The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

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Susanne Lettow

The Enlightenment and its legacies are highly controversial among contemporary feminist philosophers. Since the eighteenth century, the notions of reason, equality, and human rights have played an important role in denouncing and resisting domination and exploitation. To a great extent, feminists have articulated critiques of gender hierarchies in the language of the Enlightenment. At the same time, feminist philosophers have explored and criticized the structural limitations of Enlightenment discourse, and have argued that—far from being truly universal—the notions of equality, reason, progress, tolerance, and human rights foster prejudice, exclusion, and domination. In many respects, feminist critiques that explore the “dark” side of these “bright” concepts converge with other critical perspectives, in particular from postcolonial studies, poststructuralism, critical Marxism, and the early Frankfurt School, which have all—in one way or the other—exposed the dialectics of Enlightenment. Accordingly, the Enlightenment claim to scrutinize all forms of authority and power and to conceive of society based on the principle of equality is understood as being structurally intertwined with multiple forms of domination in terms of gender, race, class, and empire.

The question open for discussion is whether feminist critiques of the Enlightenment still need to build on and re-enact the legacy of the Enlightenment, or whether a new theoretical language that overcomes the discourse of the Enlightenment as it emerged in eighteenth-century Europe has to be shaped. A close look at the philosophical interventions made by feminists in the historical period of the Enlightenment itself, i.e. the eighteenth century, is certainly helpful for a better understanding of this problem, since it makes clear that “the Enlightenment” has always been a contested discursive space, where a wide variety of arguments and interventions were formulated, and where feminists sought to challenge established gender hierarchies.

The Plurality of the Enlightenment

Many feminist scholars argue that the monolithic understanding of the Enlightenment that has long prevailed in the history of ideas needs to be replaced with a more open and plural understanding that allows one to conceive of the Enlightenment as a collection of “disparate and often contradictory phenomena” (DeLucia 2015: 9). Such a view focuses on debates, controversies, and intellectual networks and practices through which certain ideas came to circulate in the eighteenth century, rather than on fixed concepts. “Enlightenment,” as Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor argue, “was a living world where ideas were conveyed not only through ‘high’ philosophical works but also through novels, poetry, advice literature, popular theology, journalism, pornography, and that most fluid of eighteenth-century genres, the ‘miscellaneous essay’” (Knott and Taylor 2005: xvii). Women’s contributions to the discourse of Enlightenment took many different forms, most prominently letter writing and the management of “salons.” In order to fully grasp how women’s intellectual contributions helped to shape Enlightenment discourse, it is important to note that in the eighteenth century no clear boundaries existed between science, literature, philosophy, letter writing, journalism, etc., and that the invention of new intellectual practices was a major concern for Enlightenment thinkers. In fact, assessing the philosophical impact of women and feminist thought requires one to challenge a narrow, disciplinary, and anachronistic notion of philosophy and endorse a broader understanding of philosophical activity.

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Not only was the Enlightenment constituted through a wide range of theoretical practices, but also this intellectual movement took different shapes in the various European countries and regions. Debates were loosely connected through the transnational circulation of ideas, books, and persons, so that similarities as well as differences between the multiple Enlightenments exist. In France, the institution of the salon flourished in the second half of the eighteenth century and became the paradigmatic institution of the Enlightenment. It “upheld both reciprocal exchange and the principle of governance by substituting a female salonnière for a male king as the governor of its discourse” (Goodman 1994: 5). Guided by women such as Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin, Anne-Catherine de Ligniville Helvétuis, Julie de Lespinasse, and Suzanne Necker, the salon constituted a “mixed-gender sociability” (Goodman 1994: 5). In this context, the social meaning of “femininity” and of gender relations became major issues of philosophical debate. Intellectuals such as Voltaire or Buffon claimed that civilization and politeness manifest themselves in gender equality, and that women were a “civilizing force on which depended the ‘gentleness of society’” (Buffon, quoted in Goodman 1994: 7).

