [Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2000], 168). She writes about the social as not only feminine, but specifically maternal: “an evil, dominating, destructive matriarch constantly seeking to expand her power, to control and infantilize her children, to render them docile and make them behave, until she finally extinguishes their independence all together, destroying all boundaries and merging the ‘children’ back into a single mass—herself” (171). 244 Arendt, The Human Condition, 38. 245 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 264.

116 public. However, being a woman does not determine a person—it does not have a particular, limited implication for that person’s individuality. Julia Kristeva sums this private and public role for woman nicely:

[T]he female body does not get any more attention from Arendt than any other. We would not be doing violence to her thought if we were to suppose that our philosopher would have situated that body—if she had accepted the risk of reflecting upon femininity—in the domain of the natural processes ... Is not political space the only noble space there is, to be won over from biological life, against women and slaves? Nonetheless, Arendt’s thought becomes more complicated here, because what is ‘given’ (the body, for instance) is implicated in the ‘who’s’ tensions and, in this sense, deserves in its own right both ‘thanks’ and ‘acquiescence.’ Thus Arendt considers her femininity, as she does her Jewishness, to be an irrefutable ‘given’ that she simply accepts as such. … femininity does not confine itself to the body as serf, but indeed constitutes the plurality of the world, a plurality in which it participates.”246

She begins by critiquing Arendt in the way that many feminist readers have: she overemphasizes politics and underemphasizes women’s concerns. Then, Kristeva shows what is really profound in Arendt—the way that she makes being a woman relevant to politics insofar as it constitutes the plurality of the world.

In addition to what Kristeva points out, that Arendt’s femininity constitutes the plurality of the world, being a woman also has the potential to enrich the political world by giving women a more complicated perspective than others may have. Arendt develops her idea of the pariah—the person who, by virtue of not fitting in smoothly with social norms, has an additional perspective that can come to bear in political participation—with regard both to being Jewish and to being a woman. Before one can be a pariah, however, one must accept the facts about oneself, and through that acceptance, gain the additional perspective that that

246 Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt: Life is a Narrative, trans. Frank Collins (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 68-70.

117 difference offers. Arendt treats this process in her work, Rahel Varnhagen. Rahel

Varnhagen is a Jewish woman who hosted a salon in Berlin at the turn of the 19th century.

Arendt’s writing about Rahel’s process of learning to present herself as a Jewish woman through her interactions with her friends is almost autobiographical.247

Rahel’s Jewishness and the fact that she is a woman are not things to be escaped, but rather things that she must comprehend as part of her distinctiveness within a historical and social context. Rahel is a pariah, an outsider. Rahel chooses not to attempt to blend in with society as if she were not Jewish or not a woman, which Arendt calls becoming a parvenu. To become a parvenu, or to assimilate, would be to deny the true facts about her: “One had to pay for becoming a parvenu by abandoning truth, and this Rahel was not prepared to do.”248

Assimilation attempts to remove difference, a difference that is part of one’s self: “just as

‘emancipated’ women have had little success in saving the world by removing the difference between male and female, our ‘emancipated Jews will not succeed in arguing themselves and us out of this world.”249 Arendt, like Rahel, understands that attempting to deny facts about herself is nonsensical. She writes about her own Jewishness: “The truth is I have never pretended to be anything else or to be in any way other than I am, and I have never even felt tempted in that direction. It would have been like saying that I was a man and not a woman—that is to say, kind of insane.”250 Arendt develops this idea further when

247 Seyla Benhabib describes this as “a mirror effect in the narrative. The one narrated about becomes the mirror in which the narrator seeks to understand and interpret herself.” (The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, 10). 248 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, ed. Liliane Weissberg (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 242. 249 Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 171. 250 Ibid., 466.

118 she writes that it is through understanding oneself, including in one’s difference, that one can contribute most effectively to politics:

The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a vehicle which we board or get out of at random. Our post will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future. Only then—but from that moment on—will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom.”251

One’s position or “post,” even if it the position of a pariah, is given and must be accepted.

If one attempts to reject his post through assimilation, it will simply be a burden, but if the post is accepted and understood, then it becomes a blessing and a weapon.

The pariah, although in a difficult situation, can reap benefits from her position:

It is offered to the pariah if, though unable to revolt as an individual against the whole of society, he disdains the alternative of becoming a parvenu and is recompensed for his “wretched situation” with a “view of the whole.” This is his sole dignified hope: “that everything is related; and in truth, everything is good enough. This is the salvage from the great bankruptcy.252

A pariah may have a view of the whole and of the relations among things: “Rahel had remained a Jew and pariah. Only because she clung to both conditions did she find a place in the history of European humanity.”253 Being a pariah, then, and experiencing the resulting homelessness, allows for a critical understanding that those who are not homeless may miss. The pariah is homeless both in society as a whole, and within the particular groups to which the pariah happens to belong: in Arendt’s case, among women and Jewish people.254 In both situations, Arendt advocates critiquing the party line. For instance,

251 Ibid.,150. 252 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, 249. 253 Ibid., 258. 254 Arendt, Hannah. The Jewish Writings, 150.

119 Jennifer Ring describes Arendt as a Jewish gadfly in Eichmann in Jerusalem: “She was received as a Jewish Woman writing about things that were inappropriate for her to address, especially in public.”255 In the same way, Arendt never warmed up to the women’s liberation movement of her day, but rather challenged its goals while maintaining her identity as a woman.

While the facts of a person’s existence, such as being Jewish or being a woman, are certainly relevant to the political sphere, they are only relevant for the disclosure of the individual. Arendt criticizes the move to form groups based on one aspect of the individual person. Arendt attacks the women’s movement for entering politics

only as a unified, undifferentiated whole, which never succeeds in articulating concrete goals (other than humanitarian ones). The vain attempt to found a women’s political party reveals the problem of the movement very sharply. The problem is like that of the youth movement, which is a movement only for the sake of youth. A women’s movement only for the sake of women is equally abstract.256

The women’s movement does not result in women revealing themselves in their distinctness among other humans. Rather, it tends to absorb individual woman into “a unified, undifferentiated whole” that loses the complexity of what it means to be a woman. This is too abstract—women become not individuals, but members of a group; their interests are reduced to the interests of the group. Just as Arendt criticizes the women’s movement, so she criticizes those who attempt to create a Jewish movement, “transform[ing] the Jew from a living individual into a principle, into an agglomeration of characteristics … to conjure up all the things that are Jewish about him.”257 Arendt objects to the idea that individuals have

255 Jennifer Ring, The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 166-167. 256 Arendt, “On the Emancipation of Women,” 67. 257 Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 64.

120 certain interests solely by virtue of their race or class or gender. For her, being a woman and being Jewish is precisely the opposite—it is about disclosing individuals in the space for appearances, not about becoming a member of a group.

Freedom: Action, Nature, and Custom

In order to understand Arendt’s conception of what freedom means for women, let us consider what she means by action, an essential part of freedom. In addition, let us reflect on her views of custom, as well as her rejection of human nature, coupled with her affirmation of givenness. Arendt describes freedom as the ability to act. The ability to act requires two things: First, that the individual has the capacity within them. According to

Arendt, we are born with that capacity. Second, because action occurs in the political sphere, the ability to act requires a political freedom to do so. The capacity that we have within ourselves as humans is not sufficient; the right to act must also be politically guaranteed to us. Arendt’s notion of freedom is far from negative conceptions of freedom: in fact, for Arendt, freedom has nothing to do with the private sphere, which is the realm of necessity. Freedom is solely practiced through political involvement. This is one of the areas in which Arendt’s theory is weak—her esteem for the political is so far above the private that she cannot conceive of one achieving excellence or disclosing oneself within the private sphere.

121 The lack of limits that Arendt places on human action and human freedom are another weakness in her thought. Arendt does affirm the limits of custom on human freedom—she maintains that action occurs in the web of human relationships and in the context of past actions. These past actions affect the ability of action to achieve its intent. This limit of custom on human freedom is itself limited, though: Arendt maintains that the only thing that is true about humans is that they are conditioned; humans, through creating civilization, create the very things that condition them. This means that while humans cannot immediately change themselves, they can change their conditions in such a way that they can change future generations. Arendt explicitly rejects the existence of a human nature.

She believes that the existence of a human nature would limit human freedom, which she believes is unlimited. This creates problems for her thought—if humans can overcome the facts that are given about themselves, such as being Jewish or being a woman, then human plurality would be threatened, along with the possibility of future action. As a response to this problem, Arendt develops her idea of givenness—that humans ought to accept and be grateful for what is given about them, the facts of their existence such as being Jewish and being a woman. Arendt asks humans to respect and defer to what is given, thus imposing on themselves a limit to their freedom.

Action is primarily limited by the “web” of human relationships, which are themselves the result of previous actions. Arendt is clear that actions do not happen in isolation, but rather in the context of other people and in relationship to them. Actions are affected by previous actions, and so it is not at all certain that they will achieve their intended purposes.258

258 Arendt, The Human Condition, 183-84.

122 Arendt rejects human nature as a limit on human freedom; however, she seeks to limit freedom through an appeal to givenness. She writes, “nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things.”259 If we did have one, then only a god could know what it was—“attempts to define human nature almost invariably end with some construction of a deity.”260 If man, as opposed to God, attempted to define human nature, rather than the human condition, it would involve turning a “who” into a “what.”

This is the problem of trying to convey to others the human who reveals himself by action.

Arendt writes, “The question about the nature of man is no less a theological question than the question about the nature of God; both can be settled only within the framework of a divinely revealed answer.”261 Arendt maintains that humans have a human condition rather than a nature. This means that the only thing that is certain about humans is that they are conditioned beings, which means that anything with which they interact with or form a relationship helps to form them.262

Before exploring Arendt’s appeal to givenness and the similarities and differences between nature and givenness, let us turn to Arendt’s exploration of action as rooted in natality, or the event of being born. Arendt maintains that action is ontologically rooted in the event of natality. Natality is both physical and political—humans are first born as babies; later,

259 Ibid., 10. 260 Ibid. 261 Ibid., 11. I think that Arendt’s reading of Augustine on nature leaves out an important aspect—for Augustine what we know philosophically and what we know theologically would not be separated, in the way that Arendt asks us to separate theological questions from our questions of political philosophy. Shiraz Dossa argues that Arendt does articulate a conception of human nature insofar as man is not the result of history, but that his being precedes history. He writes, “For Arendt, the nature of man is inherently and permanently unstable and unreliable” (Shiraz Dossa, The Public Realm and the Public Self: The Political Theory of Hannah Arendt [Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989], 49). While Dossa and I would not sharply disagree over how Arendt defines man, we would disagree over whether or not to categorize her description of humanness as a conception of human nature. I side with Voegelin— nature, at the most basic level, implies something that is stable. 262 Arendt, The Human Condition, 10.

123 because of their first, physical natality, they are able to enter the political sphere through action, a sort of second birth.263 It is to this political natality that Arendt refers when she writes, “With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance.”264 It is the fact of our birth that is confirmed through our participation in politics. Natality is “the beginning which came into the world when we were born and to which we respond by beginning something now on our own initiative.”265

Natality is not a capacity, as much as it is an event or action. Patricia Bowen-Moore articulates this when she writes, “By virtue of his natality, then, man can exercise his capacity to begin exactly because he not only is in possession of this faculty but also because he is this crucial reality.”266 He is this reality—a being who initiates—because of his birth. It is an action in which his later actions are rooted and by which they are inspired.267

In one instance in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt refers to natality as procreation, which gives some additional insight into her conception of action: “[M]an was created with the power of procreation, that not a single man but Men inhabit the earth.”268 It is this procreation that not only makes more men to allow for a plurality of persons, but

263 Patricia Bowen-Moore, in Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Natality, distinguishes between two senses in which Arendt uses natality: the first, she calls primary natality, and the second, political natality. “Primary natality” refers to man’s birth and his resulting capacity to initiate, and “political natality” refers to man’s entrance into the public sphere through political action in the exercise of his freedom (Patricia Bowen-Moore, Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Natality [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989], 22, 24). Bowen-Moore also introduces a third kind of natality, which is not relevant to our purposes here: “tertiary natality,” or birth into the life of the mind. 264 Arendt, The Human Condition, 176-177. 265 Ibid., 177. 266 Bowen-Moore, 25. 267 In fact, Arendt herself uses the word “inspiration,” (Arendt, On Revolution, 214). 268 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951), 439.

124 procreation itself is also man’s ability to create and act. Here we see that the private and political spheres are joined for a moment—action, for once, occurs in private. Procreation is a particularly interesting word to use here because procreation is an act of two people, a man and a woman. Procreation respects the plurality of persons—the difference of a man and a woman is required. Procreation is an act of two people simultaneously. It is the foundation for later political action, which is always one person acting in the midst of others. Both procreation and political action, then, are social. Both require plurality; procreation would literally not be possible in the absence of sexual difference.

By specifying that natality is an event, Arendt makes it clear that natality is not a nature.

Arendt bases her understanding of natality on Augustine, often citing his “Initium ergo ut esset, creates est homo—‘That there be a beginning, man was created.’”269 Arendt takes

Augustine’s assertion out of its context of creation by a god who is outside of His creation.

She keeps the idea of givenness without a giver, Augustine’s Creator in whose image man is made and acts. Now man’s creation becomes the first of man’s actions. That beginning carries within itself its own principle—“the principle inspires the deeds that are to follow and remains apparent as long as the action lasts.”270 We do not need, then, a “first beginner,” God; rather, the birth of a human is both a beginning and principle, or inspiration to further action.

The question that Arendt struggles with is whether action is a stable part of the human condition or not. On the one hand, Arendt jealously eliminates the possibility of anything

269 One of the times that she cites this can be found in On Revolution, 212. 270 Arendt, On Revolution, 2, 14.

125 that might resemble human nature in its stability and fecundity. This position is reflected in the original edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism. On the other hand, because action is rooted in natality, Arendt wants to say that action will be a perpetually recurring possibility for humans. This position is reflected in her later revisions to Origins. Her shift has significant implications: the first position maintains that the possibilities of human’s actions are entirely open and unlimited, and that humans can even act in a way to close down the possibility for action of future humans—humans are so free that they can shut down the possibility of future freedom. The second position allows for the constant future existence of freedom by limiting that freedom. However, this position also makes action more akin to the human nature that Arendt rejects; regardless of whether action is a form of human nature, this second position limits the full range of possibilities open to man in a way that

Arendt previously shied away from.

In the original Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, Arendt argues that man’s freedom, deriving from natality, is the foundation of both political action and of what attempts to suppress and prevent the possibility of that action, totalitarianism. She writes,

“The victory of totalitarianism may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man.”271 Because the essence of man is rooted in an action, if that action is made impossible through totalitarianism’s destruction of the place and opportunity for politics, human essence could be destroyed.272 While Arendt does not take a firm position on whether or not this will happen, should totalitarianism prevail, man’s ability to act may be eliminated. This is the goal of totalitarianism—“the transformation of human nature itself. The concentration camps are the laboratories where

271 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, viii. 272 Ibid., 293.

126 changes in human nature are tested …”273 It is an “attack on human nature, on humanity, and on history.”274 It is the very creative power and unpredictability of man’s ability to act that allows for the possibility that totalitarianism may eliminate that ability to act.

