Going againts the grain: Hobbes's case for original maternal dominion

Journal of Women's History

Volumn 14, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 123-148

  Wright, Joanne H ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33847135496     PISSN: 10427961     EISSN: 15272036     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2002.0028     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Cited hereafter parenthetically in the text.
2. Ingrid Makus, Women, Politics, and Reproduction: The Liberal Legacy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996);
3. Karen Green, The Woman of Reason: Feminism, Humanism and Political Thought (New York: Continuum, 1995);
4. Diana Coole, "Women, Gender and Contract: Feminist Interpretations," in The Social Contract from Hobbes to Rawls, ed. David Boucher and Paul Kelly (New York: Routledge, 1994): 191-210;
5. Nancy J. Hirschmann, Rethinking Obligation: A Feminist Method for Political Theory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992);
6. Christine Di Stefano, Configurations of Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective on Modern Political Theory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991);
7. and Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981).
8. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988).
9. See also Carole Pateman, "'God Hath Ordained to Man a Helper': Hobbes, Patriarchy and Conjugal Right," in Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory, ed. Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991): 53-73.
10. I treat Pateman's analysis of Hobbes in greater depth in Joanne Wright, "Origin Stories in the Tradition of Political Thought: Plato, Hobbes and Feminist Theory Reconsidered" (Ph.D. diss., York University, 1999).
11. Jane Jaquette also offers a critique of Pateman in which she claims that Pateman's "speculation" about the missing steps of Hobbes's argument is not the only credible one. Jane Jaquette, "Contract and Coercion: Power and Gender in Leviathan, in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Tradition ed. Hilda Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 200-19.
12. See Pateman's response to Jaquette in Carole Pateman, "Women's Writing, Women's Standing: Theory and Politics in the Early Modern Period," in Women Writers, 365-82.
13. Gabriella Stamp "Hobbes and the Equality of Women," Political Studies 42, no. 3 (1994): 441-52) also disagrees with Pateman's conquest thesis.
14. Tom Sorell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
15. and Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
16. Gordon Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1975),
17. and Gordon Schochet, "Intending (Political) Obligation: Hobbes and the Voluntary Basis of Society," in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, ed. Mary Deitz (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990): 55-73.
18. Anne Laurence, Women in England 1500-1740: A Social History (London: Phoenix, 1994);
19. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995);
20. and David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997).
21. On women's inferiority, see Margaret R. Sommerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in Early-Modern Society (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995). On marriage, see Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 101;
22. and D.E. Underdown, "The Taming of the Scold: the Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern in Early Modern England," in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985): 116-36, esp. 116. As the emerging literature on women's political and religious activism reveals, the ideological imperative for women to inhabit the private realm did not prevent their actual participation in public affairs. Women had many public roles and were by no means confined to the private realm; moreover, in early modern England, the private realm was not considered a feminine sphere, as has sometimes been implied. For example, Pateman implies as much in her general discussion of public and private in social contract theory in The Sexual Contract: "The antinomy private/public is another expression of natural/civil and women/men" (11); and "The private, womanly sphere (natural) and the public, masculine sphere (civil) are opposed but gain their meaning from each other" (11). This realization has led some historians to argue against the use of the very concept of a gendered public and private division.
23. Amanda Vickery (The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998]) argues that the "rough division between private and public could be applied to almost any century or any culture - a fact which robs the distinction of its analytical purpose" (7).
24. See also Amanda Vickery, "Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History," The Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (1993): 383-414;
25. and Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, The Family, and Political Argument in England, 1680-1714 (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1999). Certainly, scholars want to avoid ahistorical simplifications about the relegation of women to the private sphere, as well as trans-historical generalizations about the pervasive existence of a public/private dichotomy. Nevertheless, I am concerned here with the political discourse of early modern England, and in the writings of Hobbes, Filmer, James I, Locke and others, the public/private division features prominently. It remains, therefore, a useful term of analysis precisely because what is defined as public and what private is central to a theorist's vision of politics. I am making an important distinction, then, between the use of public and private to describe women's location in society, which is clearly not warranted, and the use of the terms public and private at the level of political discourse and ideology. What is of interest from a historical perspective is the changing meaning of the terms public and private and their influence on, and use of, gender.
26. Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 6.
27. Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3.
28. Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity, 2.
29. See also Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, chap. 1;
30. and Underdown, "The Taming of the Scold," on the subject of masculine or patriarchal anxiety.
31. Rosemary Masek, "Women in an Age of Transition: 1485-1714," in The Women of England: From Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present. Interpretive Bibliographic Essays, ed. Barbara Kanner (Hamden, Conn: Archon, 1979): 138-82, esp. 147-48.
32. Laurence, Women in England, 218. Although witchcraft accusations were made predominantly but not exclusively against women, witchcraft itself was not necessarily something that women consciously practiced. As often as not it was a charge leveled against those who were thought to be subverting the local social order.
33. See Diana Purkiss, The Witch In History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (New York: Routledge, 1996);
34. and Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995).
35. Quoted in Valerie Wayne, "The Dearth of the Author: Anonymity's Allies and Swetnam the Woman-hater," in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 221-240, esp. 235.
36. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 187.
37. Sommerville, Sex and Subjection, 29.
38. Filmer, Patriarcha, 142.
39. Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 256.
40. Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen (De Homine and De Cive), ed. Bernard Gert (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 213. Cited hereafter as its most common reference, De Cive.
41. Hobbes, De Cive, 213.
42. Celeste Turner Wright, "The Amazons in Elizabethan Literature," Studies in Philology 37, no. 3 (1940): 433-56.
43. Mendelson and Crawford, Women in early modern England, 349-65.
44. Lois G. Schwoerer, "Women's Public Political Voice in England, 1640-1740," in Women Writers, 56-74.
45. Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 432.
46. See also Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1994);
47. Patricia Crawford, "The Challenges to Patriarchalism: How did the Revolution affect Women?" in Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s, ed. John Morrill (London: Collins and Brown, 1992): 112-28, esp. 124.
48. Many of the women who challenged the patriarchal religious order were members of the newly emerging Protestant sects. See Patricia Crawford, "Public Duty, Conscience, and Women in Early Modern England," in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G.E. Aylmer, ed. John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf (Toronto: Clarendon Press, 1993): 57-76;
49. Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophesy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 90-91;
50. and Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500-1720 (New York: Routledge, 1993), chap. 7.
51. Mack, Visionary Women, 5.
52. Ann Hughes, "Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature," in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1995): 162-88, esp. 170. Hughes cautions that Leveller women's political activity is best interpreted in the context of the Leveller movement itself, rather than as an "episode in women's activism" (164). Indeed, Hughes's analysis of the integration of gender into Leveller writings, and the presentation of the Leveller men as honest masculine defenders of their households, aids our understanding of the tone of the women's petitions.
53. Chidley's activism was met with mockery from her male counterparts, who wrote a rhyme denouncing her religious politics as displaced lustfulness: "Oh Kate, O Kate, thou art unclean I heare, A man doth lye betweene thy sheetes, I feare." See Crawford, Women and Religion, 129.
54. Nor was the disorder of the Civil War period generally as great as had been imagined. See John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (New York: Longman, 1993).
55. A True Copie of the Petition of the Gentlewomen, and the Tradesmens-wives in and about the City of London (London, 1641). Italics added.
56. Diane Purkiss cautions about the real interpretive challenge involved in reading the early moderns for signs and indications of feminist sentiment. Diane Purkiss, Women, Texts, and Histories, 1575-1760 (New York: Routledge, 1992).
57. Although as Victoria Kahn points out, Cavendish uses the marriage contract in her drama "The Contract" to present an argument for political obligation based, not on fear nor Hobbesian self-interest, but on love. Victoria Kahn, "Margaret Cavendish and the Romance of Contract," Renaissance Quarterly 50, no. 2 (1997), 526-66.
58. Quoted in Hilda L. Smith, "'Though it be the part of every good wife': Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle," in Women and History: Voices of Early Modern England, ed. Valerie Frith (Concord, Ontario: Irwin Press, 1995): 119-44, quotation on 126.
59. For further discussion, see Hilda L. Smith and Berenice A. Carroll, eds., Women's Political and Social Thought: An Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 71-73.
60. She claims to not have exchanged more that a few passing words with Hobbes. See biographical notes in Hobbes, The Correspondence, Vol. II, 811.
61. On the question of who shall rule the family, Hobbes claimed that "the man, to whom for the most part the woman yieldeth the government, hath for the most part also the sole right and dominion over the children." See Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 132.