The Wives of Western Philosophy: Gender Politics in Intellectual Labor 9780367897918, 9780367897895, 9781003021155

Citation preview

The Wives of Western Philosophy offers a fascinating revisionary history of the women most closely associated with the men who have long dominated the canon of Western political philosophy. By looking at the tradition of Western political thought through the lens of these women’s lives and writings, from Xanthippe to Harriet Taylor Mill, the contributors overturn and challenge the gender biases that have unreflectively pervaded past scholarship and teaching in the field. Eileen Hunt Botting, Professor of Political Science, University of Notre Dame Abundantly insightful, characterized by an exuberant harmony of purpose and feminist intent, this fresh and inventive collection of essays brings the figure of the “wife” — as thinker, coauthor, concept, and collaborator — out of the shadows cast by heteropatriarchal histories of Western political thought. If you haven’t met the real “wives of political theory” here brought to light, you’ll be thoroughly acquainted by the time you finish this spirited book. The essays are both valuable biographical works that redeem female intellectual labors and illuminating examples of how “reading gender” opens up new ways to understand the production of canonical texts. Mary G. Dietz, John Evans Professor of Political Theory, Northwestern University

THE WIVES OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

The Wives of Western Philosophy examines the lives and experiences of the wives and women associated with nine distinct political thinkers—from Socrates to Marx—in order to explore the gendered patterns of intellectual labor that permeate the foundations of Western political thought. Organized chronologically and representative of three eras in the history of political thought (Ancient, Early Modern, and Modern), nine critical biographical chapters explore the everyday acts of intellectual labor and partnership involving these “wives of the canon.” Taking seriously their narratives as intimate partners reveals that wives have contributed in remarkable ways throughout the history of political thought. In some cases, their labors mark the conceptual boundaries of political life; in others, they serve as uncredited resources for the production of political ideas. In all instances, however, these wives and intimates are pushed to the margins of the history of political thought. The Wives of Western Philosophy brings these women to the center of scholarly interest. In so doing, it provides new insights into the intellectual biographies of some of the most famed men in political theory while also raising important questions about the gendered politics of canon construction and reception histories which sustain the academy even today. Jennifer Forestal is Helen Houlahan Rigali Assistant Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. Her research examines contemporary democratic practices, with a focus on the effects of digital technologies. Menaka Philips is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA. Her research areas include democratic theory, feminist political thought, postcolonial studies, and American political thought.

THE WIVES OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY Gender Politics in Intellectual Labor Edited by Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-89791-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-89789-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02115-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

List of Contributors Acknowledgments

ix xi

1 Married to the Canon: Writing the History of Western Philosophy Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

1

2 Xanthippe: Shrew or Muse Arlene Saxonhouse

19

3 Self-Sacrifice as Wifely Virtue in Aristotle’s Political Theory Sara Brill

36

4 Authoring Machiavelli: Barbera Salutati, La Mandragola, and the Performance of Political Theory Boris Litvin

56

5 Educating Gentlewomen: The Women of Locke’s Circle and Their Influence on Some Thoughts Concerning Education Emily C. Nacol

73

viii Contents

6 Jeanne de Lartigue, Madame de Montesquieu: Calvinist Refugee and Wife of an Enlightenment Philosopher Bryan A. Banks 7 Thérèse Levasseur’s Improvised Life with Rousseau Jennifer M. Jones 8 The Hidden Labors of Mary Mottley, Madame de Tocqueville Ross Carroll 9 The “Beloved and Deplored” Memory of Harriet Taylor Mill: Rethinking Gender and Intellectual Labor in the Canon Menaka Philips

88 107

127

147





Index

197

CONTRIBUTORS

Bryan A. Banks is Assistant Professor of History at Columbus State University.

He specializes in eighteenth-century French history, with a particular emphasis on the Huguenot Diaspora. Sara Brill is Professor of Philosophy at Fairfield University. She works on the psychology, politics, and ethics of Plato and Aristotle as well as broader questions of embodiment, life, and power as points of intersection between ancient Greek philosophy and literature and contemporary critical theory. Ross Carroll is Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Exeter. His

research is primarily in the history of early modern political thought, with a focus on the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Edmund Burke, David Hume, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Alexis de Tocqueville. Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol. He

has published widely on Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, and on sex, gender, and sexuality. Jennifer Forestal  is Helen Houlahan Rigali Assistant Professor of Political

Science at Loyola University Chicago. Her research examines contemporary democratic practices, with a focus on the effects of digital technologies. Jennifer M. Jones is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers, The State Uni-

versity of New Jersey. She specializes in the history of women and the social and cultural history of eighteenth-century France.

x Contributors

Boris Litvin  is Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stetson University. His research takes up questions of spectatorship and “the people” in the history of political thought and in contemporary ­democratic life. Emily C. Nacol  is Assistant Professor of Political Science in the University of Toronto Mississauga and in the Graduate Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She specializes in the history of early modern political thought and political economy, with a focus on the problems of risk and uncertainty in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century British political and economic writing. Menaka Philips  is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA. Her research areas include democratic theory, feminist political thought, postcolonial studies, and American political thought. Arlene Saxonhouse  is Caroline Robbins Professor Emerita of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She has published widely in the area of classical and early political thought and women in the history of political thought.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project has been a long time in the making. As graduate students at Northwestern, we had the opportunity to observe Mary Dietz’s undergraduate “Modernity and its Discontents” course. In her lectures, Mary—like many of us who teach the history of political thought—would give her students a brief biography of the thinkers under discussion. Unlike many, however, Mary made a point to highlight some of the women normally held in the “background” of these men’s scholarly achievements, but who were, in many cases, essential players in those achievements. She also pointed out how little scholarship attended to these women. As you can see, these lectures struck home. The idea for this volume took shape a few years later; employed at separate universities across the country, we began to exchange messages about the wives and their legacies. We tested the waters by forming a pair of panels for the American Political Science Association (APSA) meeting in 2016: one examining the wives of more straightforwardly “canonical” figures (Socrates, Tocqueville, Mill, Marx) and the other focused on wives in American Political Thought (Eliza Schuyler Hamilton, Dolley Madison, Floride Bonneau Calhoun, Anna Murray-Douglass). We met with mixed success—while the first panel was accepted, the second panel was not. This would not be the last time Wives ran into gatekeeping challenges. After the success of the canonical APSA panel, we turned our attention to publishing the four papers we had collected as a special issue. We were met with indifference from a number of political theory journals and were delighted when Hypatia recognized the value of the project. Shortly after, our first four contributions—from the original APSA panel—were published as the “Cluster on Gender and the ‘Great Man’: Recovering Philosophy’s ‘Wives of the Canon’” in Hypatia’s Fall 2018 issue. We are incredibly grateful to the

xii Acknowledgments

Hypatia editorial team—Alison Stone, Ann Garry, and Miranda Pilipchuk—for their enthusiasm for the project and their dedication to giving it a place to land. We are also grateful to Cambridge University Press for granting us permission to reprint those essays here. But we knew that the story of the “wives of the canon” extended beyond the four papers we started with. With the Hypatia cluster, the project gained more widespread recognition, and we found a remarkable group of collaborators as well as the support necessary to expand the cluster into this edited volume. The process of selecting the “final nine” was more difficult than it may seem. For example, as the volume makes clear, it is challenging to find reliable information on the wives of the Ancients. And many of the most prominent Early Modern thinkers—including Hobbes, Smith, and Hume—were lifelong bachelors (a fact worthy of study in its own right!). It was Jim Farr who, over martinis, mentioned Locke’s “little wife” Betty Clarke, which opened the door to his inclusion, while other potential thinkers like Burke, Hegel, and Nietzsche had to be dropped for lack of contributors. It took a few years, many recommendations, and much encouragement, but by early 2019, we had finally settled on the nine truly excellent chapters included here. From our original Hypatia authors, Ross Carroll, Terrell Carver, and Arlene Saxonhouse, to the additions of Bryan Banks, Sara Brill, Jennifer Jones, Boris Litvin, and Emily Nacol, we found scholars who saw the the significance of the “wives” and made the project their own. They not only took on archival challenges and dug beneath traditional reception histories, but also met all their deadlines— even amid a global pandemic. And their research has paid off with innovative contributions to thinking about gender and intellectual labor in political thought. There are, of course, many more stories to tell beyond the ones we have included in this volume. But these are, we think, a very good place to start. The volume would not have come to fruition if it were not for the longstanding and enthusiastic support of Natalja Mortgenson, our editor at Routledge. Unlike many other press and journal editors we talked to, Natalja was a vocal supporter of the project from the start. Her patience, advice, and encouragement have been invaluable as we worked through the process of finding contributors, crafting a proposal, and navigating reviews. Likewise, Charlie Baker was an enormous help during the final stages of submission, helping us to secure permissions, dot our Is, and cross our Ts. We would also be remiss not to thank our husbands, Craig Confer and Geoff Dancy. They did not type the manuscript (as so many wives have done) or provide the kind of administrative support historically managed by women, but they did cook, clean, copyedit, and oversee childcare for our respective households as this project took shape. Thanks to you both. Finally, we would like to acknowledge our near-obsessive use of the messaging platform WhatsApp, through which we have brainstormed, organized, written, and edited. Here’s to collaboration in the twenty-first century.

1 MARRIED TO THE CANON Writing the History of Western Philosophy Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

History has not been kind to wives. The ordinary and everyday labors of intimates, caregivers, and household managers—roles traditionally assigned to women— are not the stuff of legend or legacy. As has been famously remarked, “well-behaved women rarely make history.” In popular interpretation, this saying is taken to mean that history accounts primarily for those who make a fuss. The disrupters, the radicals, those extraordinary wives and intimates who, like Anne Boleyn or Cleopatra, dared to defy social norms and expectations— they are subjects worthy of remembrance. To make history, in other words, people— and especially women—must misbehave. Before adorning t-shirts and coffee mugs, that now ubiquitous statement first appeared in a 1976 American Quarterly article on funeral sermons for seventeenthcentury New England women. Written by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, it might surprise readers to learn that we have, for quite some time, entirely misread her meaning. What we have interpreted as a slogan in praise of women’s misbehavior is, in fact, a claim about the telling of history. As Ulrich notes, the pious women of whom she wrote, contemporaries of Cotton Mather, were anything but disruptive. And therein, for Ulrich, lay the problem. It is precisely because “Well-behaved women seldom make history… [that] against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all.”1 That those “pious matrons” have been forgotten by history is not, Ulrich suggests, a function of their behavior. Rather, it results from long-held assumptions about whose stories are worth telling and in what manner they ought to be told. Thirty years after its initial publication, reflecting on the surprising and unintended reception of her quote, Ulrich observed that “if history is seen as a linear progression of public events, a changing panorama of wars and kingdoms,” then extraordinary behavior would seem to rule the books. But such a view has

2  Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

consequences: it not only “limits women. It also limits history.”2 When the writing of history is bound strictly to the “great men” and “grand actions” of the public sphere, it might reluctantly recognize those remarkable women who flaunt social norms and gender roles to engage in public life. But using such criteria for recognition necessarily imposes silences; it obscures other figures and activities— especially those of the women whose lives and experiences are largely centered around the “mundane” work of the private sphere. What are the effects of these interpretive customs regarding who should be remembered and on what terms? That is the question we take up here, with an eye toward the history of political thought. Through their various studies of women forgotten or dismissed by history, the authors in this volume rethink the terms upon which the gendered politics of history-making have shaped the canon of Western philosophy. To that end, the book specifically examines the lives and labor of women as wives and intimates of canonical philosophers. Traditional studies of Western political thought have rarely attended to their roles, largely because they are considered “personal” rather than “political.” Yet it is precisely the unseen (and unpaid) work of the wives and partners of Western philosophy’s “great men” that ought to demand our attention today. Across disciplines, scholars are engaging in critical conversations regarding the relationship between gender and the academy. Yet our contemporary discussions of the gendered dynamics of intellectual life would benefit from an examination of how gender norms have historically constituted our understanding of intellectual contributions and our criteria for evaluating what counts as scholarship— criteria that persist even today. The Wives of Western Philosophy participates in these ongoing discussions by highlighting the gendered relationships that have contributed to the production of political thought and its canonical figures since Antiquity. From Ancient Greece through nineteenthcentury Europe, the chapters collected here focus on the lives and labors of women obscured and minimized by the expectations of history: women who were effectively married to, yet set apart from, the philosophical canon their male partners ascended to.

Recovering the Wives of the Canon The volume’s chapters are organized chronologically, providing an alternative history of political thought— one that centers wives and intimates rather than their more famous husbands and partners. Arlene Saxonhouse’s chapter begins the collection with a study of Xanthippe as both “shrew” and “muse” in depictions of her husband, Socrates. Though little record remains of Aristotle’s wives, Pythias and Herpyllis, Sara Brill finds that “the wife” plays an outsized role in Aristotle’s political architecture. Boris Litvin’s chapter on Barbera Salutati, mistress of Niccolò Machiavelli, draws out her collaborative influence over his famed comedy La Mandragola, while Jennifer Jones rethinks the diminutive

Married to the Canon  3

role Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s contemporaries and later readers assign to Thérèse Levasseur, his longtime mistress and eventual wife. Emily Nacol’s chapter, in turn, sheds light on how Mary and Betty Clarke, and Damaris, Lady Masham— John Locke’s close friend, “little wife,” and intimate companion, respectively— informed his theories of education in significant but uncredited ways. Turning to the question of archives and their gendered silences, Bryan Banks then examines the figure of Jeanne de Lartigue and her marriage to Baron de Montesquieu, while Ross Carroll highlights the political influence and archival responsibilities taken up by Mary Mottley, wife of Alexis de Tocqueville. The concluding chapters see Menaka Philips turn the dismissive reception of Harriet Taylor Mill in studies of her husband, John Stuart Mill, into a mirror through which the gendered politics of intellectual labor might be viewed, just as Terrell Carver troubles the masculinized conceits that haunt the genre of intellectual biography in the case of Jenny Marx, Helene Demuth, Mary Burns, and Lydia Burns, the wives and presumed mistresses of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels. These are the women—ridiculed, ignored, diminished, forgotten—whose lives were bound to some of the most prominent male figures of the Western canon. Their stories are loosely distributed over three recognized eras in the history of political thought: Ancient, Early Modern, and Modern. Though their contexts may differ, however, there are striking parallels to be found across their experiences, both in terms of the work they performed and the receptions they have been given. Indeed, what the investigations carried out in this volume reveal is that wives have been involved with the construction of political thought in remarkable ways. In some cases, their labor marks the conceptual boundaries of political life; in others, it serves as an uncredited (re)source for the production of political ideas. In all instances, however, wives are dismissed to the margins of history. Thus, while some of their names may be familiar to readers, they are too often remembered as biographical curiosities— added “color” for classroom anecdotes. Yet the labors of these wives and intimate companions are not often a recognized dimension of these colorful tales in which they sometimes appear. Moreover, when taken together, we can see how the reputations of d ifferent historical wives were, at times, wielded against others in the literature— as when Thérèse Levasseur is characterized as a “gossipy, eighteenth century Xanthippe” ( Jones, 107 this volume) or when Harriet Taylor Mill is unfavorably compared to Levasseur in terms of the roles they each played in their partners’ intellectual lives (Philips, 147 this volume). As the chapters collected here show, once the curtain is drawn back on the private lives of these men and the women closest to them, it becomes difficult to ignore the ways in which the development of political philosophy is entangled with, and reliant upon, the wife— a figure that is omnipresent but largely ignored. It is for this reason, in part, that the volume focuses on the stories of wives in the history of political thought. The role of wife (or mistress) is taken to

4  Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

signal a specific kind of association— one based on heterosexual intimacy. And that intimacy incorporates a distinctive pattern of gendered labor, where women’s contributions to the canon—if they are recognized at all—take the form of secondary, “domestic” concerns: those of, for example, comfort, emotional support, and household management. In short, little has been said about these wives of the canon and their place in the history of political thought precisely because they occupied positions assumed to be irrelevant to the work of intellectual production. Instead, they have been made into minor characters in the lives of the great men they associated with. In contrast, by centering these women’s lived experiences, this volume invites us to rethink their roles in the history of political thought. In so doing, it seeks to give voice to the different ways in which women, as wives and intimate companions, have shored up, influenced, and directly contributed to the intellectual and political work their male partners are famous for. But by calling attention to the unique patterns of gendered power at work in the lives of these women and their famous partners, the volume also complicates the figure of the wife in political thought. In many cases, as with John Locke’s intimate companionship with the Clarke women and Lady Masham or the wives and presumed mistresses of Marx and Engels, the unique dimensions of these women’s relationships with famous men are further informed by their interrelated experiences as mothers, daughters, or mistresses as well as their roles as educators, activists, secretaries, and managers. Though Locke never married, for instance, or took on the responsibilities of a husband or father, he nevertheless relied upon and benefitted from the work Mary Clarke and Lady Masham contributed as mothers and wives, just as much as he drew inspiration from observing the education of young Betty Clarke. True, not all the women surveyed here bore the legal (or social) status of wife to the men in question (a complicated status in itself, as many of the chapters note). But all nevertheless performed intimate and enriching work that shaped the personal and intellectual contexts of the men with whom they were involved. At the same time, it is their very categorization as wives that has worked to obscure and minimize these women’s contributions, which extend beyond the intimate labors traditionally associated with that role. It is by virtue of Mary Mottley’s status as wife, for example, that historians have been quick to dismiss her work as Alexis de Tocqueville’s political interlocutor and posthumous editor, just as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s contemporaries could not conceive of a place for Thérèse Levasseur that was not synonymous with sexual partner or caretaker. The understanding of the wife that results from these chapters works to complicate the simple characterizations of wives as intimates or helpmates, even as it highlights the integral role of this intimate labor in the production of “great texts.” What emerges is a picture of how “the wife” marks a set of interrelated capacities and needs that are shaped by, and give content to, intellectual life itself. From Xanthippe to Jenny Marx, the volume challenges the

Married to the Canon  5

concept of wife, as traditionally understood, and in so doing offers a broader perspective on the perennial issues of gender, partnership, and intellectual labor that permeate the foundations of Western philosophy.

Correcting the Record In contesting the traditional history of political thought, the volume joins similar work from the past few decades that takes to task the gendered conditions of canon construction. Most notably, we have seen sustained criticism around the failure to recognize the contributions of even “ill-behaved” women— innovators in traditionally male pursuits. Attempts to recover the work of these women, evident in ventures like Duke’s Project Vox, which showcases the work of women philosophers like Mary Astell and Margaret Cavendish,3 extend throughout the disciplines, from philosophy to the natural sciences.4 The goal of this work is to “transform our current conception of the canon” by filling gaps in the historical record, correcting gendered omissions, and recognizing the many contributions of women across academic fields.5 These kinds of projects are not confined to correcting the historical record, however. More recently, there is increased interdisciplinary attention to identifying and correcting ongoing gendered asymmetries of production in the academy. Black feminist scholars, for instance, have long noted the ways in which the academy generates barriers to Black women and women of color both in terms of hiring and promotion, but also in terms of the recognition their work receives within traditional disciplines.6 And emerging data confirms troubling trends regarding the status of women in academia. Studies of social science publications show, for instance, that women scholars tend to fare better with publication rates when they appear in collaborative works with men, while articles by a woman author alone tend to take twice as long to move through the review process.7 Relatedly, recent reviews of political science journals reveal significant gender citation gaps— called the “Matilda effect”— which finds female authors cited less and their ideas sometimes (mis)attributed to male scholars.8 Institutional cultures fare little better. Scholars have noted the uneven distribution and effects of childcare and so- called domestic burdens outside of departments falling disproportionately to women,9 while women within departments are also overburdened with additional service requests and obligations.10 In response to these ongoing gender troubles, work is being done to revolutionize how people identify, cite, and teach scholarship across various fields. Sites like Women Also Know Stuff and People of Color Also Know Stuff have amassed large online followings as they raise the public profiles of women and people of color with expertise in fields traditionally dominated by white men. Likewise, some academic journals have begun to limit the number of selfcitations and to encourage gender-balanced citation practices,11 while others

6  Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

have more explicitly directed authors to evaluate and address gender citation gaps during revise and resubmit stages.12 These kinds of projects are much-needed corrections to the biases in the historical record of scholarly work; they provide important resources for changing the way that record is created and passed down to future generations. But they can also reproduce gendered assumptions concerning what counts as work of public value. Without doubt, we need to recognize the women who worked as scientists, artists, and philosophers—women who produced novel contributions to academic and intellectual worlds even as they were forced to the margins of those worlds. And it is equally important to break gendered citation patterns and to ensure that women’s contemporary contributions are recognized in the same way. Such corrective recovery is necessary not only to give these women their due, but also to challenge and to change the gendered terms upon which academia was founded. But we ought to consider, too, how intellectual life can be supported by work not deemed “intellectual” and which is produced in spaces not traditionally regarded as public or of public interest. We are seeing some movement in this area, with research that calls attention to the academy’s exclusionary views of what constitutes scholarship and that highlights the relationship between domestic and family life and intellectual pursuits.13 In 2017, for example, the #ThanksForTyping movement took Twitter by storm and inspired a number of subsequent conferences and publications seeking to recognize the heretofore unnamed contributions of academic wives whose manual labor ensured the production and dissemination of “great texts.”14 In this volume, we similarly turn our attention to the wives and intimates in the context of political thought. Our intention is thus to recover the lives and labors of a particular group of women obscured in the writing of history: the wives and romantic partners of canonical political philosophers. In contrast to focus on women’s contributions to fields traditionally understood as male pursuits, then, this volume questions the very distinction between stories marked as worth telling and those marked as unworthy— a distinction at the foundation of modern concepts of intellectual history. The project therefore extends beyond one of recovery alone. Instead, examining the labors of wives and intimates also interrogates the very distinctions between intellectual and nonintellectual labor or forms of collaboration that are often upheld even in efforts to recognize women scholars. The volume draws attention to the reception practices that generate and sustain these distinctions, and to the figure of the wife that often ties these threads together.

Interrogating the Canon Though wives have remained peripheral to questions of gendered labor as well as to scholarly treatments of the canon, the chapters here show how wives were

Married to the Canon  7

critical to establishing the gendered dimensions of intellectual production and canon construction throughout the history of political thought. Thus, though the chapters in this volume are organized chronologically, corresponding to most traditional presentations of the history of Western philosophy, all nine contributions raise and respond to themes that are not so tidily confined to the major eras of political thought under which they are arranged. We discuss below three critical interventions that appear across the volume, and across time periods, highlighting chapters in which they figure prominently. Though not limited to these themes, each chapter speaks to (1) the role of wife as both concept and agent, (2) questions of collaboration, labor, and what counts as intellectual work, and (3) issues surrounding archival silences, agency, and reception histories.