Female intellectuals often also endorsed such a positive view of cultivated femininity, although Jean-Jacques Rousseau converted this ambivalent ideal of femininity into a hierarchical model of gender complementarity. In particular, in his treatise Emile, or On Education, Rousseau developed an understanding of femininity according to which women are “naturally” disposed towards pleasing men, while at the same time regulating their own and—indirectly—their husband’s desires. The sentimental arrangement of the sexes of which Rousseau conceives clearly builds on an imbalance of power. While Sophie, the female figure that Rousseau introduces in chapter 5 of the book as a companion for Emile, is mainly educated to serve the cultivation of Emile, the ideal that governs Emile’s education is autonomy. It therefore comes as no surprise that, as Karen Green notes, the “earliest female responses to Rousseau were fundamentally negative” (Green 2014: 167). However, intellectuals such as Germaine de Staël or Louise Keralio-Robert at least partly endorsed his idea of femininity, according to which “any tender bourgeois mother and competent housekeeper could aspire to govern her husband for the greater social good, through the bonds of sexual desire and love” (Green 2014: 169). By the end of the century, though, Olympe de Gouges formulated a powerful plea for gender equality in France as did Mary Wollstonecraft in England, rejecting any essentialist notion of gender difference.

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In England and Scotland, the Bluestockings circle had a significant impact on the development of Enlightenment thought during the 1760s and 1770s. This circle “grew out of activities of a number of intellectually compatible female friends, who encouraged each other’s literary endeavors” (Green 2014: 132). They also helped to shape a new vision of women’s moral mission in the development of society. Sarah Scott, “the most articulate political theorist of the group,” envisioned

a utopian community, set up by women where they take in and educate young girls whose families cannot provide for them, and which provides a sheltered environment, in which the disabled and disadvantaged poor can work and contribute to their own upkeep.

(Green 2014: 134)

According to Scott, enlightened women should work to transform society “into ‘a state of mutual confidence, reciprocal services, and correspondent affections’ grounded in Christian virtue” (Green 2014: 141).

A similar notion of the “civilizing” role of women can be found in the writings of Elizabeth Montagu who received many of the male protagonists of the Scottish Enlightenment in her salon. Recently, JoEllen DeLucia has argued that “the conversations in the Bluestocking’s salons . . . acted as a laboratory for the theories of sociability and sentiment developed by Scottish literati such as Adam Smith and James [John] Millar” (DeLucia 2015: 6). In particular the idea that

social progress is a gendered continuum that moves from masculine “undifferentiated primal energy,” a state of barely controlled individual passions, to a “refined” and “feminized” modernity in which emotions are tempered by a feminine desire to reflect on the needs and feelings of others,

echoes the Bluestockings’ understanding of women’s role in society (DeLucia 2015: 8). It also set the agenda for later modernization theories and their ambivalent, often colonialist, attitude towards the social organization of gender relations in “non-Western” societies.

While France, England, and Scotland certainly witnessed the most sophisticated debates about the role of women in society and about the meaning of gender difference, as well as critiques of the legal, political, and cultural subordination of women, debates about women’s education, gender equality, and difference also developed in other European countries. In Spain the most outspoken feminist position was formulated by Josefa Amar y Borbón who pleaded for women’s “right to happiness” (Franklin Lewis 2004: 18). In her Discourse in Defense of the Talent of Women, and of Their Aptitude for Governing and Other Positions in Which Men Are Employed (1786), Amar developed “a plan to procure that happiness for future generations of women” (Franklin Lewis 2004: 18). Elizabeth Franklin Lewis compares Amar’s Discourse to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which appeared three years later, and stresses that Amar opposed the newly emerging understanding of gender differences in terms of nature and physiology.

Like many of her contemporaries, Amar repeatedly referred to slavery in order to decry the restrictions of women’s social and legal situation. However, in contrast to the French and English writers, Amar’s opposition to “slavery” did not refer to transatlantic slavery and the abolitionist movement but to Muslim societies. While Muslim women are enslaved, the argument goes, “in the Western world . . . women experience a more subtle kind of slavery, which appears to be veneration” (Franklin Lewis 2004: 32). As Amar put it: “In one part of the world they are slaves, in the other women are dependents” (Amar, quoted in Franklin Lewis 2004: 32). This intercultural comparison nevertheless construed Muslim societies as an “abject” or negative Other to which enlightened societies should not fall back.

