1 Rough Equality, Rougher Inequalities, and the 'Jostlings of ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

for they all struggled in some terrible way with the grim realities of patriarchy. Byspeaking in the collective and critical voice of her friends, family, and fellow women,Wollstonecraft acts as a political prophet for the human status and human rights of "theoppressed half of the human species". She clears a way in the wilderness for women torethink their pernicious relationships with one another, so that future generations of girlsmight grow up to see each other more as genuine friends and less as punishing rivals.Through such amiable relationships, girls might grow up to respect not only others but,first and foremost, themselves.Wollstonecraft wrote in her Rights of Woman that any woman deserves the choiceof a "single life with dignity" instead of marriage. While she was a 32-year-old virginwhen she made this case, her defense of the "single life with dignity" is not necessarilysmall-p puritan or asexual in moral import. Most of her arguments about the dangers ofsex for women have to do with the all-too-real eighteenth-century problems ofprostitution, marital infidelity, venereal disease, marital rape, involuntary motherhood,and death from miscarriage and childbirth. Similarly to the Kantian feminist ethicistLara Denis, she thought the principle of equal respect required that marriage should be arespectful friendship in which sex was never exploitative but rather reflective of mutuallove. This is one reason why Wollstonecraft favored marital pairs over polygamy.Marriage primarily ought to be a relationship between "equal moral beings," andsecondarily a relationship that concerned natural functions such as sexual reproduction.Polygamy or polyandry might be permissible if marriage was meant to be like a businessor corporate contract, in which maximum productivity for the group was the goal.Despite the Kantian limits she laid down for ethical sexual behavior, Wollstonecraft6
thought there was nothing intrinsically wrong with sex or having a female body. Whileher Rights of Woman issued some warnings about the dangerous moral and physicalconsequences of pre-marital (hetero- or homo-) sexual behavior, especially for childrenor early adolescents, she had a generous view of the gender roles we might play insociety. For example, she praised the famous French transvestite and diplomat, CharlesD'Eon, as a woman who "acquired courage and resolution" from "from having received amasculine education."Wollstonecraft often spoke of the "sober pleasures" of rational thought andphilosophy, while always insisting that these pleasures suited the sexless minds of menand women alike. Unlike Kant, who has been criticized by feminist philosophers forpositing an "idealized" conception of a rational male agent at the core of his ethicaltheory, Wollstonecraft's approach to ethics resists such a built-in sex bias. Herphilosophical anthropology of human beings specifically accounts for biological sexdifferences across the species. She proceeded from the naturalistic fact of femaleembodiment in her theory of the girl-child's human development.Like Martha Nussbaum, Wollstonecraft also had a capacious understanding of thevariety of capabilities that define the human experience, such as sympathy, love, play,and bodily integrity. This rich view of the physical joys and freedoms of embodiedhuman life was captured in her Rousseau-inspired account of child development: "Everyyoung creature requires almost continual exercise, and the infancy of children...should bepassed in harmless gambols, that exercise the feet and hands." Although she was morelike Kant in her deontological theory of the foundations of human rights, Wollstonecraftparallels many of Nussbaum's views on the moral importance of conceptualizing humans7
Page 1 and 2: Rough Equality, Rougher Inequalitie
Page 3 and 4: oys and men. This Amazonian outcome
Page 8 and 9: in a holistic way that captures the
Page 10 and 11: see and treat each other as embodie

1 Rough Equality, Rougher Inequalities, and the 'Jostlings of ...

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?