The Wife in Western Philosophy Throughout the history of political thought, the wife has functioned both as an abstract conceptual tool to anchor theories of political society and as a real-life collaborative partner, whose labors have not only supported but also generated the material contributions of canonical men. The first of these functions, the conceptual operation of the wife, features especially clearly in the context of the Ancients, the focus of both Arlene Saxonhouse and Sara Brill’s contributions. In the first biographical chapter of the volume, Saxonhouse rethinks the mythology surrounding Xanthippe and Socrates, in which she plays shrew to his venerable philosopher— a relationship famously depicted in Reyer van Blommendael’s painting Socrates, his Wives and Alcibiades, featured as the image on this book’s cover. Here, Xanthippe is emptying a chamber pot on an unwitting Socrates, while he is presumably deep in thought. Unpacking Xanthippe’s portrayals in both ancient works and later receptions, Saxonhouse notes that Xanthippe “demanded enough attention” to be remembered, but often served as a “foil for the idealized Socratic figure” in the hands of writers like Xenophon. It is through Xanthippe’s reduction to a “baby-making machine” (24) that Socrates is cast as a man without a body. He exists outside the confines of marriage and lust and all the bodily pursuits that exist within those spaces. But as Saxonhouse argues, Socrates’s transformation into the philosopher par excellence, who eschews the body for the pursuits of the mind, requires Xanthippe to manifest as such. Though a fleeting figure in Plato’s Phaedo, Saxonhouse shows that it is Xanthippe’s presence and departure which marks a critical transition between the world of embodied existence and the world of abstract ideas about the soul presented by Socrates before his death. Xanthippe, and her babymaking body, must depart before the philosophic discussion of the Phaedo can begin in earnest. The presence and absence of his wife thus troubles, even as it helps to establish, the Socratic dichotomy between body and soul, challenging the philosophy put forward by Socrates. But this other, more complicated Xanthippe has been lost to the shrewish caricature chosen by history— a loss

8  Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

that exemplifies the dual need for and expulsion of wives in Western political thought. Sara Brill’s chapter on Aristotle picks up on that duality explicitly, exploring how the figure of the wife is used to shape the boundaries of Aristotle’s theory of the polis. The archive leaves us with few biographical details about Aristotle’s two wives, Pythias and Herpyllis, and their relative absence from the record would certainly seem to echo the subordinate status women hold in Aristotle’s politics, as traditionally read. Still, Brill shows us that the wife functions clearly as a political necessity in his thought. As a person of equal (meaning freeborn) status, the wife is an “essential part of the couplings… that form the basis of political community,” yet she is also one who “embodies a set of capacities and qualities that are both useful and also potentially dangerous” (37). As a result, concludes Brill, Aristotle details the “virtue of the wife” as one of “self-sacrifice”—this “performed inequality between husbands and wives is called upon to exist in perpetuity in order to reflect the ‘natural’ inequality of male and female” (42). Moreover, it is through the wife’s performance of selfsacrifice that the distinction between where and what constitutes the public or valuable spaces of politics and the private or subordinate space of the household is maintained. The role Xanthippe plays in Plato’s Phaedo is theorized by Brill’s Aristotle: the wife is an embodied figure whose everyday performance as a wife is necessary to demarcate the spheres in which “real work” takes place and thereby to sustain the political community itself. Yet, as Brill argues, however neat the boundaries between public and private may seem, it is clear that the role of wife is in practice always artificial—it is sustained through a particular understanding of the character of the wife and the kind of life she ought to lead. This artificiality and the processes of negotiation which sustain and complicate it take center stage in Jennifer Jones’s chapter on Thérèse Levasseur. “Neither fully wife nor solely mistress,” Jones argues, Levasseur crafted with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “a hybrid partnership that drew on well-known eighteenth-century female categories… and transformed them into a relationship” that was both “perplexing” and “remarkably adaptable” (108). Highlighting Levasseur’s sexual agency and financial autonomy—both within her relationship and after Rousseau’s death—Jones also calls attention to the ways that Levasseur has been variously defined to sustain the gendered expectations held by the couple’s contemporaries and by later readers. In receptions of Levasseur, we find attempts to reify the role of the wife in the organization of political life. It was only, Jones notes, “as long as she remained peripheral to those parts of Rousseau’s life that intersected with le monde” (119) that Levasseur was accepted as his companion. As with Socrates and Xanthippe, “Levasseur’s critics could perhaps imagine a role for her as a sexual partner, maid, or nurse but they could not imagine a salutary role for her as Rousseau’s intellectual companion or object of his love” (119), though Jones finds evidence that she was both. In Jones’s telling, then, it becomes clear how the traditional

Married to the Canon  9

depiction of the wife— as sexual object, baby-maker, and maid— obscures the more complex dynamics of societal pressures, power, agency, and interpersonal relationships that shape canonical men and their partners. This much-contested and yet much-relied upon construction of the wife, as both a boundary marker and negotiated position, appears repeatedly across chapters. There is evidence, for example, that both Jeanne de Lartigue and Mary Mottley found in aristocratic marriages not (just) the stifling confines of domesticity, but also the potential for liberation. Likewise, Harriet Taylor Mill, as with Levasseur and Rousseau, navigated her unusual relationship with John Stuart Mill against the social constraints of Victorian England (she was, after all, a married woman when their relationship began). Yet for all these women, their reception as mere wife has worked to obscure the unique contributions and challenges faced by each, reducing the wives to domesticated— and thus passive—figures, and reifying the distinction between private and public lives and labors. In this, it seems, the boundaries of political thought continue to rely upon the dual presence and absence of its Xanthippes.

Creating the Canon: Collaboration, Labor, “Great Works” Constructing the wife as a theoretical boundary line between “intellectual” and “embodied,” “public” and “private,” effects a kind of conceptual blindness— sometimes willful—to the second function of the wife: the real-life collaborative work women have performed across those ostensibly distinct spheres. These separations—inaugurated in Xanthippe’s removal from the Phaedo—persist ­ throughout the history of political thought, generating the image of great men working in isolation as great minds on great texts. Examining the stories of these women not only reveals that blindness, but also invites critical reconsideration of the way we tend to approach intellectual labor as a mode of production. As a result, we can see how meaningful collaborations are retroactively discounted, while others are outright erased. Boris Litvin’s chapter, for example, highlights Barbera Salutati’s collaboration with Niccolò Machiavelli on La Mandragola. Noting that “Salutati’s contributions to Machiavelli’s political thought go either unnoticed or subsumed as a mere performance of work authored by Machiavelli,” (56) Litvin instead suggests an “alternative interpretive approach” (65). Litvin takes seriously Salutati’s work in producing the play as we now know it and, in so doing, “problematizes the underlying distinction between performative and intellectual labor” (62). This informs interpretations of not only Machiavelli’s works, but also of political theory more generally. Salutati was a key collaborator, argues Litvin, in writing and performing La Mandragola’s canzoni— songs that were performed between the play’s acts. Often, however, receptions of the play fail to account for the political theoretic content of these canzoni—the ways they challenge conventional readings of Ligurio as stand-in for Machiavelli as political advisor. Instead, the

10  Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

canzoni are often dismissed as “mere musical interludes” (65) to be performed as “rote enactment of material made by those engaging in intellectual labor” (67). Yet authorship, says Litvin, “cannot be sealed off from performative labor” (67). In his reading, not only do performances shape our interpretations of different texts, they also— as in the case of the collaborative crafting of La Mandragola— lead to revisions to the text itself. The artificial line drawn between intellectual labor and performance, which relegates Salutati to a minor character in the play’s life, reifies the image of Machiavelli— and the political theorist— as isolated, distant, and removed from the work of performance. This bifurcation of intellectual work from performance appears again in Emily Nacol’s discussion of John Locke’s relationship with the Clarke family and Damaris, Lady Masham. Focusing attention on Locke’s work on Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Nacol shows how it was Masham and the Clarke’s “intellectual and domestic labor that Locke drew on to build his theoretical account of childrearing” (73). Though Locke’s treatise is primarily aimed at an educational program for young men, argues Nacol, there is considerable evidence that it was developed in conversation with Mary Clarke, as she raised and educated her children. Locke’s direct involvement in the education of his “little wife” Betty Clarke, for example, reveals how intimately intertwined his work on education is with the day-to- day domestic context of the Clarke household as well as how deeply involved Mary Clarke was in generating the theoretical insights that would become Some Thoughts on Education. Likewise, argues Nacol, it is Locke’s long stay with Lady Masham, during which he had “the chance to observe her teaching and parenting efforts with her son” (81), that forms the basis for numerous examples appearing in the final published work. Despite creating “the conditions for Locke to produce his treatise on education” (81), however, Nacol notes that Locke ultimately erases these women’s contributions from the final text. “[T]hese mothers and daughters,” she writes, “either go entirely unmentioned as in the case of the Clarke women, or like Lady Masham, they are described but never named” (83). Instead, Locke dedicates his treatise on education to Mary Clarke’s husband and identifies his audience as fathers raising sons. This kind of erasure, though common, need not always be the author’s intention. Indeed, as Menaka Philips argues in her chapter, the minimization of women’s collaboration is often the effect of the very distinction between authorship and performance that Litvin and Nacol problematize— a distinction that also privileges certain kinds of scholarly receptions. Philips’s chapter centers on the partnership between Harriet Taylor Mill and John Stuart Mill, a collaboration prominently credited by J.S. Mill himself but dismissed or downplayed by nearly all his readers. These readers, Philips argues, tend to force the contributions of Taylor Mill into two types: “either she was the originating mind—the true author—behind Mill’s work on gender, or her significance was minimal” (153). Unwilling to grant the former, Mill scholarship has settled on the latter.

Married to the Canon  11

Through her investigation into the Mill-Taylor Mill partnership, however, Philips finds that the disciplinary conventions leading to this reception minimize Harriet Taylor Mill’s influence on J.S. Mill. Moreover, she argues that such conventions fail to recognize an alternative mode of intellectual work present in Taylor Mill’s writings—what Philips calls an “experiential politics” (154). In taking seriously Taylor Mill’s contributions, Philips uncovers a politics rooted in “critical perceptions of the ‘everyday’” (148), perceptions shaped by her daily performance as a woman navigating a complex relationship, family life, and social pressures. Yet the intellectual value of this performance and of the ways in which Taylor Mill’s experiences shaped her husband’s own writings on gender have too often been rendered invisible by standard understandings of intellectual and scholarly labor. Taken together, the chapters in this volume force us to reconsider what counts as political theoretic work. From the performances of La Mandragola and the in-home educational practices of Mary Clarke and Damaris, Lady Masham, to the editorial work of Mary Mottley and political activism of Jenny Marx, the distinction between political texts and practices is fragile and arbitrary. This severing of “proper” authorship from its wider contexts creates a blind spot in our understanding of intellectual labor. We are led to dismiss or erase the embeddedness of canonical thinkers in domestic contexts. And we likewise often ignore the various processes of editing and revision that ultimately create the final text. Moreover, with these distinctions about what ought to count as a text in place, it becomes all too easy to downplay the labors of women who blur those lines, and to thereby silence their role in the construction of ­intellectual life.

Receptions, Archives, and Agency That the philosophical canon is artificially defined is hardly surprising. Substantive discussions regarding which thinkers and texts belong to it are numerous and unending— as they should be. What the chapters in this volume demonstrate, however, is how the dual role of the wife, as both concept and collaborator, has been consistently deployed to shape the boundaries of the canon, not just as a set of texts but as a mode of intellectual production more generally. For this reason, discussions of canon construction should rightly extend to include the kinds of labors and collaborative arrangements that are often left in the shadows as well as the resulting image of intellectual content that is produced. This is no easy task. History is told from the perspective of those who do the writing; the daily lives and humdrum work of women, even where recorded, go largely overlooked in studies of political thought. Instead, we see X anthippe become a “shrew” and Levasseur an “abusive widow,” while Salutati is relegated to “muse and love interest.” The role of women like Taylor Mill and Mottley, likewise, are toned down or even lamented by some, while other

12  Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

wives, like Pythias and Herpyllis as well as Jeanne de Lartigue, seem absent from the record entirely. But it is through these archival omissions, obscurations, and vilifications that the role of wife as private, domestic, and passive is reinforced and the image of the great man retained. And yet, as Bryan Banks points out in his recovery of Jeanne de Lartigue, wife of Baron de Montesquieu, this temptation to characterize canonical wives and women as passive is a common mistake that we must resist—lest we reinforce gendered interpretive customs. Rather than assume archival silences as proof of gendered passivity, as scholars are wont to do, Banks instead argues that many of these “women played a role in shaping their own representations through their control over the material resources that bore their mark” (90). Because Lartigue was a devout Calvinist at a time when Calvanists were actively persecuted by the French state, Banks speculates that her archival silence was due to a strategic choice on the part of her and Montesquieu, who nevertheless continued “to publish arguments beneficial to the displaced and persecuted Protestant group” (96). As Banks notes, Lartigue—like many of the women covered in this collection, including Levasseur and Mottley—was not only the active estate manager during Montesquieu’s many travels; she was also responsible for her husband’s legacy after his death. As a result, Banks invites us to read Lartigue’s archival silence as an act of agency on her part rather than a function of her passivity. Moreover, Banks notes, “erring on the side of agency does greater justice to silenced women and women choosing to silence themselves than does assuming and propagating gendered understandings of women as timid, quiet, reserved, and maternal” (101). Banks’s chapter suggests that the gendered dynamic of archives reflects the gender politics not only of the context and persons which produce an archive, but also, critically, of the scholarly world in which that archive is received and interpreted. Thus, even where the archive makes recovery possible, Ross Carroll notes that such a task will often involve pushing back against a tradition of reception history which insists on the passive, domesticated role of the woman at home. To that end, Caroll’s study of Mary Mottley, wife of Alexis de Tocqueville, challenges the common depiction of Mottley as solely that of a “domestic helpmeet and psychological prop” (132); he instead identifies her additional role as an “intellectual and political interlocutor” to Tocqueville (128). It is Mottley to whom Tocqueville turns for not only political advice, but also editorial suggestions. And it is Mottley, crucially, as Carroll argues, who Tocqueville entrusts with the responsibility for editing and publishing his papers after his death and returning or destroying letters written to him. This “great man,” in short, left his intellectual legacy to his wife. Mottley’s role in Tocqueville’s life is therefore an active and complex one of partnership. Yet she has long been vilified by Tocqueville biographers and ignored by political theorists, either accused of overstepping her “prerogatives” as widow or passed over in favor of the narrative of Alexis’s singular genius (139). By taking seriously

Married to the Canon  13

Mottley’s many roles, however, Carroll argues that we can better understand how gender norms discipline scholarly assumptions about what and who merits recognition in the realm of intellectual study, including the idea that “thoughts must be published before they can be studied” (141). The politics of archives and gendered traditions of reception come home to roost in the volume’s last biographical chapter. Terrell Carver’s study of Marx, Engels, and the women associated with them takes a wide view of intellectual biography as genre, showing how the frame of greatness— great texts, great men, great ideas—not only underlies the very foundation of the canon but is in fact predetermined by who we assume to be “great minds” thinking “great thoughts” (169). In contrast, by bringing to light the additional narratives of the “domestic” spheres of Jenny Marx, Helene Demuth, Mary Burns, and Lydia Burns, Carver highlights the places and people Marx and Engels lived in, talked to, and worked with. Only through these contextualized stories, he argues, can we fully understand Marx, Engels, and their texts as operating in and arising out of the particular material processes and spaces which shaped these men and their subjects. Yet the genre of intellectual biography that supports canon construction, Carver argues, too often lacks this contextualization. Rather, the process of “canonization” through biography makes men into minds by elevating them beyond their embodied experiences. Of course, this process also requires the exclusion or separation of the women who constitute part of those experiences—women who not only kept house but whose participation in the activist realities of political agitation (securing funding, research and editing, and publishing and translating as well as curating archives) was critical to the production of any texts we now read as part of Marx and Engels’s corpus. Indeed, Carver’s genre critique illustrates how the practice of making wives both absent and present in political thought— a practice depicted by Plato and Aristotle— evolved into a genre convention of contemporary scholarship. As all these chapters demonstrate, it is the very process of constructing a “canon” that has led us to ignore the work of the wives and partners of canonical men. And yet each of these studies also make evident that it is impossible to separate the texts and theories for which these men are known from the material contexts—the wives and households— out of which they were generated. Taken together, these contributions thus demand that we not just revisit the category of wife and the boundaries of intellectual production; we must also rethink the processes of canon construction, reception, and intellectual history that has shaped the way we read these texts and thinkers today.

Remembering “the Ladies”15 In collecting the stories of philosophy’s canonical wives, the chapters in this volume recover, correct, and interrogate the very process of canon construction and the intellectual labor it supposes. They suggest that the lens through which

14  Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

we have come to understand the canon, as a particular mode of production, is predetermined by the narrative we expect to find. In the case of gender, those expectations privilege a particular view of intellectual genius and the types of labors which contribute to producing works of scholarly value— a view which sidelines, if not excises, the lives of women in their roles as wives and intimate companions. And it is the concept of wife as a specific, intimate role that is deployed to reify these expectations and uphold these distinctions. By showcasing the ways in which women’s labors have contributed to the production of political thought, The Wives of Western Philosophy challenges the distinctions often assumed by other recovery projects—between “intellectual” and “nonintellectual” labor and the “public” and “private” spheres in which they are conducted. Of course, the women discussed herein are distinct, as are their contributions and their relationships. Barbera Salutati’s collaboration with Machiavelli, for example, differs considerably from Thérèse Levasseur’s life with Rousseau. Yet both their labors and their differences are obscured by the specific, narrow framing of wives and intimates in traditional scholarly receptions. Raising these challenges, in turn, invites consideration of how the intellectual world always already works in tandem with domestic labor to produce scholarly works. We are not minds without bodies; instead, our bodily experiences can, do, and have shaped our philosophy in important ways. By interrogating the very construction of intellectual labor as a process, the volume thus invites us to take a wider view of what constitutes scholarship in the first place, calling us all to examine how we replicate exclusionary frameworks in the way we read, write, and teach canonical figures, texts, and lives. The time has come to recover wives and intimates from the margins of political thought, and to treat them as more than biographical addendums to the honored men of the canon. As the wives in this volume did themselves, we ought to trouble the boundaries of scholarship and academic life, and to disrupt the gendered politics which sustain them.

Notes 1 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial ­Literature, 1668–1735,” American Quarterly 28, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 20. 2 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-B ehaved Women Seldom Make History (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), xxi–xxii. 3 Penny Weiss, Canon Fodder: Historical Women Political Thinkers (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009); Project Vox Team, “Project Vox” (Duke University Libraries, 2018), https://projectvox.org. 4 Pnina Abir-A m and Dorinda Outram, eds., Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789–1979 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, Media Tie In edition (New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2016); Patricia Fara, Pandora’s Breeches: Women, Science & Power in the Enlightenment (London: Pimlico, 2004).

Married to the Canon  15

­ ­ ­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­ ­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­ ­

­

­

­

­

­

­ ­

­

­

­

­

­ ­

16  Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips



­

­

­

­

­

­

­ ­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­ ­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

Married to the Canon  17

com/news/2020/04/21/early-journal-submission-data-suggest-covid-19-tanking­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ womens-research-productivity. ———. “Study Finds Female Professors Experience More Work Demands and Special Favor Requests, Particularly from Academically Entitled Students.” Inside Higher Ed, January 10, 2018. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/01/10/ study-finds-female-professors-experience-more-work-demands-and-special-favor. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ Forestal, Jennifer, and Menaka Philips. “Gender and the ‘Great Man’: Recovering Philosophy’s ‘Wives of the Canon.’” Hypatia 33, no. 4 (September 19, 2018): 587–92. Guarino, Cassandra M., and Victor M. H. Borden. “Faculty Service Loads and Gender: Are Women Taking Care of the Academic Family?” Research in Higher Education 58, no. 6 (September 1, 2017): 672–94. Hengel, Erin. “Publishing While Female.” Cambridge Working Papers on Economics, University of Cambridge, 2017. hooks, bell. “Theory as Liberatory Practice.” Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 4, no. 1 (1991): 1–12. The International Journal of Press/Politics. “Manuscript Submission Guidelines.” Accessed May 25, 2020. https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/HIJ. Jaschik, Scott. “The New Poli Sci Collaboration.” Inside Higher Ed, February 25, 2010. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/25/polisci. Kelly, Bridget Turner. “Though More Women Are on College Campuses, Climbing the Professor Ladder Remains a Challenge.” Brookings (blog), March 29, 2019. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2019/03/29/though­ ­ ­ more-women-are-on-college-campuses-climbing-the-professor-ladder-remains­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ a-challenge/. Mazanec, Cecilia. “#ThanksForTyping Spotlights Unnamed Women in Literary Acknowledgments.” NPR.org, March 30, 2017. https://www.npr.org/2017/ 03/30/521931310/-thanksfortyping-spotlights-unnamed-women-in-literary­ ­ ­ ­ ­ acknowledgements. Political Communication. “Formatting Guidelines.” Accessed May 25, 2020. https:// www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&journal Code=upcp20&#formatting. Opitz, Donald L., Staffan Bergwik, and Brigitte Van Tiggelen. Domesticity in the Making of Modern Science. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Project Vox Team. “Project Vox.” Duke University Libraries, 2018. https://projectvox.org. ———. “Project Vox. ‘About the Project.’” Duke University Libraries, 2018. https:// ­ ­ projectvox.org/about-the-project/. Roberts, Meghan K. Sentimental Savants: Philosophical Families in Enlightenment France. The Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Rossiter, Margaret W. “The Matthew Matilda Effect in Science.” Social Studies of Science 23, no. 2 (1993): 325–41. SAGE Publications Inc. “Guidelines for Authors and Reviewers,” October 28, 2015. https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/journal/comparative-political-studies. ­ ­ ­ Sample, Ian. “Keep Women in Academia by Providing Childcare, Historian Urges Universities.” The Guardian, June 7, 2017. Shetterly, Margot Lee. Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. Media Tie in edition. New York: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2016.

18  Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

Teele, Dawn Langan, and Kathleen Thelen. “Gender in the Journals: Publication Patterns in Political Science.” PS: Political Science & Politics 50, no. 02 (April 2017): 433–47. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, ­ 1668–1735.” American Quarterly 28, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 20–40. ———. Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. New York: Vintage Books, 2007. Weiss, Penny. Canon Fodder: Historical Women Political Thinkers. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Twitter. “WomenAlsoKnowStuff.” Accessed May 25, 2020. https://twitter.com/ womenalsoknow/status/1257387814976663552. Young, Jemimah L., and Dorothy E. Hines. “Killing My Spirit, Renewing My Soul: Black Female Professors’ Critical Reflections on Spirit Killings While Teaching.” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 6, no. 1 ( July 18, 2018): 18–25.