Eric Voegelin, in a now-famous exchange with Arendt in The Review of Politics in response to The Origins of Totalitarianism, offers a serious critique of her use of the concept of nature in the book. He quotes Arendt, “Human nature as such is at stake, and even though it seems that these experiments succeed not in changing man but only in destroying him,”275 and then responds: “‘Nature’ is a philosophical concept; it denotes that which identifies a thing as a thing of this kind and not of another one. A ‘nature’ cannot be changed or transformed; a ‘change of nature’ is a contradiction of terms; tampering with the ‘nature’ of a thing means destroying the thing”276 Changing human nature, then, is not possible; to change human nature is to destroy it. If there is something essential in what it means to be human, then that thing cannot be permanently eliminated from humans. If, on the other hand, what it means to be human is in flux and constantly developing, then on what basis can we critique totalitarianism for attempting to destroy the human ability to act?

Voegelin explains that Arendt starts with the facts of history, and bases her analysis on those. He takes exception to this method: “The investigation inevitably will start from the phenomena, but the question of the theoretically justifiable units in political science cannot be solved by accepting the units thrown up in the stream of history at their face-value. What

273 Ibid., 432. 274 Ibid., 433. Arendt hopes that we will never discover what totalitarianism can do: “We do not know the full implications of totalitarian rule and the chances are that we never will. Its potentialities can be realized only if it has conquered the earth, only when no human being can any longer live outside its murderous dominion” (429). 275 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 433 in Voegelin, 74. 276 Eric Voegelin, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” The Review of Politics 15, no. 1 (Jan., 1953), 74-75.

127 a unit is will emerge when the principles furnished by philosophical anthropology are applied to historical materials.” 277 Arendt herself admits to starting with what is given and what is factual. Voegelin objects to this, maintaining that while we start by observing and considering the facts, we need to apply “principles furnished by philosophical anthropology” to those facts. For Voegelin, we cannot critique history without an understanding of humans, not only the facts about them, but also their nature.

Here, the relationship between physical and political natality arises. If the two forms of natality are not connected, then physical natality does not always imply the possibility of political natality—man could be born, but prevented from political involvement, and might never achieve the culmination of natality, which is action.278 This possibility reveals the importance of politically guaranteeing action. If, on the other hand, the two forms of natality are necessarily connected, then being born implies that ability to act in the future. A lack of political space for action could temporarily, but not completely, suppress this ability.

Totalitarianism, then, is a gravely unjust form of government and ought to be opposed; however, we do not need to fear that it will succeed in its attempt to change or destroy human nature, for it never can.

277 Voegelin, “[The Origins of Totalitarianism]: Concluding Remark,” The Review of Politics 15, no. 1 (Jan., 1953), 84-85. 278 In The Review of Politics, Arendt responds to Voegelin: “I hardly proposed more change of nature than Mr. Voegelin himself in his book on The New Science of Politics; discussing the Platonic-Aristotelian theory of soul, he states: ‘one might almost say that before the discovery of psyche man had no soul.’ (p. 67) In Mr. Voegelin’s terms, I could have said that after the discoveries of totalitarian domination and its experiments we have reason to fear that man may lose his soul.” (Arendt, “[The Origins of Totalitarianism]: A Reply,” The Review of Politics 15, no. 1 [Jan., 1953], 83). Arendt misunderstands Voegelin here: Voegelin is talking about his theory of compact versus differentiated perceptions of reality—reality itself does not change with the discovery of the psyche; rather, our perceptions of reality change. Therefore, her response to Voegelin does not work—while we may no longer perceive or recognize our soul, we still have one—the reality never changes.

128 In her second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958), Arendt retreats from the position that she took in her earlier editions and from her disagreement with Voegelin. She writes at the very end of the new Origins:

But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only ‘message’ which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creates est—‘that a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.”279

This is much more hopeful than the conclusion of the previous edition. She sees action as something stable that will endure as long as man endures. In this reading, she seems to indicate that primary and political natality are inseparable—the political beginning is guaranteed by each new birth. Now insofar as new human beings are born, there is action.

Natality, according to Arendt, is “[t]he miracle that saves the world.”280 In On Revolution,

Arendt reads one of Virgil’s poems as affirming “the divinity of birth as such, that the world’s potential salvation lies in the very fact that the human species regenerates itself constantly and forever.”281 If action is a stable part of being human, then its differences from nature are significantly decreased. This articulation of Arendt’s theory loses something

279 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1966). In the new edition, Arendt removes the previous final section, “Concluding Remarks” and adds a new chapter: “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government.” Elaborating on the end of the revised Origins of Totalitarianism, Bowen-Moore writes, “Totalitarianism is rehabilitated by the promise of freedom announced by human birth and the capacity for beginning again. Political natality, therefore, stands in resolute defiance against absolute domination; its indomitable factuality counters the utter bankruptcy of totalitarian tactics aimed at liquidating the gift of freedom. Each time a human being acts politically from the vantage point of the potentiality for a positive worldly beginning, he enlarges the field of political experience and creates the reality of freedom. When this happens, the initiator of action experiences a kind of ‘second birth’ and takes his place on the stage of the public world” (Bowen-Moore, 47). Again, to be clear, this Bowen- Moore’s read of Arendt’s position is only accurate if you take her revised Origins of Totalitarianism to be the best articulation. This later conception of action undermines Arendts earlier critiques of nature. 280 Arendt, The Human Condition, 247. 281 Arendt, On Revolution, 212.

129 that she earlier clung to—the limitless possibilities of action. Now one thing that action cannot do, according to Arendt, is wipe out freedom.

In addition to the concept of natality, there is a related aspect of Arendt’s thought that provides a basis from which Arendt may defend plurality. Arendt argues that what is given, including existence itself, as well as the individual content of that existence, ought to be responded to with respect and gratitude. What is given at natality is the seed of the individual that must be realized later through political action. Givenness includes not only life, but also the aspects of the individual that call for expression in the public sphere, including being Jewish and being a woman. Arendt writes, “The human sense of reality demands that men actualize the sheer passive givenness of their being, not in order to change it but in order to make articulate and call into full existence what otherwise they would have to suffer passively anyhow.”282 Arendt maintains that this is the meaning of a line from Dante that she translates as “Thus, nothing acts unless [by acting] it makes patent its latent self.”283 What is given is the latent self that is actualized by acting. Rahel

Varnhagen is an exploration of one woman’s process of coming to terms with what is given about her, including through expressing her distinctiveness among her friends and in public.

She realizes that she cannot become a parvenu, for this would be to deny truths about her that set her apart from others.

What is interesting about givenness is not that it exists. It is not a surprise, since natality itself is given. Rather, that is interesting is Arendt’s attitude toward what is given. Arendt

282 Arendt, The Human Condition, 208. 283 Ibid., 175.

130 characterizes the modern man as resenting everything given.284 She suggests that humans ought to do the opposite—they ought to exhibit “a fundamental gratitude for the few elementary things that indeed are invariably given us, such as life itself, the existence of man and the world.”285 People ought to take the chance to express their individual givenness as individuals among other individuals. They ought to bring this givenness into full existence. Here, Arendt seeks to protect the human capacity for action and the existence of plurality by positing that humans should accept what is given.

Freedom: The Family and Politics

We cannot talk about freedom in Arendt without reflecting on its relationship to family and to politics. Political freedom is crucial, according to Arendt, because action cannot occur outside of politics. If political freedom is not guaranteed, then any internal freedom that people have is irrelevant, since it cannot be actualized. The family is more complicated: On the one hand, the family is the realm of necessity, quite separated from politics. On the other, it is precisely the family that prepares people for public life; the family is a place that offers shelter for children as they grow and prepare to insert themselves into the political sphere. Arendt calls for a proper separation between the public and private realms for the sake of children, who need “concealment in order to mature undisturbed.”286 While she

284 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 438. 285 Ibid., 438. 286 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 188. Jean Bethke Elshtain questions Arendts unmitigated private role for children, maintaining that there is a difference between good and bad political involvement, and that children’s involvement, when necessary, in the public sphere is often to protect childhood’s privacy for others.

131 affirms the family’s pre-political role in preparing children to later participate in politics,

Arendt certainly does not see the labor of the household as equivalent to political action. In fact, the family is beneficial for helping to achieve the end of political action; it is not an end in itself.

Arendt recognizes the difficulties that women’s involvement in politics and public life raises for their role in the household. In one of her early published works, a book review of

Alice Rühle-Gerstel’s Das Frauen-problem der Gegenwart, “The Contemporary Woman’s

Problem,” she writes about the situation of the contemporary woman:

Not only must women accept, despite their legal equality, less pay than men in comparable positions, but they are still left with tasks which are no longer compatible with their new position. These tasks are based partly on social, partly on biological facts: In addition to her profession, a woman must take care of a household and look after her children. Thus a woman’s freedom to make her own living seems to imply either enslavement in the family or dissolution of the family.287

Arendt affirms the separation of the public and private spheres, although without the gendered division of the past; as Mary Deitz puts it: this is the “problem about how to dismantle previously gendered spaces while still retaining the spaces themselves.”288 While

Arendt’s view of the family is full of tensions, the family is an important unit of analysis for her—in fact her book review critiques Alice Rühle-Gerstel for adopting the individual as the unit of analysis, rather than the family.289

Additionally, she sees children as apprentice citizens, allowing for some political involvement. She writes, “Perhaps, thinking with Arendt, we can find ways to sustain childhood, not as a time of innocence, but as a time of apprenticeship that occupies a border in between private and public in a sphere or zone that adults bear the heaviest responsibility for sheltering and sustaining, not to protect children from politics but to prepare them for politics, for all the responsibilities of adult life” (Honig, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, 263-283, esp. 281). 287 Arendt, “On the Emancipation of Women,” 66-68. 288 Dietz, 116. 289 Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 68.

132 While the family prepares children for a role in political life, politically guaranteed freedom is crucial for the possibility of political action. In Between Past and Future, Arendt writes:

[W]herever the man-made world does not become the scene for action and speech—as in despotically ruled communities which banish their subjects into the narrowness of the home and thus prevent the rise of a public realm— freedom has no worldly reality. Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance. To be sure it may still dwell in men’s hearts as desire or will or hope or yearning; but the human heart, as we all know, is a very dark place, and whatever goes on in its obscurity can hardly be called a demonstrable fact.290

Freedom requires a politically guaranteed public realm.291 Without that, it might be a yearning or desire or a hope in men’s hearts, but it will not be a demonstrable fact. This freedom is fragile: “There are no institutions and revolutions, however radical, that can secure human freedom over the long term.”292 Man’s freedom is not secured once and for all, but rather must be continually secured through political means.

Arendt’s position on the importance of politics springs from the Jewish experience in

Europe. Arendt fights for the idea that Jewish people are equal as other peoples are equal; that is, they need to have an equal right to join in political society in order to guarantee rights for themselves.293 It is not through human rights that Jewish people will be free, according to Arendt. Human rights, “which are aimed only at protecting individuals from excesses of public force, cannot effectively protect them or create positive rights for

290 Arendt, Between Past and Future, 149. 291 What is this political space that needs to be continually ensured for humans? Most of the politics in America in Arendt’s day did not strike her as real political action. However, the township and the town-hall meeting, she writes, are appropriate spaces of freedom. So is participating on a jury—where there is a common public interest and different points of view are being brought forward (Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979], 317). Here her understanding of government as requiring expression at the local level is quite similar to Tocqueville’s, as is her reference to townships, which Tocqueville sees as important to American politics. 292 Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 174. 293 Ibid., 157.

133 them.”294 In order for Jewish people to have political rights as Jews, Arendt maintains that they must be allowed to participate in a political community as Jewish people.

This lesson is one that Arendt also applies to women. She warns that we ought not “mistake civil rights for political freedom, or to equate these preliminaries of civilized government with the very substance of a free republic. For political freedom means the right ‘to be a participator in government,’ or it means nothing.”295 This is freedom to “to be master over one’s own necessities of life and therefore potentially to be a free person, free to transcend his own life and enter the world all have in common.”296 Freedom is only to be found, then, in the equality of the public realm.297 Only through political involvement can women be free. Therefore, Arendt critiques the women’s movement for not going “forward on political fronts, which are still masculine fronts.”298 When the women’s movement does participate in politics, “it does so only as a unified, undifferentiated whole, which never succeeds in articulating concrete goals.”299 This reduces womanhood to something abstract, rather than revealing the rich diversity of individuals women ought to show themselves to be. In this sense, the woman’s movement is not concerned with real freedom, but only with civil rights.

One weakness in Arendt’s work is her lack of a well-developed notion of a civil sphere. The notion of a civil sphere occasionally emerges in Arendt’s work, but it does not seem to have

294 Ibid., 233. 295 Arendt, On Revolution, 221. 296 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 65. 297 Ibid., 32. For Arendt, the equality of the public realm is a legal equality that is established precisely because it does not occur in nature. 298 Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schoken Books, 1994), 67. 299 Ibid., 68.

134 an important role. One of the places that civil society is present in Arendt’s work is in the salon, as Seyla Benhabib points out. The Jewish salons in Berlin provided a social area outside of society, and Rahel Varnhagen’s garret room served as a salon. In establishing a salon, Rahel comes to terms with herself as a Jewish person and as a woman. And it is only because she is Jewish and a woman that she is able to fulfill the role that she does, simultaneously outside of and within society.300 Arendt also writes about the importance of free association in her “Reflections on Little Rock.” When she writes about the civil or social sphere, however, she does it almost dismissively: “We are driven into this sphere by the need to earn a living or attracted by the desire to follow our vocation or enticed by the pleasure of company, and once we have entered it, we become subject to the old adage of

‘like attracts like’ which controls the whole realm of society in the innumerable variety of its groups and associations.”301 It seems that the social or civil sphere is one of fulfilling our needs and desires. Arendt does not praise it for teaching us to associate, linking us together with others, as Tocqueville does. But then again, Arendt’s politics are less about the art of association then about the art of self-revelation. Suzanne Jacobitti, in her article considering

Tocqueville’s influence on Arendt, “Individualism & Political Community: Arendt &

Tocqueville on the Current Debate in Liberalism,” writes of Arendt’s lack of a well-defined notion of a civil sphere, “Tocqueville emphasizes what he calls ‘habits of the heart,’ i.e., non-political habits and sentiments such as religion and enlightened self-interest. Arendt looks almost exclusively to the political sphere, rejecting the use of religion and interest for political purposes.”302 Jacobitti is right to note that Arendt more strongly emphasizes

300 Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen. 301 Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent 6, no. 1 (1959): 45-56. 302 Suzanne Jacobitti, “Individualism & Political Community: Arendt & Tocqueville on the Current Debate in Liberalism” in Polity 23, no. 4 (Summer, 1991), 585-604, esp. 592. Jacobitti’s analysis here is incomplete: She

135 politics than does Tocqueville. This is because Arendt sees politics as central to what it means to be human, while Tocqueville simply sees association, of which political association is a variety, as essential to being human. However, Arendt’s lack of a theory of civil society leaves a significant gap in her work.