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In the German speaking territories, a new model of the “learned woman” emerged in the eighteenth century, with Louise Gottsched (née Kalmus) being the most prominent example. In contrast to the French salonnières, these women who were mostly trained by their academic fathers “viewed their intellectual labor as a more ‘professional,’ if supportive activity” (Goodman 1999: 239). Among them were Christiane Mariana von Ziegler, Hedwig Sidonia Zäunemann, and Dorothea Schlözer, the first woman to earn a doctorate in Germany. Only the end of the century, however, witnessed the anonymous publication of a political treatise claiming equal rights and the admission of women to all public institutions. The author was Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, the “city president” of Königsberg and a frequent guest at Kant’s lunch table. The title of Hippel’s essay On the Civil Improvement of Women (1792) referred to On the Civil Improvement of the Jews (1781), an essay by Christian Wilhelm Dohm, who argued for the legal and political emancipation of the Jews. Hippel thus constructed parallel egalitarian claims, made in favor of religious freedom and civil equality, and lamented the failure of the French Revolution, which did not succeed in extending human and civil rights to women.

Equality, Difference, and Human Rights: Olympe de Gouges and Condorcet

This extension had been the project of Olympe de Gouges in her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, which is a unique document of feminist political philosophy. De Gouges, born Marie Gouze, never received a formal education. She published several theater plays and political pamphlets, and in October 1789, right at the beginning of the revolutionary process in France, she submitted “a reform program to the National Assembly which encompassed legal sexual equality, admission for women to all occupations, and the suppression of the dowry system through a state provided alternative” (Landes 1988: 124). In 1791, de Gouges published her reformulation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen that had first been issued by the National Assembly in 1789. De Gouges was sent to the Guillotine in November 1793 for “plastering the walls of Paris with posters urging that a federalist system replace Jacobin centralized rule” (Scott 1992: 114). Associated with the Girondist faction, de Gouges nonetheless proposed to defend the king in his trial before the National Convention, and, also in 1791, published a Declaration of the Rights of Woman, “dedicated to the Queen.” Some scholars therefore depict de Gouges as a monarchist. But this view neglects the fact that she endorsed the revolutionary political principles of egalitarianism and human rights as they were articulated in the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen and as they correlated with an understanding of society and the political opposed to that of the ancien régime.

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De Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen introduces two areas of concern that today are still central concerns of feminist political philosophy. These are first the dialectics of equality and difference, or universalism and particularism, and second the extension of the bourgeois notion of the political. The first is already present in the title of the Declaration, which points out that the “rights of man” are, in fact, tailored to the male part of humanity only, and do not encompass those rights that are required if women, too, are to be regarded as equals. However, de Gouges does not only reclaim equality—claiming that “all female and male citizens, being equal . . . have to be equally admissible to all dignities, public offices and employments according to their abilities” (Gouges 1986: 103; translations follow Hunt 1996). Also, de Gouges makes clear that when abstract human rights are adapted to the concrete lifeworld of women, those rights acquire a new meaning. Such is the case with the right to freedom of speech. De Gouges translates it into the right of a woman to name, under any circumstances, the father of her child, so that she and the child would receive means of subsistence and public recognition. “Every female citizen,” she declares, should be able “to speak frankly: I am the mother of a child which belongs to you, without any barbarian prejudice forcing her to dissimulate the truth” (Gouges 1986: 104). This right, if applied, would obviously have had a huge impact on women’s possibilities to shape sexual and familial relations according to their needs and desires. Not least of all, it would have enabled them to escape the restrictions of marriage—“the tomb of trust and love,” according to de Gouges (quoted in Scott 1992: 110).

Clearly, de Gouges’ Declaration is an attempt to overcome the exclusions that are produced or at least continued through the language of human rights and equality. Her theoretical strategy to include those who have previously been excluded from the language of universalism thereby reflects the problem of particularism that until today haunts every critique of universalism. When de Gouges claims that women are “the superior sex in terms of beauty, like in terms of courage of maternal suffering” (Gouges 1986: 102), she obviously subscribes to an essentialist understanding of difference. Joan Scott has termed this “the paradox of an embodied equality,” highlighting the fact that “de Gouges never escaped the ambiguity of feminine identity, the simultaneous appeal to and critique of established norms” (Scott 1992: 106). However, the “paradoxes” that de Gouges’ text displays are not merely intellectual shortcomings: they expose constitutive problems of Enlightenment thought and modern political philosophy. First and foremost, they reveal that there is a problem of how to recognize difference without falling back on particularism and essentialism. In addition, the Declaration, although only implicitly, also suggests a way out of this impasse, namely the politicization of difference. As Scott states, de Gouges’ “addition of Women” is “disruptive because it implies the need to think differently about the whole question of rights” (Scott 1992: 110). In contrast to other articulations of the relation between equality and difference, de Gouges’ text works towards questioning the limits of the political.