2 XANTHIPPE Shrew or Muse1 Arlene Saxonhouse

We know little about Socrates’s wife Xanthippe. She has appeared in a variety of contemporary and later anecdotes about Socrates, but her appearance in the Platonic dialogues is limited to the Phaedo, and there she speaks only one sentence. In this chapter, I review what little is reported about her and her interactions with Socrates as a preface to showing how different her role is in Plato’s Phaedo where she becomes, I argue, part of and counter to the philosophical discussion that takes place on the day of Socrates’s death. While engaging in conversation with his friends about the meaning of death and the possibility of reincarnation in the Phaedo, Socrates speculates on our rebirth as assorted animals, the unjust and violent as wolves and hawks, the good citizens as bees and ants (82ab). In Book X of the Republic, in the Myth of Er, Socrates also imagines the reincarnation of specific individuals as animals. Ajax reappears as a lion, Agamemnon as an eagle, Thersites, the buffoon of the Iliad, as an ape. In a 1995 article in the Annals of the Entomological Society of America entitled “New Genus and Two New Species of Melicharini from Venezuela,” one of the newly discovered species has been given the name “Xanthippe.”2 There she is, the wife of Socrates, reincarnated as a spider. Poor Xanthippe, mocked and scorned as a shrew, throughout history the harridan who regularly scolded her philosopher husband, a man beloved by the young men of Athens, by Plato, and by Western civilization for millennia thereafter, reappearing as an eightlegged arachnid feasting on the flowers of palms of the genus Socratea.3 We can understand Ajax as a lion and Thersites as an ape, but why does X anthippe return to us as a spider? One longs for Socrates’s speculations on this. We know so little about Xanthippe, even whether she was Socrates’s only wife or one of two, the other being Myrto, a descendant of Aristides the Just.4 Yet she has evoked a range of responses, as authors from the time of Socrates

20  Arlene Saxonhouse

to the present imagine what a wife of Socrates must have been like or, more interesting, how the presentation of this philosopher’s wife can highlight the qualities of the Socrates that we have come to venerate. Nietzsche, his own misogyny on full display, attributes Socrates becoming the philosopher he was to his henpecking wife: Socrates found the sort of wife that he needed— but even he would not have sought her had he known her well enough: the heroism of even this free spirit would not have gone that far. Xanthippe actually drove him more and more into his characteristic profession by making his house and home inhospitable and unhomely for him: she taught him to live in the streets and everywhere that one could chat and be idle and thus shaped him into the greatest Athenian street dialectician: who finally had to compare himself to an obtrusive gadfly that some god had placed upon the neck of that beautiful horse, Athens, in order to keep it from finding any peace.5 In contrast, Robert Graves, the English poet and novelist, expresses sympathy for this much-maligned woman. In an essay entitled “The Case for Xanthippe,” Graves acknowledges what might be considered her side of the story. Distinguishing between rationality—hard, “antipoetic,” numbers-focused rationality— as opposed to “reasonableness,” to which he appends the adjective “sweet,” Graves remarks that “Sweet reasonableness was wanting in Socrates.”6 Indeed, Graves writes, “His homosexual leanings, his absent-minded behavior, his idleness, and his love of proving everyone wrong, would have endeared him to no wife of mettle.” Despite that, Graves recognizes that Xanthippe “is still pilloried as a shrew who could not understand her husband’s spiritual greatness; and Socrates is still regarded as a saint because he patiently bore with her reproaches.” Graves the poet distances himself from “rationality” in order to defend Xanthippe’s intuitions: “She saw that his metaphysical theories would bring the family public disgrace and endanger the equipoise of the world she knew.” 7 Graves may not pass muster with social scientists of our day when he suggests a correlation between the decline of “sweet reasonableness” and a decline in the status of women with “an immediate increase in wars, crime, mental ill-health, and physical excess.” But he does express exasperation with the immediate assumption that Xanthippe plays the negative role in the Socrates-Xanthippe marriage. Of course, everything Graves writes is speculative fancy, the poetic imagination attached to the Xanthippe he defends. As Leonard Woodbury notes, the anecdotes that tell of the difficulties that Socrates had with his wife, “instead of providing material for a biography of Xanthippe, are told to illustrate the qualities of Socrates.” 8 The anecdotes to which Woodbury refers come mostly from brief notices in the works of Xenophon that are then elaborated in later non- contemporary writers. Below

Xanthippe: Shrew or Muse  21

I review these anecdotes and discuss how they support Graves’s and Woodbury’s contention that the portrait of Xanthippe in these ancient writings highlights Socrates’s qualities rather than giving us clear insights into the character of Socrates’s wife. Xenophon’s stories, however, may suggest that what others over time came to mock as traits to be feared in a wife in fact made her a fit spouse for Socrates, a woman who could challenge him as others seldom did. After a review of the anecdotes, I suggest that although Plato may not offer greater insight into who Xanthippe was than can be gleaned from the stories that rose up about her, her single appearance by name in Plato’s dialogues may go beyond simply elevating the renowned philosopher. With her brief role in the Phaedo, she deepens Plato’s portrait of Socrates and helps to underscore the complexity of the theories he develops about the immortality of the soul. Unfortunately, Xanthippe cannot stand on her own. Few, if any, women in the world of ancient Athens could, apart from educated courtesans such as Aspasia and high priestesses.9 Aspasia’s fame arose initially from her connection with Pericles, and Xanthippe will always remain a sideshow to Socrates, though Plato made her presence in the Phaedo serve, I contend, as more than such a sideshow.

The Ancient Anecdotes Aristophanes, who is prepared to lampoon almost anyone—be they gods, Socrates, great tragedians, leading political figures of Athens, the demos, women in general, and Aspasia in particular—never mentions Xanthippe in his surviving comedies, indicating perhaps how inconsequential she was to the cultural, political, and intellectual world of fifth- century Athens. Xenophon, Plato’s contemporary and a generation younger than Socrates, however, takes up the task of introducing Xanthippe to those interested in stories about the life and activities of Socrates. She appears by name in only one of Xenophon’s works, Symposium. Xenophon introduces Symposium by remarking that it seems good that he report not only those serious (spoudaios) deeds of great and noble men (males, andres), but also their more playful adventures (paidiai).10 One of these more playful adventures is a dinner given by the rich Callias in honor of the winner of the pankration at the Panathenaic games. Chancing to meet Socrates and his companions on his way home from the games, Callias invites them all to join the celebration. After a meal, a young girl dances and plays the flute. A handsome young man plays the zither and also dances. Together, Xenophon writes, they present a wondrous performance. Impressed by this display of talent, Xenophon’s Socrates comments: Oh men (andres), in many other ways, it is clear also in the things which the girl does that the female nature (gunaikeia phusis) is not worse than that of a man, except that it is lacking in judgment and strength.

22  Arlene Saxonhouse

To this he adds, “If any one of you has a wife, boldly (thrassôn) teach her whatever knowledge (epistemenê) you would wish her to have” (Xenophon 1923, 2.9). Two words stand out in this latter comment: “boldly” and “to have knowledge.” To educate one’s wife requires courage, comparable perhaps to that of the warrior on the battlefield. Is it because to do so flouts convention? Or is it because it is challenging to try to educate a woman? In either case, Socrates urges others not to shun the task, perhaps offering an insight into his own relation to Xanthippe— as one he dares/challenges to have the sort of knowledge he wishes her to have. Given Socrates’s own life of philosophical pursuit in the service of the good life, could his advice to others reflect his own daring in trying to teach Xanthippe whatever he wishes her to know? In another work on Socrates, the Memorabilia, Xenophon reports on an enchanting (and flirtatious) interchange between Socrates and the prostitute Theodote, whom Socrates educates in the art of acquiring “friends,” perhaps not the knowledge one would want to teach one’s own wife, but suggestive of Socrates’s engagement in educating women—be they wives or prostitutes. Xanthippe may be, however, more of a challenge to educate than Theodote, for whom he advises good deeds and “sweetness” (Xenophon 1923, III.11.11). In response to Socrates’s advice about educating their wives in the knowledge/ science husbands want them to know, the skeptical Antisthenes, another dinner guest, counters, “If you think that, why don’t you educate Xanthippe, but rather endure a wife who of all those who are and, I think, ever were and will be, is the most difficult, harshest, painful, ill-tempered (chalepotatê)” (Xenophon 1923, 2.10). Thus are we introduced to the Xanthippe, a characterization that will dominate almost all subsequent portrayals of her. But in what way was she the most difficult? Later authors take this portrait of Xanthippe in a thoroughly negative fashion, as we shall see in the discussion of Diogenes’s anecdotes. But could Xanthippe’s harshness also be her strength, making her an appropriate complement for the husband eager to educate her in whatever he wishes her to know, a match that violates the cultural norms of the submissive wife that Antisthenes treasures? In this possible reading of Socrates’s and X anthippe’s relationship, she poses the sort of challenge that Socrates welcomes in his other interlocutors. Socrates does not reject Antisthenes’s characterization of Xanthippe. Instead, he explains that he keeps her as she is; that way, he says, if he learns to endure her, he will easily be “with all other human beings (anthropoi).” Socrates follows this with an analogy with horses: the horseman who rides the horses of the highest spirit (thumoeideis) can ride all horses. Xanthippe’s ill temper prepares him for the challenges others may pose.11 The Xanthippe who emerges from this interchange introduces the Xanthippe who will dominate subsequent portrayals of the philosopher’s wife and of the man Socrates, who is of such a character that he can endure, as others cannot, the challenges of having such a high- spirited wife. The disparaging portrait of Xanthippe as one difficult to control reinforces the favorable portrait

Xanthippe: Shrew or Muse  23

of Socrates, a man so temperate, so calm that he, unlike any other man, can live with Xanthippe, thereby training himself to endure confrontations with anyone, be he the wolf-like Thrasymachus of the Republic or the dismissive Protagoras of the Protagoras. The high- spirited Xanthippe, to be sure, highlights Socrates’s excellence, as Xenophon clearly wishes to do, but the portrait may also reveal something about the personal strength of this woman whom others, expecting acquiescence from their own wives, find “harsh.” After reporting on the interchange with Antisthenes, Xenophon describes another performance by the young girl. She somersaults among upright spears. Upon observing this, Socrates remarks that no one who has seen this routine will deny that “courage/manliness (andreia) can be taught when, though a female (gunê), she leaps so boldly among the spears” (Xenophon 1923, 2.12). Perhaps Socrates’s experiences with the high- spirited (thumotic) Xanthippe has taught him to recognize that “manliness/courage” can be taught to women, even if it does not come to them by nature. Socrates had just exhorted the young men at the dinner to boldly educate their wives in whatever knowledge they want them to have; Socrates could be continuing this theme here by suggesting that the men might teach their wives manliness, a quality that they (unlike Socrates) may not want to foster.12 At the conclusion of Xenophon’s Symposium, Xanthippe reappears, though not by name; her appearance is marked more by her absence than her presence. The final entertainment of the evening can only be described as bordering on the pornographic, intended to sexually arouse Callias’s guests. “Ariadne,” perhaps the brave girl of the earlier passages, reappears costumed as a bride. She awaits the arrival of “Dionysus.” The sound of his flute precedes him and gives her pleasure. “Dionysus” appears and sits on her lap; they embrace and kiss and, under the encouraging cries from the symposiasts for more, they become lovers kissing and caressing before they go off to bed (Xenophon 1923, 9.3–9.7). We then learn that this erotic display inspired the bachelors to swear that they would get married; the married men, Xenophon tells us, mounted their horses and headed home to their wives. The wedded Socrates is impervious to the pornography that aroused the others; he remains behind as the others dash off. Xanthippe is ignored in these final passages, though she had been present as the difficult wife earlier. Through this absence, Socrates appears outside lust and outside marriage. He is the bachelor who is not a bachelor, unmoved by bodily demands and sexual desires.13 As presented in Xenophon’s Symposium, Xanthippe, whether by her presence or absence, embellishes the portrait of Socrates. Xenophon may thus unintentionally give some insight into the strength of the woman behind the famous and revered philosopher, there to challenge him but not to serve as a sexual object like the prostitute Theodote. Xenophon gives Socrates more reason to acknowledge Xanthippe in his Recollections, but he does not name her in this work. In one of the many vignettes that fill the Recollections, he repeats the portrait of this woman as shrewish and

24  Arlene Saxonhouse

oh so difficult to get along with, as Socrates tries to moderate the anger his eldest son Lamproclus feels toward his mother (Xenophon 1923, 2.2). The editor of one edition of the Recollections from 1880 has this to say about the wife of Socrates in a note to this vignette: “[W]e may infer that Socrates, who was upwards of seventy at the time, was more than twenty years senior of Xanthippe. With one of her temperament especially, this could not lead to happy results” (Winans 1880, 219). Though Lamproclus laments his mother’s harshness (chalepotatê, the same word Antisthenes uses in the Symposium), something that he says no one would be able to endure, and describes this “harshness” as “worse than that of a wild beast,” leading her to say things that no one “for all his life is worth would be willing to hear” (Xenophon 1923, 2.2.7), Socrates does not reject Lamproclus’s description. Rather, he diverts the discussion from the shrewish Xanthippe to a concern with gratitude, and notes that cities, although not caring about gratitude in any other case, monitor ingratitude to parents and forbid ingrates to hold office or oversee the sacred benefits to the city. Lamproclus should be grateful for his difficult-to-endure mother, as Socrates had told Antisthenes he himself is for his harsh wife. As a follow-up, Socrates explains why he, Socrates, may welcome this shrew as his wife. Lamproclus should not think that human beings (anthropoi) make children on account of lust (aphrodisiôn), a comment that may explain why he, unlike the other husbands, did not rush home after the pornographic performance at Callias’s dinner. The streets, he tells his son, are filled with resources to satisfy one’s lust. Rather, it is clear that “we” search among all women for the one who will make for us the best offspring. The man provides the sustenance so that they together provide the best for their children (Xenophon 1923, 2.2.4–2.2.5). Xanthippe may be the shrew her son makes her out to be, but Socrates nevertheless identified her as the best one with whom he would “make children.” Xanthippe is more than simply a baby-making machine; she is a good baby-making machine despite— or perhaps because of?—her harshness that serves as a constant challenge to others. Socrates’s comments here indicate that theirs is not an arranged marriage, but one determined by choice. Socrates chose Xanthippe to be his wife. Could it be because her harshness also would help him to develop the qualities necessary for a philosophical life, a way of life in which one must be prepared to endure both personal and intellectual challenges? While others mock Xanthippe’s shrewish nature in Xenophon’s stories, Socrates offers her churlishness as an advantage in training him to practice the moderation he urges on his son. And it may be that the challenges this shrew poses turn Socrates into the expert dialectician whom we find in Plato’s dialogues. No writer contemporary with Socrates refers to any wife other than Xanthippe. Diogenes, writing his Lives of Eminent Philosophers more than half a millennium after Xenophon in the third century CE, cites Aristotle to report that Socrates had two wives14: the first was Xanthippe, with whom he had

Xanthippe: Shrew or Muse  25

Lamproclus, of Recollections fame, and the second was Myrto, the daughter of Aristides, whom he took without a dowry and with whom he had two sons, Sophroniscus and Menexenus. Some authors, reports Diogenes, hold that because of a shortage of men in Athens as the result of the Peloponnesian War, he had two wives at the same time (Diogenes 1972, 2.26). Accurate or not, only Xanthippe satisfies Diogenes’s penchant for good stories about the philosopher. Once again Xanthippe the shrew takes center stage, this time more to show off Socrates’s witty apothegms than as a challenge to Socrates. Diogenes, for instance, tells of the time that Socrates invited some wealthy men to dinner. Xanthippe told him that she was ashamed, presumably of the meager offerings they could offer their guests. Socrates responds, “Take courage, for if they [the guests] are moderate, they will go along with it. If they are foolish, there need be no concern about them for us” (2.34). Xanthippe’s shame about the poverty of her household is in sharp contrast to her husband’s lack of concern with how he appears before others.15 Xanthippe here is the foil to reveal Socrates’s admirable personal qualities. The next anecdote builds on Xanthippe the shrew in order to display Socrates’s wit. In the midst of a series of what we might call one-liners, Diogenes reports on Xanthippe scolding Socrates and then pouring water on him, to which Socrates responds, “Did I not say thundering Xanthippe also makes water?” (2.36). When Alcibiades hears this, he comments that X anthippe’s railings and abuse are unbearable, to which Socrates explains first that he has gotten used to her abuse “as to the sound of a windlass,” not at this point suggesting that she teaches him how to “endure” other human beings. In Diogenes’s tale, Socrates then asks Alcibiades whether he is bothered by the sound of geese, to which Alcibiades replies that at least the geese provide eggs and goslings. So too, Socrates says, with Xanthippe, the baby-making machine. He has become as accustomed to her railings as to the sounds of geese and windlasses and, by the way, he adds, “She bore [my] children” (2.37). In Diogenes, Xanthippe continues to provide fodder for Socrates’s punch lines: once when she stripped off his cloak in the agora, his friends advised him to defend himself with his hand. “By Zeus,” he responded, “in order that while we are going at each other, each of you will say, ‘well done, Socrates,’ ‘well done, Xanthippe’” (2.37). And so Socrates denies them such entertainments. Diogenes concludes his repertoire of Socrates’s “words and deeds” by repeating Xenophon’s anecdote in which Socrates made the analogy between living with the “harsh, savage (tracheia)” Xanthippe and riding a high-spirited (thumoeidesin) horse. Here, though, Diogenes writes that Socrates says that having learned to master/control/rule (kratêsantes) such a creature, he can easily be around others (2.37). Diogenes’s story is not embedded in a discussion of the education of wives and women who can become manly, as it is in Xenophon’s telling. It becomes a story of control and mastery of a shrewish wife. Xanthippe serves Diogenes as a stock character, the comic shrew who is unable to appreciate

26  Arlene Saxonhouse

her philosopher husband. Diogenes probably draws on Xenophon’s Xanthippe, but half a millennium later, he does not capture the potentially positive consequences of living with a shrew that may be implied in Xenophon’s telling. Rather, he reinforces the conventional reading of the vexing wife who follows Socrates through history. Nevertheless, both authors find in Xanthippe a way to praise Socrates by highlighting the differences of temperament between husband and wife. To be sure, neither author got his portrait of Xanthippe from Plato.16

Xanthippe in Plato As noted above, Xanthippe appears by name only once in Plato’s dialogues,17 in the Phaedo, the dialogue that recounts the conversations that took place on Socrates’s last day and reports on the details of his death. Phaedo from Elis (i.e., not an Athenian citizen) has been asked by the foreigner Echecrates from the distant Peloponnesian city of Phlius to tell him the words and deeds of Socrates’s last day. Phaedo is eager to comply with Echecrates’s request and reports that on entering the prison in which Socrates was being held on the morning of the day Socrates is to die, Xanthippe, holding their young child, was sitting beside a reclining Socrates (60a). The scene is intimate. It appears that Xanthippe has been there during the entire night, for Phaedo, who has been waiting from before dawn to enter the prison, makes no mention of her entering the prison before him. It is Phaedo and his friends entering the prison who disrupt this communing— on what level, we do not know— of husband and wife. Xanthippe marks a transition in the dialogue, technically from an exterior framing that sets up the dialogue as a conversation between Phaedo and Echecrates to one that is narrated by Phaedo, but more important, she marks a transition from the world of the physical, the bodily transitory existence we all share, to the abstract language of the unseen soul whose immortality is the topic of conversation on the day Socrates is to die. Though Phaedo does not refer to Xanthippe by name near the end of the dialogue, we may assume she reappears in the evening with their sons and the women of his household as his body is prepared for his death (116b).18 After his bath, we learn, he spoke with the women and children before asking them to leave and returning to the cell where his companions were waiting for him and the executioner. Though her appearance is brief, there is little relation between the Platonic Xanthippe and the shrewish Xanthippe of the ancient anecdotes that emphasize her difficult character and have her pouring water on her husband. The prison scene where Phaedo finds her and Socrates is serene, as the husband and wife sit next to each other with her holding his child. The impression is one of quiet intimacy between husband and wife, a scene even more startling considering the conversation that will follow about the contamination to the soul that comes from the body, the distractions it causes (66b), and the chains that the body

Xanthippe: Shrew or Muse  27

puts on the soul. In this scene-setting prelude, Phaedo in mid- sentence, right after he mentions Xanthippe’s name, says to his companion, “for you know [her] (gignôskeis),” reminding us that he is narrating this series of events not to us, the readers of the dialogue, but to a particular listener, Echecrates. But why and in what way does Echecrates, a foreigner from a distant city, “know” Xanthippe? He has heard only sketchy reports of Socrates’s trial and execution and is eager to learn more specifics about the deeds and speeches surrounding his death. But he “knows” Xanthippe— as Phaedo, himself a foreigner, assumes he must. In some fashion, Xanthippe is spoken of such that even those outside of Athens “know” her. Consider here the ending of Pericles’s Funeral Oration when Pericles comments oxymoronically that the greatest glory of a woman belongs to she who is least spoken of among men, whether for good or for bad (Thucydides, History, II.45). Wherefrom Xanthippe’s fame? Plato gives us no indication why Echecrates would know her.19We never hear of the wives of other characters in the Platonic corpus.20 Yet with Phaedo’s side comment, Plato ensures that his readers attend to Xanthippe. Phaedo’s report to Echecrates continues by noting that when he and his companions entered Socrates’s cell, Xanthippe “cried aloud and said those things which women customarily do.” This speech entails the only words attributed directly to Xanthippe in the Platonic dialogues. They are: “O Socrates, now is the very last time your companions will speak with you and you with them” (60a). Although Phaedo’s side comment introducing these words may be read as Phaedo’s dismissive attitude toward Xanthippe, this brief sentence asks for more consideration than Phaedo, a young man, is willing to give it. Admittedly, Phaedo’s words can be read as trivializing, but they need not reveal Plato’s attitude toward Xanthippe. Part of Plato’s accomplishment is to give at least a double meaning to the language he uses in his dialogues, here revealing Phaedo’s—but not necessarily Xanthippe’s—limitations. Again, the sentence that is “of the sort that women customarily” speak is “O Socrates, now is the very last time your companions will speak with you and you with them” (60a). Is it so hard to imagine a man might speak this sentence? If so, why? Why should one read it as a “woman’s” comment? On the one hand, one could read the statement as simply an observation of fact. Knowing that Socrates is to die, Xanthippe recognizes— as we all would—that this is the last opportunity he will have to speak with his friends as they are “accustomed” to. This view, however, is the view of someone who focuses on the necessity of the body for engagement in discourse. In the final sections of his speech before the jury, as Plato writes in the Apology, Socrates had reflected in fanciful speculation on the possibility that death is an unending conversation among friends, that is, he had imagined an existence in which conversation might not require physical bodies (41ab). Xanthippe, a woman, does not separate the soul from the body, speech from the physical existence of the human being, as we see Socrates trying to do throughout the Phaedo; in this, she shows

28  Arlene Saxonhouse

little difference from the men in the dialogue who also have difficulty making this break with the body and resist Socrates’s arguments to that effect, and who weep as violently as she (117c– e) when they contemplate being unable to speak with Socrates as they have in the past. We should note as well that there is in this brief sentence spoken by Xanthippe feelings of sorrow, that this is indeed the last time that these friends will be able to converse with one another. This sense of loss is no less present when Phaedo begins to speak to Echecrates about the pain that he himself feels at the memory of the loss he and others have experienced, a pain that is joined with pleasure in the recollection of the time spent with Socrates. So, what is it that makes this sentence peculiarly feminine? Or is it? Does Plato suggest a certain androgyny here where Xanthippe is no different from the male friends who came early to the prison gates because they themselves knew that it was the last time they would be able to speak with their friend? She sees what they see and puts into words what they themselves feel when they weep at the end of the dialogue. Xanthippe, the mother of Socrates’s children, the bodily companion of Socrates, understands relationships based on the body that gives voice to speech, while Phaedo, the companion and friend of Socrates, seems dismissive of such an understanding. Both males and females will experience grief at the loss of the body of Socrates and the speeches that go along with that body, but— and here I believe Plato is alerting us to the difference—Xanthippe expresses the sadness that will be experienced by others rather than herself. She shows an altruism that does not surface as one of the traditional virtues of the Greeks— apart, we might note, from Socrates’s claims in the Apology that he is driven by a certain philanthropy and that he has been sent by the god to care for his fellow citizens by urging them to attend to the quality of their souls rather than to wealth, power, and beauty.21 Xanthippe is the one who expresses concern for another, while Phaedo admits that his weeping at the end of the dialogue is not for Socrates, but for his own misfortune in being deprived of such a companion as Socrates (117d). Socrates does not respond to Xanthippe’s grief that that day’s conversation will be the last between himself and his companions. Rather, he prepares for this conversation by looking to his friend Crito, who will care for his body after his death, and says, “O Crito, let someone lead her home” (60a). Some of Crito’s men (slaves?—the Greek says only tines) lead her off as she performs the ritual role for the women of the household in ancient Athens, “weeping and beating her breast.”22 With her, presumably, goes Socrates’s child; they are replaced by a world of speech that emphasizes opposition and an isolation from bodily communion. The conversation that follows can take place only after the female has departed and with her the understanding of the body as the site of mutuality, community, sexuality, and physical continuity. The philosophical soul flourishes only in the abstraction from these. The presence of Xanthippe

