Introduction

BERENICE A. CARROLL

In the mid-nineteenth century, Sarah Grimké wrote:

Thus far woman has struggled through life with bandaged eyes, accepting the dogma of her weakness and inability to take care of herself not only physically but intellectually. She has held out a trembling hand and received gratefully the proffered aid. She has foregone her right to study, to know the laws and purposes of government to which she is subject. But now there is awakened in her a consciousness that she is defrauded of her legitimate Rights and that she never can fulfil her mission until she is placed in that position to which she feels herself called by the divinity within.... There is now predominant in the minds of intelligent women to an extent never known before a struggling after freedom, an intense desire after a higher life. (Grimké, [1852] 1975: 254)

Nearly a century and a half later, these words still have an uncomfortably familiar ring. In the persistent stereotypes, science, reason, and intellect are still male. In the elite halls of academe, women are still a relatively small minority; in the recognized annals of intellectual history, a yet smaller minority.

But today there is growing recognition that the image of woman with bandaged eyes is as limited as the image of woman with trembling hand—that neither is true to the complex realities of womens participation in history. As Mary Daly put it: "[I]t is necessary to grasp the fundamental fact that women have had the power of naming stolen from us" (Daly, 1973: 8). "Stolen”: that is, not that women never had the power, nor even that we are without it now, but that women have been denied the free and full exercise—and rewards —of this essential function of human intellect.

There is a compelling exploration of the power of naming in Ursula Le Guin's fantasy, A Wizard of Earthsea. The apprentice wizard sees there "that in this dusty and fathomless matter of learning the true name of every place, thing, and being, the power he wanted lay like a jewel at the bottom of a dry well. For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.” Substitute "science” for "magic” (bearing in mind that this novel is an allegory on modern science) and we will understand better the meaning of this remark in contemporary terms. The power of naming is the power to define, comprehend, and seek to control reality.

Naming has appeared to be in the hands of men in the realm of social reality as much as in the realm of natural science, and a large proportion of feminist scholarship has focused on exposing the distortions and false consciousness arising from the oligopoly of what has been called "masculist” or "phallocratic” knowledge and the techniques by which it is maintained —discouraging, repressing, and ultimately suppressing namings by women and other unwelcome aspirants.

But if the power of naming has been stolen from women, some, unquestionably—like Sarah Grimké— have wrested it back, in every time and place, from Page xvi → Enheduanna in the third millennium B.C.E. to the present. Some have always refused to forego the "right to study, to know the laws and purposes of government.” Not all have been equally daring in questioning the dominant consciousness, but many have insisted on the right to formulate and put forward their own conceptions of political reality.

The readings in this anthology were selected to represent contributions of women specifically in the field of political and social theory, rather than the more general realm of women writers or intellectuals, though it is often difficult to draw the boundaries. Over the past three decades there has been explosive growth in the study of women in literature—women as poets, dramatists, and novelists. Women’s education, “learned women,” women in science, and women academics have also received attention. A project to restore the history of women philosophers has produced a four-volume collaborative history, and several other studies of women philosophers in particular periods have appeared in recent years. Substantial work has also been done on women as political activists, revoltionaries, and social reformers. The extensive intellectual tradition of feminist thought in particular has been explored in many works in recent decades. A selected list of studies of these kinds, such as the bibliography at the end of this volume, can only be suggestive of the impressive growth of knowledge in these areas.

Yet this rapidly growing scholarly literature has not produced a widespread awareness of women as creators of diverse theoretical contributions throughout the long history of social and political theory.

This has been almost as true of feminist scholarship as it is of “malestream” scholarship and education. The defensiveness of many feminists concerning the intellectual work of women is reflected, for example, in the title of Nancy J. Holland's book, Is Womens Philosophy Possible? (1990), or in Kate Fullbrook's remark that “It is no longer heretical to discuss [Simone de] Beauvoir as a philosopher” (quoted in Chronicle of Higher Education, September 4, 1998: A22). Holland acknowledges that “there is philosophy done by women” but passes over the history of their work in favor of seeking a new body of “women’s philosophy” defined as “philosophical work (i.e., discussion of traditional philosophical issues) that arises from, explicitly refers to, and attempts to account for the experience of women” (p. 1). Of this, Holland finds that there is very little, and she directs her attention to the search for “what women’s philosophy might be.”