Concluding Remarks

As an advocate of public freedom who is also sensitive to the ways in which an influx of new participants in politics can affect the political sphere, Arendt offers nuanced and thought-provoking insights into a theory of women’s freedom. And because Arendt sees things like a being a Jewish person and being a woman as relevant and even beneficial to politics, she also worries about the tendency of the women of her day to approach politics as a group, rather than as individuals. She argues that politics is a place for individuals to disclose themselves in the midst of others. Being Jewish and being a woman, when acknowledged as aspects of the self-revelation of individuals through word and deed in politics, can contribute a rare and valuable critical perspective. When women approach politics as a group, asserting that being a woman means one particular thing and demanding that they be granted equality in private as well as public, Arendt fears that the political space will be corrupted. She fears that pervasive equality will threaten the very individual difference that is necessary to politics.

is wrong to see Arendt as looking “almost exclusively” to the political sphere, because, while Arendt says very little about religion, she does write about the importance of the private sphere. Jacobitti is also wrong to deemphasize the importance of politics for Tocqueville—mores and political participation both play an important role in his thought.

136 On the surface, Arendt seems to be belittling the private sphere, while endlessly praising the political sphere. She sweeps issues concerning the body and the family into the private sphere, raising the hackles of any feminist attentive to the way in which the personal and political spheres actually overlap. Indeed, Arendt too strenuously seeks to separate public and private; her theory is weaker for not understanding ways in which the individual could be fully human through non-political action.303 However, Arendt is masterful at showing how being a woman and being Jewish are not only relevant to the private sphere, but also play a role in politics. They make up the unique individual who participates in politics without over-determining the individual, nor implying a single, inflexible role for women.

Rather, being a woman and being Jewish are parts of the individual that must be accepted and explored through political participation.

Arendt vehemently objects to the existence of human nature in order to preserve the unpredictability of free action. She believes that should a human nature exist, it would cramp the freedom of human action in unconscionable ways: free action is limited, but only by customs or past actions. If, as Arendt argues, action is so free that people can become anything that they choose, then it is possible that their action could undermine the very plurality and difference that is a precondition for action. That is to say, humans could act in such a way that they could close off the possibility for further action. While Arendt’s half- joking motto regarding women was “Viva la petite difference!,” her understanding of human nature allows women to become anything that their condition permits, even potentially

303 Bhikhu Parekh writes, “[H]er criteria are based on a narrow view of good life. … If her criteria were consistently applied we would have to conclude that Mother Theresa, Albert Schweitzer, a woman who gave up a career to nurse her chronically sick mother and a politician who leaves public life to devote more time to his family are all living ‘meaningless’ and not fully human lives” (182).

137 denigrating that petite difference.304 In Men in Dark Times, Arendt maintains that the difference between men and women is a key part of plurality: “Just as men and women can be the same, namely human, only by being absolutely different from each other, so the national of every country can enter [the] world history of humanity only by remaining and clinging stubbornly to what he is. A world citizen would be no less a monster than a hermaphrodite.”305 Difference, including the difference between men and women, is essential to humanity. However, if we could create sexless beings who still acted, Arendt would have little basis for philosophical critique, since she denies the existence of human nature. Natality and givenness are the only tools that Arendt has by which she can argue for the preservation of the difference between men and women. In her revisions to The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt amends her position to emphasize that the possibility of action comes with the birth of each new person in the world. Furthermore, Arendt claims that we ought to have an attitude of respect and gratitude toward what is given. This is an important limit to freedom, one that does some of the work that the limits of nature might have done.

Freedom is connected both to politics, directly, and to the family, indirectly. It is through politics that freedom is practiced; this means that freedom must be politically guaranteed in order for it to be really present. It is in the political sphere that the individual acts, so individual freedom and political freedom are inseparable, for Arendt. Freedom is related to

304 Young-Bruehl, 238. 305 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 89. Pitkin writes, “And if I must accept my public classifications as a woman, a Jew, an American, does that mean I must also accept the conventional stereotypes about femininity, Judaism, and Americanism?” Arendt argues strongly against simply filling conventional stereotypes—the facts that are given about a person (including being a man or woman) do not imply only one thing; rather, one must make sense of their particular expression through her own life. The one thing that a person ought not do is deny or ignore them, for then she functions as a parvenu. For Arendt, being a woman does not mean being separated from the public into the private sphere. However, if Arendt were to deny the fact that she is a woman, then she would be rejecting what was given about her. Whatever public involvement that she had, then, would be built on a deception and a rejection of herself.

138 the family indirectly. While the family, part of the private sphere, is a place of necessity rather than freedom, it also does the work of concealing the child until he is mature enough to enter political life. Arendt affirms the separate and complementary orderings of family and politics. However, the family is subservient to politics—it is a means to the end of politics.

To go back to the question with which this paper began: What, then, will we lose if we win?

If we lose the difference between men and women in the midst of expanding equality, we will lose one aspect of plurality. We will deny a fact about ourselves. If we allow social questions to enter the public sphere, which the women’s movement was calling for in

Arendt’s day, then we will lose the political sphere itself, and with it the political guarantee of free action. Arendt’s conception of politics advocates a political role for women.

However, Arendt strictly defines what may and may not occur in politics. Most importantly,

Arendt recognizes that the women’s liberation movement involves trade-offs. Women’s entrance into the public sphere, while important, creates tensions with the flourishing of the family and with the vitality of the private sphere. Arendt seeks to defend the possibility of politics, for both men and women, in the midst of these threats.

139

CHAPTER 4

The Ancient Answer to the Contemporary Problem:

Aristotle on Women, Nature, Custom and Reason

Role of Women

The theories regarding women’s role considered in this dissertation—those of Tocqueville,

Mill and Arendt—are vastly different. Some appear to denigrate women—Tocqueville wants to keep them in the realm of family and religion; Arendt fastidiously avoids any identification with feminism and affirms a politics that some interpreters perceive as masculine, one that quenches any contribution women might make to the political arrangement. Mill seeks economic and political equality for women, focusing on women’s individual rights rather than on the health of the family and of the political order. I maintain that in order to understand and engage with these thinkers’ recommendations regarding women’s role, one must consider women’s freedom within the context of nature and custom, as well as within the context of individual freedom, the freedom of the family and political freedom. In addition, one must consider the various sorts of freedom that these thinkers seek to protect. Tocqueville, Mill and Arendt struggle over how women ought to engage in public life given the emergence of democracy; I argue that Aristotle’s conception of women’s role offers significant insights into the problems that Tocqueville, Mill and

Arendt articulate but are unable to solve.

140 Tocqueville senses that the forces of democracy are pushing toward equality, an equality that may soon eliminate the difference in function between men and women. In this face of this push toward equality, Tocqueville sees women as primarily oriented toward religion and the family. He maintains that women are able to make the most significant contribution to the common good by confining themselves to the private sphere, rather than entering the public sphere that is concerned with politics and business. This is not because women lack political savvy or a business mind. Rather, women maximize their societal power when they highlight their difference from men. In addition, the public/private split between men and women reinforces natural differences, which are both beneficial to and threatened by the democratic age.

Mill is writing just after Tocqueville and, like Tocqueville, praises democracy. But on women, Mill is at odds with Tocqueville: Mill sees past political and economic inequality between men and women as harmful both to women and to society as a whole. Thus, he advocates political and economic equality for women and seeks women’s freedom to engage in the public sphere in all ways that men may. He foresees this expansion of liberty having great social benefits, as women expand competition in the workplace. As he makes clear, progress emerges from such equality.

For Mill, equality within both the public and private spheres is important; this sharply contrasts with Tocqueville’s argument that the family ought to be ordered differently from political institutions, providing a place of retreat and harmony away from political chaos.

Women’s individual rights trump concerns about the adverse effects that might be wrought

141 by women’s entrance into the public sphere. But when it comes to increasing democratization in other areas, Mill is hesitant. His concern about the ills of democracy, which includes a fear of the tyranny of the majority and of slipping into mediocrity, does not apply to women’s political participation. Another reason that Mill is so enthusiastic about women’s political involvement and about reordering the family is that his theory is driven by a concern for individual women, not for women as part of families or for the importance of children for the future of political society. On the topic of children and the family, Mill is oddly quiet.

Arendt engages in the conversation between Tocqueville and Mill that took place a century earlier. The question of her time is about more than how women’s entrance into public life will affect the public sphere: Arendt is also concerned with feminists’ attempts to bring concerns of private life into the public sphere. Arendt is coy about her views on women’s role, far less forthright than Tocqueville and Mill. Nonetheless, both her station as the first female political philosopher of her stature, as well as her concern with questions of human identity and the relationship between public and private, means that her work makes a significant contribution to debates over women’s role.

Arendt’s position, pieced together from her oblique comments in her writings, is that the difference between men and women is important, rooted in what is given, and relevant to both women’s private and public interactions. Women’s impact on the public sphere, however, ought to be one that brings their individuality to bear without eroding the boundary between the public and private spheres. Like Tocqueville, Arendt sees women as

142 having more power as a result of their difference than they could have if they were identical to men. Like Mill, though, Arendt sees a public role as appropriate to women, insofar as they are humans for whom action is the highest expression of their humanity. Arendt, though her work has its own tensions and weaknesses, acts admirably as a referee between

Tocqueville and Mill, carrying some of their same concerns into the twentieth century: like them, Arendt is concerned with the manner in which democratization occurs, perceiving both its immense potential and accompanying problems .

In this final chapter, I add another voice to the conversation, although one that has been there all along through its influence on Arendt and Tocqueville: Aristotle’s. While many readers of Aristotle characterize him as patriarchal, I am attentive to the ways in which he questions the received ideas of women’s role. In addition, his understanding of the relationship among nature, habit and reason is insightful, as is his affirmation of both the household and the city as places in which human excellence can be achieved. Turning back to Aristotle illuminates the problems struggled with by Tocqueville, Mill and Arendt.

Aristotle overtly writes that women are inferior to men and that their role is in the household and not in the political sphere. For instance, he writes, “Further, the relation of male to female is by nature a relation of superior to inferior and ruler to ruled.”306 At another point, Aristotle writes almost opaquely about women’s reason: “The parts of the soul are present in all, but they are present in a different way. The slave is wholly lacking the deliberative element; the female has it but it lacks authority; the child has it but it is

306 Aristotle, The Politics, 40–41, 1254b12–14.

143 incomplete.”307 What does it mean for a female to have reason, insofar as she is human, but yet lack authority? Is the lack of authoritative reason natural or is it the result of customary gender relations? Ought this lack of authority of the female’s reason to continue? Upon a closer study of his work and of his references, Aristotle’s position on women’s role becomes both clearer and more nuanced.308

307 Ibid., 53, 1260a10–13. 308 I do not dwell on Aristotle’s metaphysical nor biological understanding of females, although they are of interest here. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle explains the way in which male and female differ. The difference between male and female is a difference of contrariety or opposite. This contrariety, however, of female and male belongs qua animal: “But male and female, while they are modifications peculiar to ‘animal’, are not so in virtue of its essence but in the matter, i.e. the body” (Aristotle, The Basic Works Of, 848–849, 1058a29– 1058b258). Aristotle points to important differences between male and female; however, men and women are more than bodies for Aristotle, so it is important not to take the differences between male and female qua animals as the whole of Aristotle’s position on the difference between male and female human animals. This is not to say that Aristotle understands sex difference to be something insignificant—on the contrary, he sees bodies as intimately connected to souls and differences in bodies to significantly impact the development of the whole. Aristotle’s biological descriptions of sexual difference are striking: the differences between male and female that Aristotle points to are hierarchical, with the male being superior to the female. Aristotle writes, “Nobles of all are those whose blood is hot, and at the same time thin and clear. For such are suited alike for the development of courage and of intelligence. Accordingly, the upper parts are superior in these respects to the lower, the male superior to the female, and the right side to the left” (Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, Book 2, Part 2). Aristotle also explains that male animals have some parts that female animals lack, such as horns or spurs, because they are stronger and more choleric than females. He maintains that nature provides what is physically necessary, and that this differs along sex lines (Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, Book 3, Part 1). Aristotle maintains that not everything is matter and privation, but that there is the form (which is “divine, good, and desirable), as well as what desires that form (the matter), and what is contrary to it—the privation. In order to explain this further, he writes, “The truth is that what desires the form is matter, as the female desires the male and the ugly the beautiful-only the ugly or the female not per se but per accidens.” This is important on two points—it reinforces Aristotle’s point that the male is superior; second, it reinforces the point that male and female are not essential, but accidental (Aristotle, The Basic Works Of, 235, Book 1, Ch. 9, 192a22–24). In The Female in Aristotle’s Biology: Reason or Rationalization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), Robert Mayhew convincingly argues that while many of Aristotle’s biological observations and writings were incorrect, they were not, as many feminist’s claim, ideologically motivated (ix). He is responding to the work of people like Judith Green (“Aristotle on Necessary Verticality, Body Heat, and Gendered Proper Places in the Polis: A Feminist Critique” Hypatia 7.1 (Winter, 1992) 70-96), who claims not only that Aristotle is at odds with feminism, but that his feminism is part of his consistent theoretical corpus, and that critiquing his position on women critiques his whole body of thought (70). For instance, while many of Aristotle’s critics focus on his assertion that males provide the form and females provide the matter in procreation, Mayhew replies with a reminder of Aristotle’s claims that women, too, provide seed (36). Similarly, Mayhew explores Aristotle’s assertion that “the female is as it were a mutilated male” (54). He maintains that this must be understood in the context of eunuchs and castration: “Aristotle moves from the fact that castration—a change in a relatively small part of the body—affects the whole body, to the idea that a small change in an embryo (or in the development of an embryo) can account for differences between males and females” (60). Mayhew explains a not-unsound philosophical contribution that Aristotle makes and that is reflected in his biological writings:

144

Aristotle illuminates women’s reason when he discusses them in relation to slaves, maintaining that the treatment of women is a defining difference between the Greeks and the barbarians. For the Greeks, the woman is different from the slave; for barbarians the woman and the slave are the same thing: “The reason for this is that they [barbarians] have no naturally ruling element; with them, the partnership [of man and woman] is that of female slave and male slave. This is why the poets say ‘it is fitting for Greeks to rule barbarians’—the assumption being that barbarian and slave are by nature the same thing.”309

Greek women, then, are different from slaves because Greeks possess a naturally ruling element. The recognition of this difference between women and slaves distinguishes Greeks from barbarians, according to Aristotle. For the barbarians, the household is only for reproduction, whereas the Greeks recognize that women have reason, even if they deny that their reason has authority.310 While reproduction is central to the partnership of the

Aristotle believed that there was an intimate connection between body and soul; he rejected the dualism of Pythagoras and Plato. In the opening chapter of his De Anima, he writes that the affections of the soul (including the spirit and appetite) involve the body (403a17; see also De sensu 1.439a9). So Aristotle would be inclined to expect that a difference in body would tend to imply a difference in soul—in some respect, though not wholly—and vice versa. And this is often a philosophically sound inference to make. (108) Mayhew systematically debunks claims that Aristotle’s biology was ideologically motivated, showing, instead, that while much of Aristotle’s biological assessment of female animals was wrong, it was not maliciously so. Daryl McGowan Tess in “The Metaphysical Science of Aristotle’s Generation of Animals and Its Feminist Critics” also tries to show how some feminist criticisms of Aristotle’s biology are misguided (in Ward, Julia K. Feminism and Ancient Philosophy [New York: Routledge, 1996], 31-50). 309 Aristotle, The Politics, 36, 1252b1–9. 310 I am seeking to establish that Aristotle’s treatment of women subtly undermines the received views of his women that were popular in his day. Aristotle’s separation of women from slaves is part of that. I take my starting point for reading Aristotle on women from Gerald Mara’s treatment of Aristotle on slavery. Mara describes what he takes to be Aristotle’s method: “Aristotle’s treatment of culture is dialogic in nature, both representing and engaging diverse cultural voices over the questions of how one should live and how one’s society should be structured” (Gerald Mara, “The Near Made Far Away: The Role of Cultural Criticism in Aristotle’s Political Theory” in Political Theory 23.2 [May 1995] 280-303, 281). Mara maintains that Aristotle undermines slavery by making it a question of justice rather than of political inevitability or economic utility (284). He writes:

145 household, it is not the sole aspect of the household’s existence—ruling and being ruled are also part of the household relationship; women have at least the reason necessary to be ruled, if not to rule.