Xanthippe: Shrew or Muse  29

reminds the reader (and the Pythagorean Echecrates) that we ought not ignore that mutuality even as we speak of the opposites that fill so much of the rest of the dialogue. “How strange is this which human beings call pleasure,” Socrates remarks in his first words after he has asked Crito to take Xanthippe home, words that now serve as the introduction to the speeches of the dialogue. Pleasure is strange because by nature, even though it is so close to pain, what seems to be its opposite, the two never come to the same man at one time. To explore this curiosity further or to point to their interconnection, the mutuality of opposites, Socrates proposes an Aesopian myth using an absurd image (60c) of a head with two parts attached to it— one pleasure, the other pain. In an effort to put an end to their warring with each other, the god bound them together so that one cannot be without the other; thus, wherever pain is, there too is pleasure. The quarrelsome Xanthippe (at least, according to some) is bound to Socrates— or perhaps more seriously, for Socrates, sitting there in prison with his wife during the night before his execution, the female who departs and the male friends who arrive are like the Aesopian head that the god has fashioned, the head with two parts, who though they are opposites, cannot escape each other, the friends who want to focus on the soul with their immaterial words and the wife whose body has given him children. Xanthippe’s departure marks the departure of the family, of the mutuality of male and female, but not the importance of mutuality that seems to dominate the early parts of the dialogue before the harsher oppositions of exclusion take thematic control of it.23 I cannot say that we learn anything about Xanthippe from the Phaedo, but although Xenophon and the ancient anecdotes portray her as the shrew in opposition to mild-mannered Socrates, for Plato, she appears as qualifier— a question mark, so to speak—that causes his readers to think more deeply about efforts to cast off the body in order to argue for the immortality of the soul with questionable arguments based on opposites that are at the heart of this dialogue. Socrates in his speeches tries to isolate the soul from the body, to imagine the soul in and of itself (see esp. 80e, 82a and b, 83a), and thus enable the soul to exist independently from the contamination of the body, not “in community” (ouden koinônousa, 80e) with the body. In this fashion, he concludes that philosophy is the preparation for death. But the simple dichotomy between body and soul does not work well, and the isolation of the soul becomes a problematic claim, perhaps a gift to his friends, as some have suggested (Davis 1980, 72; Ahrensdorf 1995, 201), but perhaps not sufficiently compelling to convince Plato, who portrays himself as absent from the discussion on the day of Socrates’s death. I do not debate that, in Socrates’s presentation in the Phaedo, the body is a hindrance to the pursuit of philosophy (esp. 82d–83b) and that a reliance on sight corrupts what we can know; I do question, though, whether this argument, which shifts quickly to the corrupting power of the pursuit of pleasure, is

30  Arlene Saxonhouse

the last word either from Socrates or most especially from Plato concerning this topic. Plato writes dialogues in which speeches come from specific individuals, individuals who can only be identified though the senses. We learn at the very beginning of the dialogue that Echecrates wants to hear not only what was said, but also who was physically there and what was seen on the day Socrates died. Thus, Phaedo offers the details of who was there and who did what; he reports the bodily movements of characters, especially Socrates, who sits up and lies down, who strokes Phaedo’s hair (89b), who rubs his legs. And we also learn of Xanthippe’s posture when Phaedo arrives, what she did when she left the prison and what she did when she (probably) returned in the evening. To support his argument about the immortality of the soul, Socrates draws on the developing theme of opposites (sleeping and waking, tall and short) and refers his audience back to an ancient tale that the souls of the dead, having gone to Hades, return; and from them, the dead but now returned souls, the living are born. Thus, death gives life to life. Just as the weaker comes from the stronger, the faster from the slower, the smaller from the bigger, so too all opposites come from their opposites (71a). This exposition leads to the Q.E.D.: “It is agreed by us also in this that the living come into being from the dead no less than the dead come into being from the living.” All this is claimed as if there were no process of procreation that depended on sexual commingling, no Xanthippe necessary to produce the child who sits with his mother in his father’s prison cell. Such an argument, such claims, such an ancient story can only be put forward when Xanthippe is no longer in the room, when the women have not only physically departed, but when they have left all consciousness, when the previous dismissal of the body as a hindrance to purity and to learning has been “proven.” Socrates suggests that without the movement back and forth that is entailed in this ancient tale, everything would remain the same, in a static condition of foreverness. He proposes instead a flowing, pendulum-like transition, but no sexuality, no bodies mixing, as if there had been no Xanthippe, no restraints on this vision of independence. Socrates’s companions find nothing problematic in his asexual story of the origins of life, where the living simply arise from their opposite, the dead. They, like Phaedo, welcomed the departure of Xanthippe. Her presence in the cell might have reminded Socrates’s interlocutors of the role of the female in the production of a life that may not come from death, but from an interdependence and commingling of bodies—whether in the family or in the polis. We the readers, though, can recall her presence and that of the child whom the old but living Socrates fathered through sexual relations with Xanthippe. Xanthippe’s presence reminds us of the grief that will be felt later despite Socrates’s repeated claims that the body is not him. Xanthippe is there not because she provides any answers, but because the issues surrounding life and death, body and soul, opposition and mutuality are not so simple or straightforward

Xanthippe: Shrew or Muse  31

as Socrates appears to argue, in what may indeed be a gesture of friendship to those with whom he spends his last day. Xanthippe is not only there to be sent away; she is there to be a brooding reminder that we are more than speech or soul, that the love of wisdom requires the female as well as the male. Plato himself ensured that we recognize this by putting Xanthippe there for us to notice. He need not have granted this role to Socrates’s wife, but he did so for his own theoretical purposes, forcing his readers to become aware of tensions in the argument he gives to Socrates in this dialogue, keeping alive issues of mutuality and sexuality that the other interlocutors may refuse to see. He did not do so in order that we might know who this Xanthippe was or why she in particular was the wife of Socrates, but to help his readers stand back and assess the arguments that Socrates may offer to his friends to comfort them.

Xanthippe’s Accomplishment: To Be “Known” Xenophon may have written of Xanthippe the shrew in order to illuminate the character of Socrates, and Plato may have set her beside Socrates in his prison cell in order to introduce a certain philosophical questioning to the constrained conversation about the immortality of the soul, but the mere fact that she appears in the ancient literature at all needs to be acknowledged. The only other individual woman known to us from this period would be Aspasia, the concubine of Pericles and the mother of his children. Both Xanthippe and Aspasia were wed to men who dominated the cultural and political life of fifthcentury Athens, but the mere fact that they were noticed by name—by Plato, by Xenophon, by Aristophanes (for Aspasia)—suggests that perhaps Xanthippe, like Aspasia, was a personality in her own right, a force who by the mere fact of demanding attention from Socrates and thereby violating the expectations of the unseen/unheard women whom Pericles appears to praise is worthy of that attention. Phaedo had said to Echecrates, “You know [her].” Would Plato have given those words to Phaedo were there not some history behind them that ensured we, the readers of his dialogues, knew the name of Socrates’s wife too? Perhaps, but given the infrequency of fictional characters in his work, more likely not. We will never really know who Xanthippe was, why Socrates married her, what words she spoke, whether she tossed that bucket of water on Socrates’s head, or whether she sat with Socrates on the night before he drank the poison hemlock. But we do know that she demanded enough attention from those writing about Socrates that they felt comfortable mentioning her by name and not just ignoring her, whether it was to create a foil for the idealized Socratic figure, to express misogyny about women who could never rise to the level of the philosopher, or to give a deeper meaning to the philosophical texts they wrote. Plato may have used her as a representation of the body that demands attention, even as he imagines the immortality of the soul, and Xenophon may

32  Arlene Saxonhouse

have used her to shower praise on his beloved Socrates, but in each case, she managed to impress her existence onto the consciousness of these thinkers. It should not surprise us that she has the reputation of a shrew if she had a forceful personality at a time when the woman least spoken of had the greatest glory. We need only think of poor Clytemnestra who tried to assert her own independence of action, driven by her anger at a husband who dared to sacrifice their child, and who has become the object not of comic ridicule, but of fear. Xanthippe is no Clytemnestra, but somewhere behind all the anecdotes and behind the bachelor Plato’s acknowledgment of her existence, we may catch a glimpse not of a shrew or a spider, but of a woman who dared to speak and act in ways that forced men to “know” of her, even a foreigner such as Echecrates. If only there had been a writer like Plato, perhaps a female writer, who could have reported on the words she spoke, the actions she took, and the movements she made, and turned them into dialogues of the quality that the acolyte of her husband bequeathed to us.24 Xanthippe’s name will always be associated with the henpecking wife, such as she appears in the writings of Nietzsche or more contemporary works like Maxwell Anderson’s Barefoot in Athens, but this doesn’t mean that she was such a person. History has bequeathed to us the Xanthippe of the mocking ancient anecdotes, the wife who becomes the caricature of the woman who cannot appreciate the brilliance of the man to whom she is bound by marriage rather than Plato’s Xanthippe, who, thinking of the pain of others, laments that Socrates’s death means the end of his conversations with his friends. We are, I venture, the worse for it.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter first appeared as Arlene Saxonhouse (2018) Xanthippe: shrew or muse. Hypatia 33(4): 610–25. Reprinted with permission. 2 Piotr Naskrecki and Robert K. Colwell. 1995. New genus and two new species of melicharini from Venezuela. Annals of the Entomological Society of America 88 (3): 284–93. 3 Wikipedia also makes note of a species of “African white-toothed shrew” with the common name “Xanthippe’s shrew.” Less interestingly, she apparently has also made it into the skies as a comet, according to Wikipedia. 4 There is speculation about an aristocratic background for Xanthippe: the “hippe” part of her name refers to hippos or horse and thereby those whose wealth enabled them to own horses. Pericles, for example, was the son of Xanthippos. Several works explore the relative status of the two possible wives, which one came first, what this tells us about marriage laws in Athens, and who bore Socrates’s children; see Fitton (1970); Woodbury (1973); Bicknell (1974). 5 Frederich Nietzsche. 1995. Human, all too human, I. Trans. Gary Handwerk. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cf. the conversation between Socrates and his son told by Xenophon and discussed below, which suggests that Socrates knew just what sort of woman he chose to be his wife and perhaps welcomed the challenge she posed. 6 I think Graves is wrong here about Socrates’s “antipoetic” nature, but for the sake of his argument, he presents a stern rather than the charming Socrates who appears

Xanthippe: Shrew or Muse  33

7

8 9 10

11 12

13

14 15 16 17

18 19

to anyone who reads both Plato and Xenophon with a view to understanding his appeal to the young he was accused of corrupting. Robert Graves. 1960. “The case for Xanthippe.” Kenyon Review 4 (4): 599. In his effort to speak on Xanthippe’s behalf, Graves reads the Republic as expressing Socrates’s views with regard to the necessity of expelling the poets from the best city; he suggests that that “may have been the cause of Xanthippe’s quarrel with him” and wonders whether there may have been a dialogue that, unrecorded by Plato, took place “between Socrates and an angry, unyielding poet, Xanthippe’s love—in which the honours went elsewhere?” (Graves 1960, 605). Leonard Woodbury. 1973. “Socrates and the daughter of Aristides.” Phoenix 27 (1): 7, n.1. See Joan Breton Connelly. 2007. Portrait of a priestess: Women and ritual in ancient Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press, especially ch. 7. The following discussion of Xenophon’s anecdotes has benefited significantly from the advice of an anonymous reviewer who pushed me to probe more deeply into what may be the implicit biases against strong women captured in the stories and may be as well revelatory of Xanthippe’s character and her relationship with Socrates. The word thumoeidos suggests that Xanthippe—like horses (befitting her name)—is “spirited,” controlled by thumos. In the Platonic dialogues, thumos along with eros is essential for the philosophical pursuit of truth. Aristophanes’s comedies, especially Lysistrata and Ecclesiazusae, illustrate the expectations of husbands who are challenged by strong women. These husbands do not welcome women’s refusal to submit to conventional roles. Socrates’s response to Antisthenes suggests that he, in contrast to other husbands, might appreciate a wife like the fictitious Praxagora of the Ecclesiazusae who easily subdues her mealy mouthed spouse and other men with arguments for the rule of women. Leo Strauss writes that Socrates behaves as an inveterate bachelor and that his relation to Xanthippe is the comic equivalent of his relation to the city (Strauss 1972, 178). The preface to his interchange with the prostitute Theodote, though, suggests that Socrates is not immune to lust. After observing her pose for an artist, Socrates comments, “We are eager to touch what we have seen, and we shall go away excited and after we depart we shall long for her” (Xenophon 1923, III.11.3). Socrates’s references to Xanthippe never suggest any such excitement or longing. But no more. There is no mention in the surviving texts of Aristotle of Xanthippe or of Socrates’s wives. See my discussion of the “shameless Socrates” in Saxonhouse 2006, passim, but especially Chapter 5. J. W. Fitton suggests that the wife nagging her timocratic husband about their meager resources in Book 8 of the Republic (549c– d) may be “modelled on Xanthippe” and refers us to Adams’s note in Adams 1963 (Fitton 1970, 64, n. 4). We might note that when Socrates mentions that he “has endured that the things of his household have been uncared for so many years (31b)” and when he refers to his young children near the end of the Apology (34c), he acknowledges, but he does not mention, the existence of his wife and their mother. I have considered the theoretical implications of Xanthippe’s appearance in the Phaedo in Saxonhouse 1998. In the current chapter, I focus more on what the dialogue might tell us about Xanthippe. In my article on this dialogue, I argue that to know Socrates as a body is to know him in the context of his family (Saxonhouse 1998). The report of Socrates’s death— even to Pythagoreans such as Echecrates, those most focused on the nature of the soul and the opposition of body and soul—nevertheless entails a report of the body‘s existence and that bodily existence entails a relationship— sexual and more—with

34  Arlene Saxonhouse

20

21

22

23

24

his wife. To know Socrates on the day of his death is to know his entanglements in the creation of new life via bodies. In the Republic, we get the sense that Glaucon may be aware of crying babies, whence his comments about the arrangements for the children of Callipolis: “It’s an easy-going kind of child-bearing for the women guardians, as you tell it” (460). We hear of Glaucon’s “hunting dogs and …throng of noble cocks” (459a) that he breeds, but not of a wife. I introduce the language of altruism here focused on specific individuals as distinct from a concern for the welfare of the community as a whole, such Pericles extols in his Funeral Oration or Oedipus expresses when he speaks of his fatherly concern for all the inhabitants of Thebes. It is amusing to note that Hugh Tredennick’s translation of the Phaedo renders this passage “Some of Crito’s servants led her away crying hysterically” (Plato 1993, 111; italics added.) The use of the word “hysterically” here completely misrepresents for the modern reader the traditional expression of mourning that was expected of female mourners. Plato’s dialogue expresses none of the misogynist overtones of Tredennick’s “hysterical.” Ronna Berger comments, “Plato seems to go out of his way to let us know that Socrates who is about to speak of the philosopher‘s desire to escape from the body is the father of a child young enough to be held in his wife‘s arms” (Berger 1984, 225, n.). Plato, of course, did this for Aspasia in his Menexenus, attributing to her a female version of Pericles’s funeral oration, surely not a record of her actual words but a record that captured the existence of a woman to whom men might attend, who deserved more than notice by the comic playwright.

References Adams, James. 1963. The Republic of Plato. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ahrensdorf, Peter J. 1995. The death of Socrates and the life of philosophy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Berger, Ronna. 1984. The Phaedo: A Platonic labyrinth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bicknell, P. J. 1974. Sokrates’ mistress Xanthippe. Apeiron 8(1): 1–5. Connelly, Joan Breton. 2007. Portrait of a priestess: Women and ritual in ancient Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Davis, Michael. 1980. Plato and Nietzsche on death: An introduction to Plato’s Phaedo. Ancient Philosophy 1(1): 69–80. Diogenes Laertius. 1972. The lives of eminent philosophers, vol. 1. Trans. R. D. Hicks. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fitton, J. W. 1970. That was no lady, that was.… Classical Quarterly 20(1): 56–66. Graves, Robert. 1960. The case for Xanthippe. Kenyon Review 4(4): 597–605. Naskrecki, Piotr, and Robert K. Colwell. 1995. New genus and two new species of melicharini from Venezuela. Annals of the Entomological Society of America 88(3): 284–93. Nietzsche, Frederich. 1995. Human, all too human, I. Trans. Gary Handwerk. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Plato. 1993. The last days of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo. Trans. Hugh Tredennick. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Xanthippe: Shrew or Muse  35

Saxonhouse, Arlene W. 1998. Xanthippe and philosophy: Who really wins? In Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, ed. John J. Cleary and Gary M. Gurtler, S. J. Leiden: Brill: 111–129. ———. 2006. Free speech and Athenian democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2018. Xanthippe: shrew or muse. Hypatia 33(4): 610–25. Strauss, Leo. 1972. Xenophon’s Socrates. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Winans, Samuel Ross. 1880. Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Woodbury, Leonard. 1973. Socrates and the daughter of Aristides. Phoenix 27(1): 7–25. Xenophon. 1923. Memorabilia, Symposium. Trans. O. J. Todd. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

3 SELF-SACRIFICE AS WIFELY VIRTUE IN ARISTOTLE’S POLITICAL THEORY Sara Brill

The entry for Aristotle’s first wife, Pythias, in Ogilvie and Harvey’s biographical dictionary of women in science consists of a handful of sentences. She was the relative of Hermias of Atarneus,1 seems to have specialized in embryology, and to have worked with Aristotle in gathering specimens and producing written work on fetal generation and development.2 When, in his will, he asks that her remains be exhumed and buried next to his, Aristotle asserts that he does so in fulfillment of her wishes.3 Evidence about the life of Herpyllis, Aristotle’s second historically attested life companion, is also scant. She may have been a slave, he may have eventually married her, the two had a son named Nicomachus; at the very least, he felt sufficiently responsible for her well-being as to include provision for her in his will. Scholarly discussion of the evidence surrounding her status reveals at least as much about ancient polemics and nineteenth- century scruples about matrimony as it does about Aristotle, a good reminder that “the historical record” is reducible neither to an accident of time nor to a carefully regulated process, but rather a play between the values of symbolic life, the pressures and forces that form the terms of its embodiment, and the interpretative strategies designed to discern their meaning.4 While we know very little, relatively speaking, about Aristotle’s domestic partners, we do know quite a bit about the status of the category of wife in Aristotle’s political theory. And theories of the polis are amongst the sources to which we must turn in order to shed light on the paltry information we do have about women intellectuals, and women’s lives, in the ancient Greek world. Aristotle’s comments about wifely duty illuminate a few of the broader currents of thinking and practice that form the milieu in which Pythias and Herpyllis lived, worked, and died. In looking at one of the most ancient philosophical formulations of

Self-Sacrifice as Wifely Virtue  37

the status of the wife, my aim is to contribute to our understanding of both the context of the material conditions for the production and reproduction of intellectual labor in the ancient Greek world and the context of ancient Greek theorizing about labor, political life, and philosophy. For Aristotle, the “wife” designates a role, a form of difference that Aristotle seems to think is necessary for a flourishing polis. In the system of differences that drives human political life, the wife names an entity that is reducible neither to the slave, nor the child, but that lacks the complete constellation of capacities required for fully enfranchised citizen life. She is free, that is, not a slave; she is an adult, that is, not a child, but she cannot and should not be allowed to rule in the same manner as men. For one, her deliberation lacks authority (Pol. 1260a13). There is no clear scholarly consensus on whether we are to read this infamous enigmatic line as pointing to an intrapersonal failing, that is, she possesses the capacity for deliberation but not sufficiently or strongly enough for it to rule her passions and appetites, or an interpersonal and structural issue, that is, she possesses deliberation but is not listened to, her reason is not given authority by the political community.5 But in any case, the two are not unrelated—Aristotle’s claims about the contexts in which women should not be listened to are informed by both medical and zoological theories about female embodiment that have bearing on the relationship between rational and appetitive faculties, and observations about the role of women in political stasis and revolution. For Aristotle, full citizen status is contraindicated because, as female, the wife is too cold and too soft to be able to embody fully all the requisite aspects of proper citizen character.6 Moreover, when her maturation is not properly attended to, she is so oriented toward luxury and the instrument that affords it (money) that were she to ascend to rule, the results would be disastrous, a claim Aristotle sees proven by the fate of the Spartan regime. At the same time, as female, she has greater memory, compassion, and cleverness than men (HA 608a22–608b19). She has forms of courage, moderation, and generosity that are not as developed as those of mature men but are nevertheless important to cultivate in order to avoid their accompanying vices (e.g. Pol. 1259b17–33). And she is an essential part of the couplings of those who cannot exist without one another that forms the basis of political community and assures its perpetuity via the production of children (Pol. 1252b26–31). She thus embodies a set of capacities and qualities that are both useful and also potentially dangerous; a good political order would be able to harness the good while guarding against the bad. Put differently, a good regime would both maintain and contain the role of the wife. Following the logic of containment requires us to discern not only her difference from the slave and the child, but also how her role stands with respect to other aspects of her embodiment, that is, her position as female and as mother. And here we run into a significant and interesting set of complications.

38  Sara Brill

For instance, Aristotle’s emphasis throughout his account of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics on the active character of maternal love complicates the picture of female passivity present elsewhere in his work.7 It is tempting to cast this tension between the activity of the “mother” (hē mētēr) and the passivity of the “female” (hē thēleia) along the lines of more contemporary tensions between the political and the biological, the discursive and the bodily.8 And yet the “mother” already defies these divisions. Because she is understood both as the giver of birth and as the bearer of a particular social role, mētēr tracks across human and animal worlds; across material and symbolic concerns; and, in Aristotle, across ethico-political and zoological texts. If “mother” names both the activation of female reproductive generativity and the honorific title of a necessary (although thus also ambivalent) and esteemed (although not as much as others) social position, m ētēr defies a rigid distinction between the “biological” and the “political,” between “matter” and “meaning.” Something similar, I argue, must be said of the role of the wife in Aristotle’s thought. Her “female” character militates against rule, her human capacities lean toward it, and in the tense dynamic that emerges we see the stability of the distinction between husband and wife increasingly drawn into question and unable to be taken for granted. Attaining and holding this stability emerges as a central task of political life as Aristotle conceives it. The wife, then, like the female and the mother, troubles the political order. In the conceptual apparatus of the Hippocratic corpus, we could say that, like the womb itself, she wanders, slips, slides; her role is labile and, to borrow from Emanuela Bianchi, aleatory.9 However we might conceive of this trouble (return of the repressed, internal contradiction that drives immanent critique, etc.), it is inescapable precisely because of its place within the larger framework of Aristotle’s political theory, a framework which explicitly asserts that human political life (and the leisure it requires) must be parasitic on the labor of a working class. Within this system, there must be someone who has greater cognitive capacities than the slave, in order to free up the time of the male citizen for the demands of active citizenship, but who cannot be allowed to threaten the position of the male citizen. “The wife” fulfills this role. The rigors of assuring that actual wives conform to the requirements of their position do not seem to have daunted Aristotle. That the demands of human political life also contain the seeds of its destruction is simply taken for granted by Aristotle as the reason why political expertise is so needed and valuable.10 But he does appear to think that securing participation in the wifely role, and the balance between the maintenance and containment of cognitive capacities it requires, is sufficiently distinct as to merit its own form of rule: marital rule (gamikē ).11 Tracing the role that the figure of the wife is to play in this framework illuminates a currency of exchange whereby the giving of affection, care, love, and honor serve as primary mechanisms of containment. Just as the mother is willing to forgo recognition of her status as mother if it is in the child’s

Self-Sacrifice as Wifely Virtue  39

best interest, and is able to do so by the very intense activity that is her love (EN 1159a28–33), so too the role of the wife is constructed in such a way as to make her self- sacrifice central to her virtue and to demand that she sacrifice her intellectual capacities for the sake of her affection, that is, that she participate in making her reason lack authority. Marital rule, then, consists largely in the “agreement” (enacted practically, symbolically, and cognitively) of the ruled to be ruled in perpetuity. A comprehensive consideration of the role of the wife and the perceived need for its containment that ranges over Aristotle’s ethical, zoological, and political texts exceeds the possibilities of a single chapter. I aim to contribute to such a study by exploring in greater depth the connections between: the distribution of labor and honors that differentiate the roles of husband and wife in the Nicomachean Ethics (Part 1); the constellation of qualities and capacities that accompany sexual difference and support the embodiment of wives and husbands, as they are enumerated in the History of Animals (Part 2); and Aristotle’s account in the Politics of the danger that a rule of women, a gunaikokratia, poses for the political community (Part 3).

