Liberal feminism
Liberal feminism would appear to be the earliest form of feminism. Feminism has
a particular relationship to liberalism, and it has been said that all feminism is ‘liberal
at root’ (Eisenstein, 1981: 4). We are assuming here not only that earlier treatments
of women were anti-feminist in character, but that the ancient Greek philosopher,
Plato, does not count as a feminist although his views on women were remarkably
atypical at the time.
Plato argues in The Republicthat women can be among the elite who rule
philosophically in his ideal state. Whereas Aristotle had contended that ‘the relation
of male to female is naturally that of superior to inferior, of the ruling to the ruled’
(Coole, 1988: 44–5), Plato adopted (at least in The Republic) a gender-free view
of political capacities. On the other hand, what makes his feminist credentials
suspect is his explicit elitism. Only a tiny number of women would have been eligible
to become rulers, and those that did, would (it is said) have to act just like men.
The position of women in medieval theory is depicted in explicitly hierarchical
terms with women being seen as more sinful than men, inferior to them and not
equipped to take part in political processes. Aquinas follows Aristotle in arguing
that a wife ‘is something belonging to her husband’, although she is more distinct
from him than a son from his father or a slave from his master (1953: 103). Had
not the Bible made the inferiority of women clear?Mary Wollstonecraft
What is remarkable about the liberal tradition is that it challenges the notion that
repressive hierarchies are natural. It thus opens the way for the feminist argument
that if all are free and equal individuals, why can’t women be equal to men? It is
true that Mary Astell had contended, as early as 1694, that women should be
educated instead of being nursed in the vices for which they are then upbraided
(Brody, 1992: 28). However, Mary Wollstonecraft is rightly regarded as the first
major feminist, and in her famous A Vindication of the Rights of Women(first
published in 1792), she argues for women’s economic independence and legal
equality. At the time she wrote, a married woman could not own property in her
own right, enter into any legal contract or have any claim over the rights of her
children. History, philosophy and classical languages were considered too rigorous
for women to learn; botany and biology were proscribed from their educational
curriculum, and physical exercise thought unsuitable.
Wollstonecraft directs her argument to middle-class women – women in what
she calls the ‘natural state’. The middle-class woman is the woman who is neither
dissipated by inherited wealth, nor brutalised by poverty. Wollstonecraft had taken
from Richard Price the Enlightenment principle that all people are rational. The
problem lay with the environment. Physical frailty derives from a cloistered
upbringing, and this was thought to impact negatively upon intellectual ability. She
tackles in particular Rousseau’s traditionalist view that women are inferior, seeing
this as a betrayal of the liberal assumptions of his political theory. What Rousseau
thought charming, Wollstonecraft considered immoral and dangerous. It is314 Part 3 Contemporary ideologies