A year before de Gouges published the Declaration, Condorcet’s On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship (1790) appeared. The Marquis de Condorcet, a member of the abolitionist Société des Amis des Noirs and a Girondist like de Gouges, contended that women should receive the full rights of citizenship and be admitted to all public institutions. The “principle of the equality of rights” (Condorcet 1996: 119), he argued, does not allow any exception:

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Either no individual of the human species has any true rights, or all have the same; and he or she who votes against the rights of another, whatever may be his or her religion, colour, or sex, has by that fact abjured his own.

(Condorcet 1996: 120)

Condorcet’s famous essay also refers to the opposition of equality and difference but, in contrast to de Gouges’ essay, he does not treat it as a “disruptive” paradox. Condorcet instead establishes a notion of equality that includes difference by way of subordination, treating it as a specification of the general. Condorcet argues that “women are not governed . . . by the reason (and experience) of men; they are governed by their own reason (and experience)” (1996: 120). This distinction resonates with his understanding of the distinctive “private” duties, for which—Condorcet responds to his opponents—women “would only be better fitted” if they become equal citizens.

As Joan Landes has remarked, Condorcet, “at this point in his argument, appears to bow to masculinist prejudices of republican doctrine—specifically to the increasingly popular notion that women’s domesticity can be made to service the wider polity” (Landes 1988: 114). Moreover, in Condorcet’s essay a certain model of women’s emancipation emerges that has informed much of subsequent politics and political theory, liberal and socialist alike. According to this model, women are to be treated as equals in the public sphere and within the market economy while leaving the power relations of the private sphere intact. De Gouges’ Declaration, in contrast, points in a different direction as it undermines “the possibility of any meaningful opposition between public and private” (Scott 1992: 111). In fact, when de Gouges introduces “woman” into the discourse of human rights, she subverts the underlying notion of the political as a distinctive sphere in which autonomous subjects meet. So even if the rights she refers to are the same as in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, these rights now constitute the non-political—relations of kinship, reproduction, and sexual desire—as political.

In addition, de Gouges’ Declaration hints at the fact that the opposition between equality and difference is not stable. Differences proliferate. What is at stake is not only the difference between men and women, but also differences among women, for example women of rich and of poor families for whom the same laws do not have the same effects, as de Gouges explains in the Postambule to the Declaration. In addition, the question that looms at the margins of her text concerns the interrelations between gendered and racialized forms of oppression, in particular slavery. De Gouges extends her egalitarian view to those enslaved and colonized: “Man everywhere is equal” (L’homme partout est égal), she states in her 1788 Reflections on Black Men (Réflexions sur les hommes nègres; Gouges 1986). She also deconstructs the “black–white” dichotomy: “Men’s colour is nuanced, like all the animals that nature has produced, as well as the plants and minerals. . . . All is varied and this is the beauty of nature” (quoted in Scott 1992: 113). If, one could argue, the extension of the language of universal human rights and equality to the colonized and enslaved evokes the dialectics of equality and universalism in a similar way to the feminist perspective, then the question emerges of how these forms of critique interfere with each other.

Education, Equality, and Independence: Mary Wollstonecraft in Context

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1798) is certainly the most prominent feminist Enlightenment thinker. In defense of the early French Revolution she published A Vindication of the Rights of Men, the first reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, in which she heavily criticized Burke’s aristocratic views. In this book, though, she did not reflect upon the situation of women as she had already done in her first book Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786) and as she continued to do up to her last novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Women (1798), published posthumously by William Godwin, her husband and the father of her daughter Mary Shelley.

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The Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), her most important publication, is a plea for gender equality through equal education. Wollstonecraft’s “central organizing principle, through which she expresses her observations about the oppression and domination of women” (Coffee 2014: 908), and thus her leading ethical ideal, is “independence.” In the dedication to Talleyrand, who Wollstonecraft wishes to convince of the necessity of women’s equal education, she stresses: “Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 65). The main precondition for gaining independence—including economic independence—is, according to Wollstonecraft, for every being “the exercise of its own reason” (1989: 90). In the present state of society, she diagnoses, women are systematically hindered in this with fatal consequences for the female habitus. Education is thus meant to initiate a “revolution in feminine manners” and to change women’s subaltern forms of behavior, which Wollstonecraft critically exposes again and again throughout the Vindication (1989: 114). Indeed, education was a major topic in Enlightenment discourse, as a wide range of authors considered it the central means for improving the individual and society alike. In line with this, Wollstonecraft reflects upon the correlation between the transformation of society and the transformation of subjectivity, or the need of women’s “reforming themselves to reform the world” (1989: 114). She thereby introduces an understanding of emancipation that has had an enormous impact on feminist notions of the political as starting from and indispensably including a politics of subjectivity and self-transformation.

