Women Theorists on Society and Politics

Description

Revolution, abolition of slavery, public health care, welfare, violence against women, war and militarism — such issues have been debated for centuries. But much work done by women theorists on these traditional social and political topics is little known or difficult to obtain. This new anthology contains significant excerpts not normally included in standard collections.

Women Theorists on Society and Politics brings together scarce, previously unpublished and newly translated excerpts from works by such women theorists as Emilie du Châtelet, Germaine de Staël, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Flora Tristan, Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, Beatrice Webb and Jane Addams. It focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, but also includes some selections from as early as the Renaissance and late seventeenth century.

Introductions to the material, biographical background and secondary sources enhance this important collection. Women Theorists on Society and Politics provides essential theory on standard topics and a balance to the anthologies of feminist writing now more commonly available.

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 22 octobre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554587445
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Women Theorists on Society and Politics
Lynn McDonald, editor
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Women theorists on society and politics
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-88920-290-7 (bound)
1. Social sciences - Philosophy - History. 2. Political science - History. 3. Women social scientists - History. 4. Women political scientists - History. I. McDonald, Lynn, 1940-.
H31.W65 1998 300 .9 C98-930586-4
Copyright 1998 WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5
Cover design by Leslie Macredie

Printed in Canada
Women Theorists on Society and Politics has been produced from a manuscript supplied in camera-ready form by the editor.
All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any meansgraphic, electronic, or mechanicalwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping, or reproducing in information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to the Canadian Reprography Collective, 214 King Street West, Suite 312, Toronto, Ontario M5H 3S6.
Dedicated to Thelma McCormack
professor emerita at the Department of Sociology, york university, and founding director of the york graduate programme in women s Studies, thelma mccormack has encouraged, assisted, aided and abetted a whole generation of women scholars. i am one of many who has benefited from her advice, practical help and friendship.
Table of Contents
Dedication
Preface
Acknowledgements
C HAPTER 1 Introduction
C HAPTER 2 Early Theorists: Christine de Pisan, Mary Astell, Emilie du Ch telet, Mary Wortley Montagu, Sophia
C HAPTER 3 Theorists on Revolution: Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Marie Jeanne-Roland, Germaine de Sta l, Sophie Grouchy de Condorcet
C HAPTER 4 Theorists on Social Reform: Flora Tristan, Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, Helen Taylor, Beatrice Webb
C HAPTER 5 Theorists on Gender and Violence: Josephine Butler, Elizabeth Blackwell, Frances Power Cobbe
C HAPTER 6 Theorists on Peace, War and Militarism: Jane Addams, Bertha von Suttner, Olive Schreiner, Catherine E. Marshall, Emily Greene Balch
C HAPTER 7 An Afterword
Manuscript Sources
Bibliography
Index
Preface
Women Theorists on Society and Politics represents the end of a long intellectual journey, to find and publish the great women theorists who have been so unjustly excluded from textbooks and courses on theory, in spite of the high quality of their contributions. My Early Origins of the Social Sciences, 1993, included women theorists along with many more men, while The Women Founders of the Social Sciences, 1994, was devoted entirely to reporting the women s work. Most of the theorists included in this anthology appeared at least in the Women Founders, but the focus there was on their methodological contribution, with only secondary attention to social and political theory.
Women Theorists on Society and Politics now provides the opportunity to relate the enormously interesting social and political writing of these theorists, with biographical background on their no less exciting lives. The quality of these theorists contributions will speak for itself. I merely recount my own experience of being constantly amazed at how prescient they were, how often they anticipated the work of better-known men and how lively and witty their writing was.
A significant phase of unlearning was required to get me past a well-ingrained deference to leading male theorists to see the originality and relevance of the women s work. In some cases the women theorists were saying something quite different, material that deserves to be read for its distinctive contribution. In other cases their position was not greatly different from that of more prominent men, but they nonetheless brought insights, experience and nuance worth considering. Readers of conventional histories of social and political theory and students and professors in conventional courses, which still deal virtually exclusively with men theorists, are the losers for the absence of these women.