Aristotle further explains that women are by nature free when he differentiates between mastery and political rule; political rule is over those free by nature; mastery is over slaves.311 The wife is ruled in the political fashion, as a free person.312 It is particularly important that Aristotle does not liken the marital relationship to a kingship, but rather to an aristocracy, where the best rule:

For the man’s rule in the area where it is right accords with the worth [of each], and he commits to the woman what is fitting for her. If, however, the man controls everything, he changes it into an oligarchy; for then his action does not accord with the worth [of each], or with the respect in which [each] is better. Sometimes, indeed, women rule because they are heiresses; these cases of rule do not accord with virtue, but result from wealth and power, as is true in oligarchies.313

A marital relationship ought to correspond to an aristocracy, where the people control what they are best at controlling. Aristotle’s explanation of the marital aristocracy is telling: he

Yet Aristotle’s positing of a substantial conception of the human occurs more in the way of posing unavoidable questions than of offering absolute answers. … However this more determinate conception of the human is grasped neither abstractly nor transcendentally, but emerges concretely and dialogically, and this means imperfectly, as Homer and Euripides, Herodotus and Thucydides, Sparta and Carthage, Scythia and Persia, are all interrogated regarding their similarities, differences, achievements, and shortcomings. This imperfect emergence of the human through cultural interrogation thus encourages the more adequate, although hardly perfect, investigation of the human as a species characteristic in the Ethics, the De Anima, and some of the biological works. (297) Aristotle seeks to establish a conception of the human dialogically, through cultural interrogation. This dialogic method, when applied to the problem of slavery, allows Aristotle to subtly shift the conversation, without explicitly attacking slavery. Similarly, Aristotle’s understanding of the role of women does not simply assume the role of women that was dominant in his day. Rather, he subtly questions it, as I will argue, especially through his references to Herodotus and Sophocles. 311 Aristotle, The Politics, Book 1, Ch. 7. 312 Ibid., 52, 1529a41. 313 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 131, 1160b33–1161a4.

146 does not say that the man ought to control everything; in fact, if he does, then he is an oligarchic ruler, one who rules not because he is best suited to rule and will order his rule to the common good, but because he has taken power, often due to the fact that he has more wealth, and will rule on behalf of his own interests. Rather, in a marital aristocracy, each should rule according to his or her worth. This means that neither men nor women ought to have complete power in the relationship, nor should either rule in their own interest. Just as if men alone rule, they change the aristocracy into an oligarchy, so if women alone rule, they also rule as an oligarchy. Aristotle argues that marital rule ought to be in accord with virtue and ordered to the good of the family.314

However, while women ought to rule according to their worth and men ought to rule according to theirs, we must ask why this is not a feature of the political realm in Aristotle’s time. Aristotle explains that the man is by

nature more expert at leading than the female … In most political offices, it is true, there is an alternation of ruler and ruled, since they tend by their nature to be on equal footing and to differ in nothing; all the same, when one rules and the other is ruled [the ruler] seeks to establish differences in external appearance, forms of address, and prerogatives, as in the story Amasis told about his footpan. The male always stands thus in relation to the female.315

Aristotle says explicitly that man is by nature more expert at leading than the female. He points to a natural difference between men and women. Still, he does not say that women

314 Harold L. Levy suggests in “Does Aristotle Exclude Women from Politics?” (in The Review of Politics 52.3 [Summer 1990], 397-416) that women actually have a natural aptitude for prudence, a political ruler’s special virtue. This can be seen by women’s ability with regard to the rearing of the young, which is also a concern of the lawgiver (399). However, Levy also maintains that Aristotle is ambiguous on his position on women’s role in order to conceal his intention because his audience understands conventional sex roles to be sacred (401). I think that Levy goes too far here; Levy’s position does not give sufficient weight to the importance of generation and the family to Aristotle. I do not take Aristotle’s affirmation of the body and the body’s connection to the soul and his attention to the importance of procreation to be solely deference to the mores of his day. Rather, I find them to be significant political insights. 315 Ibid., 52, 1259a44-1259b10.

147 are unable to lead by nature, but that men are more expert. Furthermore, immediately after claiming that the male is more expert at leading, Aristotle says that when there is no difference between ruler and ruled, the ruler attempts to establish external differences in order to cement his position as ruler. He then introduces the story of Amasis and his footpan and claims that this explains the relationship between the male and the female: men rule in the public realm because men have established differences in “external appearance, forms of address, and prerogatives,” differences of custom instead of differences of nature. Without explicitly questioning the role of women in his society, Aristotle complicates and even undermines the idea that he starts with—that men are by nature more expert at ruling.

A deeper examination of the story of Amasis, which is told by Herodotus, will make this clearer. Herodotus explains that Apries, king of the Egyptians, faced a people who rebelled from him after they were defeated in battle.316 Apries sent Amasis to placate the rebels. As

Amasis arrived, “an Egyptian [rebel] came behind him and put a helmet on his head, saying it was the token of royalty. And Amasis showed that this was not displeasing to him, for being made king by the rebel Egyptians he prepared to march against Apries.”317 Instead of encouraging the rebel people to submit themselves to Apries’ rule, as he was sent to do,

Amasis accepts their move to appoint him to rule them; Amasis and Apries are now at war with one another. Apries’ bodyguards, whom Herodotus calls “strangers,” marched against his own people; “they came both to Momemphis, where it was their purpose to prove each

316 Herodotus, Herodotus, I:475, II.161. 317 Ibid., I:476–477, II.162.

148 other’s quality.”318 Amasis won. However, despite winning the battle, Amasis faced resistance to his rule:

Apries being thus deposed, Amasis became king; … Now at first he was contemned and held in but little regard by the Egyptians, as having been but a common man and of no high family; but presently he won them to him by being cunning and not arrogant. He had among his countless treasures a golden foot-bath, in which he and all those who feasted with him were ever wont to wash their feet. This he broke in pieces and made thereof a god’s image, which he set in the most fitting place in the city; and the Egyptians came ever and anon to this image and held it in great reverence. When Amasis knew what the townsmen did, he called the Egyptians together and told them that the image had been made out of the foot-bath; once (said he) his subjects had washed their feet in it and put it to yet viler uses; now they greatly revered it. “Do now” (quoth he to them) “it has fared with me as with the foot-bath; once I was a common man, now I am your king; it is your duty to honour me and hold me in regard.”319

Amasis cleverly shows his subjects that there is no natural difference between his gold footpan and the image of a god. The difference that exists between the two depends on the value that social conventions place on the thing. This is the only difference that exists between a common man and a man of high family; as Aristotle interprets the story, this is also the difference that exists between men and women.320

Aristotle both explains and questions the prevailing idea of his day—that the male is more expert at leading than the female and that this arrangement best matches nature’s intention.

Aristotle questions this perception of nature by adding a caveat: the male is more expert at leading “unless [he is] constituted in some respect contrary to nature.”321 Here Aristotle shows that men are not always the best at ruling, which encourages the reader to consider

318 Ibid., I:479, II.163. 319 Ibid., I:486–487, 172. 320 Ibid., I:488–489, 174. Of course, it must also be noted that after this Amasis degenerates, as he was degenerate before, into following his appetites rather than ruling well. 321 Aristotle, The Politics, 52, 1259a39–1259b1.

149 what the implications of being male or female are on ruling. Aristotle further questions the argument that men are by nature better rulers by showing the way in which rulers attempt to establish difference, even where none exists: “[W]hen one rules and the other is ruled, [the ruler] seeks to establish differences in external appearance, forms of address, and prerogatives, as in the story Amasis told about his footpan. The male always stands thus in relation to the female.”322 At the very least, Aristotle here allows that females may sometimes, contrary to nature, be more expert at ruling than the male.

It is possible, though, that Aristotle is allowing for something even stronger—that men and women can be equally made of gold, or have ruling capability, but that men attempt to distinguish themselves from women by changing their outward appearance, or by developing different forms of address or benefits. Like the gold footpan, a woman may be made of gold and well-suited to rule. Determining in advance that women, or lowly born

Amasis, are not excellent at ruling is impossible, given that this excellence may be hiding in unexpected places. Aristotle is undermining the idea that he appears to be upholding—the idea that ruling is natural to men and unnatural to women.

Next, Aristotle asks if women have virtues, and if so, if those virtues are the similar to or different from men’s virtues.323 This is important, because if women can be virtuous and pursue excellence, it is less clear why men should rule and women should be ruled. In fact, even to be ruled, according to Aristotle, one needs virtue, and so women must have virtue,

322 Ibid., 52, 1259b4–9. 323 Aristotle asks the same question in Book 1, Chapter 13 about slaves. If they do have virtues, he asks, then how do they differ from free men? If not, then why not, given that they are human beings who have reason?

150 though its qualities are different from that of men.324 Men have the virtue of ruling, and women the virtue appropriate to being ruled. He writes that “All must share in [the virtues], but not in the same way, but to each in relation to his own work.” The moderation of a woman and a man is not the same; likewise, there is courage proper to ruling and courage proper to serving. Aristotle seems to claim, in accordance with the received wisdom of his time, that this is because men and women are by nature different, with different roles.

However, if, as we saw above, it is the case that women can rule, then women could have the virtue of the ruler instead of the ruled. Because virtue is developed according to one’s function, if one’s function changes, then the virtue appropriate to that function changes.

Once again, it seems that Aristotle makes room for women to share in the virtue appropriate to ruling.

In order to explain how virtue relates to women, Aristotle maintains that it can be enlightening to enumerate the virtues, rather than vaguely talking about them. He proceeds to enumerate one virtue before moving on: “One should thus consider that matters stand with everyone as the poet said of the woman: ‘to a woman silence is an ornament,’ thought this is not the case for a man.”325 He does not explain how courage or moderation differ in the ruler from the ruled; rather, he says that silence suits women. Here he is quoting from

324 Aristotle asks whether the woman should be moderate and courageous and just … And in general, then, this must be investigated concerning the ruled by nature and the ruler, whether virtue is the same or different. For if both should share in gentlemanliness, why should the one rule and the other be ruled once and for all? For it is not possible for them to differ by greater and less, since being ruled and ruling differ in kind, not by greater and less; but that one should [have such virtue] would not be surprising. For unless the ruler is moderate and just, how will he rule finely? And unless the ruled is, how will he be ruled finely? For if he is licentious and cowardly he will perform none of his duties. It is evident, then, that both must if necessity share in virtue, but that there are differences in their virtue, as there are in [that of] those who are by nature ruled. (Aristotle, The Politics, 53, 1259b30–1260a3). 325 Aristotle, The Politics, 53, 1260a28–31.

151 Sophocles’ Ajax, and the context shows that he is being ironic when he says that silence suits women. A brief examination of the play shows that Aristotle may have been subtly picking up on and perpetuating that irony.

Ajax is named after Ajax, the play’s protagonist, who is angry at Odysseus because he received Achilles’ armor rather than Ajax. To protect Odysseus, the goddess Athena convinces Ajax that Odysseus and others have been turned into livestock. Ajax slaughters the animals and then realizes what he has done and kills himself. His wife Tecmessa, whom he had originally taken as a prisoner, asks him just before he goes to slaughter the animals in the middle of the night where he is going and what he is doing. Ajax replies to her,

“Silence best becomes a woman,” dismissing her and rushing off. 326 If Ajax had listened to his wife, rather than silencing her, the tragedy of the play would not have occurred. Silence is not proven to be the grace of a woman in this play: it would have been better if Tecmessa could have stopped Ajax and reasoned with him, provided that Ajax would have listened to her.327 It is ironic, too, that Sophocles does not give Ajax the lines silencing his wife; rather, at that point in the play, Tecmessa is recounting what happened, including the words her husband said. Thus, even in the assertion that silence best becomes a woman, a woman is speaking. Despite Ajax’s knowledge of his wife’s intelligence and foresight, he disregards her repeatedly: he also tells her not to question him when he is preparing to go kill himself.

Over and over, he tells her to be quiet: as she cautions him to not utter proud words against the gods he says, “Tell someone who’ll listen.”328 And later to her question, “Won’t you

326 Sophocles, Ajax, 23, 293. 327 In fact Tecmessa is the clever one in Ajax—for instance, Ajax says of her initiative to hide his son from him in order to protect his son, “I approve your action, and your presence of mind” (Sophocles, Ajax, 39, 536). 328 Ibid., 43, 591.

152 listen?” he replies, “You’ve said too much already.”329 In spite of his repeated commands for her to be silent, the reader sees that it is precisely Tecmessa’s wisdom, expressed through her speech, that would have saved Ajax. Aristotle’s use of Ajax to convey the importance of women’s silence picks up on and continues Sophocles’s irony.

Aristotle most explicitly lays out the characteristics of women’s virtue and the importance of encouraging women to develop it in the context of a discussion of what it means to possess good children, which is one aspect of happiness:

Both male and female are here included; the excellences of the latter are, in body, beauty and stature; in soul, self-command and an industry that is not sordid. Communities as well as individuals should lack none of these perfections, in their women as well as in their men. Where, as among the Lacedaemonians, the state of women is bad, almost half of human life is spoilt.330

Here we see that attention to women’s excellence is necessary to the happiness of the city.

Women’s excellence is beauty and stature in body and self-command and industry in soul.

Industry and self-command are involved in many occupations, both those inside and outside of the home. In addition, both industry and self-command are applicable to men as well as to women. This is not to say that Aristotle’s discussion of male and female virtue is equivalent: female virtue is discussed in the context of male virtue and pursuit of happiness; female virtue comes into the discussion with regard to children, not adults; Aristotle genders the body—women’s bodily excellence is beauty, which is a different from men’s bodily excellence, which involves, “health, beauty, strength, large stature, athletic powers.”331

329 Ibid., 43, 592. 330 Aristotle, The Basic Works, 1341, Book 1, Ch.5, 1361a6–12. The beauty of the young man’s soul is temperance and courage. 331 Ibid., 1340, Book 1, Ch. 5, 1360b22. It is primarily different insofar as women’s excellence does not require the strength and size and athleticism that men’s excellence does.

153 Nevertheless, this may still be part of Aristotle subtly undermining received conventions about women insofar as it shows where women’s virtue intersects with the common good—

“the state of women is bad, almost half of human life is spoilt”—and where women’s virtue is similar to men’s virtue—in “self-command and an industry that is not sordid.”

Aristotle highlights women’s potential for excellence when he affirms the possibility of marital friendship, showing that women are more than bodies that are reproductively useful:

The friendship of man and woman also seems to be natural. For human beings form couples more naturally than they form cities, to the extent that the household is prior to the city, and more necessary, and childbearing is shared more widely among the animals. For the other animals, the community goes only as far as childbearing. Human beings, however, share a household not only for childbearing, but also for the benefits in their life. For the difference between them implies that their functions are divided, with different ones for the man and the woman; hence each supplies the other’s needs by contributing a special function to the common good. For this reason their friendship seems to include both utility and pleasure.