Wollstonecraft, who “seems to have read very few of the earlier women writers on her sex, radical or conservative” (Ferguson and Todd 1984: 61), and who did not have any connection to the Bluestockings circle, was deeply impressed by Catherine Macauley’s Letters on Education. Wollstonecraft reviewed the book enthusiastically upon its appearance in 1790, and as Moira Ferguson and Janet Todd highlight, “In all essential ideas on women Wollstonecraft and Macauley agree—politics, religion, and pedagogy” (1984: 61). Macauley, too, advocated the equal education of boys and girls and argued that “differences that actually subsist between the sexes” might be altered through education (1996: 204). She engaged in a kind of deconstruction of sexual difference and argued heavily against Rousseau’s ideal of complementarity. For Macauley, Rousseau’s account of girls’ education, which he gives in chapter 5 of his Emile, or On Education, in which he introduces the figure of Sophie, is “blinded by his pride and sensuality” (Macauley 1996: 213). His ideal of femininity, which requires that a woman “cultivate her agreeable talents, in order to please her future husband,” must, in Macauley’s view, be compared to the ideal Circassian slave, who “cultivates hers [i.e. her agreeable talents] to fit her for the harem of an eastern bashaw” (1996: 213). This orientalist theme also runs through Wollstonecraft’s criticism of women’s oppression and her critique of Rousseau.

Wollstonecraft’s relation to Rousseau is complex. Certainly, she was critical of Rousseau’s idea of gender complementarity, which many of her contemporaries endorsed. Her “quarrel with the depiction of women in Emile” was, however, by no means a “wholesale repudiation of his ideas” (Taylor 2002: 115). On the contrary, Wollstonecraft shared his critique of how inequality distorts society and has led to degeneration. Her attempt is to “extend” his argument “to women, and confidently assert that they have been drawn out of their sphere by false refinement” (Wollstonecraft 1989: 90). As a consequence, Wollstonecraft argues that women “must return to nature and equality” instead of “degrading themselves” (1989: 90). Wollstonecraft’s statement that Rousseau’s construction of femininity “appears to me grossly unnatural” (1989: 93) is thus completely in line with her interpretation of Rousseau. While Wollstonecraft acknowledges some gender differences—“women, I allow, may have different duties” (1989: 120)—her overall claim is that different tasks do not constitute differences on the level of moral principles. “They are human duties,” she contends, “and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same” (1989: 120). In the last instance, it is the “authority of reason” that should govern all human behavior (1989: 120).

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Among twentieth and twenty-first century feminist philosophers, this rationalist commitment, together with Wollstonecraft’s harsh critique of sensuality and her “astringent attitude to heterosexual love,” (Taylor 2002: 112) have attracted much criticism. Authors such as Cora Kaplan and Mary Poovey have argued that Wollstonecraft adopted a masculine ideal of reason, which led to a neglect of the body and a “denial of female sexuality” (Kaplan 2002: 258). In a similar way, Joan Landes has argued that Wollstonecraft endorsed “the implicitly masculine values of the bourgeois sphere” and repudiated the “female position” (Landes 1988: 135).

Vivian Jones, however, has challenged these readings by highlighting the “innovative quality” of Wollstonecraft’s views on sex education (Jones 2005: 145). Wollstonecraft extensively read the medical literature of her day and engaged in the so-called “botany controversy” that surrounded the eroticized depictions of plants in the poems of Erasmus Darwin. Wollstonecraft took sides, Jones argues, with “a language of sexual instruction based on rational ideals of openness and transparency” (Jones 2005: 146). Accordingly, Wollstonecraft’s refusal of feminine sensuality should not be misunderstood as a negation of bodily pleasures but as a critique of imposed subaltern subjectivity.