Gerda Lerner wrote in 1986: “Women have not only been educationally deprived throughout historical time in every known society, they have been excluded from theory-formation” (Lerner, 1986: 5). Indeedthere is no question that there have been processes of systematic exclusion of women from the institutions and recognized bodies of literature dominant in “the enterprise of creating symbol systems, philosophies, science, and law” (ibid.). But there exists nonetheless an extensive history of women’s participation in the enterprise of theory-formation. It is not exclusively a history of feminist thought but ranges over the entire spectrum of political and social theory.

Ironically, this very diversity of perspectives has bolstered resistance to serious assessment of women as political theorists. The traditions of women’s political thought do not fit neatly into contemporary ideological frames and therefore lack an assured base of recognition, acceptance, and adherents.

One problem is that women identified as “intellectuals” are generally of a small privileged class, and often “exceptional” even in that class; hence they are isolated from and unrepresentative of the overwhelming majority of women. The latter, even in middle and upper classes, have generally been denied the educational and occupational opportunities to produce recognized works of political and social theory, at least on the model of the male classics. Women of less privileged class, race, or ethnic groups experience even greater obstacles and isolation in asserting claims to formulate theory. Thus those who managed to produce written works of theory were often seen as “outsiders” in their own communities and lacked a following of admiring supporters. Those who did acquire such a following were generally perceived less as creators of social theory than as religious leaders (e.g., St. Catherine of Siena), popular reformers (e.g., Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells), or revolutionaries (e.g., Vera Figner, Rosa Luxemburg).

At the same time, women of all groups have been seen as marginal in the male-dominated arenas of intellectual and political activity, even where they succeeded in breaking barriers to enter those arenas. This “outsider” status often stamps their work with an innovative or dissimulating character that may seem deviant or dissenting even in the intellectual and political movements with which they are associated, making them appear on the periphery rather than at the center of the movement’s intellectual tradition. For Virginia Woolf and others, this outsider status became a platform and badge of honor, but even for Woolf, it hid her message in the shadows of obscurity.

Women have adopted a remarkable diversity of responses to their status as intellectual outsiders, from appearing to ignore it to drawing on it as inspiration for their theoretical doctrines. Those who adopt the former model are often, particularly if successful and famous, heavily imbued with male attitudes, male doctrines, Page xvii →male “wisdom.” They may have internalized and conformed to tradition, the “malestream” as Mary O’Brien named it (O’Brien, 1981: 21), more completely than other women, in order to gain a hearing in the male intellectual oligopoly, not to be locked out of the recognized realm of intellectual discourse. Thus some women who have written extensively on social and political questions have ignored or at times even demeaned women and have adopted the goals, values, and methods of the patriarchy. From the Neo-Pythagoreans of the ancient world to a Melanie Klein or Ayn Rand of the twentieth century, many women have adopted this stance in their works.

Feminist scholars today, not surprisingly, find these (and many other) women’s writings troubling and have preferred to seek out those of our foremothers who anticipated or approximated what we now consider a correct “line,” leaving the rest in an obscurity which admittedly saves us many discomforts. On the other hand, this practice leaves us in ignorance or nearignorance of an enormous body of works constituting an integral part of the collective product of human consciousness. These works are important to restore to light and subject to analysis.

When we embark on this endeavor, seeking to find the women who contributed to the varied traditions of political thought and to explore and assess their works, we encounter many obstacles. The first, and still the most widespread and destructive obstacle, is their omission from standard courses, texts, and reference works in political theory and philosophy. Most older standard histories and anthologies of political theory, political and social philosophy, or intellectual history simply omit all women. This remains true of some today, but recent collections may include one woman theorist, such as Hannah Arendt, or a few, such as Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil. A striking advance is the introduction of a series of works by women among the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (now including works by Christine de Pizan, Mary Astell, and Mary Wollstonecraft).