And it may also be friendship with virtue, if they are decent. For each has a proper virtue, and this will be a source of enjoyment for them.332

Friendship between men and women is natural; the friendship between them need not be limited to pleasure and use (for the sake of procreation), but also may be a friendship in virtue, which animals cannot have. Aristotle is clear that childbearing does not exhaust relationships between men and women; rather, they are able to share a friendship by virtue of what is shared between them—their common human nature.333

332 Ibid., 133–134, 1162a17–27. 333 The possibility of marital friendship is one of the strongest arguments against Susan Okin’s reading of Aristotle in Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Okin calls Aristotle a functionalist, who asserts that things derive their character from their function (74). She maintains that while, for men, their end is in themselves and their own happiness, women must serve men in attaining their end: Thus, in accordance with his characteristic teleology, Aristotle argues that not only the entire animal kingdom, but the vast majority of humans as well, are intended by nature to be the instruments which supply to the few the necessities and comforts that will enable them to be

154

We must also consider how this female excellence applies to the home and to the state.

While Aristotle subtly undermines and questions the received role of women of his day, this is not to say that he sees men and women as identical, without important sex differences that have pervasive effects. However, Aristotle’s examples, such as Amasis’s footpan and Ajax and Tecmessa, and his descriptions of women’s excellence and marital friendship all point to the potential for a broader role for women. Furthermore, the virtues of a woman’s soul, self-command and industry, would seem to make it possible for women to rule, despite it not being customary in Aristotle’s day.

Nature, Habit, Reason

As demonstrated above, Aristotle’s understanding of women’s role can be pieced together from a careful reading of his works. But his understanding of the relationship among nature, habit and reason also gives insights into a future role for women. In addition, the close connection Aristotle draws between these characteristics provides a solution to a problem with which Tocqueville, Mill and Arendt wrestle. Tocqueville and Mill, for example, theorize about women’s role in the political and social world in a time of not only increasing democratization but also of particular change in women’s public role. Both

happy in their contemplative activity. Thus, women, slaves, and artisans and traders are all subsidiary instruments for the achievements of the highest happiness of “man.” … Human good and human happiness have been defined in such a way that the vast majority of the human race is necessarily excluded from the achievement of either. (77-78). I read Aristotle’s description of marital friendship and of women’s virtue, however, as opening up the possibility for both men’s and women’s functions to contribute simultaneously to their own excellence and to the common good. Okin writes, “As the context makes very clear, the slave’s function is the provision of the daily needs of subsistence, whereas the female’s primary function is reproduction” (81). She sees Aristotle as relegating “women to an altogether subhuman position” (87). While Aristotle esteems generation and the role of men and women and the family in it, this is not the only aspect of the relationship between men and women.

155 consider women’s freedom to engage with politics in light of women’s nature and the customs that formed that nature, both those of their day and throughout history. Their recommendations for women’s role and even their responses to democratization relied on their understandings of nature and custom. Tocqueville, however, is ultimately hesitant when it comes to relying on nature’s durability, and Mill declares that nature cannot be a guide, for it contains both good and evil within it.

Tocqueville’s and Mill’s conceptions of the relationship between nature and custom are persuasive to varying degrees. Tocqueville writes that nature and custom are so closely tied that they mutually impact one another. Changing customs can even appear to change nature; although since nature is fundamentally unchanging, customs change which aspects of nature are revealed and hence alter our perception of nature. Nature, in turn, ought to inform custom, although nature’s influence can be subverted, resulting in customs that are at odds with nature. Tocqueville theorizes that the good of society and the good of the individual is best achieved when custom supports nature. In this case, nature is identified by

Tocqueville’s reason as well as by the reason of the past. Tocqueville is hesitant to rely on nature when it comes to women’s role: he advocates a gendered division of labor, because he worries that without a difference in function men and women will become increasingly alike.

Mill ostensibly seeks to divorce custom from nature, maintaining that we can only know what nature is when customs are created that allow nature to express itself. In one sense, his view is similar to Tocqueville: custom is so influential that nature can be mutilated by it.

156 But ultimately he goes further than Tocqueville: for Mill, custom is so influential that nature can be completely obscured by it. Tocqueville would not admit of this complete, permanent obfuscation of nature by custom. Thus, while Tocqueville’s conception of nature is certainly not classical, it does preserve the foundation of nature’s permanence. Mankind’s nature cannot completely change, even if it appears to do so.

As I argue in my discussion of Mill, there is a gap between what he sets out to do and what he in fact accomplishes. While he contrasts custom and progress, he is not able to entirely eliminate custom. This is not surprising, for a theory that entirely eliminates custom would not long endure. Custom itself is natural: humans engaging in social behavior fall back on common ways of action. Against Mill, I maintain that this tendency is not to be disparaged; common ways of acting facilitate future social interactions. Innovation, as Mill argues, is also natural. Customs change; they can be improved or degraded when innovated. What

Mill neglects to mention is that it is in the context of customs that innovations happen; similarly, it is in the context of established gender relations that women advocated for increased political and economic liberties. These changes establish new customs, which then can be further innovated.

For Tocqueville, unlike Mill, innovation does not go all the way down—it changes the way our nature is expressed, but it does not change our nature itself. For Mill, innovation must go all the way down—women’s nature has been fundamentally distorted by inadvisable customs; these customs stand in the way of women’s (and society’s) progress and so must be eliminated. Women’s nature does not provide a guide for identifying beneficial customs:

157 since our nature contains within it both good and evil, it is up to human action to discover and then encourage the good parts of our nature.

Tocqueville’s and Mill’s understanding of women’s nature is consistent with their broader positions on nature: Tocqueville sees women’s nature as permanently capable of participation in the public world, regardless of whether it is advisable for women to practice that capacity; Mill sees women’s nature as unrevealed and flexible, depending on the customs that are adopted. Tocqueville and Mill are writing in the midst of increasing democratization, but before women had guaranteed economic and political liberty. Hence, to expand democratic liberties they offer two very different responses to the trend of their day. Tocqueville cautions against an unreflective embrace of democratization; Mill is more enthusiastic, although he also saw potential problems with democratization, particularly with a revolutionary and unreflective expansion of the franchise. He advocates instead for a gradual expansion of democracy. This general circumspection with regard to democratization, however, is less prominent in Mill’s positions regarding women’s participation in politics.

Although Mill radically redefines nature and attacks custom, Tocqueville and Mill are at least theorizing about women’s freedom with reference both to human nature and to custom. Arendt, however, seeks to further unmoor freedom, including women’s freedom, from nature. Unlike when Tocqueville and Mill were writing, in Arendt’s time, political and economic liberty for women was assumed. Thus, Arendt was facing a slightly different question with regard to women’s freedom. She was writing just before and during the

158 Women’s Liberation Movement, when women’s liberty was being discussed in terms of the remediation of societal injustice: women were seeking equal social treatment. A rallying cry of the Women’s Liberation Movement was that the personal is political.334 Arendt intentionally resisted this urge in her own writing, arguing that the personal and political ought to be kept separate. Arendt argues that women, like men, ought to have the freedom to engage in political action, and through that engagement in political action, to become fully human. However, Arendt writes from a specific understanding of the definition of politics, arguing that her conception of political action is necessary in order to create a well- functioning public sphere. Women’s freedom, then, is limited by a political form that

Arendt herself posits.

In one sense, for Arendt women’s freedom is the same as men’s freedom—action in the political sphere where biological concerns are not relevant. But Arendt also supports la petite difference between men and women. In the face of the Women’s Liberation

Movement’s push for an elimination of the boundary between personal and political, Arendt wants to maintain that difference between men and women and between the private and political spheres. She argues that this difference is part of the plurality that makes people different from one another. Arendt is perhaps overly narrow in her concept of freedom: for instance, the private life is by definition a place of necessity and not a place of freedom. Her use of the term “freedom” is one that she posits and one that only tenuously connects to our use of the word in everyday language. This discussion of freedom is incomplete insofar as it

334 The phrase, “The Personal is Political” can be traced to Carol Hanisch’s 1969 essay, which was given that title in the 1970 Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, according to her 2006 introduction to the essay. She maintains in the essay that “personal problems are political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.” It seems that the phrase, “the personal is political,” is a phrase that was in popular use before Hanisch’s essay.

159 excludes freedom entirely from private interactions. However, Arendt’s position is still instructive—free political action is compromised when the separation of private concerns from public concerns is eroded or even entirely eliminated.

Just as Mill attempts to separate freedom from custom through a redefinition of nature, so

Arendt attempts to separate freedom from nature. For Arendt, to adhere to an idea of human nature as an unchanging purpose or end is to limit human freedom in an unconscionable way. The only descriptive limit that Arendt allows on free action is a flexible one: the limit of preceding actions, a type of custom. Free actions occur within past actions. This means that the outcome of actions is not predictable. Humans are conditioned beings; that conditioning is facilitated by past actions. The fact that humans are conditioned by past actions means that in the future they will be conditioned, at least in part, by actions of the present; therefore, humans are able to contribute to their own conditioning. At the same time, while Arendt attempts to separate freedom from nature, I argue that she smuggles a version of nature back in to her theory in her concept of “givenness.” Givenness is not the same as a stable, permanent human nature. Arendt does, though, argue that what is given should be respected, and even associates what is given with what is created.

Mill and Arendt attempt to unmoor freedom from nature and custom, although they are, I suggest, not completely successful in doing so. Tocqueville’s freedom is more securely rooted in nature and custom. While nature and custom are closely related in his writing, he does not explicitly explain their relationship, and so sometimes his position is unclear. For a

160 more forthright and considered theory of the relationship between nature and custom, we cannot do better than to return to the wisdom of Aristotle.

Aristotle begins The Politics with a discussion of man’s nature. By nature, Aristotle explains that he means an end: “what each thing is—for example, a human being, a horse, or a household—when its coming into being is complete is, we assert, the nature of that thing. Again, that for the sake of which [a thing exists], or the end, is what is best …”335

Aristotle specifies the content of man’s end or nature when he writes, “man is by nature a political animal.”336 Aristotle further explains human nature by describing what makes humans different from animals: “man alone among the animals has speech. … [S]peech serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful, and hence also the just and the unjust.

For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and other things [of this sort]; and partnership in these things is what makes a household and a city.”337 The word ‘speech’ here is the translation for the Greek word, logos, which means not only speech, but also reason. Human nature, then, involves speech and reason, which provide the capacity for judgment. A partnership in this reasoned judgment, which is concerned with the good and the bad and the just and the unjust, is the foundation for the city.338

335 Aristotle, The Politics, 37, 1252b31–35. 336 Ibid., 37, 1253a3–4. 337 Ibid., 37, 1253a8–18. 338 Aristotle uses the word, “man” here instead of “human.” I argue previously that Aristotle believes that women have these same capabilities. However, whether or not he extends his own view of nature to include women, Aristotle provides a theoretical understanding of the relationship among nature, habit and reason that rewards reflection.

161 Freedom presupposes the existence of options. One cannot choose among various courses of action unless real and different options exist. In order to choose, people need the capacity to reason and deliberate; without this ability, the existence of choices is only apparent, not actual.339 Reason allows for deliberation about the good, even over time: it takes into account both the past and the present. It is precisely these qualities of reason and speech

(logos) that Aristotle identifies as uniquely human; they are what separate humans from animals. Reason and speech make possible participation in the household and the city; they are required for free action to be possible.340

This view of freedom has implications for how politics ought to be ordered: political rulers have power over others. Thus, in order for widespread political freedom to exist, the political order must be democratic, with citizens being ruled and ruling in turn. In short, political freedom requires a political order that allows for man to exercise his capacity for reason and decision.341

The greatest human end or function is the “activity of the soul in accord with reason or requiring reason,” or virtue.342 This characterization of the human end depends not only on reason, but also on custom or habituation. Aristotle explains that habits are crucial to virtuous action, as such action must proceed from a virtuous character. It is through this habituation that man feels pleasure at just actions and pain at unjust ones. Therefore, choosing the good requires the development of good habits. Aristotle writes, “For

339 Deliberation and reason are not identical. Not all deliberating is reasoning, at least in its technical sense of reasoning revealing the good. One can deliberate, for instance, about which color shirt to wear without that decision taking into account the good. Reasoning about the good, though, involves a type of deliberation. 340 Aristotle, The Politics, 37, 1253a18–19. 341 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 346. 342 Ibid., 9, 1098a6–7.

162 abstaining from pleasures makes us become temperate, and once we have become temperate we are most capable of abstaining from pleasures.”343 It is through the formation of good habits that we are able to act virtuously, which is to act in accord with right reason. This means that habituation is necessary in order for man to act in accord with his nature.

This habituation is achieved not only through individuals repeatedly acting virtuously, but also through societal forces acting through laws and education. Aristotle does not, however, advocate accepting the content of all customs. In fact, his definition of virtue, which is an activity of the soul, emphasizes the involvement of action. This activity may or may not differ from past actions, since the actions of the past may or may not accord with virtue. In addition, the fact that this activity must respond to particular circumstances, which are ever new, means that the actor cannot rely solely on the knowledge transmitted through past action.

The importance of habit for fulfilling human nature leads Aristotle directly to a concern with moral education and politics, for both can help encourage virtuous action. At the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes, “Now some think it is nature that makes people good; some think it is habit; some that it is teaching.”344 He goes on to explain that it is habits that prepare the way for teaching, and it is good laws that lead to the development of good habits: “It is difficult, however, for someone to be trained correctly for virtue from his youth if he has not been brought up under correct laws. … It is best, then, if the community

343 Ibid., 20, 1104a34–1104b. 344 Ibid., 168, 1179b20–22.

163 attends to upbringing, and attends correctly.”345 Aristotle’s consideration of how best to encourage virtuous action, which fulfills human nature, leads him to consider the political order; he famously ends the Ethics with an introduction to the Politics: “Then let us study the collected political systems, to see from them what sorts of things preserve and destroy cities … For when we have studied these questions, we will perhaps grasp better what sort of political system is best; how each political system should be organized so as to be best; and what habits and laws it should follow.”346 The development of social and political customs through laws and education is therefore crucial to the development of habits, which ought to be devised in order to contribute to the flourishing of human nature. It is through reasoning together about political systems that we are able to gain insight into what customs and laws are most in accord with that nature.

Aristotle’s position on the importance of habit is not only made clear from his argument that virtuous action requires good actions emerging from good habits, but also from his philosophical method of beginning with reflection on common beliefs. Aristotle writes, “For we should certainly begin from things known, but things are known in two ways; for some are known to us, some known without qualification. Presumably, then we ought to begin from things known to us.”347 Here he maintains that we should begin from the things that are known to us because “it is rather futile to examine all these beliefs [that exist].”348

According to Aristotle it is not possible to start from a position of doubting everything;

345 Ibid., 168–169, 1179b33–35 and 1180a30–32. 346 Ibid., 171, 1181b17–24. The fact that Aristotle realizes that the laws that are instituted form humans either toward virtue or vice does not mean that the state ought to implement laws instituting every form of morality. Aristotle’s emphasis on what is choiceworthy implies that choosing the good is important to virtuous action. A society in which people could not choose against the good would not teach them to discover and choose the good. 347 Ibid., 3–4, 1095b2–4. 348 Ibid., 3, 1095a29.