The Community of those Who Have Life in Common Aristotle’s account of the polis in Books 1–3 of the Politics traces the emergence of the political partnership, and the bond on which it relies, by charting a series of connections and attachments necessary for life, beginning with that between male and female: By necessity there is first a coupling [sunduazesthai] of those who cannot exist without one another: on the one hand, male and female, for the sake of reproduction (which occurs not from intentional choice but—just as in the case of other animals and plants—from a natural command to leave behind another one like oneself ); on the other, the naturally ruling and ruled, on account of preservation (Pol. 1252a26–31)12 These essential pairings form the nucleus of the household, the village, and the polis, and it is out of these that the roles of husband and wife develop. At the same time, these roles are not co-extensive with their origin. While the pairing of husband and wife has one foot in reproductive life and in a realm outside of human choice, we cannot reduce their operation to such a sphere, a point Aristotle makes especially clearly in his discussion of friendship in EN 8, where the nature of the pairing is treated as a sign of human particularity: The friendship of a husband and a wife seems to be present by nature, for a human being is by nature more disposed to couple than to form a

40  Sara Brill

political association [anthrōpos gar tēi phusei sunduastikon mallon ē politikon], insofar as a household is prior to and more necessary than a city, and the production of offspring is more common among animals. Among the other animals, then, the partnership goes that far, but human beings dwell together [sunoikousin] not only for the sake of producing offspring, but also for the things that go into life [alla kai tōn eis tou bion], since the work is divided from the start [euthus], and is different for a man and for a woman, so that they help one another by placing what is each’s own into what is common [eparkousin oun allēlois eis to koinon tithentes ta idia]. (1162a16–24)13 Thus, husband and wife mark a conjunction that serves at least two ends, a reproductive mandate and what we could call a “trophic” mandate; their bond includes not only the bond of children but also of their shared need for the things that make life possible. And these needs are met by a distribution of labor that occurs “from the start.” While the political bond cannot be reduced to the shared satisfaction of need, neither can it occur without it; the partnership in living well, that is, the city, would not be possible without (even as it cannot be reduced to) co-residence in a place and intermarriage (Pol. 1280b35–36). The role of the wife, then, includes the reproductive capacities that were taken to accompany embodiment as female but also a work, a collection of deeds that can be placed in common and must be so if survival is to be assured. This distinctive work brings with it a distinctive and corresponding set of virtues, and thus the philia between husband and wife includes not only use and pleasure but virtue as well: For these reasons, there seems to be both use and pleasure in this friendship, and it would be a friendship for virtue as well, if the people are decent, for there is a virtue of each, and each would take delight in such a partner (EN 1162a24–27)14 Arriving at the distinct virtues of each will require a foray through the characterological effects of sexual difference that Aristotle catalogues in the History of Animals, but before moving on we should linger long enough to notice that the wife’s excess of reproductive labor is apparent even in the initial essential pairings we identified above insofar as the relation between husband and wife is a relation between both male and female and ruler and ruled: for example, “the relation of male to female is by nature a relation of superior to inferior and ruler to ruled” (Pol. 1254b13–14)15 and “For the male, unless put together in some way contrary to nature, is by nature more expert at leading [hēgemonik ōteron] than the female, and the older and complete than the younger and incomplete” (Pol. 1259b1–4).16 And in elaborating on this aspect,

Self-Sacrifice as Wifely Virtue  41

too, Aristotle sees a kind of categorical excess: the husband’s rule over the wife is both political (e.g., Pol. 1259b4–10) and aristocratic (EN 1160b32–33).17 As Marguerite Deslauriers points out, this is not an instance of contradiction on Aristotle’s part but rather a reflection of the complex relation between sameness and difference at play in Aristotle’s understanding of husbands and wives.18 As free, that is, as not slaves, wives are the same as their husbands, and the rule of husbands over wives has a political dimension; as possessing inferior capacities, wives are different in the sense operative for aristocratic rule, that is, different with respect to virtue and less worthy. Because of this difference with respect to virtue, the philia between husband and wife is a philia between unequals in the most salient ethical sense. The mechanism for their equalization is a differential calculus of a ffection and honor: in all the friendships that go along with superiority, the affection also ought to become proportional, such that the better one, or the one conferring greater benefit, ought to be loved more than he loves, and similarly for each of the other cases. For whenever the affection comes to be in accord with what is deserved, there comes to be a certain kind of equality, which seems to belong to friendship (EN 1158b23–28)19 There seem to be then two reasons to consider the wife worthy of shared rule: one, she, like her husband, is freeborn (not a slave); and second, she may compensate for the difference in their ethical value by giving her husband greater affection and honor. That is to say, the wife has within the field of her capacities a demonstration of her sameness with her husband (i.e., is not a slave) by exercising her freedom in such a way as to elevate him above herself. It is precisely such a performed differential between ruler and ruled that Aristotle cites as always applicable to the relation between male and female in the very passage in which he asserts that the husband’s rule of the wife is political: in most political offices, it is true, ruler and ruled alternate (since they prefer by their nature to be equal and to differ in nothing); all the same, when one rules and the other is ruled, [the ruler] seeks for there to be differences in outward appearance, speech, and honors, as in the story Amasis told about his footpan. The male always has this manner toward the female. (Pol. 1259b4–10)20 I take this vexed passage to be an effort to mark out the particular relation between sameness and difference that makes marital rule like political rule.21 Because both husband and wife are free, they share an equal social position vis-à-vis

42  Sara Brill

the enslaved. This equality then demands a performance of difference akin to the performed difference between equals (e.g., in outward appearance, speech, and honors) in a system of alternating rule. However, unlike political rule, the performed inequality between husbands and wives is called upon to exist in perpetuity in order to reflect the “natural” inequality of male and female. The permanence of this performed hierarchy marks its difference from the sharing of power by means of the alteration of the roles of ruler and ruled.22 By these terms, the primary virtue of the wife, it would seem, is precisely in her chosen self-sacrifice, both symbolic—for example, in forms of dress,23 manners of address, and eschewing unnecessary public appearance24 —and, when necessary, real. In so choosing, she would be exhibiting the self-knowledge available to her, that is, an understanding of the character she possesses by merit of her female embodiment. The terms of this character are given succinct expression early on in Aristotle’s discussion of animal ēthos in the History of Animals.

Male and Female Animals In the extended discussion of animal ēthos that Aristotle provides in his History of Animals, sexual difference appears as one of five aspects of animal character that allow for the granular discussion of difference that is the hallmark of this text. Animal ēthos itself forms one of four primary animal differentiae: parts (moria), manner of life (bios), character (ēthos), and action (praxis) (HA 487a10). Of these, parts are the most vivid of differentiators (HA 491a15–16) and are treated in the greatest detail, but the other differentiae are given careful consideration as well, with the same focus on what they make manifest. When Aristotle turns to a study of the ēthos of animals in order to fill out the preceding study of animal bios and praxis, for instance, he opens by considering the conditions under which animal character is most vivid: The characters of the animals are less obvious to us by perception in the case of the less developed and shorter-lived ones, but more obvious in the longer-lived. For they are seen to have a certain natural capability in relation to each of the soul’s affections—to intelligence and stupidity, courage and cowardice, to mildness and ferocity, and the other dispositions of this sort. (608a1–18)25 This concern with what living being makes manifest is structural for Aristotle’s zoological works, and particularly so for the History of Animals.26 Aristotle’s emphasis there on what a part or capacity or organ illuminates about the animal as a whole plays upon broader cultural and linguistic associations between vitality and vividness that are at work throughout the Aristotelian corpus.27 The privileging of living being in his Metaphysics, for instance, rests on its ability to

Self-Sacrifice as Wifely Virtue  43

render especially clear an aspect of being (substance) that proves foundational to our understanding of what he called “first philosophy.” This is all to say that Aristotle’s comments about sexual difference in his discussion of animal ēthos must be located within the larger context of his development of systems of difference. His discussion of the difference that is sex arises amongst four other significant dimensions of animal ēthos: length of life, friendship and enmity, intelligence (and the lack thereof ), and courage/wildness. Like length of life, sexual difference has comprehensive effects on animal character and demonstrates strong cross- species similarity, with humans, larger animals, and viviparous quadrupeds providing the clearest evidence of its effects. According to Aristotle, throughout the animal world, the character of the female is softer, quicker to be tamed, more receptive to handling, readier to learn (as with the female Laconian hounds, who are cleverer [euphuesterai] than the males (608a27)), less spirited (in all animals except the bear and the leopard), more vicious, less simple, more impetuous, and more attentive to the feeding of the young. He pauses here to observe, There are traces of these characters in virtually all animals, but they are all the more evident in those that are more possessed of character [echousi mallon ēthos] and especially in the human. For human nature is the most complete, so that these dispositions too are more evident in humans. (608b4–7) This allows him to briefly direct attention to the differences between wife and husband—“a wife is more compassionate than a husband and more given to tears, but also more jealous and complaining and more apt to scold and fight” (608a9–11)—before returning to the female and the male: the female is more dispirited and despondent, is more shameless and prone to lying, is readier to deceive and has a longer memory, is more wakeful, is more afraid of action, is less inclined to move, and takes in less nourishment than the males, while the male is a readier ally and is braver (608a11–18).28 I take these lines to tie Aristotle’s account of female embodiment directly to his assessment of women’s less political, less deliberative character.29 The wife’s compassion, jealousy, and so on are expressions of the softness that Aristotle finds indicative of the female and that militate against women’s full enfranchisement as citizens— as Giulia Sissa argues, for Aristotle, the relative softness, coldness, and diminished thumos of the female body make human women less able to perform the courage and spiritedness most necessary for the city and are not compensated for even by the female’s greater cleverness.30 Thus, while he will argue for the necessity of the wife and female in the city, he will also argue for the necessity of her mitigated status. The courage, modesty, and so on of women are different from those of men, and lesser. Not only are her virtues lesser, it would seem that she is also more challenged in her capacity to realize

44  Sara Brill

those virtues. After all, the very fact that Aristotle can speak of character in comparative terms, that one can have more complete or greater character than another, suggests that human beings can simply fail to develop the character of which they are capable, that, when faced with the rigors of character development, an innate softness will, paradoxically, prevail.31 Aristotle’s ethics is haunted by this possibility. Within this model, the life of the citizen is a task to be completed, an aspiration that requires one bring oneself into line—the ability to do so is the expression/use of one’s freedom, and the failure to do so an expression of one’s weakness with respect to pleasure (akrasia) and softness with respect to pain (malakia).32 Not only must human beings contend with the power of pleasure and pain as tending toward totalizing effects on human life, and with a variety of other destabilizing forces that draw toward vice, they must also contend with a certain weakness of will, a refusal to hold oneself together sufficiently to realize fully the capacity for choice. And it would seem that this weakness or refusal is native to female embodiment, as Aristotle presents it. The best that could be expected of such a being is that she embrace her less effective, less vivid, less vital status; that she actively perform her inferiority. Self- sacrifice, whether symbolic or literal, accomplishes just this.33 For our purposes, it would seem that the wife’s softness makes the demands of character development greater, and this characterological mitigation has reverberative personal and political effects. Aristotle tracks these effects in Politics in both his discussion of the failings of the Spartan regime and his account of tyranny.

Fear of the Rule of Women Aristotle broaches the possibility of a rule of women, a gunaikokratia, twice in Politics, and in both cases, it is associated with a degree of depravity and decline that is fatal to the city. It is, for instance, one of the primary engines of Sparta’s erosion, and its function serves for Aristotle as a cautionary tale about the neglect of legislation pertaining to the education and lives of women or, as Aristotle puts it, about laxness concerning women (peri tas gunaikas anesis): For just as man and woman are a part of the household, it is clear that the city should be held to be very nearly divided in two, into a multitude of men and a multitude of women, so in regimes where what is connected with women is poorly handled, one must consider the legislation is lacking for half the city. This very thing has happened there; for the legislator wished the whole city to be hardy [karterikēn], and this is conspicuous in terms of the men; but he was utterly careless of it in the case of the women, who live licentiously and luxuriously, intemperate in every respect [zōsi gar akolast ōs pros hapasan akolasian kai trupherōs]. (Pol. 1269b14–23)34

Self-Sacrifice as Wifely Virtue  45

The failure to legislate women opens a slew of related degenerating forces that compromise the character of the regime and, in knitting together love of money, love of war, and rule by women, are forces to which Sparta was especially vulnerable because of the dominant passions of its citizens: “Wealth [ton plouton] will necessarily be honored in a regime of this sort, especially if they are dominated by the women [gunaikokratoumenoi]” (Pol. 1269b223–25). Aristotle will go on to say that this is the case with most communities that are fond of soldering and war (tōn stratiōtikōn kai polemik ōn gen ōn, 1269b25–26): For the one who first told the myth was not unreasonable in pairing Ares and Aphrodite: all those of this sort are possessed when it comes to relations with either men or women. This was the case with the Spartans, and many matters were managed by the women during the period of their rule. And yet what difference is there between women ruling and rulers who are ruled by women [kaitoi ti diapherei gunaikas archein ē tous archontas hupo tōn gunaikōn archesthai]? For the result is the same. (Pol. 1269b28–34)35 The “result” of women’s rule, according to Aristotle, was particularly clear in the Theban invasion, where the women “were not only wholly useless, like women in other cities, but they created more of a clamor than the enemy” (Pol. 1269b37–39). Even in cities that do undertake to legislate the lives of women, the form this legislation takes can also be a source of instability, one that tends toward the kind of consolidation of power that is the hallmark of tyranny. The tyrant’s silencing of frank speech, leveling of high thoughts, and destruction of trust between citizens disrupts the balance between difference and similarity that is necessary for the political bond. In particular, he exploits the tensions we have been tracking between husband and wife: Everything that happens in democracy of the extreme sort is characteristic of tyranny— dominance of women in the household so that they may report on their husbands [gunaikokratia te peri tas oikias, hin’ exaggellōsi kata tōn andrōn], and laxness toward slaves for the same reasons [kai doulōn anesis dia tēn autēn aitian]. Slaves and women do not conspire against tyrants, and as they prosper [euēmerountas] they necessarily are well-disposed toward both tyrannies and democracies (for, indeed, the people wish to be a monarch). (Pol. 1313b32–39)36 Plato’s Socrates also treats erosion of the relationship between husbands and wives as symptomatic of a decline into democracy and tyranny (Rep. 563b–c). ­ In Aristotle’s case, his thinking is supported by an understanding of a distribution of capacities and labor that requires both difference and hierarchy; not

46  Sara Brill

only do male and female have different work, but also the work of the male is more noble, and in the best political communities, nobler work is commensurate with greater rule. The tyrant’s sacrifice of all other interests to his own—his collapse of commonality, even and especially the common good—is an extreme expression of the reliance of citizen life on an unequal distribution of labor, realized both in the relationship between master and slave and in the relationship between husband and wife. The collapse of an unequal division of labor will mean increased liberty for slaves and wives and decreased liberty for masters and husbands. And so, the support for democracy and tyranny found among wives and slaves, a support that earns Aristotle’s round condemnation, is, in fact, an effect of a model of human political community that treats the virtues of political life and the commission of noble deeds as underwritten by a hierarchical distribution of labor that requires some humans to be valued only for the work they perform for the sake of others. But perhaps we can go one step further and see Aristotle’s notion of the beautiful deed and its accompanying pleasure—precisely in its aesthetic character as the bloom of human action (EN 1174b32–33) and thus an excess in the way that virtue itself is an excess, an excess of goodness (EN 1107a8–9)—as further argument for a distribution of human labor that treats the ownership of human beings as a just realization of the capacity of certain kinds of human beings to be owned and others to be ruled in perpetuity. If this labor can be treated as given, either by nature, in the case of the slave, or by both nature and choice in the case of the wife, then the system can proceed as planned, the cracks in its armor shored up by a conceptual apparatus and ethical system that treats self- sacrifice as a defining virtue of a particular essential role. I am arguing that this is precisely the virtue of the wife as Aristotle sees it, and that our understanding of his vision of human political life requires both an integration of the physiological and zoological theories that support it and a sense for the political work of engineering people with the “right” stance toward the terms of their embodiment.

The Children of Ares and Aphrodite Early on in Euripides’ Alcestis, the titular character offers a poignant account of her matrimonial bond in the form of a brief address to her wedding-bed: O marriage bed, where I yielded up my virginity to my husband, the man for whose sake I am now dying, farewell. I do not hate you, although it is you alone that causes my death; it is because I shrank from abandoning you and my husband that I now die. Some other woman will possess you, luckier, perhaps, than I but not more virtuous.37 Alcestis delivers these lines in the midst of a nearly hyperbolic performance of self-sacrifice; like Socrates, she has bathed herself and, dressed in finery, is

Self-Sacrifice as Wifely Virtue  47

adorning the household altars with garlands. Both alive and dead (141), she bids farewell to a husband who, in losing his noble wife, will, as the chorus describes, “live a life that is no life at all” (241–42). As a stand-in for her wifely duties, the marriage-bed serves to illuminate the perverse replacement of life with death that is the fodder of tragedy, resonating with Antigone’s famous alignment of her tomb with her bridal bed. And as with Antigone’s, Alcestis’s fate shines a light on the acquiescence to self- sacrifice as, paradoxically, the pinnacle of self-assertion. It is Alcestis’s death that will make her irreplaceable; while someone else may possess her bed, no one else will approach her virtue. Euripides is clearly dramatizing the role of the wife, and the repeated reference to Alcestis’s virtue, by Admetus, by the Chorus, by Pheres, by Hercules, by the household servants suggest that never is the wife’s agency and excellence more apparent than when she is “choosing” to die.38 That there are “wifely” virtues was hardly a radical claim, but, as we have seen, it is to Aristotle that we should turn if we want to see an extended application of this claim to a theory of the polis. By way of concluding, we could gather together the observations offered here by returning to the tension between political and aristocratic rule in the relation between wives and husbands. As we have seen, Deslauriers treats this tension as reflecting the complex play between sameness and difference that constitutes Aristotle’s construction of the marital relationship. For Sissa, the possibility of political rule (granted in part by the climatological conditions that make such rule possible for Aristotle) gives way to the reality of aristocratic rule grounded in the dominance of embodied sexual difference. In the tension Sissa stages between the effects of climate and the effects of sexual difference— a tension she also presents as between two classificatory systems, political (husbands and wives) and physiological or zoological (male and female)—sexual difference prevails; its characterological effects are somehow deeper than those of climate. Thus, while Aristotle concedes that freeborn Greek citizen husbands could extend political rule to their freeborn wives, in practice they do not. Instead, “they just monopolize authority and respect.” “Greek wives,” continues Sissa, “let them behave that way.”39 Their coldness and softness deny them sufficient self-possession and confidence to compete with their husbands; they fail, in language Sissa borrows from Hegel, to struggle for recognition, and Aristotle’s way of accounting for this failure is to appeal to the relative coldness of the female in comparison with the male. I have aimed to expand on just what the nature of the wives “letting them” is. That is, I have argued that it is important to complicate the implicit claim here that the effects of sexual difference are somehow deeper than those of climate and the political register a certain climate affords. I do so in part because I am wary of a tendency to treat “physiological” or “biological” phenomena as somehow more basic, as automatically having greater explanatory depth and breadth—it is indeed vital to bring Aristotle’s zoological thinking into the fold

48  Sara Brill

of his broader philosophical projects, but we should be wary of assuming too quickly a status of self- evidence to the perception of natural phenomena. To be sure, Aristotle will claim in a famous passage from the Generation of Animals that logos should conform to aisthēsis (760b30), but his own importation of assumptions about what is to be seen caution us against doing the same. In any case, the relationship between physiology, climate, and political life seems a bit more complicated here. After all, the thing that husbands and wives first share— that they are free and not slaves—is a function of their birth in a particular time and a particular place with particular laws pertaining to citizenship. And birth itself was not immune to political aspiration, as Aristotle’s eugenics legislation suggests, if not fully successful manipulation, as Plato’s infamous nuptial number asserts. If the husband’s behavior vis-à-vis his wife is controlled not by the status of her birth but by the compulsion of his maleness and her femaleness, this must be due not only to said compulsion, but also to his submission to this compulsion, or at the very least his failure or refusal to choose differently. And the question of choice proves even more complicating when we turn to the wife, whose femaleness tends toward not competing with the husband for rule, toward not asserting the full freedoms of free birth. Is this stance too something the wife could either affirm or resist? Could she too choose to embrace the coldness and softness of her female nature, or attempt to resist it? Or, perhaps even more radically, could her choosing either way enact a kind of resistance? For as we have seen, there is within Aristotle’s understanding of philia another mode of equality or similarity other than the natural one. There is the achieved equality attained by a calculus of affection/honor and benefit; the greater benefit conferred by the superior party can be compensated for by greater love and honor from the inferior party. In the case of husband and wife, the specifically wifely virtue would then be found in attaining equality with her husband precisely by performing her female inferiority, by choosing to honor him above herself, by sacrificing her free birth for his, and accepting diminished status. It is by agreeing to remain within the house that she is granted the limited form of shared rule that the combination of her birthright and embodiment permit. Any greater rule would threaten the polis because rule itself is the greatest test of character, and the terms of her embodiment would make the ethical rigors of rule even more challenging for her. There is a much greater threat, then, that she will succumb to these terms and refuse to choose self-sacrifice; then the “evils” of gunaikokratia and tyranny would prevail. The virtue that the role of the wife makes possible, the excellence that belongs to her as wife, is the virtue of exercising her freedom toward her own domination. And here I would like to insist on the seriousness with which we should adhere to the status of the wife as a role. Aristotle’s Politics outlines, and operates by merit of, a kind of grammar; the system “works” because, as a system of differences, its meaning lies not in any one position or another, but the relation between them. What it requires is not this or that individual but the

Self-Sacrifice as Wifely Virtue  49

perpetuation of roles, the perpetuation of differences. Even if everything that Aristotle says about sexual difference and female embodiment were true (and here I want to also insist that it is not), we would still have to account for the stance one takes toward these factors. And while the wife’s stance may be more limited than that of her husband because she is female, that she has such a stance is a function of her also being human. But perhaps even more importantly, there is no good reason to assume that these roles themselves are the exact roles that healthy political life requires. Even if one agrees with the general claim that politics is a field of differences, what those differences are is very much up for grabs. I say this with absolutely no intent or desire to “defend” Aristotle, whatever that may mean, but rather to attack any assumption that because Aristotle said it, it is worthy of emulation. This is worth emphasizing, given a political climate in which Aristotle is, once again, enlisted in profoundly oppressive, nefarious, and misogynistic political discourse and practice.40 The use of Aristotle in these circles is neither coextensive with Aristotle’s meaning nor utterly alien to it; we are perhaps best off saying of Aristotle what Simona Forti has concluded about Plato, namely that he is not responsible for the structures that produce ideology, but he is responsible for his use of them.41 The dialectic that is produced by the structural misogyny informing Aristotle’s account of wifely virtue problematizes any one person’s ownership over intellectual “property.” What Aristotle’s own account tells us is that the entire edifice of political theory we have been looking at is “Aristotle’s” only in the qualified sense of intellectual work that is made possible by the labor of the slave and the chosen self-sacrifice of the wife. This state of affairs, in turn, makes demands on scholars of the ancient Greek world and of intellectual “property” alike to linger over the nexus of the material conditions for the work of thinking, the network of attachments and roles that enables leisure, and the discursive ideological formations that perpetuate the entire structure.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Gigon identifies six possible relationships; see also Mulvaney (1926). Ogilvie et al. (2000) and Hurd-Mead (1938). Diogenes Laertius 5.1. See, for instance, the difference in her status between Greek and Arabic versions of Aristotle’s will (freeborn and slave, respectively); see Mulvaney (1926), Usaibia, Aristotle’s Will 1e, tr. Düring (1957), and the discussion in Natali (2013). 5 For intrapersonal interpretations, see, for example, Fortenbaugh (1977), Spelman (1983), Modrak (1994), Saunders (1995), Simpson (1998), Miller (1995), Parker (2012), Karbowski (2012), and Riesbeck (2015); for interpersonal, see, for example, Austin and Vidal Naquet (1972), Levy (1990), Salkever (1990), Nichols (1992), Swanson (1992), Lockwood (2003), Trott (2013), and Deslauriers (2003), and (2015). Saxonhouse (1982); 208 remains agnostic. 6 Here I follow Giulia Sissa and recent work by Marguerite Deslauriers’s in asserting that Aristotle will, in part, justify comments about the political status of wives with observations about the embodied condition of “the female” (see Sissa