The long-standing pattern of omission and neglect of women theorists has been addressed in the field of sociology and social theory by two outstanding works of the 1990s: The Women Founders of the Social Sciences, by Lynn McDonald (1994), and The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory, 1830—1930— A Text/Reader, edited by Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Jill Niebrugge-Brantley (1998). Lynn McDonald describes well the experience of discovering “the women founders” in the course of a study of the history of sociology, in which she set out to look for women’s contributions and found far more than she anticipated:

The exercise of recovery was not easy, for there was so much to unlearn. It often took me a long time simply to believe what I was reading, to give full value to the original observations, insights, theories, propositions, and practical research examples provided by these women. I would frequently tell myself that what the woman had said reminded me of work by some other, prominent, male theorist, only to realize that her work predated his by years, even decades. (McDonald, 1994, 1996: x)

McDonald mentions and includes early political theorists among the women she discusses, but her emphasis is upon the founders and shapers of empirical social science in the period from the late sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. She defends empiricism against some contemporary feminist attacks and is chiefly concerned with recovering the important contributions of women to the methodology of sociology and empirical social research. Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley, like McDonald, address the contributions of women as sociologists and “the politics of erasure” but provide also selections from the writings of the “founders” : Harriet Martineau, Jane Ad-dams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Marianne Weber, the Chicago women’s school, and Beatrice Potter Webb. These are both very welcome and important contributions.

These works focus on a particular area of women’s political and social thought. Methodology and social research are grounded in theory, but the range of women’s political theory, as reflected in small part in the present volume, is much broader, more diverse, and often contrary to empiricist approaches. Moreover, as Lynn McDonald herself notes, there is reason to wonder about the security of such gains. Awareness of women’s intellectual contributions is not entirely new today but rather a revival of knowledge that has been recovered and lost, recovered and lost again, repeatedly over time. This pattern of repeated loss and suppression may be discerned in the historical accounts given in such works as Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Womens Writing (1983); Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them (1982, 1988); Mary Ellen Waithe, ed., A History of Women Philosophers (4 vols., 1987—95), and others.

In this sense, it may be misleading to say, as stated above, that “most of the older standard histories” simply omit women altogether. While this may be true for general introductory texts, it is possible to find some older specialized works that give more attention to women than many recent texts. For example, Henry Osborn Taylor’s The Medieval Mind (4th ed., 1930) Page xviii →devoted a chapter in volume 1 to five women (Elizabeth of Schönau, Hildegard of Bingen, Mary of Ognies, Liutgard of Tongern, and Mechtild of Magdeburg), and a chapter in volume 2 to Heloïse. Since Taylor concludes with the thirteenth century, he does not deal with such important figures as Catherine of Siena and Christine de Pizan. We might also find some grounds for regret or criticism concerning Taylor's presentation of these womens ideas. But two full chapters on medieval women writers goes beyond anything in even the most recent textbooks on intellectual history and philosophy, other than works in women’s studies.

Taylor’s work reflected a revival of knowledge concerning women’s intellectual contributions that coincided with the development of the women’s movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and we owe a great deal to that period. Henry Steele Commager’s The American Mind (1949), now five decades old, marked a kind of turning point between that era and the regressive anti-feminism of the middle decades of the twentieth century, a reactionary era described for example by Kate Millett in Sexual Politics (1978) and Marilyn French in Beyond Power (1985). Commager, like Taylor, accorded some extended consideration to women writers, giving particular attention to a few novelists, above all Willa Gather and Ellen Glasgow. However, Commager’s treatment of women as intellectuals was uneven. Mary Baker Eddy and Margaret Sanger appear, but no mention is made of Mercy Otis Warren, Emma Willard, Frances Wright, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emma Goldman, or Eleanor Roosevelt. Mary Beard is not mentioned even when Commager discusses the Rise of American Civilization, which he treats as though it were solely the work of Charles Beard. No mention is made of Jane Addams except for the title of one of her books, included in passing. Even so, Commager gave more attention to women writers than many successors, and the decades of the 1950s and 1960s were singularly barren. Only since the 1970s has the cycle of recognition and recovery of women’s intellectual work moved again into an upward path.

Insofar as the power of naming has been stolen from women, it has been mainly by this process of omission from general works of intellectual and social history, which makes inaccessible what women have named in the past, and implies its unimportance. Total omission is probably the most frequent approach and most effective in creating a void of silence from which the work of women is especially difficult to rescue. But where the presence of women has been noted, their contributions to political and social theory have often been obscured by distortion, derision, and depreciation—to which we return below—which rationalize the omission of their work in later collections and studies, and eventually the loss or deliberate destruction of the works themselves.

