"The Disorder of Women": Women, Love, and the Sense of Justice

Abstract

In his essay on Politics and the Arts Rousseau proclaims that "never has a people perished from an excess of wine; all perish from the disorder of women." Rousseau states that drunkenness is usually the sole failing of otherwise upright, decent men; only the immoral fear the indiscretion that wine will promote. Drunkenness is not the worst of the vices since it makes men stupid rather than evil, and wine turns men away from the other vices so it poses no danger to the polity. In contrast, the "disorder of women" engenders all the vices and can bring the state to ruin.1 Rousseau is not the only social or political theorist to regard women as a permanently subversive force within the political order. Freud (to whose arguments I shall also refer) argues in chapter 4 of Civilization and Its Discontents that women are "hostile to" and "in opposition to" civilization. In a similar vein, Hegel writes that the community "creates its enemy for itself within its own gates" in "womankind in general." Women are "the everlasting irony in the life of the community," and when "women hold the helm of government, the state is at once in jeopardy."2 These arguments are by no means of only historical interest. Although women have now been granted citizenship in the liberal democracies, it is still widely believed that they are unfitted for political life and that it would be dangerous if the state were in their hands. This belief is very complex. One of its central dimensions, which I shall begin to explore in this paper, is the conviction that women lack, and cannot develop, a sense of justice. * I am grateful to Anna Yeatman for discussing the questions raised in this paper. 1. J.-J. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: A Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theatre, trans. A. Bloom (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 109. Rousseau also notes that wine attracts old men because youth have other desires; beliefs about the subversiveness of youth are outside the scope of this paper. 2. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Ballie (London: Allen & Unwin, 1949), p. 496; Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), addition to par. 166. N. 0. Keohane ("Female Citizenship: 'The Monstrous Regiment of Women"' [paper presented at the annual meeting of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought, New York, April 6-8, 1979]) discusses various aspects of the belief that women should not enter the political sphere, with particular reference to ancient Greece and Bodin's theory.