50  Sara Brill

7 8

9

10 11

12

13

14 15 16 17

(2018) and Deslauriers (2015), a revision, as she notes, of her position in Deslauriers (2002)) and am indebted to Sissa’s study of the connection between Aristotle’s zoological and political theorizing of the role of women in the polis. For an account of this complication within the Generation of Animals, see Connell (2016). For its function in the EN and Politics, see Payne (2013), and Ward (2008), and Brill (2020) Ch 5. As with Giorgio Agamben’s construction of a zōē/bios distinction in Aristotle’s thought, see, for example, Agamben (1998) 187–88. However, doing so would also overlook the differences between male and female attributes on the one hand, and men and women on the other; see, for example, Swanson (1992). For a detailed critique of the applicability of Agamben’s zōē/bios distinction to Aristotle’s thought, see Brill (2020). Agamben’s construction relies heavily on his engagement with Hannah Arendt’s work; for a concise critique of Arendt’s handling of the materiality of birth, see O’Byrne (2010, 105). Bianchi (2014). We see this lability within the zoological realm as well, for while Aristotle will insist in the Generation of Animals, for instance that no male animal takes trouble over the care of children, he will also observe in the History of Animals the care of male pigeons for their offspring. While all humans have an impulse toward political community, the founders of such communities are particularly worthy of praise (Pol. 1253a30). Pol. 1253b9, 1259a39. On the broader context of Aristotle’s coining of the term, see Riesbeck (2015). I am largely in agreement with Reisbeck’s account of the difference between marital and political rule, but, with Deslauriers (2015) and Sissa (2018), am also mindful of the demands that Aristotle’s comparison of the husband/ wife relationship with aristocracy makes on our understanding of it. The sense of marital rule and wifely duty I develop here holds that both comparisons hinge upon the notion that the wife is called upon to participate in her own secondary status. ἀνάγκη δὴ πρῶτον συνδυάζεσθαι τοὺς ἄνευ ἀλλήλων μὴ δυναμένους εἶναι, οἷον θῆλυ μὲν καὶ ἄρρεν τῆς γεννήσεως ἕνεκεν (καὶ τοῦτο οὐκ ἐκ προαιρέσεως, ἀλλ’ ὥσπερ καὶ ἐν τοῖς ἄλλοις ζῴοις καὶ φυτοῖς φυσικὸν τὸ ἐφίεσθαι, οἷον αὐτό, τοιοῦτον καταλιπεῖν ἕτερον), ἄρχον δὲ φύσει καὶ ἀρχόμενον διὰ τὴν σωτηρίαν. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics are my own. The Greek text is that of Ross (Politica) and Bywater (EN). As I discuss in greater detail below, the coupling of ruler and ruled would extend to both husband and wife and master and slave. ἀνδρὶ δὲ καὶ γυναικὶ φιλία δοκεῖ κατὰ φύσιν ὑπάρχειν· ἄνθρωπος γὰρ τῇ φύσει συνδυαστικὸν μᾶλλον ἢ πολιτικόν, ὅσῳ πρότερον καὶ ἀναγκαιότερον οἰκία πόλεως, καὶ τεκνοποιία κοινότερον τοῖς ζῴοις. τοῖς μὲν οὖν ἄλλοις ἐπὶ τοσοῦτον ἡ κοινωνία ἐστίν, οἱ δ’ ἄνθρωποι οὐ μόνον τῆς τεκνοποιίας χάριν συνοικοῦσιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ τῶν εἰς τὸν βίον· εὐθὺς γὰρ διῄρηται τὰ ἔργα, καὶ ἔστιν ἕτερα ἀνδρὸς καὶ γυναικός· ἐπαρκοῦσιν οὖν ἀλλήλοις, εἰς τὸ κοινὸν τιθέντες τὰ ἴδια. διὰ ταῦτα δὲ καὶ τὸ χρήσιμον εἶναι δοκεῖ καὶ τὸ ἡδὺ ἐν ταύτῃ τῇ φιλίᾳ. εἴη δ’ ἂν καὶ δι’ ἀρετήν, εἰ ἐπιεικεῖς εἶεν· ἔστι γὰρ ἑκατέρου ἀρετή, καὶ χαίροιεν ἂν τῷ τοιούτῳ. ἔτι δὲ τὸ ἄρρεν πρὸς τὸ θῆλυ φύσει τὸ μὲν κρεῖττον τὸ δὲ χεῖρον, καὶ τὸ μὲν ἄρχον τὸ δ’ ἀρχόμενον. τό τε γὰρ ἄρρεν φύσει τοῦ θήλεος ἡγεμονικώτερον, εἰ μή που συνέστηκε παρὰ φύσιν, καὶ τὸ πρεσβύτερον καὶ τέλειον τοῦ νεωτέρου καὶ ἀτελοῦς. “The relationship of a husband to a wife seems aristocratic, since the man rules as a result of worthiness, and over those things which a man ought to rule; as many things as are suited to a woman, he turns over to her. If the husband is in charge of everything, he changes the relationship into an oligarchy, since he does it contrary to worthiness, and not insofar as he is better suited. Sometimes wives rule, when

Self-Sacrifice as Wifely Virtue  51

18 19

20

21

22

23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30

they are heiresses, but their rule does not come from virtue, but from wealth and power, just as in oligarchies.” Deslauriers (2015). ἀνάλογον δ’ ἐν πάσαις ταῖς καθ’ ὑπεροχὴν οὔσαις φιλίαις καὶ τὴν φίλησιν δεῖ γίνεσθαι, οἷον τὸν ἀμείνω μᾶλλον φιλεῖσθαι ἢ φιλεῖν, καὶ τὸν ὠφελιμώτερον, καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἕκαστον ὁμοίως· ὅταν γὰρ κατ’ ἀξίαν ἡ φίλησις γίνηται, τότε γίνεταί πως ἰσότης, ὃ δὴ τῆς φιλίας εἶναι δοκεῖ. See also “the ones who are equal ought, in accord with their equality, to be equal in loving and all the rest, while those who are unequal ought to give what is proportional to the superiority” (EN 1162b@3). On the differential of affection between husbands and wives, see also Mulgan (1994) and Deslauriers (2013). ἐν μὲν οὖν ταῖς πολιτικαῖς ἀρχαῖς ταῖς πλείσταις μεταβάλλει τὸ ἄρχον καὶ τὸ ἀρχόμενον (ἐξ ἴσου γὰρ εἶναι βούλεται τὴν φύσιν καὶ διαφέρειν μηδέν), ὅμως δέ, ὅταν τὸ μὲν ἄρχῃ τὸ δ’ ἄρχηται, ζητεῖ διαφορὰν εἶναι καὶ σχήμασι καὶ λόγοις καὶ τιμαῖς, ὥσπερ καὶ Ἄμασις εἶπε τὸν περὶ τοῦ ποδανιπτῆρος λόγον· τὸ δ’ ἄρρεν ἀεὶ πρὸς τὸ θῆλυ τοῦτον ἔχει τὸν τρόπον. As will become clear, while I diverge slightly in maintaining schemasi to refer to forms of appearance, I agree with Deslauriers’s interpretation of the reference to Amasis’s footpan as asserting an essential difference within a broader similarity, and with her divergence from a reading that asserts Aristotle is here claiming a purely conventional distinction between men and women; for example, Saxonhouse (1982) 202–19 and Stauffer (2008) 929–41; see also Dobbs (1996), Mulgan (1994), Nagle (2006), Nichols (1992), Swanson (1992) and Smith (1983). By my reading, the point is that the differences specified here perform the distinction conferred by office, a distinction that Aristotle points out is such that, when it is held amongst the fully equal (and not the equal in some ways and superior in another, as would seem to be the case with wives and husbands), it renders the holder of the office like another person (1261b4–5). See also the discussion of this passage in Saunders (1995), Simpson (1998), Riesbeck (2015) Deslauriers (2015), and Sissa (2018). While I agree with Reisbeck (2015) on the distinctiveness of political rule, my interest falls more on what is demanded of the wifely role in securing this distinction. The maintenance of the hierarchy between husband and wife in perpetuity seems to me to require something more active than the wife’s borrowing of her husband’s phronēsis that Deslauriers envisions “in order to develop the moral virtue of obedience”; see Deslauriers (2003) 229. See, for example, Llewellyn-Jones (2003). This is consistent with the silence and imperceptibility that Pericles cites as the primary feminine virtue. All translations of HA are those of Balme. In part, this accounts for the significance of the text in the relatively recent scholarly debate surrounding the character of Aristotle’s zoological works and the general conclusion that Aristotle’s interests are less in arriving at a taxonomy of kinds than in developing a science of difference. For the main terms of and conclusions of debate, see especially the collection of essays in Deveraux and Pellegrin (1990). See Brill (2020) for examples and discussion. It is worth emphasizing the structural misogyny at work here; this list resonates with attitudes toward women that have long- standing cultural expression from Semonides’s poem ‘Females of the Species’ to Hesiod’s invective against Pandora, to Aeschylus’s Oresteia and so on. And in this, I diverge from Deslauriers (2009). Sissa (2018).

52  Sara Brill













Self-Sacrifice as Wifely Virtue  53



54  Sara Brill

Lockwood, T. (2003) “Justice in Aristotle’s Household and City.” Polis 20:1–21. Miller, F. (1995) Nature, Justice and Rights in Aristotle’s Politics. Oxford: Oxford ­University Press. Modrak, D. (1994) “Aristotle: Women, Deliberation, and Nature.” In B.-A. Bar On (ed.), Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 207–22. Mulgan, R. (1994). ‘Aristotle and the Political Role of Women.’ History of Political Thought 15:179–202. Mulvaney, C. M. (1926) ‘Notes on the Legend of Aristotle.’ Classical Quarterly 20:155–67. Nagle, B. (2006). The Household as the Foundation of Aristotle’s Polis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Natali, C. (2013) Aristotle: His Life and School. Ed. Hutchinson. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nichols, M. (1992) Citizens and Statesmen: A Study of Aristotle’s Politics. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. O’Byrne, A. (2010) Natality and Finitude. Bloomington, IN. Ogilvie, M., Harvey, J. and Rossiter, M. (2000) The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science. New York: Routledge. Parker, H. N. (2012) “‘Aristotle’s Unanswered Questions: Women and Slaves in Politics 1252a–1260b.” Eugesta 2: 71–122. Payne, M. (2013) “Aristotle on Poets as Parents and the Hellenistic Mother.” In Vanda Zajko and Ellen O’Gorman (eds.), Classical Myth and Psychoanalysis: Ancient and Modern Stories of the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rabinowitz, N. (1993) Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Riesbeck, D (2015) “Aristotle on the Politics of Marriage: ‘Marital Rule’ in the ­Politics.” Classical Quarterly 65(1): 134–152. Salkever, S. (1990) Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Saunders, T. (1995) Aristotle, Politics, Books 1 and 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Saxonhouse, A. (1982) “Family, Polity and Unity: Aristotle on Socrates’ Community of Wives.” Polity 15:202–19. Simpson, P (1998) A Philosophical Commentary on the Philosophy of Aristotle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Spelman, E. (1983) “Aristotle and the Politicization of the Soul.” In S. Harding and M. Hintikka (eds.), Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science. MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Sissa, G. (2018) ‘Bulls and Deer, Women and Warriors: Aristotle’s Physics of Morals.’ In Marco Formisano and Christina Shuttleworth (eds.), Marginality, Canonicity, Passion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 141–76. Smith, N. (1983) “Plato and Aristotle on the Nature of Women.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 21:467–78. Stauffer, D. (2008). ‘Aristotle’s Account of the Subjection of Women.’ Journal of Politics 70:929–41. Swanson, J. A. (1992) The Public and the Private in Aristotle’s Political Philosophy. NY: Cornell University Press Trott, A. (2013) Aristotle on the Nature of Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Self-Sacrifice as Wifely Virtue  55

Ward, A. (2008) “Mothering and the Sacrifice of Self: Women and Friendship ion Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.” Third Space: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Culture 7(2):32–57. Weiner, A. (1992) Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping While Giving. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Zuckerberg, D. (2018) Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

4 AUTHORING MACHIAVELLI Barbera Salutati, La Mandragola, and the Performance of Political Theory Boris Litvin

Over the past few decades, Niccolò Machiavelli’s comedy La Mandragola has i nspired fecund challenges to the conceptual vision traditionally associated with his thought, that is, a vision that organizes political life around “princely” manliness and autonomous agency. Feminist interpreters have found the comedy especially fruitful in this regard, turning to it both to identify a female character capable of deft manipulation and to problematize Machiavelli’s attempts to isolate virtù from “effeminate” qualities. Yet what does it mean to revise the conceptual landscape of an author who—through “so many troubles and perils”—nonetheless advances a claim to self- sufficient mastery over sociopolitical knowledge?1 In revising the content of Machiavelli’s advice, where should we position the all- seeing eye that identifies itself with “Machiavellian” authorship? While following recent efforts to displace princely agency in Machiavelli’s thought, this chapter pushes such efforts to interrogate the role of the ­Machiavellian theorist and advisor in challenging this vision of politics. Indeed, I argue that La Mandragola provides a significant opportunity for such an interrogation if we consider the contextual dynamics behind its staging— specifically, the place of women’s labor therein. Tracking this context, I offer evidence to conclude that key sections of La Mandragola were in fact co-written by Machiavelli and Barbera Salutati, a Florentine singer and actress chiefly remembered as Machiavelli’s muse and love interest in contemporary scholarship. In short, Salutati’s contribution to Machiavelli’s political thought goes either unnoticed or subsumed as a mere performance of work authored by Machiavelli. Instead, illuminating Salutati’s more substantial intellectual and performative involvement in La Mandragola’s production, I argue that the comedy defies

Barbera Salutati  57

­

58  Boris Litvin

Feminist Interpretations of La Mandragola and the “Ligurio Problem” The first draft of La Mandragola was likely written in 1518, five years after The Prince was distributed to the Medici. During the subsequent decade, Machiavelli continued to restage the comedy as it underwent a key revision, discussed in detail below. La Mandragola’s action features a scheme advanced by the former student Callimaco to seduce Lucrezia, famous for her “beauty and manners” (M, 1.1.) and “fit to govern a kingdom” (M, 1.3), from her witless and apparently infertile husband, Nicia. Soliciting the strategic acumen of the matchmaker and “parasite” (M, prologue) Ligurio, Callimaco convinces Nicia that he is a Parisian doctor capable of making Lucrezia pregnant with the help of a mandrake root potion. The catch is that the first person to sleep with Lucrezia afterward will die, thus requiring that Nicia scheme to find an outside party and convince Lucrezia to have sex with him. Soliciting the help of the corrupt Friar Timoteo, Ligurio, in turn, presents Nicia with a disguised Callimaco as their “victim,” whom Nicia throws in bed with his wife. At the end of their night, Callimaco confesses the plot to Lucrezia and promises to take her as his wife upon her husband’s death. Lucrezia, noting Callimaco’s “astuteness” and her husband’s “stupidity,” concludes that she will take Callimaco as her “lord, master and guide,” (M, 5.4) although her actual assent to his proposal remains ambiguous. The comedy concludes with Nicia introducing Lucrezia to Ligurio and the (now undisguised) Callimaco, in turn, offering the two a key to his house in celebration of the apparent success of his plot. La Mandragola unfolds over five acts (including a prologue) along with five canzoni added in the revision to the comedy made during the 1520s. The canzoni are sung between each act and reflect upon the comedy’s central thematic concerns, including deception, love, and Fortuna. La Mandragola’s manifest affinity for manipulation and its sly subversion of social mores have prompted many interpreters to read it as an exemplification of Machiavelli’s arguments in The Prince.3 Yet the fact that the comedy depicts a prominent female character who, by its conclusion, seems to participate in (if not direct) the very manipulations to which she had been subjected has also occasioned distinct attention from feminist interpreters. As Maria Falco suggests in her introduction to the Feminist Interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli, Machiavelli’s comedies are “perhaps of most interest to feminists” insofar as their protagonists are “women who demonstrate without a doubt their ability to ‘rule a kingdom,’”4 directly referencing the description of Lucrezia advanced at the outset of La Mandragola. Indeed, both La Mandragola and this specific characterization of Lucrezia feature prominently across different feminist interpretations of Machiavelli’s thought. Examining Machiavelli’s fundamental ambivalence over manhood, Hanna Pitkin finds Callimaco struggling to manipulate others without Ligurio’s help, thus advancing a plot “thoroughly problematic with respect to heroism”5 of the sort often extrapolated as virtù from Machiavelli’s thought.

Barbera Salutati  59

Moreover, the fact that Lucrezia alone seems fit to rule a kingdom illuminates Machiavelli’s anxiety over virtù for Pitkin.6 Tracing the broader ambiguities of Machiavelli’s uses of gendered tropes, Arlene Saxonhouse suggests that “in the process of breaking down old hierarchies…we can no longer tell good from bad or women from men,” 7 likewise referencing Lucrezia’s description.8 From a substantively different approach, Jane Jaquette argues that Machiavelli’s ambivalent portrayals of male characters suggest we might very well take Lucrezia to be La Mandragola’s actual “hero.”9 Jaquette thus reasons that Lucrezia’s navigation of morally questionable means and ends reveals Machiavelli’s “underlying ability to imagine women as princes,” concluding that “his attack on ‘the feminine’ is not an attack on women” as such.10 In a similar vein, Jo Ann Cavallo argues that Machiavelli “depicts female figures—both real and imaginary—in ways that counter misogynist stereotypes and chauvinistic ideals,”11 in turn, identifying Lucrezia as “a wise ruler who will determine the course of events in the future,” given her capacity to manipulate both Nicia and Callimaco.12 For Cavallo, Lucrezia thus constitutes an exemplary case of Machiavellian female characters who “provide models of behavior for either sex”13 —that is, as characters who embody virtuous action—precisely when some of his male protagonists fail to do so. These approaches all emphasize Lucrezia’s political acumen in re- evaluating the place of gender in Machiavelli’s thought. Yet their different arguments about Machiavelli’s relationship to gendered language suggest substantively different accounts of Lucrezia’s place in Machiavelli’s broader political vision. Determining Lucrezia’s fitness to govern a kingdom either illuminates Machiavelli’s anxiety concerning “manly” virtù, or, instead, provides an example of virtù divorced from gendered stereotypes. Making that determination requires us to interrogate how Machiavelli himself fits into the drama of gender ambiguities and rhetorical manipulations. Here, however, we find substantial— and, I suggest, problematic—interpretive overlap: just as La Mandragola’s readers consistently note its favorable depiction of Lucrezia, they likewise continue to affirm its depiction of the matchmaker Ligurio as a representation of Machiavelli himself. To be sure, at first glance the Ligurio/Machiavelli analogy makes intuitive sense. Ligurio, after all, serves as a strategist for the comedy’s protagonist, Callimaco, and seems to understand and manipulate the desires and motivations guiding the comedy’s characters while not succumbing to them himself. However, the Ligurio/Machiavelli analogy also affirms a particular character type: the “clearly” Machiavellian,14 true “author” of the comedy’s plot,15 alone able to unite virtù and Fortuna, as The Prince would have it,16 yet likewise removed from the political fray of public appearance that characterizes princely action. As Pitkin puts it, this type is the fox-like, “somehow sexless advisor” that Machiavelli understands himself— and depicts Ligurio—to exemplify in his political landscape.17 Indeed, the seemingly self- evident analogy between Machiavelli and Ligurio is often advanced in readings of La Mandragola beyond the feminist approaches outlined here.18

60  Boris Litvin

In seeking to reevaluate the role of women’s intellectual labor in Machiavelli’s oeuvre, this chapter argues that the Ligurio/Machiavelli analogy should appear problematic, especially for readings of La Mandragola attentive to gender and sexuality. For one, to take the hidden, “somehow sexless,” and seemingly allperceptive advisor as an “authorial” representation of Machiavelli reaffirms the very agentic isolation and mastery otherwise put into question across feminist interpretations of La Mandragola. If Lucrezia’s depiction reveals cracks in Machiavelli’s apparent conflation of virtù, manliness, and mastery, then his supposed self-presentation as Ligurio seems to patch those cracks back up, again asserting a sort of princely control behind Machiavellian knowledge.19 Insofar as feminist interpreters of Machiavelli turn to La Mandragola to problematize this vision of political agency, Ligurio’s character thus stands in tension with this project. Indeed, Ligurio’s capacity both to “organize” La Mandragola’s overlapping desires (Nicia’s desire for a child, Callimaco’s desire to seduce Lucrezia, Timoteo’s desire for church donations) and to remain “above” or “behind” desire as such appears in tension with the comedy’s celebration of all-encompassing, reciprocal manipulation that permeates social life. As the comedy’s Friar Timoteo remarks, reflecting on his acceptance of a bribe that draws him into the comedy’s plot, “I don’t know which one has duped the other…It’s true that I’ve been duped; nevertheless, this trick is to my profit” (M, 3.9). In contrast, Ligurio alone seems to remain immune from being duped throughout La Mandragola. I thus hold that the presumed analogy between Machiavelli and Ligurio constitutes a problem for feminist interpretations of La Mandragola. Disagreements over the place and function of gendered tropes in Machiavelli’s thought require us to make sense of his own self-understanding and self-presentation as a political actor—yet it is precisely this question that gets short- shifted when we take Machiavelli as Ligurio and Ligurio as simply “behind” the political fray. In what follows, I reconsider this association by suggesting a different interpretive approach to La Mandragola and, in turn, a different area of inquiry regarding the place of gender and sexuality in Machiavelli’s oeuvre. I argue that we should approach Machiavelli’s use of gendered tropes and his depictions of women characters with an eye toward the place of gender and sexuality in his very practice of political theorizing. This practice, I argue, resists a vision of the political advisor as the distanced, masterful agent suggested above, instead offering what I contend is a heretofore overlooked consideration of women’s labor in Machiavelli’s oeuvre. To examine this practice, let us first turn to Machiavelli’s relationship with Barbera Salutati.