Outright destruction and physical loss of the body of works appears to have been the fate of the vast majority of women’s writings from ancient times to the period of the Renaissance in Europe, and of many works since then. The entire writings of Sappho, as well as those of Hypatia and other women, have been lost to such destruction, with the exception of fragments and perhaps some works that survived under the names of male authors. Selective destruction to suit the predilections of male associates has also been practiced. Margaret Fuller’s writings were heavily "edited” (or rather: censored) after her death by her friends (!) James Freeman Clarke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and W. H. Channing, who went so far as to destroy the original manuscripts after editing to their taste (see Chevigny, 1976: 9).

A modified form of omission of women’s work is neglect or inattention to their intellectual work as such, particularly in the case of women well known as political activists or social reformers, such as Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells, or Eleanor Roosevelt. The case of Jane Addams is particularly salient in view of Christopher Lasch’s effort to rescue her intellectual contributions from obscurity in his anthology, The Social Thought of Jane Addams, where he describes Addams as "a thinker of originality and daring” (1965: xv). Unfortunately, in his treatment of her elsewhere, Lasch was not entirely without fault in the failure of this rescue mission. We are left, even in the late 1990s, without a comprehensive, full-length critical study of the political and social thought of Jane Addams.

The same must be said for the overwhelming majority of significant women theorists in the political and social realm. We have biographies, essays, anthologies, but still few full-length critical analyses. Some biographies contain incisive discussion of their subjects’ ideas. But for purposes of intellectual history and the critique of political theory, a biography cannot substitute for a systematic critical study.

To the extent that women’s intellectual work escapes from total invisibility or neglect, it is often subject to a pattern of distorted representations ranging from blatant depreciation and derision to wasteful defensiveness and uncritical apologetics. The analysis of women’s political thought is often clouded also by judgments on their personal lives and motives. It is true that this is the case for men as well, and that on the Page xix →positive side, a careful interweaving of biographical information with critical analysis may provide the richest comprehension of a writer’s work. But too often the process degenerates into a focus on the personal characteristics and motivations of the writers rather than on their ideas as such.

In seeking to restore the body of works expressing the political and social theories of women, we must recognize that their ideas are more likely to be expressed in vehicles other than formal treatises. Women, excluded for centuries from the academies, the chambers of law, the divinity schools, and similar institutions, had fewer opportunities to learn, practice, and publish in the conventional style of the political treatise. This does not mean that they thought less, nor less rigorously and systematically, than men, but that the forms of expression open to them were more likely to be of other types: essays, letters, diaries, autobiographies, histories, speeches, pamphlets, textbooks for the school or the home, reviews, periodical articles, poetry, drama, and novels.

Poetry and drama have often been vehicles of political expression, particularly under repressive regimes. Works in these forms by male writers have often been recognized as "political theory,” as in the case of Greek tragedy, the dialogues of Plato, and epic poetry by John Milton and Dante Alighieri. In such works, theory may be implicit rather than explicit, and the problems of interpretation and assessment are multiplied. But if we are not to accept an exclusionary double standard, we must search a wide range of materials for the political philosophy of women who were excluded from the recognized channels of theoretical discourse. We have therefore included in this collection examples of works by women in diverse genres, including poetry, drama, autobiography, letters, fiction, and others.

Similarly, in order to discern the political theory of ancient times we must turn to a variety of literary, historical, and religious sources in which the early ideas are embodied. Epic poetry and scriptures, temple hymns, fragments, and aphorisms quoted by later writers or rediscovered in cuneiform tablets, stone inscriptions or shreds of ancient papyri are among the sources from which we derive knowledge of the ideas and influence of the ancient theorists. Secular political philosophy emerges only in modern and contemporary times, and the mixing of political with religious or spiritual beliefs, especially the explanation and justification of political principles through religious doctrines, persists from ancient times throughout the history of political philosophy.

Finally, there is a need for balance in assessing the place of women’s writings about women in their overall social philosophy. There has been a tendency to give attention to those writings which relate to women and gender, to the neglect of writings offering observations and theory on other questions. For example, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is well known today, but her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) is so little known and used that it is sometimes confused with the later work. For purposes of research and scholarship, what is crucial is not to dichotomize these areas of thought. Rather, we need to see them in the context of the writer and her time. Where the role of women in social action is seen by the writer as a central concern, as in the case of Angelina Grimké, we should consider it as such—that is, neither focus exclusively on her ideas on women’s roles nor try to excise them from our examination of her ideas on other matters. On the other hand, where the roles and experiences of women are seldom directly addressed, as in the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, we must consider why that was so but give our attention mainly to understanding what she saw as essential to write about.