164 rather, one ought to reason from within received opinion. Just because philosophical reflection ought to start from received opinion, however, does not mean that that received opinion should be uncritically accepted. This is precisely why Aristotle is subtly undermining received opinions about women’s role: Aristotle starts from received opinion about women and criticizes it, without attempting to pull down the established order.

Aristotle writes explicitly about the interconnectedness of nature, habit and reason, which is informative for our understanding how freedom operates within nature and custom. As he explains:

Now [men] become good and excellent through three things. These three are nature, habit, and reason. For one must first develop naturally as a human being and not some one of the other animals, and so also be of a certain quality in body and soul. But there is no benefit in certain [qualities] developing naturally, since habits make them alter: certain [qualities] are through their nature ambiguous, through habits [tending] in the direction of worse or better. The other animals live by nature above all, but in some slight respects by habit as well, while man lives also by reason (for he alone has reason); so these things should be consonant with the other.349

In order for man to achieve excellence, he must develop his nature through habits that accord with that nature. Habits can alter certain aspects of nature in better or worse directions. Once again, Aristotle highlights the difference between animals and humans to clarify human nature: animals live primarily through nature with a little bit of habit; man lives according to his nature, his habits and his reason. Reason is necessary in order to discern human excellence, given human nature. Reason is a uniquely human activity that requires the freedom to discover and choose the good. Aristotle recommends that these things be consonant, that they be in agreement or harmony. This implies that it is also possible for nature, habit and reason to be at odds with one another. Aristotle specifies later

349 Aristotle, The Politics, 218, 1332a41–1332b6.

165 that the harmony among nature, habit and reason can be of a better or worse quality; for instance, it is possible for reason and habits to be in accord with one another, but to be bad habits and corrupted reason.350 The harmony Aristotle recommends is one in which habits accord with human nature and encourage the development and practice of reason.

Again Aristotle writes, and I quote at length because his explanation is at the heart of this dissertation:

We made a distinction earlier [to the effect] that there is a need for nature, habit, and reason. Of these things, what quality [the citizens] ought to be in their nature was discussed earlier; what remains is to study whether they are to be educated first by means of reason or by means of habits. These should be consonant with one another, and the consonance should be the best; for it is possible for one or both to have missed the best presupposition in respect of reason and to have been similarly guided by habits. This, then, is evident at any rate in the first instance, [with men] just as among other things—that birth derives from a beginning point, and the end from some beginning point that is an end of something else; but reason and intellect are the end of our nature, so that it is with a view to these that birth and the concern with habits should be handled. Next, just as soul and body are two things, so also do we see two parts of the soul, the irrational and that having reason, and the dispositions belonging to these are two in number, one of which is appetite and the other intellect; and just as the body is prior in birth to the soul, so is the irrational part to that having reason. This too is evident, for spiritedness and will, and furthermore desire, are present in children immediately on their

350 This division is not unique to Aristotle, although his discussion of the relationship among these three things is particularly insightful. In Book 11, Chapter 25 of The City of God, Augustine writes, and I quote at length: “As far as one can judge, it is for the same reason that philosophers have aimed at a threefold division of science, or rather, were enabled to see that there was a threefold division (for they did not invent, but only discovered it), of which one part is called physical, another logical, the third ethical. The Latin equivalents of these names are now naturalized in the writings of many authors, so that these divisions are called natural, rational, and moral, on which I have touched slightly in the eighth book. … But certain it is that, though philosophers disagree both regarding the nature of things, and the mode of investigating truth, and of the good to which all our actions ought to tend, yet in these three great general questions all their intellectual energy is spent. And though there be a confusing diversity of opinion, every man striving to establish his own opinion in regard to each of these questions, yet no one of them all doubts that nature has some cause, science some method, life some end and aim. Then, again, there are three things which every artificer must possess if he is to effect anything,—nature, education, practice. … From these the philosophers have elaborated, as I said, the threefold division of that science by which a blessed life is attained: the natural having respect to nature, the rational to education, the moral to practice.”

166 being born, while reasoning and intellect develop naturally in them as they go along. Hence in the first instance the superintendence of the body must necessarily precede that of the soul; next comes that of appetite; but that of appetite is for the sake of intellect, and that of the body for the sake of the soul.351

In this passage, Aristotle begins to explore whether education in reason or in habit should come first, granted that they ought to be consonant with one another. He argues that habit should precede reasoning: Just as the body is for the sake of the soul, so the appetites are for the sake of the intellect or reasoning. The intellect is the part of the soul that has reason; the appetites are the other part of the soul. Habits are associated (although not exclusively) with the appetitive part of the soul—they are the way that the person unites his desires to his reason. Although the intellect and the reasoning are higher than the appetites, the appetites and desiring part of the person come first. A child is born with the appetitive, desiring part of his soul functioning immediately upon being born; his reason and intellect, on the other hand, “develop naturally in them as they go along.” This reasoning, while fully present at the beginning, develops naturally, for it is his end.

Here Aristotle distinguishes between the beginning of something and its nature. Birth is the beginning of a person; reason and intellect are the ending or nature of the person. We must understand our birth in light of this end. Reason and intellect, our nature, require habit in order to develop: as infants, we are not reasoning beings; moreover, developing our capacities of reason requires education to form the habits appropriate to reason. The fulfillment of our nature, insofar as it includes reason, requires deliberation about the good.

And in order to reason about the good, humans must deliberate about various choices; this requires a certain amount of freedom to choose among various options. This reason, which

351 Aristotle, The Politics, 223, 1334b7–28.

167 presupposes habit and freedom, allows humans to enter into partnerships based on the good and the just. It enables the possibility of exercising political freedom, although it does not ensure it: without a democratic political system, this political freedom is not guaranteed.

Aristotle’s categories are not identical to the categories of this dissertation. However, it does take its inspiration from Aristotle’s interconnected concepts of nature, habit and reason.

This dissertation also calls for an attention to nature that starts with Aristotle’s teleology and expands from that starting point to consider how human nature is impacted by sex differences. But in a slight departure from Aristotle, this primarily considers custom rather than habit.

By custom, I mean to focus on those external forces that habituate people toward certain actions. Custom includes social forces, education and laws. In contrast, Aristotle’s “habit” begins with these social forces, but moves beyond them to the individual, internalized repetition of action. The concept of custom does not always imply that all individuals internalize or even follow its behaviors. People who have Aristotle’s habits, on the other hand, have not only been trained in those habits through the laws, but have also begun to act that way out of their own character and choice. Now we see that Aristotle’s habit offers something even richer than the treatment of custom by the other authors examined above: habit refers not only to the external customs of society, but also to the individual who is internalizing and participating in those customs.

168 Finally, this overall interpretation focuses on the importance of freedom in Aristotle.

Aristotle’s human nature includes reason, which is able to discern the good, and to engage in familial and political partnerships in order to also achieve the good. This conception of reason, however, requires freedom—in order to choose the good, people require at least some freedom to reject that good. In addition, this conception of reason calls for a political system that allows people within a polity to exercise that reason. The categories examined here—nature, custom, and freedom—are not identical to Aristotle’s nature, habit, and reason, but are undoubtedly inspired by them.

Levels of Freedom

Just as freedom is best explained when it is situated in relation to nature and custom, so individual freedom primarily operates in two contexts: in intermediary institutions, such as the household, and also within the political sphere.352 For the individual to exercise freedom within the household and the polity, the social and political realms ought to be ordered in a way that corresponds to human reason. Thus, the health of the family and the polity are both of considerable importance. To argue that women simply need the right to vote; or that women only need economic freedom; or even to argue that what is needed is a list of rights for women, is to reduce freedom to a definition that is so one-dimensional that it misses the point. For instance, the right to vote is far from being a robust form of political involvement, although it is certainly an initially necessary form. Rather, saying that women require the

352 It is important to mention that by freedom here, I am not referring to philosophical freedom. I am not considering whether wills are free or fated, although I assume that wills are free. Rather, I am discussing how individual freedom is exercised in the context of civil and political associations.

169 freedom to engage in politics is to say that women deserve a stable political order that has a place for the involvement of its citizens.

To say that women need freedom to participate in the public sphere means that the plurality of ways in which women can participate in this realm need to be preserved. This includes the maintenance of a diversity of organizations within civil society, such as the family and religion, among countless other voluntary associations. I focus on the family here, as it connects the private sphere to the public sphere, providing the context for the generation and education of children. Ensuring freedom for women, then, means that we must attend to the organization of society, encouraging the development of a political society that not only permits a wide range of individual liberties, but is also conducive to the existence of many and varied voluntary organizations. By also attending to the conceptions of freedom offered by Tocqueville, Mill, and Arendt, we can see that freedom is multi-dimensional and complex: it does not involve a consideration of the individual alone, but rather of the individual in relation to institutions of civil and political society.

For Tocqueville, the freedom of individual women to participate in politics must be sacrificed in order to protect the health of the family and of religion, and by extension, to protect the health of democratic society as a whole. This is a curious conclusion and one that bears elaborating. For Tocqueville, it is crucial that institutions of civil society are functioning well: they link the interest of individual persons to the interest of society and serve as a school for teaching political freedom. However, democratic equality threatens their healthful operation. When leveling becomes extreme, humans resist being linked together and tend to withdraw from the very associations that teach them the art of

170 connecting to others. Tocqueville fears that citizens may lose the skill of protecting their political freedom, and government may step in and take away individual rights. In order to counteract this tendency to float toward the extremes of democratic equality, Tocqueville recommends that humans continue to participate in politics and in other associations, such as religion and the family. When Tocqueville recommends that women confine themselves to the private sphere, he has this concern in mind. For Tocqueville, women’s freedom is bounded by other considerations. Women’s freedom is bounded by the goal of allowing other individuals, associations, and politics as a whole to thrive. And women’s participation in religion and the family will encourage the development of the art of association.

While Mill seems to focus on only one or two aspects of freedom for women—most notably political and economic freedom and independence—he emphasizes these areas because he believes that women’s political freedom and economic independence are necessary in order for them to appropriate other freedoms to themselves. For Mill, there is no better way to ensure that freedom is granted in other areas than to have women take an equal share in ruling, since it will be in their interest to appropriate freedoms to themselves. In addition,

Mill takes exception to Tocqueville’s position on women and the family. Rather than sacrifice women’s freedom in order to protect the good of society, Mill argues that women’s freedom to participate in politics actually benefits not only individual women, but also society as a whole. This is because he does not emphasize women’s role in the family, nor the importance of the family as a whole. The family becomes a place of marital friendship and another locus for equality, rather than the context of generation and educating

171 children.353 For Mill, democracy is not only relevant to the public sphere, but also affects the private realm. He maintains that this spread of equality will not lead to the serious institutional problems predicted by Tocqueville.

Arendt brings the concerns of Tocqueville and Mill regarding democratic equality into the twentieth century. Arendt certainly approves of women’s political and economic freedom; however, she recognizes the problem of bringing equality into every area of life and the difficulties inherent in rapid democratization. In order to combat these problems, Arendt outlines what she believes to be the best ordering of the public sphere and cautions against altering it. Women, according to Arendt, are free to engage in the public sphere on the same terms that men are: they are not free to alter the public sphere. Arendt delicately balances the importance of individual political action, which is what makes people human, with the importance of protecting the political space in order to encourage its flourishing.

In addition to the focus Arendt places on maintaining the health of the public sphere, she also emphasizes the importance of separating the public and private. According to Arendt, equality is appropriate to the public sphere, while the private sphere is dependent on difference, perhaps especially the sex difference. One of the most significant threats that

Arendt identifies is the rise of the social sphere, which occurs when the public and private realms are no longer separate and private concerns become public. Arendt particularly fears the rise of the social sphere that may result from women who enter politics while proclaiming, “the personal is political.” Arendt identifies the family and the private sphere

353 Mill is not afraid that women’s engagement in politics will replace their engagement with the family; in fact, he assumes that women will choose either a domestic life or a public one. He takes it for granted that they will not pursue both, given the time that it takes to run a household.

172 as appropriate to caring for the basic needs of life, among these the raising of children. It is in the public sphere that humans create a civilization that outlasts them and act in ways that engage the human ability to reason about the common good. Arendt praises the public sphere over the private sphere: it is only in public that human freedom can be expressed.

While Tocqueville looks to intermediary institutions of civil society to bridge the gap between the private world and the public world, Arendt’s sharp separation between the public and private spheres makes it less clear where the organizations that comprise civil society would fall. Clearly the family is part of the private realm—its order counterbalances the equality and mobility seen in the public sphere. Where religion would fall is less clear: possibly in the public realm insofar as it constructs something that endures for future generations. Arendt does not address where other voluntary organizations fall—they are not grand enough to aim at the whole common good, but neither can they be simply confined to the private sphere of necessity.354 Voluntary associations are an important way to engage individuals in activities that connect their individual interest to the common good. Thus, the fact that voluntary organizations do not fit into either Arendt’s concept of the public or private sphere challenges those categories.

Tocqueville, Mill and Arendt provide varying assessments of the various levels at which freedom can be practiced: Tocqueville argues for the importance of the family and religion, as well as other institutions of civil society. In fact, his views of the family and religion are so high that they trump women’s political freedom. Mill, on the other hand, holds up

354 One example of an association of civil society that is difficult to place in Arendt’s public/private distinction is the salons she discusses in Rahel Varnhagen.

173 political freedom and deemphasizes the family and religion, as well as other civil institutions. In fact, Mill’s vision of the family mimics democratic politics in emphasizing equality. Arendt focuses on separating the public and private spheres, which has benefits and drawbacks. It is appropriate that she sees the public and private spheres as having two different goals; however, she goes too far in separating them by unequivocally exalting the public over the private sphere. For her, it is only in public that humans exercise their humanness. To move the conversation forward, we should look to Aristotle. His explanation of freedom is again constructive, as he argues that freedom relies on the ability to reason about the good in the partnerships of the household and the city.

The ability to practice freedom, according to Aristotle, relies on the thing that distinguishes humans from animals: logos—reason or speech. This reason involves the perception of good and bad and just and unjust, as well as the partnership with others in these things.

Freedom, then, has both an individual and a communal component: reason belongs to individual persons, but is practiced in a partnership with others, both in the city and the household. Furthermore, these two components are interwoven: the individual person practicing reason must necessarily be concerned with the common good. In the same way, the common good must take into account the good of each individual person. There is an interplay and inseparability between the individual and partnerships, as well as between the household and the city.