Another controversial issue is how far Wollstonecraft reflects on the intersectionality of domination. Of particular interest here are her relation to abolitionism and the references that she makes to slavery in order to decry the subordination of women. Like other radical egalitarians such as de Gouges and Condorcet, Wollstonecraft also advocated the abolition of slavery. In particular, the abolitionist movement and the revolution of Black slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue impacted on Wollstonecraft’s understanding of slavery. “Formerly, in all forms of discourse throughout the eighteenth century, conservative and radical women alike railed against marriage, love, and education as forms of slavery perpetrated upon women by men and by the conventions of society at large” (Ferguson 1996: 126). In the wake of the French and the Haitian Revolutions, “slavery” was “recontextualized in terms of colonial slavery” (Ferguson 1996: 126).

Moira Ferguson credits Wollstonecraft with having “been the first writer to raise issues of colonial and gender relations so tellingly in tandem” (1996: 131). Indeed the Vindication of the Rights of Women on many occasions decries colonial slavery. However, the more conventional, metaphorical reference to “slavery” also runs through the text, invoking a supposed moral superiority of the European nations. Penelope Deutscher, in her account of Wollstonecraft’s use of analogies, therefore hints at the problematic, yet unthought aspects of the complex analogies that her text displays.

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For when the claim that women are like animals and slaves (not to mention children and savages) serves the interests of women’s claim to a better status, what links the analogy with the analogy of the analogy is the hinge of what may be named an indirect, aspirational, analogical subordination of those whom it would . . . be degrading for women to be “like.”

(Deutscher 2014: 204)

An equally unsolved problem that only surfaces in Wollstonecraft’s late writings, the Letters from Sweden and Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, is the interference of gender and class domination. In her last novel Wollstonecraft portrays “with sympathy the peculiar horror suffered by women of the laboring class” (Ferguson and Todd 1984: 85). But Wollstonecraft does not engage in theoretical reflection about that horror.

Feminist Engagements with the Enlightenment

From the second half of the twentieth century onward, feminist philosophers have engaged with the Enlightenment in various ways. Methodologically two strategies can be distinguished: re-readings of Enlightenment authors and debates about the legacy of the Enlightenment for present feminist theory.

The first strategy worked, on the one hand, against the neglect of the theoretical contributions of female authors. Prior to the feminist wave of the 1960s and 1970s, de Gouges, for example, had been more or less “forgotten” while Wollstonecraft was largely recalled because of her biography and her personal struggle for independence. In this respect Emma Goldman and Virginia Woolf paid tribute to her, but scholarship and serious engagement with her theoretical positions only date from the last decades of the twentieth century. On the other hand, the masculine canon of philosophy was scrutinized as feminist philosophers started to systematically assess the gender ideologies of “classical” male authors. In particular, the “dark” sides of Rousseau and Kant provoked a wide range of readings and critiques.

As in the eighteenth century, Rousseau’s gender theory has inspired diverse and controversial readings. Lynda Lange, for example, has argued that despite the “very unequal prescriptions he makes for women’s and men’s lives,” Rousseau “nevertheless . . . accords women not-insignificant power and has, after all, claimed that their contributions to family life are of crucial importance to a good civil society” (Lange 2002: 5). Critics such as Susan Moller Okin, on the other hand, have highlighted the fact that equality and freedom, the “two most prevalent values” of Rousseau’s social and political philosophy, were only “for men” (Okin 1979: 140). Indeed, for Rousseau, gender difference did not constitute a problem of inequality but on the contrary was introduced as a necessary component of society. Rousseau’s account of the education of Sophie that is purely supplementary to that of Emile can thus be understood as paradigmatic of “the exclusion of women from public life and its complement, their relegation to private life,” where women are to exercise a moral and cultivating influence on their husbands (Steinbrügge 1995: 6). Within the structure of bourgeois society, Steinbrügge concludes, women “became the moral sex” while “humane qualities survived (only) as a female principle” (1995: 6).

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Despite the fact that this gender arrangement clearly resonates with a wide range of attempts of the period to naturalize gender hierarchies, other scholars such as Jacques Derrida, Penny Weiss, and Linda Zerilli have pointed to the ambiguity of Rousseau’s concept of nature. “Nature,” and in particular “woman’s nature,” is by no means to be understood in a positivistic sense as a set of given data but, for Rousseau, is something that needs to be created and conserved. Accordingly,

there is a profound sense in his writings that gender boundaries must be carefully fabricated and maintained . . . because what announces “man” or “woman” is not anatomical difference but instead an arbitrary system of signs that stands in permanent danger of collapsing into a frightening ambiguity of meaning and a loss of manly constitution.

