Women Intellectuals and Intellectual History: their paradigmatic separation

Abstract This article integrates an exploration of intellectual history as a specialty within broader historical scholarship, its long‐term omission of women and gender issues, and an analysis of the writings of early modern women, in order to suggest how the latter provide insights into current shortcomings within intellectual history. It points to the nature of intellectual history and the blinders it places on the intellectual contributions of women: a focus on paradigms that posit universal qualities that ignore gender bias, a reliance on institutions that have traditionally excluded women, and a neglect of gender as a fundamental ideological category underpinning many of the societal judgments of past thinkers. The article argues that Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell, in particular, amongst early modern women writers saw such limitations most clearly, and more so than many contemporary feminist theorists. Early modern writers can, therefore, offer useful insights as to how intellectual historians can more effectively open up their specialty to women's knowledge and gender analysis. Notes [1] Donald R. Kelley (2002) The Descent of Ideas: the history of intellectual history (Aldershot: Ashgate), p. 1. [2] Ibid., p. 2. [3] Ibid., pp. 1–8. [4] Charles Darwin (1896) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd edn (London: John Murray), p. 563. [5] Ibid., p. 564. [6] John Stuart Mill (1869) The Subjection of Women, p. 122 quoted in Darwin, The Descent of Man, pp. 564–565. [7] See Lionel Tiger (1969) Men in Groups (New York: Random House) and feminist critiques of Tiger's work, especially Michelle Rosaldo & Louise Lamphere (Eds) (1974) Woman, Culture and Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press). A more recent article which presents an overview of feminist anthropology is Micaela di Leonardo (1992) Women, Culture, and Society Revisited: feminist anthropology for the 1990s, in Cheris Kramarae & Dale Spender (Eds) (1992) The Knowledge Explosion: generations of feminist scholarship (New York: Teachers College Press). [8] Hilda L. Smith (2001) Aging: a problematic category for women, Journal of Women's History, 12(4), pp. 77–86. [9] Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 565. [10] Ibid., p. 564. [11] Ibid., p. 565. [12] Ibid. [13] The most thorough and perceptive discussion can be found in Berenice A Carroll (1990) The Politics of Originality: the class system of the intellect, Journal of Women's History, 2(2), pp. 136–163. Carroll documents the ways in which men (especially in the academy and professional societies) have set up measurements for significance and prominence that require posts and influence consistently denied to women. [14] An inclusive collection by Alison M. Jaggar & Iris M. Young (1998), A Companion to Feminist Philosophy (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell), includes selections on differing regions, particular perspectives (such as rationalism, empiricism, and postmodernism), and different disciples such as the natural and biological sciences and psychoanalytic feminism, but no discussion of women philosophers. Another introduction to feminist philosophy features feminist interpretations of the history of philosophy, feminist epistemologies, feminist ethics of conflict and transnational feminism, again giving slight attention to women philosophers. (Robin M Schott [2003] Discovering Feminist Philosophy [Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield]). [15] Linda K. Kerber (1997) Towards an Intellectual History of Women: essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press); Hilda L. Smith & Berenice A. Carroll (Eds) (2000) Women's Political and Social Thought: an anthology (Bloomington: University of Indiana); Michele Le Doeuff (2003) The Sex of Knowing (Kathryn Hamer & Lorraine Code, Trans.) (London: Routledge; originally published as Le Sexe du Savoir). [16] Kerber, Towards an Intellectual History of Women, p. 17. [17] Simone de Beauvoir (1984) France: feminism—alive, well, and in constant danger, in Robin Morgan (Ed.) Sisterhood is Global: the international women's movement anthology (New York: Viking Penguin), pp. 232–238; Michèle Riot‐Sarcey documented the resistance of French historians to moving beyond a political history that was tied to a universal ‘masculine’ and the essentialist treatment of women as different that justified a separate (and irrelevant) women's history. In her words: ‘women's history in France is reluctant to engage in a historical analysis which would take into account the founding role of hierarchy, which is central to gender’. Michèle Riot‐Sarcey (1997) Women's History in France: an ill‐defined subject, Gender and History, 9(1), pp. 15–35; (1999) The Difficulties of Gender in France: reflections on a concept, Gender and History 11(3), pp. 489–498, citing p. 490. [18] Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing, p. ix. [19] Ibid., p. xi. [20] For a fuller discussion of this topic see Hilda L. Smith (2005) Margaret Cavendish and the Microscope as Play, in Judith Zinsser (Ed.) Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science (Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press), pp. 35–47; for a fuller discussion of the correspondence between Cavendish and Huygens see Nadine Akkerman & Marguérite Corporaal (2004) Mad Science Beyond Flattery: the correspondence of Margaret Cavendish and Constantijn Huygens, Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue, 14, pp. 1–21; for a discussion of Anne Conway see Sarah Hutton (2004) Anne Conway: a woman philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). In the final chapter on Conway's legacy she places her thought within the neo‐Platonic, Cartesian God‐centered philosophies, especially those which equate God with the created universe. Also, in a new edition of Anna Maria van Schurman's central work the editor stresses the breadth of her intellectual correspondence, but neither woman is characterized as establishing her own school or having a significant following. Anna Maria van Schurman (1998) Whether a Christian Woman Should be Educated, and Other Writings from Her Intellectual Circle, Joyce L. Irwin (Ed.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). [21] Mary Astell (1996) Astell: political writings, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). [22] Susan Bordo (2001) The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought and the Seventeenth‐Century Flight from the Feminine, Feminism: critical concepts in literary and cultural studies, selections in Mary Evans (Ed.) Feminism: critical concepts in literary and cultural studies, 2 vols (London: Routledge), vol. 1, p. 161; another influential work isolating women from reason is Genevieve Lloyd (1984) The Man of Reason: ‘male’ and ‘female’ in western philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). [23] Susan Bordo (2001) The Flight to Objectivity, in Mary Evans (Ed.) Feminism: critical concepts in literary and cultural studies, 2 vols (London: Routledge), vol. 1, p. 155. [24] Marjorie Hope Nicholson (1929) The Early State of Cartesianism in England, Studies in Philology, 25, pp. 364–380. [25] Mary Astell (2002) A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest, Parts I and II, ed. Patricia Springborg (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press), pp. 16–17, originally published in 1697. [26] Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II, p. 6. [27] Ibid., p. 119. [28] Ibid., p. 121. [29] Ibid., p. 123. [30] Ibid., p. 124. [31] For a discussion of Poulain de la Barre, see Siep Stuurman (1997) Social Cartesianism: Francois Poulain de la Barre and the origins of the Enlightenment, Journal of the History of Ideas, 58(4), pp. 617–640. [32] Smith, ‘Aging: a problematic category’, p. 35. [33] Bordo, ‘The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought’, pp. 161–162. [34] Carolyn Merchant (1980) The Death of Nature: women, ecology, and the Scientific Revolution: a feminist reappraisal of the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row). [35] Bordo, ‘The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought’, pp. 163–166. [36] Ibid., pp. 167–170. [37] Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1653) Philosophicall Fancies (London: Printed by Tho. Roycroft for J. Martin and J. Allestrye), ‘A Dedication to Fame’, n.p. [38] See ‘Of the working of Severall Motions of Nature’ in Philosophical Fancies (London: Printed by Tho Roycroft for J. Martin and J. Allestrye), p. 30. [39] Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1668) Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (London: printed by A. Maxwell), p. 7. [40] Ibid., p. 8. [41] Ibid., p. 10. [42] Ibid., pp. 10–11. [43] M. de (Bernard Le Bovier) Fontenelle (1688) A Discovery of New Worlds, from the French, made English by A. Behn (London: Printed for William Canning), ‘Translator's Introduction’, n.p. [44] [Cockburn [Trotter], Catherine] (1702) A Defence of the Essay of Human Understanding, Written by Mr. Lock (London: Printed for Will. Turner and John Nutt), ‘To the Excellent Mr. Lock’, n.p. [45] Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer (1985) Leviathan and the Air‐Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life (Princeton: Princeton University Press). [46] Patricia Crawford & Laura Gowing (Eds) Women's Worlds in Seventeenth‐Century England (London: Routledge). Additional informationNotes on contributorsHilda L. Smith Hilda L. Smith is Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati, USA. Her most recent book is All Men and Both Sexes: gender, politics and the false universal in England 1640–1832 (Penn State Press, 2002). She has published numerous books and articles on the history of feminism, a gendered analysis of early modern political thought and women's intellectual history. She is currently working on a book‐length critique of the field of intellectual history through the framework of the intellectual works of Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell.

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