Early Modern Feminists on Wooing as a Gendered Epistemic Harm
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article I explore how three early modern European feminists—Marie de Gournay, Margaret Cavendish, and Mary Astell—discuss wooing in surprisingly similar ways. Independently and without the benefit of a personal or intellectual relationship, all three highlight how wooing is characterized by deception, insincere flattery, and occasional coercion to secure consent to marriage; they problematize how wooing tricks women into consenting to their own subordination. This is a feminist social epistemological project: Gournay, Cavendish, and Astell recognize wooing as a gendered socio-epistemic harm, for wooing undermines women’s abilities to exercise their epistemic agency over making what was often the single most consequential choice in their lives—who to accept as husband. I argue that for Gournay, Cavendish, and Astell, wooing not only is a gendered socio-epistemic harm but also manifests an epistemic injustice, hermeneutical obscuring, which was deployed by wooers in service of maintaining patriarchal power hierarchies. For Gournay, Cavendish, and Astell, the social practice of wooing manifests patriarchal control via a kind of gendered epistemic tyranny. Successful wooing frustrates epistemic capacities, entrenches gender hierarchies, and traps women in the epistemically and politically subordinating relation of marriage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".