Barbera Salutati between Performance and Authorship Barbera Raffacani Salutati (?–1544) was a Florentine singer and actress known primarily in Machiavelli scholarship as the political theorist’s “love interest” in the final years of his life. The two likely met in 1523 or 1524 at one of the many

Barbera Salutati  61

banquets hosted by Iacopo Falconetti, a wealthy Florentine who, after falling into political disfavor, had turned his estate into a meeting-place for Florence’s intellectual and cultural elite.20 The surviving facts of Salutati’s life largely reflect scholarly attention to her relationship with Machiavelli. She is reputed to have been beautiful, to have been substantially younger than Machiavelli, outliving him by 17 years, and to have married later in her life. Besides these observations, there is also evidence that she wrote her own poetry, with one surviving poem attributed to her,21 as well as a surviving portrait of Salutati by the Florentine painter Domenico Puligo,22 suggesting that she occupied a significant place in the Florentine intellectual and aesthetic life. These latter details, however, rarely command attention in political theoretic interpretations of Machiavelli’s thought. Insofar as political theorists do pay attention to the relationship between the two, they tend to discuss Machiavelli’s amorous poetry written for Salutati,23 their affair, and the possibility that Machiavelli satirized this affair in his comedy Clizia.24 Existing scholarship thus generally focuses on Salutati’s place in Machiavelli’s biographical narrative and, accordingly, his characterization of her. Several scholarly accounts, however, make more of Salutati’s contribution to Machiavelli’s oeuvre. Specifically, such accounts notice the fact that Salutati played a more significant role in the actual performance of Machiavelli’s comedies, singing the canzoni between each act of La Mandragola. Evidence for such participation is primarily drawn from Machiavelli’s letters, which mention the composition of these canzoni during his plans to restage the comedy in the 1520s.25 Insofar as scholars acknowledge Salutati’s participation in Machiavelli’s intellectual work, her participation is thus generally characterized by the claim that Machiavelli wrote La Mandragola’s canzoni “for” his love interest. The scholarship mentioned above is commendable in its increasing attention to Salutati and her place in Machiavelli’s thought. However, this chapter maintains that Salutati’s place in Machiavelli’s oeuvre remains minimized in ways that neglect both her work and the subsequent political theoretic implications of her contribution to La Mandragola. Specifically, the above approaches emphasize what we might understand as Salutati’s performative labor—that is, her participation in productions of La Mandragola as an actress and singer. Yet this participation remains detached from the intellectual labor by means of which Machiavelli is understood to have written a collection of works and thus to have authored political theoretic content attributable squarely to him. This distinction— even if unstated or implicit— carries broader political theoretic implications. While plays, like all staged works, surely cannot do without performative labor, such labor is not understood to denote a meaningful effect upon intellectual output. That is, the content of the play is taken to be determined by its author, and the author is no performer. As Michel Foucault puts it, authorship signifies more than a name attached to a text, but rather results from “a complex operation which constructs a certain rational being that we call an

62  Boris Litvin

‘author’” to whom we attribute the “design” behind an intellectual object.26 Performative labor does not fit well in this operation. To be sure, those engaging in such labor might become relevant when interpreters reconstruct the historical context informing an author’s argument, but they are not taken to contribute to the argument itself or to affect its meaning. Thus, unlike authors, performers seem replaceable in the eyes of the interpreter of political theoretic texts; indeed, almost inevitably so. The distinction between intellectual and performative labor thus leaves interpreters with a Salutati whose place in Machiavelli’s oeuvre remains distinct from this oeuvre’s political theoretic content. In what follows, I revisit Machiavelli’s correspondence, arguing that it offers evidence for reevaluating Salutati’s contribution to La Mandragola. Doing so, I challenge the conclusion that Salutati’s performative labor can be neatly insulated from the play’s content and, in turn, its authorship. More broadly, this challenge problematizes the underlying distinction between performative and intellectual labor that informs scholarly ­approaches to La Mandragola and its relationship to Machiavelli’s oeuvre. To begin, I maintain that Salutati’s role as a noteworthy performer in early productions of La Mandragola in fact entailed her contribution to the very content of the comedy as we now encounter it. This argument requires us to consider Machiavelli’s surviving correspondence regarding La Mandragola with his friend and colleague Francesco Guicciardini, who offered Machiavelli his thoughts on the comedy and helped to secure its staging in 1526.27 Machiavelli’s letters suggest this new production entailed that he edit the comedy from its earlier, written form, preparing it for a more festive performance.28 This is precisely where Salutati’s contribution comes into the picture, with Machiavelli soliciting the use of her singing talents. As one of Machiavelli’s October 1525 letters to Guicciardini indicates, Machiavelli “offered to write” canzoni for La Mandragola’s new production, in turn, noting his conversation with Salutati on the matter.29 The scholarship that notes Salutati’s performance in La Mandragola indeed tends to refer to the above interaction.30 However, this interaction only marks the beginning of Salutati and Machiavelli’s collaboration— one which required Salutati to organize a troupe of singers, Machiavelli to secure funding, and the comedy itself to undergo revision. Accordingly, Machiavelli’s January 1526 letter to Guicciardini details the progress in these arrangements, concluding his mention of Salutati with the remark that “we have composed five new songs appropriate to the play.”31 I contend that this latter correspondence offers significant evidence that La Mandragola’s canzoni were not only performed by Salutati, but, in fact, co-written by her. This reconstruction of Salutati and Machiavelli’s interactions suggests that existing approaches offer an inadequate appreciation of Salutati’s contribution to Machiavelli’s oeuvre. That is, they reduce our understanding of her role in La Mandragola’s staging only to that of performance. Yet the above correspondence suggests that Salutati’s performative labor cannot be neatly separated

Barbera Salutati  63

from intellectual labor. Rather, the comedy’s revised form—its canzoni— reflects Machiavelli and Salutati’s anticipation of her performance and thus enshrines her performative labor in comedy’s preserved content. The challenge for interpreters, then, is to consider how such labor can become meaningful for our reception of the comedy and its political implications. In this spirit, I argue that Salutati’s more engaged involvement in La ­Mandragola’s production also implicates our interpretation of the claims advanced in the comedy. Recall the above section argued that Ligurio’s character posed a particular constellation of interpretive challenges for La Mandragola’s readers: his “somehow sexless” mastery over political events did not sit well with feminist interpretations finding such mastery subverted in the course of the comedy, nor did his apparent immunity to being duped sit well with the comedy’s celebration of reciprocal duping; and these tensions were accentuated by the commonplace reading of Ligurio as a mouthpiece for Machiavelli himself— an analogy that took both figures to “author” political outcomes while remaining above their fray. Having complicated the dynamics of Machiavelli’s singular authorship in relation to Salutati’s performative labor, I now suggest that this complication casts a more critical perspective on the Machiavelli/ Ligurio analogy often presumed by Machiavelli’s readers. Insofar as our investigation of La Mandragola’s staging has problematized the conceptual distinction between performance and authorship, we must also interrogate this distinction in La Mandragola’s own depiction of “authorial” agency. Specifically, in questioning Machiavelli’s association with the singular subject position of “the author,” we should take care to notice that La Mandragola likewise provides opportunities to question Ligurio’s characterization; indeed, the comedy casts doubt precisely on his “somehow sexless” mastery over its plot. Consider, for example, that while Callimaco and Ligurio formulate their plan to trick Nicia into throwing Callimaco in bed with Lucrezia, it is Ligurio who suggests that Callimaco then blackmail Lucrezia into continuing their affair. Explicating his advice, Ligurio reasons that “it’s impossible that she won’t agree with you” to make “this night the only one” without “great scandal” (M, 4.2) in what is likely the comedy’s darkest moment. To be sure, Callimaco ultimately rejects this course of action, instead confessing his love for Lucrezia to her apparent assent. Yet, as Jane Tylus suggests, Ligurio’s suggestion nonetheless raises an ongoing possibility of threat, shame, and violence, thereby suggesting that a “markedly sinister” thread lurks beneath the comedy’s “festive activities”32 —one that appears especially sinister if we take Ligurio to speak for Machiavelli’s own position as the La Mandragola’s “master of spectacles.”33 On my reading, this observation should instead problematize the interpretive claims underlying the Ligurio/Machiavelli analogy outlined above. Insofar as La Mandragola presents Ligurio suggesting a course of action attentive specifically to the threat of scandal and the possibility of blackmail associated with Lucrezia’s social standing as a married Florentine woman, the comedy offers resources to question Ligurio’s otherwise “sexless” presentation. Moreover, insofar

64  Boris Litvin

as this advice is not followed (and apparently not needed), La Mandragola likewise distances its ultimate festive resolution from Ligurio’s strategic acumen, again offering its audience an opportunity to question the role of the all-perceptive advisor in a comedy that celebrates reciprocal duping.34 Put differently, Ligurio as masterful author ultimately appears out of place in the comedy. Outlining these possibilities, my intention is not to argue that they conclusively undermine Ligurio’s character within the comedy’s plot or amount to a rejection of his advice. Rather, it is to suggest that the association between Ligurio and Machiavelli only appears self- evident by obscuring aspects of La Mandragola’s multifaceted engagement with gender and sexuality. For example, the fact that Ligurio’s apparent control over the comedy’s events entails manifestly misogynistic advice illuminates a gendered dimension in his claim to mastery—yet the fact that this advice is not followed likewise casts doubt on this very claim. This incongruity, however, becomes obscured precisely when Ligurio is taken simply to voice Machiavelli’s own “authorial” advice. The conflation between Ligurio’s character and Machiavelli’s voice likewise obscures the gendered dynamics behind La Mandragola’s depiction of Lucrezia’s political acumen. While her characterization as a potential political ruler certainly appears in tension with Machiavelli’s arguments about “masculine” political agency across his oeuvre, we should also take care to notice that this characterization is articulated specifically by Ligurio (M, 1.3) and in contrast to Callimaco’s fixation only on her beauty and manners (1.1). That is, the claim establishing Lucrezia’s political acumen appears as an isolated fact only when Ligurio’s voice is conflated with Machiavelli’s. To question this conflation is thus to notice that the comedy’s depiction of Lucrezia remains entangled in the manipulations of a character who ultimately advocates violence against her. Again, our assessment of Lucrezia’s place in Machiavelli’s thought requires us to interrogate La Mandragola’s alleged identification with Ligurio. In what follows, I advance a critical perspective on this identification by juxtaposing La Mandragola’s co-authored ­ canzoni with several key interactions arranged by Ligurio— ostensibly masterfully so. Doing so, I argue that the dynamics of La Mandragola’s co-authorship offer an opportunity to reconsider the interpretive tendency simply to accept this character’s depiction as the “author” of the comedy’s events. As a result, I contend that Salutati’s multifaceted contribution to the production of La Mandragola should shape both our reading of this text and our broader understanding of the practices underlying political advice across Machiavelli’s oeuvre.

“How Pleasant Is the Trick”: Reconsidering La Mandragola’s Canzoni Perhaps it should come as no surprise that La Mandragola’s canzoni are seldom featured in political theoretic interpretations of this text. After all, they appear in an uncertain, if not befuddling, relationship to the rest of the text, at least

Barbera Salutati  65

as readers encounter it. As songs meant to be performed by actors who do not otherwise participate in the comedy’s narrative, they are easily dismissed as mere musical interludes from the interactions between the comedy’s chief characters. Moreover, as songs added between each of the comedy’s acts, they also seem to imply a sort of meta-commentary upon each act’s developments, serving to remind La Mandragola’s audience of certain themes associated with Machiavelli’s thought without advancing the comedy’s plot per se. Yet I want to suggest that these two characteristics point to an alternative interpretive approach to La Mandragola. As breaks that comment upon each act, the canzoni in effect enact another possibility of an externally positioned “voice” reflecting upon the comedy’s plot— one that offers a counterpart to the perspective of the all-perceptive political advisor advanced by Ligurio and taken to stand in for Machiavelli. Put differently, the canzoni operate alongside Ligurio’s character insofar as both appear to embody authoritative perspectives upon the events at hand, albeit in markedly different ways. Indeed, having explored the dynamics of co-authorship underlying the composition of the canzoni, in what follows I argue that these canzoni hardly complement the “authoritative” Ligurio, instead offering an occasional, pointed contrast to the claims articulated by his character. Let us consider an example. The scenes between La Mandragola’s third and fourth acts depict the coalescence of events orchestrated squarely by Ligurio: it is here that Friar Timoteo understands himself to be “duped” by Ligurio into assisting with the conspiracy in exchange for church donations and that we thus witnesses Timoteo endeavoring to “persuade” Lucrezia that her night with the victim of the mandrake plot will not count as a sin, before reporting back to Ligurio. Yet these scenes likewise depict the comedy’s chief characters at the height of doubt if not despair. Faced with Timoteo’s sophisms, Lucrezia clearly remains unconvinced, asking him, “what are you leading me to, Padre?” (M, 3.11). Likewise, the opening scene of the fourth act depicts a perturbed Callimaco revealing his fears of doing evil and his general uncertainty concerning the long-term viability of the mandrake plot in the comedy’s longest monologue. Between these scenes, however, is a curious musical interlude, occasioning the following pronouncement: How pleasant is the trick conducted to its imagined and dear end that rids one of worry and makes every bitter thing that’s tasted sweet. Oh, remedy high and rare, you show the straight path to wandering souls; you, with your great valor, in making others blessed you make Love rich; you conquer with your holy counsels, alone, stones, venoms, and enhancements. (M, song after 3.12)

66  Boris Litvin

Considering the ongoing events of the comedy, how might we make sense of this canzone? For one, we might interpret it as an ironic counterpoint to both Lucrezia and Callimaco’s apparent displeasure at the comedy’s unfolding events. In this sense, the canzone appears to remind its audience of the comedic narrative in which these characters are caught up: “conducted to its imagined and dear end,” the “trick” promises to arrive at a “pleasant” outcome, despite its illumination of tragic possibilities. However, if we take this canzone to offer such commentary upon the events at hand, then it runs directly counter to Ligurio’s subsequent actions. It is precisely here, following Callimaco’s despair, that Ligurio proceeds to articulate the nefarious possibility mentioned in this chapter’s first section, namely, that Callimaco coerce Lucrezia into continuing their affair after unveiling the mandrake plot to her, effectively introducing the possibility of rape and blackmail into La Mandragola’s narrative. The juxtaposition of Ligurio’s advice with the jovial canzone that precedes it should raise significant interpretive questions: to whom will the trick celebrated in the canzone be “pleasant”? Moreover, what, precisely, is the nature of the “trick” as Ligurio apparently sees it? In this chapter’s prior section, I suggested that Ligurio’s advice constituted a road not taken by Callimaco. Yet considering this advice in light of the above canzone illuminates a more serious tension between the comedy’s different voices. Ligurio does not merely suggest a course of action that Callimaco foregoes but envisions a fundamentally different relationship between the comedy’s chief characters—indeed, one that cannot be obtained if the comedy is to fulfill the narrative promise articulated in the canzone. As such, in employing the second-person address to speak to “the trick” itself (i.e., “you show [tu mostri]…”; “you conquer [tu vinci]…”), this canzone helps to establish a critical distance from the comedy’s chief trickster, bringing attention to an emerging discrepancy: the trick’s “holy counsels” are not those of Ligurio. The latter may very well be the comedy’s most “masterful” character, indeed its only character who eludes being duped; yet his position likewise suggests that he does not fit well within the contours of the comedic genre.35 He is, as La Mandragola’s prologue puts it, “a parasite.” The comedy, of course, never offers anything akin to an explicit rejection of Ligurio’s manipulations, and we would be hard-pressed to find in it conclusive evidence against his general perspective as chief strategist. Rather, I want to suggest that the emergent discrepancy identified above illuminates La Mandragola’s contribution to an aspect of Machiavelli’s thought overlooked when Ligurio is taken, unambiguously, as “the author’s” mouthpiece: namely, what Yves Winter calls the polysemic quality of Machiavelli’s writings, encompassing the “contradictions, tensions, and paradoxes” that shape readers’ encounters with Machiavelli’s texts and that occlude the search for “a single meaning” within them.36 Different manifestations of such polysemy run across Machiavelli’s oeuvre and have been identified in substantively different ways—from Mary Dietz’s case for Machiavelli’s deception of Lorenzo de’ Medici in The Prince to

Barbera Salutati  67

Winter’s own investigation of Machiavelli’s ambivalent depiction of striking Ciompi workers in the Florentine Histories.37 In arguing that interpreters should take La Mandragola’s canzoni— and the complications they raise for Machiavelli’s authorship of the comedy— seriously, I maintain that here Machiavelli and Salutati’s polysemy offers a distinct political theoretic implication. Recall that above, I argued that Salutati’s reception in contemporary scholarship reduced her place in Machiavelli’s oeuvre merely to performative labor, at the expense of an appreciation of her contribution to La Mandragola’s actual content. Yet an examination of this contribution, offered in the above paragraphs, suggests a revised conclusion to this argument. Illuminating an underlying polysemy in La Mandragola’s depiction of political advice, Salutati’s contribution rather suggests that the comedy’s political theoretic content cannot be divorced from its performance. How the comedy’s actors enact its various characters and interactions—Ligurio as astute advisor or sociopath, Callimaco as lovestruck hero or bumbling charlatan, the comedy’s singers as authorial commentators or ironic critics—involves necessary ambiguities inscribed in the very nature of La Mandragola as a theatrical text constituted by different performances.38 Indeed, Salutati’s case suggests that performative labor itself entails a rich variety of activities, and not merely a rote enactment of material made by those engaging in intellectual labor. Certain performances may significantly alter how audiences (and authors) interpret a given work; others may inspire revisions in subsequent versions of texts; and, more generally, anticipated performances may alter how those seeking to “translate” political theoretic ideas onto the stage go about doing so. Indeed, this performative dimension of meaningmaking again parallels our thematic criticism of Ligurio’s character and his advice: he alone is intent on mastering a political world where mastery itself has been put into question. Just as La Mandragola resists one authorial voice, so Ligurio’s efforts to direct the comedy’s manipulations ultimately leave him out of step with some of its most significant interactions. Authorship—in all its manifestations—thus cannot be sealed off from performative labor. Rather, this chapter’s examination of the dynamics underlying La Mandragola’s co-written ­ canzoni illuminate this comedy’s history as a changing text with multiple competing voices. The extent of this multiplicity becomes visible when the comedy’s production is understood as an ongoing process— one that Machiavelli continued to revisit, one that involved his collaboration with Salutati, and one that continues to challenge current- day interpretations ­ of La Mandragola.

Conclusion This chapter has argued for a greater appreciation of Barbera Salutati and her contribution to Machiavelli’s oeuvre. As Machiavelli’s “love interest” who makes appearances in his poems and letters, it is unsurprising that Salutati is

68  Boris Litvin

easily integrated into a familiar sort of narrative: one in which she inspires Machiavelli to write on certain topics, yet herself remains external to his production of political theoretic content. At the very least, this chapter has endeavored to show that such a narrative significantly misconstrues Salutati’s actual contribution to Machiavelli’s oeuvre. Yet, beyond the simple fact of this contribution, the dynamics of Machiavelli and Salutati’s co-authorship of La ­Mandragola’s canzoni should further encourage interpreters to reconsider how they approach the comedy and its place in Machiavelli’s oeuvre. As a political theoretic work entangled in the practical challenges and possibilities of performative labor, La Mandragola’s polysemy offers a significant contrast to Machiavelli’s prior intellectual engagements. Alongside Machiavelli’s depictions of sexualized and gendered interactions— of Fortuna as a woman, of political acumen as manly virtù, or of Lucrezia as a character who embodies such virtù—is a multifaceted and changing relationship to the very production of political theoretic content, one that also navigates sexualized and gendered interactions. These interactions, in turn, shape what we make of Machiavelli’s political theoretic content. It is in this sense that La Mandragola does not merely transpose Machiavelli’s political theoretic arguments into a new medium but exemplifies a theatrical shift in his practice as a political theorist. Indeed, Salutati’s co-authorship of La Mandragola constitutes a significant aspect of this shift, especially insofar as her contribution offers a contrast to the practice of political theorizing as depicted in The Prince. The latter work famously provides readers an image of Machiavelli in a privileged relationship to political knowledge: having occupied both the metaphorical mountaintop— which he associates with princely self-understanding— and the valley—which he associates with the perspective of the people—Machiavelli, in turn, claims to provide Lorenzo de’ Medici a distinct appreciation of both, consequently encouraging the potential Prince to put such knowledge to work.39 La Mandragola, in turn, offers a different “trick” with a substantively different end. It does not merely depict a female character likewise capable of employing similar princely lessons. Rather, its performative polysemy raises challenges for the very claim to political advice underlying such princely action, thereby illuminating the possible mismatches, deceptions, narrative shortcomings, and blind spots of such advice. Salutati plays a crucial role in staging this illumination.

Notes 1 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, vol. 1 of Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), dedication. 2 Niccolò Machiavelli, Mandragola, trans. Mera J. Flaumenhaft (Illinois: Waveland Press, 1981), prologue. Hereafter, M. 3 See especially Carnes Lord, “On Machiavelli’s Mandragola,” Journal of Politics 41.3 (1979): 806–827; Isaiah Berlin, “A Special Supplement: The Question of Machiavelli,” New York Review of Books (1971), 31, https://www.nybooks.com/

Barbera Salutati  69

4

5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

19

20

21 22 23

articles/1971/11/04/a-special-supplement-the-question-of-machiavelli/; ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ and Susan Behuniak-Long, “The Significance of Lucrezia in Machiavelli’s ‘La Mandragola,’” Review of Politics 51.2 (1989): 264–280. Maria J. Falco, “Introduction,” in Feminist Interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. Maria J. Falco (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 10. Falco’s mention of Machiavelli’s comedies extends this depiction to Sofronia, one of the chief characters of Machiavelli’s subsequent comedy Clizia. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 31. See Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman, 47. Arlene Saxonhouse, Women in the History of Political Thought: Ancient Greece to Machiavelli (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1985), 151. Saxonhouse, Women, 173. For another approach also attentive to Machiavelli’s gendered language and the anxiety over manliness therein, see Mary O’Brien, “The Root of the Mandrake: Machiavelli and Manliness,” in Feminist Interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. Maria J. Falco (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). Jane S. Jaquette, “Rethinking Machiavelli: Feminism and Citizenship,” in Feminist Interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. Maria J. Falco (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 344. Jaquette, “Rethinking Machiavelli,” 348–49. Jo Ann Cavallo, “Machiavelli and Women,” in Seeking Real Truths: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Machiavelli, ed. Patricia Vilches and Gerald Seaman (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 124. Cavallo, “Machiavelli and Women,” 136. Cavallo, “Machiavelli and Women,” 147. For an approach that makes a similar case against sexual difference in Machiavellian politics in the context of his comedy Clizia, see Catherine H. Zuckert, “Fortune Is a Woman—But so Is Prudence: Machiavelli’s Clizia,” in Feminist Interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. Maria J. Falco (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). Zuckert, “Fortune Is a Woman,” 202. Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman, 30–31. Behuniak-Long, “The Significance of Lucrezia,” 272. Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman, 30–31. See especially Lord, “On Machiavelli’s Mandragola,” 817; and Mark Hulliung, “Machiavelli’s ‘Mandragola’: A Day and Night in the Life of a Citizen,” The Review of Politics 40.1 (1978): 32–57, 44. For a notable exception to this trend and an approach that explicitly rejects this analogy, see Timothy J. Lukes, “Lionizing Machiavelli,” ­ The American Political Science Review 95.3 (2001), 571. For interpretations of Machiavelli’s oeuvre that argue for this very conceptual association, see especially Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Harvey Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). For accounts of this encounter that accord it varying significance in Machiavelli’s biography, see Corrado Vivanti, Niccolò Machiavelli: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Simon MacMichael (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 176–77; and Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli’s Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli (Hill & Wang, 2002), 223–28. See Virginia Cox, Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). See Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon, eds., The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 146–47. See, for example, Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli’s God, trans. Antony Shugaar ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 73.

70  Boris Litvin



­

­

­

Barbera Salutati  71





­

­

­

­

­

­

­

72  Boris Litvin

———. Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Guicciardini, October 16–20, 1525. In Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence. Edited by David Sices and James B. Atkinson. Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996. ———. Niccolò Machiavelli to Luigi Guicciardini, December 9, 1509. In Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence. Edited by David Sices and James B. Atkinson. Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996. ———. Mandragola, trans. Mera J. Flaumenhaft. Illinois: Waveland Press, 1981. ———. The Prince, vol. 1 of Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others. Translated by Allan Gilbert. Durham: Duke University Press, 1989. Harvey Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Martinez, Ronald L. “Comedian, Tragedian: Machiavelli and the Traditions of Renaissance Theater.” In The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli. Edited by John M. Najemy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. O’Brien, Mary. “The Root of the Mandrake: Machiavelli and Manliness.” In Feminist Interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli. Edited by Maria J. Falco. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. Fortune Is a Woman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Ruggiero, Guido. Machiavelli in Love: Sex, Self, and Society in the Italian Renaissance. Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Saxonhouse, Arlene. Women in the History of Political Thought: Ancient Greece to Machiavelli. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1985. Strauss, Leo. Thoughts on Machiavelli. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Tylus, Jane. “Theater and its Social Uses: Machiavelli’s Mandragola and the Spectacle of Infamy.” Renaissance Quarterly 53.3 (2000). Viroli, Maurizio. Machiavelli’s God. Translated by Antony Shugaar. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. ———. Machiavelli’s Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli. New York: Hill & Wang, 2002. Vivanti, Corrado. Niccolò Machiavelli: An Intellectual Biography. Translated by Simon MacMichael. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Winter, Yves. “Plebeian Politics: Machiavelli and the Ciompi Uprising.” Political Theory 40.6 (2012): 736–766. Zuckert, Catherine H. “Fortune is a Woman—But So Is Prudence: Machiavelli’s Clizia.” In Feminist Interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli. Edited by Maria J. Falco. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. ———. Machiavelli’s Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

5 EDUCATING GENTLEWOMEN The Women of Locke’s Circle and Their Influence on Some Thoughts Concerning Education Emily C. Nacol

John Locke tells his readers early in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) that his purpose is to detail how “a young gentleman should be brought up from his infancy.”1 He introduces the text as partly inspired by a query from his friend Sir Edward Clarke, who wanted guidance for rearing his son. Locke cautions Clarke and his readers that he has designed a program of education “which in all things will not so perfectly suit the education of daughters.” He is confident, however, that “where the difference of sex requires different treatment, it will be no hard matter to distinguish” for interested readers.2 While Locke expects that his advice for raising sons might be capacious enough to apply to daughters too, Some Thoughts Concerning Education is explicitly staged as a conversation between gentlemen seeking to raise young boys into their ranks. The exchange between Locke and Clarke belies the significant role that women and girls played in Locke’s formulation of his theory of education and childhood development. This chapter highlights the critical role that three people played in the development of Locke’s theory of education: Mary Clarke, Betty Clarke, and Lady Damaris Masham. All three women are familiar to Locke scholars, appearing as important personal figures in biographies of Locke’s life: Mary Clarke as a beloved cousin and lifelong friend; her daughter, Betty Clarke, as Locke’s young friend and so-called “wife”; and Masham as a believed one-time lover and closest friend.3 Feminist interpreters of Locke have established they served as more than cherished companions to Locke. They may also have done considerable labor to help him cultivate and develop his thoughts on education—intellectual and domestic labor that Locke drew on to build his theoretical account of childrearing, and even some care work for Locke himself as he worked on the text. As Locke’s correspondence makes clear, his theory of education was forged from observations of and in dialogue with these women and with their support.

