"A Great Championess for Her Sex": Sarah Chapone on Liberty As Nondomination and Self-Mastery

Abstract

In her 1735 work, The Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives, Sarah Chapone (1699-1764) recounts the story of Gyges of Lydia and his magical ring, story that also appears in book II of Plato's Republic. According to Platonic legend, Gyges's golden ring possesses the extraordinary power of rendering its wearer completely invisible. With the help of this ring, the lowly shepherd Gyges enters the court, seduces the king's wife, then murders the king and takes his throne-all with impunity. In her own text, Chapone asks the question: what would man of honour do, had he such ring? Her answer is, the same as he would without it. Though the wearer of the ring might steal whatever he pleased, or slay whomever he despised, all without fear of punishment, the honourable man would not take such action. Chapone also points out that Man of Honour would not desire such Ring and that a Man without Honour should not be trusted with it.1 Nobody would think it wise or prudent to permit any man in the kingdom to wear Gyges's ring, she says, lest the Power of doing Mischief, might create, as well as assist an Inclination to it.2The main purpose of Chapone's text is to show that the laws in eighteenthcentury England have in fact granted husbands this power of doing mischief with impunity. In this time and place, she points out, the laws permit husbands to hold their wives captive, to psychologically and physically abuse them, to deprive them of their property, and to keep them from seeing their children-all without being accountable to any earthly authority whatsoever. Chapone observes that good Husband would not desire the Power of Horse-whipping, confining, Half-starving his Wife, or squandering her Estate; bad Husband should not be allowed it.3 In her anonymous seventy-page treatise, she appeals to King George II and both houses of parliament an Alteration or Repeal of some Laws, which, as we conceive, put us (i.e., married women) in worse Condition than Slavery itself.4In this paper, I argue that Chapone deserves prominent place in the history of feminist philosophy as one of the first writers consistently to apply what is now known as the republican concept of liberty to the situation of married women in early modern society. Historians have identified at least three republican moments in England in the 1600s: the first during the Interregnum of 1649-60; the second in response to the looming threat of Catholic succession and an absolute monarch, ca. 1675-83; and the third in the late 1690s as result of various constitutional crises following the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89.5 At each moment, the most prominent republicans did not call for the abolition of monarchy as such, but rather for limited or regulated monarchical rule.6 In their view, the liberty of the people could be assured only if just and reasonable laws prevented the sovereign from exercising an arbitrary power over the lives of subjects. A state in which monarch could take away his subjects' property (their 'lives, liberty, and estates') at his arbitrary will and pleasure, was not free state-it was state of tyranny. The early modem republicans thus called for monarchical rule in the service of the law, and for restrictions on the sovereign's power to amass standing army in times of peace (a typical harbinger to absolute rule).Though some English women writers endorse the republican ideal of liberty prior to Chapone,7 she is the first to follow through with its implications for married women in civil society: call for an institutionalised guarantee of security for women against domination in marriage. More than this, I believe that Chapone articulates an ideal that is both negative freedom from domination and positive freedom to be one's own master. Present-day theorist Philip Pettit describes the republican notion of freedom as intermediate between the ideals of non-interference and self-mastery, but nevertheless denies that the concept is positive in Isaiah Berlin's sense of requiring agents actively to govern or to gain control over themselves. …