Aristotle maintains that a partnership in reason or speech that perceives the good and bad, the just and the unjust, is the basis for partnership in both the household and the city. While

174 these two realms have different goals—the household providing for the necessity of everyday life and the city attending to the common good of the whole—there is a place for humans to exercise their freedom to reason in both of them. Accordingly, Aristotle separates the public and private spheres and insists that the possibility for the development of human excellence exists in both realms. The household is a partnership that is the “conjunction of persons who cannot exist without one another: on the one hand, male and female, for the sake of reproduction (which occurs not from intentional choice but –as is also the case with other animals and plants—from a natural striving to leave behind another that is like oneself); on the other, the naturally ruling and ruled, on account of preservation.”355

Aristotle does not reduce the domestic life to reproduction, and sees a sort of ruling and being ruled, as well as a pursuit of excellence, taking place in the household. He writes,

“both children and women must necessarily be educated looking to the regime, at least if it makes any difference with a view to the city’s being excellent that both its children and its women are excellent.”356 Aristotle strongly implies that it does make a difference, and so we see that the household is a partnership in which excellence can be pursued.357

355 Ibid., 35–36, 1252a27–31. 356 Ibid., 54, 1260a13–17. 357 Not all interpreters of Aristotle agree that Aristotle’s household is a partnership in which excellence can be pursued. Roger Boesche, for instance, maintains that the household is a place of tyranny: “By Aristotle’s definition, the tyrant eliminates what is political—citizenship, participation, popular assemblies, and deliberation—and transforms political rule into household management or oikonomike (from which we get our word economics). Aristotle maintained that with tyranny we see the eclipse of politics and the primacy of economics, an argument later borrowed and elaborated by Machiavelli, Tocqueville, and Arendt.” (Boesche, Theories of Tyranny: From Plato to Arendt, 64) Boesche draws a sharp distinction between the home and the polis. He writes of tyranny that “the relations between individuals are despotic; that is, they resemble the relation of a master to household servants, and by definition, this is not a relation involving friendship” (Ibid., 72). Here he ignores the other forms of rule that comprise a household, especially the rule of a husband over a wife, which Aristotle himself identifies as political rather than despotic. While Boesche’s understanding offers a helpful interpretation of tyranny, he misidentifies the household solely with tyrannical rule, thereby missing the political elements of the family, including both the rule of parents over children and of man over woman (and even, at times, of woman over man).

175

While freedom and excellence are possible in the household, they are also pursued in the city, the partnership that embraces all other partnerships.358 Aristotle does not see political freedom as simply the freedom of the individual from coercion. Rather, he understands the free person to be one who is involved in ruling and able to wield power; this freedom is most widely applied in a democracy. Aristotle writes, “Now the presupposition of the democratic sort of regime is freedom. It is customarily said that only in this sort of regime do [men] share in freedom, for, so it is asserted, every democracy aims at this.”359 One aspect of freedom is being ruled and ruling in turn. Another part of freedom is to “live as one wants. For this is, they assert, the work of freedom, since not living as one wants is characteristic of a person who is enslaved. This, then, is the second defining principle of democracy.”360 While Aristotle subtly criticizes aspects of democracy here, he also outlines some aspects of freedom, which is obviously associated with democratic regimes.

Ultimately, Aristotle recognizes that a healthy society must be concerned with the exercise of freedom in both the household and the city. In each place, human beings must be ordered in relationships of ruling and being ruled. In each place, human beings can practice virtue or excellence in a particular function.

Aristotle also explains a nuanced relationship between the household and the city, one that can be examined through the importance of generation, an idea which is also present in

Tocqueville. Generation explains the aspect of the family that relates to meeting the needs of the body, as well as the family’s role in raising children who are able to participate in the

358 Ibid., 35, 1252a1–6. 359 Ibid., 183, 1317a40–1317b2. 360 Ibid., 183–84, 1317b12–14.

176 political order. The household is first a partnership in providing for what is necessary for life. In providing a space for the fulfillment of sexual urges, the family naturally creates new persons. These new people are crucial to the continuation of the polity. Already, then, the family benefits politics by allowing for the perpetuation of human society. In the family, new physical life is created, and those children can also be prepared to govern themselves one day. Until then, they need paternal rule, which Aristotle describes as the rule of those within the family who do not yet have full use of their reason; this is not the rule of a master over a slave, but an instruction in how to rule oneself. Because the household involves both bearing and raising children, it has both a biological and a political function. Having children is not simply a biological urge or necessity, for Aristotle it also is part of a person’s social nature; hence, even the virtuous, self-sufficient man wants children.

The household and the city have a complicated relationship—they are institutions with different ends, but they are also interrelated: while the private sphere deals with the necessities of life and politics deals with the common good, both are places in which excellence can be achieved and human freedom can be practiced. Aristotle does not insist that women cannot be human without participating in politics, which would involve the call for a radical revision of his society. Women participating in politics is, however, a good to which Aristotle’s thought is open. Women’s participation in both the household and in politics emerges from their natural capacities; bodies and souls are so closely connected that while women’s sexual difference from men does not preclude participation in politics, it also cannot be ignored when considering their public and private roles.

177 Arlene Saxonhouse’s explanation of Aristotle’s plural structure is enlightening. She argues that both the family and politics are necessary to allow diversity to exist and to achieve unity out of that diversity. 361 In “Family, Polity & Unity: Aristotle on Socrates’ Community of Wives,” Saxonhouse explains that the family encourages the development of unity out of diversity, a move that is appropriate not only to the family, but also to the polity; it encourages a love of one’s own, which necessarily precedes the love of what is common.362

Here we see that while the home and the city have similar roles in developing unity out of diversity, it is not appropriate to turn the city into the family; rather, the family is necessary to maintaining the city.363 Saxonhouse writes of the role of the family in appreciating and unifying diversity: “Aristotle wants to preserve the family; the city consists of naturally diverse elements and it is within the family that the natural diversity from which unity grows first finds its necessary expression.”364 Saxonhouse emphasizes the importance of diversity, and the need for it to continue, even when it is unified in the family or polity. Part of the diversity that the family preserves is the diversity of sex difference; this is evident in

Aristotle’s realization of the importance of bodies.365 Saxonhouse writes, “It is our differences which unite us in the common endeavor of procreation, just as our differences

361 Here Saxonhouse is encouraging us to reflect on why Aristotle was writing about women and what truths he meant to point to. She takes Aristotle on his own terms rather than simply critiquing him for not being a modern liberal, as many writers do. She writes, “In the context of such questions, the female enters not as she does today—as a potentially equal member of the political community to whom custom and tradition has denied rights in the past assigned to the male—but as a limit on the possibilities of politics or as a member of a coherent whole whose difference from the male must be acknowledged and incorporated” (Arlene Saxonhouse, Women in the History of Political Thought: Ancient Greece to Machiavelli [New York: Praeger, 1985], 9). Saxonhouse describes one of the limits on politics that women point to: “the female reminds the early thinkers of the limits of that potential by clarifying the city’s dependence on particular bodies, especially the reproductive bodies of its women” (10). 362 Saxonhouse, “Family, Polity & Unity: Aristotle on Socrates’ Community of Wives,” 202–203. 363 Saxonhouse, Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought, 197. 364 Saxonhouse, “Family, Polity & Unity: Aristotle on Socrates’ Community of Wives,” 203. 365 Saxonhouse, Women in the History of Political Thought: Ancient Greece to Machiavelli, 81–82.

178 from other citizens establish the common purpose and being of the polity.”366 Natural differences of sex are united in the family; difference, however, is not restricted to the family. It is also the basis of the polity. Aristotle’s insight here is rejected by contemporary liberalism, according to Saxonhouse, as it advocates ignoring differences among individuals in the public sphere by compartmentalizing private from public: while Aristotle advocates a separation in function between the public and private spheres, the relationship between the two is closer and more permeable than it is under liberalism.367

One admirer of Aristotle’s plural structure of society inaccurately finds that plural structure to be inextricably connected to a division of roles in which women stay in the home, while men are engaged in the public sphere. Darrell Dobbs argues that those who think that

Aristotle covertly advocates women’s participation in civil affairs miss the point of The

Politics—

that polis and household differ in kind, not merely in number. I argue that Aristotle condones the exclusion of women from civic affairs because this practice conforms to the natural complementarity of the sexes and because it fortifies the naturally pluralistic structure of society. By securing these underpinnings, Aristotle frames a constitution that best supports women and men in their pursuit of human excellence.”368

He maintains that Aristotle sees sexual complementarity as the foundation for Aristotle’s plural structure of society, which recognizes the good of both the polis and the household.

Dobbs’s evaluation of Aristotle’s plural structure of society has much to recommend it: I agree with Dobbs that Aristotle affirms a society in which there are different realms where

366 Saxonhouse, “Family, Polity & Unity: Aristotle on Socrates’ Community of Wives,” 207. 367 Saxonhouse, Women in the History of Political Thought: Ancient Greece to Machiavelli, 182. 368 Dobbs, “Aristotle’s Appreciation of Women and the Plural Structure of Society,” 74.

179 human excellence can be achieved. Furthermore, Dobbs rightly points out the importance of maintaining the city and the household as separate spheres: “[d]omestic offices must be preserved in their integrity; they must not be absorbed by an expansive polis.”369 Dobbs’ goal of exploring the importance of the family and preventing its absorption by politics is one that I also see in Aristotle. In addition, it is clear that Aristotle affirms sex difference and sees it as implying different functions for men and for women. However, I do not read

Aristotle’s sex differences as narrowly as Dobbs perceives them; rather, Aristotle affirms the existence of sex difference while undermining its prevailing connection to strict public and private functions. Hence, a pluralist structure of society can be affirmed without inextricably tying it to immutable sex roles. Dobbs also dismisses what he characterizes as

Aristotle’s exceptional cases of Amasis’ footpan and Tecmessa.370 But it is precisely the existence of these cases that allows Aristotle to subtly question the accepted social roles of his day and to ask whether those roles were only the result of nature and not of social custom. Furthermore, Dobbs’s understanding of sex difference is problematic insofar as he reduces women to that sex difference: “Sex complementarity also involves certain temperamental differences between men and women. These differences exist for the sake of species preservation, but their integration in the human soul is such that they permeate mankind’s higher callings as well.”371 Dobbs misses something: sex difference is pervasive and reproduction is important to the city, but there is more to women than their reproductive capacities, just as there is more to men than their reproductive capacities. It may be that sex difference does not necessarily determine mankind’s higher callings. Instead, sex difference might imply something about how and why men and women fulfill their callings.

369 Ibid., 87. 370 Ibid., 84. 371 Ibid., 88.

180

It is a problem to place responsibility for preserving the home entirely on women. Aristotle sees women as having a special link to the home, particularly in their child-bearing capacities. This does not, however, preclude women from any participation in public life.

Nor does it preclude men’s participation in the home, something that even Dobbs admits when he criticizes men who seek to rule women both in the public and in the private sphere.

Dobbs limits Aristotle here, and even tries to turn him into Tocqueville, maintaining that women are better off in the home; they are more virtuous than men are and do not need the benefits of politics as much as men do. Dobbs maintains that citizenship is a therapy to regulate men’s passions in a way that women do not require: “In this light it would appear absurd to view citizenship as some kind of prize granted exclusively to men in recognition of their supposed moral or intellectual superiority to women. Citizenship is more like a therapy than a trophy.”372 This is a misreading of Aristotle’s high esteem for political involvement. Aristotle’s politics is not only—or even primarily—a remedy for human weakness, but rather an exercise of human reason that contributes to the common good, a ruling and being ruled in turn that, given their rational capacities, is appropriate to humans.

Like Dobbs, Steven Salkever argues that both the home and the polis provide a place for the development of human virtue or excellence.373 However, he argues that women, like men, also need politics in order to develop their virtue in ways that only politics allows and in accord with an innate capacity: “That is, they need politics not as a way of protecting their rights against the community, or for security generally, but as a context for the development

372 Ibid., 86. 373 Salkever, “Women, Soldiers, Citizens: Plato & Aristotle on the Politics of Virility,” 240.

181 of those virtues or excellences whose potential expression they inherit biologically.”374As a result of this purpose of politics, Salkever argues that Aristotle sees that women need politics, although the virtues and excellences that they work to develop are different from those of men.375 While Salkever and Dobbs both offer a high view of the home as a place in which human excellences are developed, Dobbs argues that the home is a sufficient place for women’s excellences to be developed, given women’s different strengths and the importance of preserving a society with plural forms of association. In contrast, while

Salkever admits that men and women have different excellences, he maintains that because humans are more than sexual beings, women ought to be in the public realm alongside men.

Salkever is right to point out that women have the natural capacity to participate in politics.

But he misses what is Aristotle’s most nuanced point: because women can achieve excellence in the home, Aristotle does not call for a radical critique of his society, though he is able to envision women making political contributions. Aristotle recognizes the ways in which those contributions will benefit both women and the society in which they participate.

While Dobbs does not go far enough in acknowledging the ways in which Aristotle subtly undermines the gender roles of his day, Jill Frank goes to the other extreme, arguing that

Aristotle not only undermines gender roles, but in his discussion of women also undermines nature itself, articulating it as something that is fundamentally changeable. She maintains that nature is not outside of and before politics, but rather is malleable, shaped by politics

374 Ibid., 241–242. 375 Ibid., 243.

182 and discerned through attention to a person’s activities.376 According to Frank’s interpretation of Aristotle, this is the case with slavery, which is the product of slave activity, not the result of nature.377 Frank writes, “Aristotle does not use nature to establish the prepolitical and necessary conditions of politics. He treats nature, instead, as a question for politics. He thereby divests nature of the moral authority usually granted to it; subjects to scrutiny the exclusions said to be secured by that authority; and, placing authority in those who establish the hierarchies of politics, namely, rulers and citizens, renders them accountable for those hierarchies.”378 She writes, “Nature is thus not immutable but changeable, and this means that the hierarchy it underwrites, though necessary to politics, will be changeable too.”379 In the process, then, of arguing that Aristotle subtly undermines the received opinions of his day regarding women’s role, Frank also argues that Aristotle undermines the moral authority of nature.

While I agree with Frank’s position that Aristotle undermines hierarchies, including those of sex difference and of slavery, it is not because Aristotle undermines nature by finding it to be adjustable. Rather, he questions whether the things that nature is commonly taken to imply—that women must remain in the home, that all slaves are slaves because it is in their nature, or that slavery is just—are the things that nature in fact implies. Aristotle is keenly aware of the influence of customs and habits and social pressures in shaping our actions, but this is not equivalent to disregarding any role for nature. Frank’s reading is not Aristotelian, but rather Arendtian, replacing nature with action that emerges from a human condition. As

376 Frank, “Citizens, Slaves, and Foreigners: Aristotle on Human Nature,” 38, 98–99. 377 Ibid., 94. 378 Ibid., 92. 379 Ibid.

183 she describes Aristotle’s view of nature, “Who the doer is, the nature of the doer, is stable.

This is not to say, however, that nature is once and for all determined. Rather, who the doer is, his nature, is continually informed by the activities he has performed and continues to perform.”380 While Aristotle certainly has an important role for the habits formed by different actions, whether vicious or virtuous, there is an underlying nature that cannot, or ought not, be eliminated or changed by any habits or actions. What is natural regarding women is not their restriction to the home, but rather the sex difference that forms the foundation of the family, as well as the human capacity for reason.

Theorizing about women’s freedom in the contemporary world has much to gain from

Aristotle: His insights into women’s natural political abilities are prescient, given the primarily private role for women in his day. His understanding of women’s political potential makes his work relevant today. However, he does not advocate radical changes to custom in the name of justice. This illustrates his high view of custom and the stability of the rule of law. In addition, his affirmation of the possibility of women achieving excellence within the home recognizes the good that women can achieve in any sphere of society in which they participate. This more expansive conception is superior to Arendt’s view that the political realm is the only place where people become human. Aristotle’s woman, on the other hand, is simultaneously an individual and a member of a family, as well as potentially a member of political society.

We should keep in mind that Aristotle is writing in a specific cultural context: his age was not a time when political rights included women. He does not deal with the practical

380 Ibid., 100.

184 question of how women could participate in political life as Mill and Arendt do. In addition,

Aristotle’s explanation certainly does not completely resolve the concerns of Tocqueville,

Mill and Arendt. For instance, beyond politics and the family, Aristotle does not deal with civil society in the way that Tocqueville does, nor does he so insightfully address the benefits of association. Mill is aware of the movement of history in ways that Aristotle does not address. Arendt advocates that sex difference between treated differently in public and in private: in public, there should be an equality of the sexes that does not deny the sex difference that is most clearly articulated in the private sphere. Given these contemporary conditions, political theory cannot simply go back to Aristotle. The insights of the intervening thinkers are too valuable and the social and political context has changed drastically. But a close examination of Aristotle’s writing on women in politics shows that a theory of women’s public freedom has much to learn from his framework.

