The Woman Question

HUM 2052: Civilization IISummer 2010Dr. PerdigaoJune 1, 2010

Absolutism• With absolutist state, centralized government, power to

collect taxes, over foreign policy, publication of books, regulating dress (Perry 371)

• Absolutism: republican, constitutional states by 1800

• European state building in late seventeenth century—commercial rivalry between states and colonial expansion as markers of state’s role in world trade (Perry 374)

• French, English models of central governments during the period; English constitutional monarchy and French sovereignty with dynastic state, absolutism (Perry 379)

• Dynastic state, absolutist principles: “centralized bureaucracy; royal patronage to enforce allegiance; system of taxation universally but inequitably applied; and suppression of political opposition, either through the use of patronage or, if necessary, through force” (Perry 383) seen as negatives but more positive characteristics include cultivation of arts and sciences as a “means of increasing national power and prestige”; leads to political stability in France, a uniform system of law, and channels resources into state (Perry 385)

Raison D’État• Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453), English driven from

France, allegiance to French king, French national identity (Perry 379)

• Key role for Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s chief minister, architect of French absolutism

• Richelieu’s “raison d'état” employed by Louis XIII and Louis XIV, increased power of central bureaucracy, attacked power of independent (Protestant) towns and cities, limited roles of nobles, dictated foreign policy (Perry 381)

• With Louis XIV, increase in monarchical authority

• Flaws in Louis XIV’s system—no check on his power and ideas for international conquest; no limit on “State’s capacity to make war or spend money”; revokes Edict of Nantes in 1685, causing French Protestants to flee, become imprisoned; policies turn violently aggressive; underestimates England and the Dutch Republic (Perry 382)

• Death of Louis XIV in 1715; French Revolution in 1789

Her Majesty• England’s national unity achieved earlier than any other

major European state (Perry 385)

• War of the Roses (1455-1485) between two noble families: Tudors, Henry VIII (1485-1509) (Perry 386)

• Protestant Reformation in England defeated power of papacy and enhanced power of Parliament

• After Henry’s death, Edward VI: daughter Mary (1553-1558), tries to return to Catholicism, with brutality; Elizabeth I (1558-1603) brings peace and religious stability

• Elizabethan period—national identity—as “golden age”

• Threat of rebellion by Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots

• Elizabeth “secures” England for Protestant cause (Perry 387); Shakespeare’s plays during the period

Glorious and Unglorious Revolutions• Von Hippel’s representation of national identity;

Shakespeare’s sister in Woolf

• Glorious Revolution changes “political and constitutional reality”

• Parliament gains right to assemble and vote on taxation, rights to trial by jury (for men of property and social status), Bill of Rights in 1689, religious toleration to Protestants (Perry 391)

• English revolutions established English parliamentary government, gave freedom to propertied, property issues factor in failure of absolutism in England (Perry 391)

• Property: power, placement of women

On Liberty• Notion of sovereignty, state’s authority, state as entity,

church subordinate to state, sovereign state as “the basic unit of political authority in the West” (Perry 397)

• Human liberty—as Italian creation, in Middle Ages and Renaissance, not in sovereign states in Europe

• 16th and 17th centuries, liberty rarely discussed—only in writings by Calvinist opponents of absolutism

• Mid-seventeenth century in England, political thought that “human liberty can be ensured within the confines of a powerful national state: one governed by mere mortals and not by divinely sanctioned and absolute kings” (Perry 397)

• American Revolution as result of Enlightenment ideas and writers of English Revolution, idea of liberty (Perry 448), confidence in reason, freedom of religion and thought, natural rights

• July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence, from thirteen colonies, Locke’s theory of natural rights (Perry 447), still liberty and equality not to all—slaves and women

Evolving Terms• Republican ideal as alternative to absolutism during

European Enlightenment in eighteenth century

• Revolutions in late eighteenth century, Europeans and Americans repudiated monarchical systems and opted for republics

• Human rights (Perry 435)

• Representation of slavery in Candide; condemned in Diderot’s Encyclopedia (1755)

• Economic thought—Adam Smith (1732-1790), The Wealth of Nations (1776), capitalism, laissez faire economy (Perry 437-438)

A New Tradition in Reason?• The Enlightenment: eighteenth century writers and

scholars applying “critical, reasoning spirit” to problems in the world

• Three major factors: revulsion against absolutism; new freedom of publishing; impact of Scientific Revolution (Perry 420)

• Belief in progress; importance of education; question of freedom (despite existence of slavery)

• In the Dutch Republic in 1785, “society founded by women interested in receiving a scientific education” (Perry 415) in Middleburg, lasts for 100 years, yet most academies excluded women until the 20th century

• Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), challenging traditional authority of monarchy, aristocracy, fathers, and churchmen (Perry 422)

• Paris at center of Enlightenment but circles of philosophes in Berlin, Moscow, Budapest, London, the Hague, Philadelphia (Perry 422)

What is (and isn’t) Enlightenment?• Philosophes: rather than concentration on abstract ideals

and ideas, interest in real problems, material concerns (intersection with political philosophy)

• Term “enlightened century” used in the 1760s

• Immanuel Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” (1784) shows interests characterizing the period: reason; humanity; religious tolerance; natural rights; and criticism of outmoded customs and prejudices

• Some critics saw it as a movement that was “antireligious, undermining of authority, and even atheistic and immoral”

• Limits of reason and science: After WWII, In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947, 1993), Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno ask why “mankind was sinking into ‘a new kind of barbarism’” and answer that it is because “we have trusted too much in the Enlightenment and its belief in reason and science.” (MW: 565)

• Enlightenment, from Renaissance humanists to Scientific Revolution

Instilling Enlightenment?• Role of women during Enlightenment

• Salons (Perry 422-423), women as key organizers

• Freemasons—late 17th century in England and Scotland, middle-class and aristocratic men (and some women), blamed for French Revolution (Perry 423)

• Training in self-government, self-education, social criticism, leads to social revolutions (Perry 423)

• Standards of education for girls and women were poor—calls for reform but only by few

• With industrialization in 1800, women in work force, need for literacy, changes in education

• Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), his Sophie to Émile—bears burden of “instilling enlightenment” although limited experience of world and education (Perry 433); Kant: women feel and do not reason (Perry 436)

Instilling Enlightenment?• John Locke (1632-1704), Two Treatises of Government,

justification for English Revolution of 1688-1689, government for the people, written before the Glorious Revolution (Perry 429); idea of tabula rasa in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding

• Natural rights of man, religious toleration (except to Catholics), necessity of education, works later used to justify revolutions in Europe and America (Perry 429-430)

• Rousseau—The Social Contract, idea of reform, society and government corrupting man who is born free and innocent in nature (Perry 430); ideal in city-state of ancient Greece

The Perfect Woman (1975, 2004)

Reconfiguring the Fall

Simulations of Simulations

Reality and Illusions

Anonymity• “Sophia,” eighteenth century• “Woman Not Inferior to Man” (1739); “Woman’s

Superior Excellence over Man” (1740)• “will to reason” (245); “pretended authority” (246)• England as model, “how much happier a kingdom is”

(255), university culture

• Theodor Gottlieb Von Hippel (1741-1796), East Prussia, writing in sentimental fiction, poetry, hymns, and moral and social treatises

• “On Improving the Status of Women” (1792)• Published anonymously, like Sophia’s • “Liberty, this divine spark by means of which we are

what we are” (267)• The female sex was deprived of its human rights by no

fault of its own, but merely through the great strides forward taken by all human activity and affairs in their advancement toward civilization” (267)