Growing numbers of scholars have taken up these women theorists, so that the work is no longer lonely. Especially helpful were the sessions on women theorists at the International Sociological Association, History of Sociology, meeting in Amsterdam, 1996, a session on women theorists at the American Sociological Association meetings, Toronto, 1997 and the founding of the Harriet Martineau Sociological Association at the Amsterdam meetings, with its first working meeting at Mackinac Island, 1997 (a special thanks to Michael Hill and Mary Jo Deegan for organizing it). I appreciated also Charles Camic s encouragement to pursue the women theorists, by including my paper at his mini-conference on theory at the American Sociological Association meetings in Washington, D.C., 1994, later published in his Reclaiming the Sociological Classics, 1997.
Another happy indicator of interest is the coming together of a group of scholars to prepare a collected works of Florence Nightingale, in my view the most exciting of the women theorists included here. This work is now in progress, with first publication anticipated, with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. (This will include complete publication in electronic form of Nightingale s work, selective publication in print, with myself as the project director/chief editor.)
Lynn McDonald
University of Guelph
Acknowledgements
As well as the persons cited above, many others assisted in the preparation of this book. I especially acknowledge the role of Sandra Woolfrey, director of Wilfrid Laurier University Press, and Joanne Duncan-Robinson, technical assistant at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Guelph. Faults and errors that remain are, of course, my own.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
I gratefully acknowledge permission by Jean Hawkes to reproduce material from her translation of The London Journal of Flora Tristan, permission of the British Library of Political and Economic Science to publish material from the Mill-Taylor collection and the Passfield Papers and the assistance of the Charles Woodward Memorial Room, Woodward Biomedical Library, University of British Columbia for supplying previously unpublished Nightingale letters.
The British Library Students Manuscript Room, the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, Contemporary Medical Archives and Claydon House are all gratefully acknowledged for providing access to previously unpublished Nightingale manuscripts. Appreciation is due to the Henry Bonham Carter Will Trust for treating Nightingale material as public domain and generally facilitating scholarly access.
Chapter 1 Introduction
The recovery of writing by women scholars is now high on the feminist agenda for social and political theory. In the past feminist scholars devoted their efforts to the exposure of sexist bias in scholarly research and discussed the possibility of a new feminist paradigm. Women s studies programmes have resulted in considerable publication, some very impressive, on women s history and literature, and issues of the status of women and gender roles. Dale Spender s Women of Ideas, 1982, and Feminist Theorists, 1983, are excellent examples (and there are others, both by Spender and others) of this work of recovery, but focusing on status of women issues. The great works by women theorists on mainstream social and political issues have remained in obscurity. Little attention has been paid to women s contributions themselves, even those of great originality and importance at the time, and by very well known women. Women political theorists are absent from political science texts as they are from histories and textbooks of sociological thought or social theory. Yet women have, for centuries, written on such central issues as the nature of the social bond, social contract, individual rights versus social obligation, the role of government, the welfare state, socialism, constitutional change, slavery and revolution.
This book is directed to filling, as much as one anthology can, that gap of missing contributions. It presents, with critical introductions, texts on society and politics by a diverse range of women scholars. The time period covered is effectively the eighteenth century to World War II, with a small amount of material from the Renaissance (one writer, Christine de Pisan) and the late seventeenth century (Mary Astell). The bulk of the work, however, comes from the mid- to late eighteenth century (especially Emilie du Ch telet, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Germaine de Sta l, Marie-Jeanne Roland) and the nineteenth century (notably Florence Nightingale, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Blackwell, Frances Power Cobbe, Helen Taylor, Jane Addams and Beatrice Webb).
Work on more recent writers is much more available and the need for its inclusion here correspondingly less. Earlier writing, although there is much less of it, of course, enjoys no such readership, but would have presen