A Supremacy to Themselves
Barred from formal education, most women in seventeenth century England also lacked the economic resources required to indulge their intellect. Yet they were aware that a new social contract could either help or harm them relative to men.
Many of the dissenting religious sects that became increasingly prominent before and during the Civil War questioned the sexist precepts of traditional religious doctrine.34 Women of the aristocracy enjoyed privileges that occasionally allowed them to criticize the existing order. As early as 1655 a wayward duchess named Margaret Cavendish claimed, contra Hobbes, that, women were men’s equals in the State of Nature, and that men had ‘‘usurped a Supremacy to themselves’’.35In France, a cleric who preferred Descartes to the Bible announced that conventional views of women's inferiority were preposterous. In A Physical and Moral Discourse on the Equality of the Sexes, Which Shows the Importance of Getting Rid of One’s Prejudices, published in 1673, Poulain de la Barre argued that lack of access to education made it difficult for women to realize their full potential.36 Women were just as virtuous and just as rational as men, and even more charitable. Furthermore, their economic contribution to society was unfairly depreciated:
A man who tamed a tiger would be rewarded generously. Those who know how to train horses, monkeys or elephants are highly valued; a man who writes a little book, which hardly takes any time or effort, is spoken highly of. Women, however, are neglected although they spend many years in nourishing and educating children.37
Such arguments found little audience, in part because they were repressed. Even Descartes’s writings were included in the Index of Forbidden Books.
In Britain, the emergence of a prosperous middle class created more space for debates over women’s place.
Mary Astell, a largely self-educated merchants’ daughter, managed to eke out a living for herself as a writer. Her most famous salvo, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest was published in 1694. It accused the new individualism of inconsistencies, pointing out that absolute sovereignty was no more necessary in a family than in the state. If men were born free, were women born slaves?Interestingly, Astell was no individualist. She believed that hierarchies of both church and state served the useful purpose of enforcing social obligation.38 She rejected the notions of original war and the social contract for the same reasons Filmer did: Men were children. She poked delicate fun at Hobbesian mushrooms:
How I lament my stars that it was not my Good Fortune to live in Those Happy Days when Men sprung up like so many Mushrooms or Terraie Filii, without Father or Mother or any sort of dependency.39
Astell explained why she preferred the Kingdom of God to a contract forged by men seeking their own self-interest: the former, unlike the latter, was designed to protect the weak.40 Christian doctrine persuaded Astell that a married woman should obey her husband and fulfill her wifely duties. But she also felt that marriage, in its contemporary form, was tantamount to slavery. Applying Locke's reasoning, she pointed out that wives held no rights to the free use of their intellect and abilities, much less their own money.41 Why, she protested, should all women be excluded from most remunerative employments, and therefore forced into marriage?
Astell also complained, like Poulain de la Barre, that family labor had been devalued. She observed that men seemed to consider the nursing of children as something low and despicable even though no activity deserved more honor, or greater thanks and rewards.42 She located the source of women's subordination in their caring responsibilities:
Our more generous souls are bias'd only by the good we do to the children we breed and nurture: Daily experience reminding us, that all the gratification we can hope for from the unnatural creatures, for the almost infinite pains, anxieties, care, and assiduities to which we subject ourselves on their account, and which cannot be matched in any other state of civil society, is an ungrateful treatment of our persons, and the basest contempt of our sex in general. Such the generous offices we do them: Such the ungenerous returns they make us.43
The exchange of care was inherently unequal, because genuine care would be offered even if unreciprocated. Maternal altruism could be taken for granted— and therefore, it was. Both Poulain de la Barre and Mary Astell anticipated arguments that twentieth century feminist economists would develop further in analysis of the costs of caring labor (see discussion in Chapter 20).