(Zerilli 2002: 279)

In contrast to the case of Rousseau, the gendered aspects of Kant’s philosophy did not receive much attention in the eighteenth century although they, too, were controversial, as the example of Theodor Gottlieb Hippel shows. Contemporary feminist philosophers, however, have engaged extensively with Kant. His views on women, citizenship, and marriage in the Metaphysics of Morals, his distinction between male reason and female emotion in his essay On the Beautiful and the Sublime, and his theory of gender complementarity in the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View have been heavily researched in the last decades. This research has established that Kant—despite his critical remarks on the tutelage of the “beautiful sex” in his essay What Is Enlightenment?—was certainly not an advocate of women’s equality.

The controversial question, however, is how far “the basic categories of Kantian moral philosophy contain elements that, irrespective of their author’s view on gender differences, admit of a feminist appropriation” (Nagl-Docekal 1997: 102). In particular, the Kantian notions of reason and autonomy have inspired feminist arguments as well as generated wide-ranging critiques. As Geneviève Lloyd put it, Kant’s ethical writings introduce “a view of morality as the antithesis of inclinations and feelings—a transcending of the subjectivity and particularity of passion to enter, as free consciousness, the common space of Reason” (Lloyd 1986: 68). The structural omissions that underlie and constitute the Kantian moral philosophy—affect and emotion, collectivity and sociality, the body and non-human nature—have been criticized in different but converging ways by feminist philosophers inspired by psychoanalysis, Marxism, poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, and environmental ethics. It is here that the different branches of feminist critiques of Enlightenment meet.

Indeed, the various feminist critiques of Enlightenment thought have largely focused on the dichotomies that constitute the notions of reason and autonomy. It has been argued that the concepts of freedom, equality, and human rights have proved to be insufficient when it comes to understanding and overcoming gendered forms of domination—or, worse, have even worked to conceal them. The question that has generated the most controversy among feminist philosophers is, then, what theoretical consequences follow from these critiques. Could or should feminist philosophy relate to the egalitarian and rationalist legacy of the Enlightenment and treat it as an unfinished project that has to be further radicalized? Or, on the contrary, could or should feminist philosophy engage in a radical deconstruction of Enlightenment discourse?

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Feminist philosophers such as Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser, working in the tradition of Habermasian Critical Theory, have clearly pursued the first path. In particular, Benhabib has formulated a “post-Enlightenment defense of universalism,” which rejects the “metaphysical illusions of the Enlightenment,” first and foremost that of disembodied reason (Benhabib 1992: 3–4). She therefore replaced the notion of “a disconnected and disembodied subject” with the idea of a “situated self” that is always already engaged in embodied and situated communicative action. Fraser, for her part, has reformulated the notion of the public sphere. In contrast to Habermas’ idealization of the liberal public sphere as an institutionalized arena of discursive interaction in which citizens exercise their reason, Fraser has proposed to conceive of public spheres in the plural. She introduced the notion of “subaltern counter-publics . . . where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs” (Fraser 1990: 67). Other feminist philosophers have attempted to rethink the Dialectics of Enlightenment as formulated by the early Frankfurt School from a feminist perspective. Cornelia Klinger, for example, has explored the “gender dialectics of enlightenment,” arguing that the double privatization of family and religion in modernity led to a “sacralization” of the private sphere, so that women and the private came to function as an utopian reservoir that complements the devastations of modern society (Klinger 2003: 200).

If all these readings in one way or the other try to assess and overcome the structural shortcomings of Enlightenment thought while recuperating its critical impulse, an inverse dialectics seems to be at work in the attempts to overcome Enlightenment discourse while nevertheless engaging in radical problematizations of power and subjection. This is most explicit in Judith Butler’s writings on “precarious life” and critique, in which the political-ethical horizon of the Enlightenment is re-established. Her question, “Who is normatively human?” critically posed in order to disrupt discursive and practical “dehumanization” (Butler 2004: xv–xvi) and the unequal mourning of deaths, obviously evokes and re-instantiates a political notion of humanity and the claim that everybody should be treated equally. With reference to Kant and Foucault, Butler even states in the essay “Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity” that “to the degree that we can still ask the question, what is enlightenment, we continue . . . to show that critique has not stopped happening, and that in this sense neither has enlightenment stopped happening” (Butler 2009: 787). In light of contemporary complex and intersecting forms of domination and ideology, and in light of our knowledge about the troubles of critique, one might add that the task of scrutinizing and challenging all established authorities has only become more complicated.