185 CONCLUSION

The modern era’s increasing democratization raised the question of how women should interact with public and political life. Two of the era’s central thinkers, Tocqueville and

Mill, came to drastically different, provocative positions. Then, in the middle of the twentieth century, as feminism moved from its first to its second wave, transitioning from a push for equal voting rights to demands for changes to the nature of the political sphere itself, Arendt grappled with the implications of women’s political freedom. In modernity, we ought to reflect on how women can enter politics in a way that benefits society as a whole. These thinkers show that we should reflect not only on what freedom means for individual women, but also on what it means for both politics and civil associations, including the family. Ironically, turning back to Aristotle’s principles offers great insight into women’s public and political freedom in the modern world.

Freedom is not something unmoored from any restrictions or applicable to disconnected individuals, nor is it not merely a negative freedom from government control. Drawing on

Aristotle’s work, I understand freedom as grounded in nature, custom, and habit, as well as properly oriented to social and political associations. Human nature explains why freedom is appropriate to humans, and why nature is the object toward which freedom ought to be aimed. It is precisely the human ability to reason about the good life, a part of human nature, which makes freedom necessary—humans need the freedom to choose the good and to act well. This does not mean that laws are neutral with regard to the good, nor that social forces should not encourage humans toward the good life; on the contrary, the good is

186 something that humans should arrive at through discussion and reflection with each other, as well as with the reason of the past as expressed through customs. While the natural human ability to reason is the same in men and women, there are also sex differences that have an impact beyond the biological. Sex differences may impact how and why women interact with public and political life.

The biological importance of sex difference should not be ignored: for one thing, it permits the generation of children. Sex difference is especially important to consider in the private sphere, which should not be organized in the same way as the public sphere. While equality is proper to the public sphere, difference, including of a sexual nature, is the foundation of the private sphere. Not only are children born into the family, but they are also raised and trained to be citizens there. In the home, children are both physically nourished and politically and socially educated. The inequality of the private sphere provides an organizing mechanism that both contrasts with and complements the equality of politics.

Parents and children are unequal, as are men and women. Inequality in this case refers not to superiority over inferiority, but rather to differences that contribute to the dynamism of the private sphere.

Women’s freedom is limited not only by nature, but also by customs and habits. Custom refers to social forces comprised of the actions of others, past and present, which encourage particular behaviors. Habit refers to the internalization of certain behaviors through repeated action. The limits of custom and habit on women’s freedom can be advantageous or pernicious, but they always exist. Freedom can never be completely severed from the

187 impact of customs. To be sure, particular customs can hinder or reveal women’s nature, and those that accord with nature are preferable and ought to be sought.

In addition, politics can encourage the development of beneficial social and political mores through laws and education. However, it is important that customs not be overbearing, and that the space for free action be preserved. In this sense, custom and actions are constantly in dialogue and are sometimes at odds with one another: custom is the accumulation of past actions, while new actions preserve and innovate on old customs. In order to ensure that customs best correspond to human nature, humans need to engage in partnerships that discuss what customs are best and seek to encourage them. Thus, freedom is bounded by both nature and custom.

In addition to nature and custom, women’s freedom is also limited by social and political associations. Freedom is not simply freedom from government and social pressures; it is also the freedom to participate in government and in social associations. In fact, the freedom to participate in civil and political associations prevents against encroachments of the government on an individual’s negative freedom. The only way to ensure that negative freedom is not lost is to encourage the use of the freedom of association. This also requires an attention to the conditions of flourishing political and social realms in order to maintain their functioning. These structural concerns suggest that political and civil associations should be constructed so as not to be at odds with one another: political participation ought to be encouraged without denigrating private life.

I turn to women’s experience of freedom and its absence as a lens through which to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of conceptions of freedom offered by Tocqueville, Mill, and

188 Arendt. Their approach to women’s freedom provides insight into their understanding of the concept of freedom on a more abstract level. Their discussion of freedom as it relates to women also grounds freedom in particular political experience. And women’s freedom is an especially interesting case. While Tocqueville, Mill and Arendt all affirm democracy as an advantageous political development, their varying approaches on the participation of women is telling, including whether or not they extend to women the right to participate in politics and how they suggest they ought to participate in it. By looking at a group that participated in politics indirectly at the time Tocqueville and Mill were writing, we gain a clearer understanding of the importance and limits of freedom. Women’s experience of freedom chastens our expectation of freedom: it shows that we do not live in an ideal world in which we can have everything at once; rather, there are always trade-offs. For instance, focusing solely on the freedom of the individual person weakens broader society. Women’s experience of freedom also shows us that we should not limit decisively in advance the capabilities of women and humans in general: just because we think that something is natural does not mean that it is actually natural. Giving women the freedom to act in social and political life, while discussing together about the nature of women and all of humanity, allows women to reveal their nature, but not in a way that is unconstrained by any normative judgments. Theories of freedom and the social and political role of women are mutually enlightening: A focus on women allows us see freedom more clearly. And, conversely, reflecting on freedom gives us greater insight into how to conceive of women’s social and political roles.

This interpretation of the thought of Tocqueville, Mill and Arendt on women’s freedom asks us to reconceive of freedom as situated, limited and as something that must be

189 cultivated with care. A limited freedom rejects a notion of progress: it prohibits the idea that if freedom for individuals is ensured, humans will inevitably progress and develop in favorable ways throughout the march of history. Instead, freedom is rooted in human nature, and ought to be responsive to it, even though it remains stable across time. Customs and habits are another limit on human freedom: humans are inevitably shaped by forces outside of them; however, we should reflect on the customs that shape us where we can, in order to ensure that the customs that form us are beneficial. Our reflections on these formative customs should be revealed in the habits that we choose to adopt. Freedom is not simply the absence of restraint, for such an absence would not be fecund, given the probable incursions of politics and other groups on that freedom, not to mention the inability of a freedom that is simply the absence of restraint to defend itself against those incursions. The more limited freedom that this dissertation advocates is still freedom—and the best kind—because it allows for its own continuation.

What should characterize women’s public role? First, women should be free to engage in a public role or reject one; therefore, I advocate a pluralist society that permits and even encourages different conceptions of the good life. Second, women’s role ought to be redefined through ongoing public conversation; this requires a pluralism that can discuss the common good while protecting minority rights. This public conversation about women’s freedom should include reflection on human nature and what makes women different from men. The public should discuss the ideal, while realizing that the abstract ideal is almost never attained in practice; rather, trade-offs must be made, choosing one good over another.

The conversation should not be confined to the freedom of an individual in isolation—it should also consider how the freedom of a woman is put into practice in the family, in other

190 intermediary institutions, and in politics. The conversation about women’s freedom should not focus solely on women’s bodies or their rights, although both of these are important. It must also be about the individual woman in relation to her social and political circumstances.

191 WORKS CITED

Allen, Barbara. Tocqueville, Covenant, and the Democratic Revolution: Harmonizing Earth with Heaven. New York: Lexington Books, 2005.

Annas, Julia. “Mill and the Subjection of Women.” Edited by Maria H. Morales. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin, 1968.

———. Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. Edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schoken Books, 1994.

———. The Human Condition. 1st edition. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1998.

———. The Jewish Writings. Edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. New York Schocken Books, 2007.

———. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.

———. On Revolution. New York: Penguin, 1965.

———. “On the Emancipation of Women.” In Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. Edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken, 1994.

———. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970.

———. “On the Emancipation of Women.” Essays in Understanding: 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. Edited by Jerome Kohn, 66-68. New York: Schocken Books, 1994.

———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1966.

———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951.

———. “The Origins of Totalitarianism: A Reply.” The Review of Politics 15, no. 1 (Jan., 1953).

———. Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. Edited by Liliane Weissberg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

———. “Reflections on Little Rock.” Dissent 6, no. 1 (Winter 1959): 45-56.

192

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. 2nd edition. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1999.

———.On the Parts of Animals. Translated by W. Ogle. New York: Garland, 1987.

———. Politics. Translated by Carnes Lord. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

———. The Basic Works Of. Edited by Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941.

Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Translated by Marcus Dods. Peabody, MA.: Hendrickson, 2009.

Benhabib, Seyla. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. New edition. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003.

Berlin, Isaiah. Two Concepts of Liberty. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958.

Bible. King James Version.

Birmingham, Peg. Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Bloom, Allan. “The Relation of the Sexes: Rousseauan Reflections on the Crisis of Our Times.” In Tocqueville’s Political Science: Classic Essays. Edited by Peter Lawler, 233–245. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992.

Boesche, Roger. Theories of Tyranny: From Plato to Arendt. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.

Bowen-Moore, Patricia. Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Natality. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

Ceaser, James W. Liberal Democracy and Political Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

———. Nature and History in American Political Development: A Debate. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Dietz, Mary. Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, and Politics. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Dobbs, Darrell. “Aristotle’s Appreciation of Women and the Plural Structure of Society.” The American Political Science Review 90, no. 1 (March 1996): 74–89.

193 Donner, Wendy. “John Stuart Mill’s Liberal Feminism.” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 69, no. 2 (March 1993): 155–166.

Dossa, Shiraz. The Public Realm and the Public Self: The Political Theory of Hannah Arendt. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989.

Elster, Jon. Political Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Frank, Jill. “Citizens, Slaves, and Foreigners: Aristotle on Human Nature.” The American Political Science Review 98, no. 1 (February 2004): 91–104.

Freud, Sigmund. Letters of Sigmund Freud. Edited by Ernst L. Freud. Mineola, NY: Courier Dover Publications, 1992.

Goldstein, Lesle Friedman. “Mill, Marx, and Women’s Liberation.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 18, no. 3 (July 1980): 319–334.

Herodotus. The Persion Wars. Translated by A.D. Godley. Vol. I. 4 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946.

Hill, Melvyn A, editor. Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979.

Honig, Bonnie. Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.

Jacobitti, Suzanne. “Individualism & Political Community: Arendt & Tocqueville on the Current Debate in Liberalism.” Polity 23, no. 4 (Summer, 1991).

Janara, Laura. “Democracy’s Family Values: Alexis De Tocqueville on Anxiety, Fear and Desire.” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne De Science Politique 34, no. 3 (September 2001): 551–578.

Kateb, George. “Freedom and Worldliness in the Thought of Hannah Arendt." Political Theory 5, no. 2. (1977): 141-182.

———. Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1983.

Koritansky, John. “Alexis de Tocqueville’s Hopes for the Education of Democratic Women.” In Tocqueville’s Defense of Human Liberty. Ed. Peter Augustine Lawler and Joseph Alulis. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993.

Kristeva, Julia. Hannah Arendt: Life is a Narrative. Translated by Frank Collins. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

194

Levy, Harold L. “Does Aristotle Exclude Women from Politics?” The Review of Politics 52, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 397-416.

Manent, Pierre. Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy. Translated by John Waggoner. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996.

Mara, Gerald. “The Near Made Far Away: The Role of Cultural Criticism in Aristotle’s Political Theory.” Political Theory 23, no. 2 (May 1995): 280-303.

Mathie, William. “God, Women, and Morality: The Democratic Family in the New Political Science of Alexis De Tocqueville.” The Review of Politics 57, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 7–30.

Mayhew, Robert. The Female in Aristotle’s Biology: Reason or Rationalization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

McGowan Tress, Daryl. “The Metaphysical Science of Aristotle’s Generation of Animals and Its Feminist Critics.” In Feminism and Ancient Philosophy. Edited by Julia K. Ward, 31-50. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Mill, John Stuart. Additional Letters of John Stuart Mill. Edited by Marion Filipiuk, Michael Laine, and John M. Robson. Vol. XXXII. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

———. Autobiography and Literary Essays. Edited by John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger. Vol. I. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981.

———. Essays on Equality, Law, and Education. Edited by John M. Robson. Vol. XXI. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984.

———. Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society [1833]. Edited by John M. Robson. Vol. X. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.

———. Essays on French History and Historians. Edited by John M. Robson. Vol. XX. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.

———. Essays on Philosophy and the Classics [1828]. Edited by John M. Robson. Vol. XI. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978.

———. Essays on Politics and Society. Edited by John M. Robson. Vol. XVIII. Collected

195 Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977.

———. Essays on Politics and Society. Edited by John M. Robson. Vol. XIX. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977.

———. On Liberty and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

———. Public and Parliamentary Speeches, Part I, November 1850-November 1868 [1850]. Edited by John M. Robson and Bruce L. Kinzer. Vol. XXVIII. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.

———. Public and Parlimentary Speeches: July 1969-March 1973. Edited by John M. Robson and Bruce L. Kinzer. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill XXIX. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.

———. Speech of John Stuart Mill, M.P. on the Admission of Women to the Electoral Franchise: Spoken in the House of Commons, May 20th, 1867. London: Trubner and Co., 1867.

———. The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1849-1873, Part I [1849]. Edited by Francis E. Mineka and Dwight N. Lindley. XIV. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972.

———. The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1849-1873, Part III [1865]. Edited by Francis E. Mineka and Dwight N. Lindley. Vol. XVI. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972.

Mitchell, Joshua. The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion , Democracy, and the American Future. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Morales, Maria H., ed. Mill’s The Subjection of Women: Critical Essays. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.

Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1960.

O’Brien, Mary. The Politics of Reproduction. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

Okin, Susan. Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Parekh, Bhikhu. Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981.

196 Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2000.

Rich, Adrienne. On Lies Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995.

Ring, Jennifer. The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Salkever, Stephen G. “Women, Soldiers, Citizens: Plato & Aristotle on the Politics of Virility.” Polity 19, no. 2 (Winter 1986): 232–253.

Saxonhouse, Arlene. “Family, Polity & Unity: Aristotle on Socrates’ Community of Wives.” Polity 15, no. 2 (Winter 1982): 202–219.

———. Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1992.

———. Women in the History of Political Thought: Ancient Greece to Machiavelli. New York: Praeger, 1985.

Skorupski, John, editor. Cambridge Companion to Mill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Sophocles. Ajax. Translated by Shomit Dutta. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

———. Journey to America. Edited by J.P. Mayer. Translated by George Lawrence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960.

———. Journeys to England and America. Edited by J.P. Mayer. Translated by George Lawrence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958.

———. Selected Letters on Politics and Society. Edited by Roger Boesche. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

———. The Old Regime and the Revolution. Edited by Fransçois Furet and Françoise Mélonio. Translated by Alan S. Kahan. Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

———. Writings on Empire and Slavery. Edited by Jennifer Pitts. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

197 Urbinati, Nadia. Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Villa, Dana. Public Freedom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Voegelin, Eric. “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” The Review of Politics 15, no. 1 (Jan., 1953).

Welch, Cheryl. De Toqueville. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Winthrop, Delba. “Tocqueville’s American Woman and ‘The True Conception of Democratic Progress.’” In Feminist Interpretations of Alexis De Tocqueville. Edited by Jill Locke and Eileen Hunt Botting, 177–197. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009.

Wolin, Sheldon S. Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Zunz, Olivier, editor. Alexis De Tocqueville and Gustave De Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010.

198