In seeking to achieve a better naming of political reality, feminist scholars have adopted two main approaches to the history of social thought: first, critical analysis of the traditional canon of political theory from a feminist perspective; and second, recovery and development of feminist theory both as an autonomous tradition in the history of political theory and in dialogue with other traditions both within and outside the accepted canon.

The first approach has produced a large body of scholarly literature. Some of the studies presenting critical analysis of the traditional literature also encompass exposition and critique of contemporary feminist theory. Almost all give at least brief attention to feminist writers, though the chapter titles or content may focus mainly on male theorists. Yet the emphasis is still upon the male theorists of the traditional canon. Indeed, attention often remains focused on the familiar names of the most authoritative "Fathers”: Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Luther, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Sartre. Some recent works in this genre address an updated male canon, including critique of currently more popular intellectual heroes: Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida (see, for example, Holland, 1990). The lists could be used for the syllabi in conventional courses in the history of political theory. In content such a course, taught from a variety of critical feminist perspectives, would be by no means conventional, but to the extent that dominance rests on a mystique of authority and control, the persistence of Page xx →primary attention to the Fathers may have the unintended and undesired consequences of reinforcing this mystique.

The second approach escapes this difficulty by turning attention fully to the history and current development of feminist theory. While this body of theory does encompass the works of some male writers (such as John Stuart Mill or Friedrich Engels), the overwhelming majority of the literature of feminist theory has been written by women. This approach has produced a large, growing, and important body of literature dealing with the history and critical interpretation of feminist thought. However, this literature has been compartmentalized, so that feminist thought has been treated as though it were outside the body of political theory.

A third approach to the goal of transforming political theory and intellectual history is that of efforts to open up the traditional canon itself to works not usually represented in it, including works by people of subordinated races, cultures, or classes; works by advocates of marginalized philosophies such as utopianism, pacifism, and gay and lesbian identity; and works by women—of all races, cultures, classes, sexual orientations, and ideologies. These efforts are not yet far advanced, and as suggested above, the range and richness of women’s political thought is little recognized.

This volume is offered as a contribution to the third approach to the goal of transforming political theory and intellectual history. It is divided into four sections, by historical era, designed to illustrate the presence and varied contributions of women in the political and social thought of their time. The editors hope that the volume will provoke discussion and provide material for exploration of questions hardly touched on to date concerning the continuities and discontinuities, consistencies and inconsistencies, of women’s political thought over time and difference.

It is not possible to examine these substantive questions here, but one may venture the observation that, to varying degrees and in widely differing ways, women’s political writings fall most often on the side of challenge to authority and the search for alternatives to relations of hierarchical dominance. These challenges may be embedded even in a conservative framing, as in the instances of seventeenth-century royalists Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell. One may speculate that the outsider status of women theorists—even those most closely associated with ruling groups, such as Enheduanna—gives them an edge of indignation, a critical vision, provoking challenge to particular forms of dominant authority. As Hannah Arendt wrote: “It is only after one ceases to reduce public affairs to the business of dominion that the original data in the realm of human affairs will appear, or rather, reappear, in their authentic diversity” (Arendt, 1972: 142-43).

In this context, we may note the example of another theorist not included in this volume, Mary Parker Follett. Follett is little remembered today, and there is no full-length biography of her, though she is included in Notable American Women. She is not well known in feminist circles, for the good reasons that she apparently never dealt with the situation of women in her writings, and in the labor-management issues to which she addressed herself later in life, she spoke more to corporate management than to labor. Nevertheless, Follett’s early writings provided an analysis of power that bears a striking resemblance to some contemporary feminist concepts, distinguishing “power-over” from “power-with.” In The New State (1918) and Creative Experience (1924), Follett argued that genuine power is “coactive” rather than “coercive” and that both power and creativity are interactive functions of group processes: “Out of the intermingling, interacting activities of men and women surge up the forces of life: powers are born which we had not dreamed of, ideas take shape and grow, forces are generated which act and react on each other....” (Follett, 1920: 149).

So it is, we may suggest, in our quest for the history of women’s political and social thought. Taking a liberty with Follett’s words, I would suggest that out of our recovery of works previously unknown or obscured to our understanding, out of the collective process of learning and naming, “forces are generated which act and react on each other, ideas take shape and grow, powers are born which we had not dreamed of.”