74  Emily C. Nacol

While Locke’s theory of education is, on its face, concerned first and foremost with the rearing of young gentlemen, it was thus produced in part by the intellectual and practical labors of the gentlewomen in his life— curious, skeptical people who, through their own practices and judgments, alternately challenged and supported his work. As Sara Mendelson has persuasively shown, Mary and Betty Clarke played a vital experiential role in Locke’s work on childhood development. Mary Clarke put his theories into practice in her own home and shared her results with Locke, and Betty Clarke, rather than her older brother, perhaps served as the model product of an experimental education devised by Locke for her brother.4 Masham, a philosopher in her own right, offered Locke her patronage and a place to live and work when he returned to England in 1688. He wrote Some Thoughts Concerning Education in her home, while watching her raise and educate her son.5 The major aim of this chapter, then, will be to emphasize how the domestic labors of Locke’s women friends—largely in their roles as mothers— supported his public musings on education. This chapter proceeds in three parts. The first section examines Locke’s dialogue on childrearing with Mary Clarke, with her daughter Betty as a central figure in this ongoing conversation. In her persistent queries about the best way to rear her sons and daughters, Mary Clarke helped Locke develop some of his views on how to cultivate children’s minds and bodies through instruction, exercise, and punishment—views that he spells out in his prescriptions for boys and their parents in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. The following section examines how the domestic labor and care work performed by Damaris Masham also shaped, in ways barely acknowledged, Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education. Locke observed and reflected on how she taught her own son, weaving some examples of her work into his treatise. And further, she gave him the material support and care he needed to write the treatise, as he resided in her house. By way of conclusion, I note that Locke’s correspondence with and about them suggests that he had a sanguine view of their rationality and a respect for their judgment, but his esteem for them never quite motivated him to make a thoroughgoing argument for women’s rationality and education in private or in print. That task was left to others—most notably for our purposes, Lady Masham herself. She developed and published a justification for why women should be allowed a robust education, one of the kind Mary Clarke wanted for her daughter Betty.

Locke’s Correspondence with the Clarkes: A Model for Early Childhood Education Locke spent the 1680s and 1690s in constant correspondence with Mary Clarke (née Jepp), as she began and continued the work of raising her family. Clarke may have been one of Locke’s cousins, and she was certainly one of his most treasured friends and confidantes. He opens a 1682 letter to her this way:

The Women of Locke’s Circle  75

Wit and good nature meeting in a fair young Lady as they doe in you make the best resemblance of an Angell that we know; and he that is blessed with the conversation and friendship of a person so extraordinary enjoys all the remains of paradise in this world.6 Here he praises Clarke for her intelligence, good character and “uncommon accomplishments,” qualities which shine in her correspondence with Locke over the next decades.7 In ascribing to her merely “wit,” rather than judgment or reason, he perhaps sells her short however.8 Clarke’s letters to him disclose her good judgment and mastery of many subjects—parenting, household management, social dynamics, and politics. Mary Clarke’s exchanges with Locke on childrearing show her to be a mother as keen to implement a rigorous education for her daughters as for her sons. Through the duration of her long and happy marriage to Edward Clarke, who was perhaps Locke’s closest male friend and his some-time political ally, she gave birth to 11 children. The first three died when they were very young, but in 1681 she gave birth to Edward, her first son who survived, followed by her first surviving daughter, Elizabeth (known as Betty) in 1682. Both children played significant roles in the development of Locke’s theory of education. At the request of both Mary and Edward Clarke, Locke took a strong interest in young Edward’s education and upbringing. In the dedicatory letter to Edward Clarke that precedes Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke comments that the treatise is merely an adaptation of the collected advice he has passed on in their correspondence over the years. As such, readers may find that the text reads more like “the private conversation of two friends than a discourse designed for public view.”9 As Mendelson has aptly shown, Locke presents in this dedicatory letter only a partial view of the dialogue that spurred his thinking on childrearing. If we look back at his correspondence in the years leading up to the publication of Some Thoughts Concerning Education, we find instead, she argues, a “lively three-cornered epistolary conversation” on parenting among Locke, Edward Clarke, and Mary Clarke. Mary Clarke’s letters document her thirst for specific knowledge on how to properly educate her son, Edward, and her daughter, Betty.10 They also disclose her own long- standing, independent relationship with Locke based on her respect for his advice as a physician and philosopher, beginning with her pregnancies and continuing through to her efforts to raise healthy infants and then well- educated young children of good habits and sound reason.11 He was, for years, her main advisor and sounding board for her efforts to manage her family. She contributed to his work, in turn, as her ongoing requests for parenting guidance pushed him to develop a systematic account of early childhood education, parts of which she tested for him on her children. While this collaboration is obscured in Locke’s published account, Clarke’s correspondence with Locke gives us a fuller sense of her contribution to his work.

76  Emily C. Nacol

While Some Thoughts Concerning Education focuses on how to raise boys into gentlemen, with scant attention to young girls, in Mary Clarke’s letters to Locke we find reflections on how to raise children of different genders. Most notably, she recognizes that she has an unusually bright and capable child in Betty, for whom she seeks a proper education. Mary Clarke’s early letters to Locke reveal her struggle to extract advice on how to rear Betty, as Locke was interested mainly in the education of the eldest Clarke son, Edward. In a 1685 letter from Locke to Mary Clarke, it becomes clear that she has asked him to create a program of education for Betty, but she receives no customized plan. Locke gives her only the advice that mothers of girls can slightly modify the program he has developed for their sons: Since therefore I acknowledge no difference of sex in your mind relating…to truth, virtue and obedience, I think well to have no thing altered in it from what is [writ for the son]. And since I should rather desire in my wife a healthy constitution, a stomach able to digest ordinary food, and a body that could endure upon occasion both wind and sun, rather than a puling, weak, sickly wretch, that every breath of wind or least hardship puts in danger, I think the meat drink and lodging and clothing should be ordered after the same manner for the girls as for the boys.12 Here we see a clear acknowledgment from Locke that young girls can share their brothers’ capacity for knowledge, good character, and proper deference to parental authority.13 Thus, he recommends they be educated in a similar way. Locke also recommends that they be treated similarly with respect to their bodies— given the same food, drink, clothing, and rooms as boys—to build their strength and vigor. He gives no independent reasoning for why these are good qualities for women to have, but instead he frames them as traits that would make them good companions to their husbands. The second part of Locke’s advice to Mary Clarke in this 1685 letter further stresses the distinctive role that young girls are being raised to fulfill. He develops the argument that cultivating the physical health of young girls is the best preparation for their futures as capable wives. His recommendations are detailed: girls must be allowed to play outdoors in all types of weather; their heads and necks should remain uncovered so that they can get fresh air and sunshine; their feet should be exposed to cold water; and they should exercise and dance at home and even in public sometimes. Locke notes that all of these parenting techniques will fortify the health of little girls so that they can grow into strong women. Free play in fresh air is especially important, he thinks, as “it will make them not only fresh and healthy, but good housewives too.”14 Again, the emphasis is on preparing young girls to become good wives, mothers, and household managers. The connection between physical vigor and housewifery that Locke draws is an apt one when we consider the physical stamina Mary

The Women of Locke’s Circle  77

Clarke’s life required. For nearly three decades, she simultaneously survived multiple pregnancies, raised and educated several children, and ran a complex estate—frequently singlehandedly while her husband traveled for his political career. Her daily life surely required the kind of health and endurance that Locke believed gentlewomen needed.15 Locke does make a few specific recommendations tailor-made for daughters in this letter to Mary Clarke, but again, this advice is not about how to cultivate their minds. Instead, it addresses and reinforces the social currency of women’s physical appearances and their outward displays of manners. He remarks to Clarke that, for young girls, “care too is to be taken of their beauty as much as health will permit,” tacitly acknowledging that even strong girls and women will still have to perform ornamental functions in seventeenth-century aristocratic societies.16 In spite of his recommendation that girls get as much fresh air and sunshine as possible, he advises that they be kept mostly out of direct sunlight to preserve their fair complexions. Likewise, while he recommends that shy girls be encouraged to dance in public, mothers must regulate these outings and watch for signs of over- confidence in their daughters. As he notes, “of the two, too much shamefacedness better becomes a girl than too much confidence, but having more admired than considered your sex I may perhaps be out in these matters, which you must pardon me.”17 In the end, he defers to Mary Clarke on her daughters’ rearing, commenting that since he simply has not done a systematic study of the health, intellect, and manners of women, he must rely on her firsthand experience and judgment.18 Locke never does perform such a study of young women and how to raise them, leaving Mary Clarke and mothers like her to sort out the details for themselves. This final rhetorical flourish is a bit double-edged. On the one hand, it suggests that Locke trusts Mary Clarke’s judgment and expertise when it comes to her own experience as a gentlewoman. On the other hand, he leaves the work of raising daughters nearly entirely to her—highlighting once again the significant and demanding labor of women in the family as protectors of their daughters’ health, teachers of manners and morals, and instructors of higher learning. While Locke gave Mary Clarke some general advice on the physical and moral training of young girls, she apparently never received from him detailed guidance regarding her daughters’ intellectual development. From these extant letters, it seems that the most she gleaned was the general admission that girls should be quite similar to boys in terms of potential. As already noted, Locke wrote to Mary Clarke in 1685 that he observed no marked differences between men and women with respect to virtue or intelligence; likewise, in his dedication to Edward Clarke at the beginning of Some Thoughts Concerning Education, he suggests that only slight adaptations will have to made to the program he sets out for boys to make it suited to girls as well. Locke’s correspondence with Mary Clarke about her individual children, however, should have given him some pause regarding making boys— specifically

78  Emily C. Nacol

her eldest son Edward—the assumed subjects for his study of education. In her letters, Clarke documents her anxieties that Locke’s recommended program of academic study (language, arts, letters, mathematics) for boys has not been working well for her oldest son Edward. As she gently reproaches Locke, I feare you thinke [Edward] forwarder then he is; he is a sort of a downe right honest Blockheaded boy, and what he has in him is pretty hard to find out…he has but a bad memory and it is pretty hard to him to Larne, but he is of a very Good nature, and Loves his Father extreemly and I beleve would doe any thing in the world that he sed he should doe or that he thought would please him, and seemes to be under Great Concerne when he is displeased with him soe much that he Changess Coler as pale as can be and seemes to tremble though his Father resons with him with as Great love and tenderness as can be soe that at Last he seemes to be quite dosed, and yett soone forgetts it.19 Mary Clarke assesses her son’s abilities and voices frankly her concerns about his struggles to learn and his apparently weak memory. As she notes, young Edward has a good-natured will to please and honor his parents, and thus he follows their educational instructions and those of his tutor. She observes, however, that, in spite of his best efforts, he struggles to retain the lessons he is taught and to apply them to future endeavors.20 Because of Edward’s difficulties, Clarke suggests that she and her husband have had better results from whipping him than by reasoning with him when he is at fault.21 In Locke’s response, which he addresses to both Clarkes, he urges moderation when it comes to corporal punishment (in keeping with what Clarke says she and her husband practice). Locke remarks in his letter, I guess by what you say of him that he is a little more tender and soft in his nature than I imagined he would have been, which is a new reason for me to insist on my former rules against rough usage. Let not the rod I beseech you be employed either on him or my little mistress [Betty], but in case of obstinacy and direct refusal to obey your commands. I take the liberty to repeat it here, because your letter seems to intimate that the rod is of most prevalency on him…22 Here we see Locke in dialogue with the Clarkes about the proper modes of disciplining children, in which he favors reason over corporal punishment for sensitive and obedient children like Edward. Whipping is suitable as a punishment only in cases of obstinacy, Locke argues, and is not a proper instrument for helping children learn and develop their reason. This second pair of letters provides some evidence that Locke worked out his views on corporal punishment in response to Mary Clarke’s observations

The Women of Locke’s Circle  79

and experiences guiding a son who struggled to learn but was eager to please his parents.23 The fruits of her queries and observations in her letters to Locke appear in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, where he argues that it requires care, attention, observation, and a nice study of children’s tempers, and weighing their faults well, before we come to this sort of punishment. But is not that better, than always to have the rod in hand, as the only instrument of government; and, by frequent use of it, on all occasions, misapply and render inefficacious this last and useful remedy, where there is need of it? For, what else can be expected, when it is promiscuously used upon every little slip? When a mistake in concordance, or a wrong position in verse, shall have the severity of the lash, in a well-tempered and industrious lad, as surely as a wilful crime in an obstinate and perverse offender; how can such a way of correction be expected to do good on the mind, and set that right? which is the only thing to be looked after…24 Willfulness and obstinacy may, he argues, be met with violence, but corporal punishment is unlikely ever to “do good on the mind.” Its main purpose, after all, is to inflict pain and shame. Locke thus advises against whipping children who make errors in their learning, particularly if the child is a “well-tempered and industrious lad,” reminiscent of the kind Mary Clarke describes in her letters to him about her son. She, as Edward’s mother, performed “care, attention, observation, and a nice study of [her] child’s tempers, and weighing [his] faults well,” recording her efforts for Locke, who used them to cultivate a theory of punishment.25 Mary Clarke did, however, have another child who adapted more proficiently to Locke’s prescriptions and produced the results he anticipated. That child was Betty, Locke’s clear favorite, whom he refers to often as his “little mistress” or “wife” in his letters to the Clarke family. In a letter to Locke, Mary Clarke compares Betty favorably to her second daughter Ann, commenting that Betty “is more afectted with one word then the other with five hundred.”26 Unlike her older brother and younger sister, Betty responds best to reasoning and verbal correction from her parents rather than corporal punishment. In addition to her reasonable character, she was also intellectually gifted. Locke himself acknowledges her strengths in a letter to Mary Clarke, in which he advises that if a tutor cannot be placed in the Clarke home, an excellent older sibling can instruct the smaller children. The example he gives is Betty, the oldest Clarke child living at home in 1693. He writes that Betty, “being the eldest and set right, will have a great influence by her example and instruction over all the rest, and you need not doubt but she will be a good proficient in anything that is taught her, for she is very capable and apt to learn.”27 Locke and Mary Clarke seem to be in agreement here: Betty demonstrated the strongest intellectual capabilities in the Clarke household, and this led Locke to

80  Emily C. Nacol

recommend her for intellectual labor in the family as guide and teacher for her younger brothers and sisters. Mary Clarke and Locke’s high opinion of Betty Clarke’s talents bore out, for she became a lifelong reader and learner, as we see clearly in her independent correspondence with Locke. Their letters reflect that he frequently made presents of books to her, such as in a 1704 letter, in which Betty Clarke writes to Locke, You Sir have furnish’d me with most of the bookes I have; it will therefore be needless to Send you a Catalogue of them, in order to your judging what Sort I want; and besides; I remember when I had the honour to see you Last, You persisted in it, that I should Chuse for My Selfe. These then, are What I Shall take the Liberty to name, and if you approve them not, I hope you will be so kind as to Correct My judgment. Dr Tillottson’s Sermons, Plutarch’s Lives, and a Ladys travels into Spaine, which I thinke is intitled Memoirs of the Court of Spaine.28 This excerpt from Betty Clarke’s letter demonstrates her affectionate relationship to Locke, his persistent interest in her education, and her intellectual progress into adulthood. We discover here that he has gifted books to her for years, and that she has developed independently her interests in theology, morality, history, and culture. Betty Clarke never appears in the educational treatise explicitly linked to her brother Edward, and Locke spends less time and energy corresponding with her mother about her upbringing. But it may well be the case that, as a gentlewoman of reason and learning, Betty Clarke stands as what Mendelson calls “the best vindication of Locke’s liberal theories of education”—theories developed in unacknowledged dialogue with her mother Mary Clarke’s domestic labor, observations about her children, and experiences as a parent.29

Damaris Masham as a Lockean Educator Mary Clarke was not, however, the only woman who left her mark on Locke’s views of how children ought to be educated. The other was Damaris Cudworth Masham (1658–1708), whom Maurice Cranston describes as “closer to Locke than any other human being.”30 Locke met Damaris Cudworth in or just before 1682, and she was one of the last people who sat with him when he died in her home in 1704. As the daughter of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, she grew up at Christ’s College. While there appear to be no formal records of her education, we know that she was fluent in French and was able to use the resources at Cambridge to develop her own keen interest in philosophical inquiry. Upon meeting Locke, she struck up a correspondence with him that was both romantic and philosophical. From 1682 to 1683, they wrote each other

The Women of Locke’s Circle  81

love letters and poems under the pseudonyms of “Philander” and “Philoclea,” until Locke fled England for Holland in the aftermath of the Rye House Plot of 1683. There is some evidence that Damaris Cudworth intended to visit him in Holland, but she never did. In 1685, she married Sir Francis Masham, a widowed Essex landowner with nine children, and together they had a tenth child, a boy. Although Damaris Masham’s romantic entanglement with Locke ended quite early in their relationship, they continued to write each other about their daily lives and shared interests in philosophy until Locke returned to England in 1688. Soon after, he became her guest at her home, Oates. In the early 1690s, as his health began to fail, she made him a permanent member of her household and attended to him until his death in 1704. Locke’s time at Oates was productive for him; along with other work, he composed Some Thoughts Concerning Education during his stay in the Masham household and most likely in conversation with Lady Masham. During Locke’s stay with her, Lady Masham also generated her intellectual work, as Locke encouraged her to compose her two best-known contributions to philosophy: A Discourse Concerning the Love of God (1696) and Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life (1705). She published them both anonymously, and they, along with her correspondence with both Locke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, stand as proof of her rich philosophical mind. Locke comments on her sharp intellect in a 1691 letter to the Dutch theologian Phillipus van Limborch: The lady herself is so much occupied with study and reflection on theological and philosophical matters, that you could find few men with whom you might associate with greater profit and pleasure. Her judgement is singularly keen, and I know few men capable of discussing with such insight the most abstruse subjects, such as are beyond the grasp, I do not say of women, but even of most educated men, and of resolving the difficulties they present.31 Here Locke sets Masham apart for her reason and intellect, identifying her as not simply a singular woman but a remarkable person when it came to her capacity for theological and philosophical inquiry. But more importantly for Locke’s work on childhood development and education, she was also an exemplary teacher for her young son. This we can surmise from Locke’s brief, anonymous mentions of her techniques and capabilities in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. By offering him a stable home, the chance to observe her teaching and parenting efforts with her son, and plenty of philosophical conversation, she, like Mary Clarke, created the conditions for Locke to produce his treatise on education. She bears another similarity to Clarke too—her contributions are obscured by Locke’s writing. While Mary Clarke receives no mention at all in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Damaris Masham appears once but goes unnamed. Midway through

82  Emily C. Nacol

his argument, Locke notes that while writing and thinking about childhood education, he has been living in a house with a child whom his mother has so well instructed…in geography, that he knew the limits of the four parts of the world, could readily point, being asked, to any country upon the globe, or any county in the map of England; knew all the great rivers, promontories, straits, and bays in the world, and could find the longitude and latitude of any place before he was six years old.32 This mother-and-child pair was, of course, Damaris and Francis Masham. Locke recommends in Some Thoughts Concerning Education that small boys should be educated at home, either by well-chosen tutors or by their mothers. This example highlights how a mother, Lady Masham in this case, has instructed her young son in the basics of geography, and in helping him learn them by heart, she has instilled in him both a love of learning and the foundations that prepare him for more challenging lessons as his judgment develops. Through a more circuitous route, we can also see Lady Masham’s domestic labor as a teacher to her son reflected in another moment in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. In a letter from Locke to his friend William Molyneux in 1695, he thanks Molyneux for reporting the positive benefits Locke’s schema of education has had on his son. He also asks Molyneux for salutary details that he can use to persuade his critics. For inspiration, Locke offers an empirical example illustrating his preferred method of language acquisition for children: “I have seen the success of it in a child of the lady, in whose house I am, (whose mother has taught him Latin without knowing it herself when she began).”33 This anecdote corresponds directly to a passage in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, where Locke says that if a child must learn Latin, perhaps his mother can learn it so as to instruct him at home: And indeed, whatever stir there is made about getting of Latin, as the great and difficult business; his mother may teach it him herself, if she will but spend two or three hours in a day with him, and make him read the evangelists in Latin to her: for she need but buy a Latin testament, and having got somebody to mark the last syllable but one, where it is long, in words above two syllables, (which is enough to regulate her pronunciation, and accenting the words,) read daily in the gospels, and then let her avoid understanding them in Latin, if she can…I do not mention this as an imagination of what I fancy may do, but as of a thing I have known done, and the Latin tongue with ease got this way.34 Locke notes that women, who were not traditionally educated in Latin, could teach it to themselves for the purposes of tutoring their sons. We can speculate that the mother who learned Latin to teach her son the language and prepare

The Women of Locke’s Circle  83

him to read classical Roman texts by the method Locke “has known done” and recommends to other parents was again Lady Masham. At a minimum, Locke tells Molyneux that Masham instructed her son in Latin without knowing it herself first, a reference that corresponds closely to the general scenario he lays out for readers in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. These brief asides about childrearing, drawn from what appear to be observations of Masham, suggest that she and Locke were exchanging ideas about learning and education while he wrote and edited Some Thoughts Concerning Education during his stay with her family. At the very least, he was observing her instruction of her son and incorporating exemplary choices of hers into both his manuscript and his correspondence with other parents trying out his advice. Locke’s brief nods to Lady Masham’s intellectual work with her son gesture to an implicit argument for a rigorous education for young girls: according to his own prescriptions, they must grow up to be gentlewomen who are capable of tutoring their children in arts and languages. Here we recall again Locke’s advice to Mary Clarke, when he suggests that Betty, as the eldest daughter and most intellectually capable of the Clarke children, serve as a tutor to her younger siblings. In both cases, we find him suggesting that a well- educated woman performs among the most significant acts of labor in her household: teaching young children. But in his treatise, these mothers and daughters either go entirely unmentioned as in the case of the Clarke women, or like Lady Masham, they are described but never named. Furthermore, we never get a precise account of what their educations, so critical to the functioning of a household, should comprise.

An Argument for Women’s Education Locke’s theory of education would likely not have taken the shape it did without Locke’s relationships with the women in his life and his dependence on their domestic labor. As this chapter has stressed, it is now well established that Locke developed his theoretical and practical views on childrearing and education in dialogue with his friend and cousin, Mary Clarke, who asked for and tested his advice among her children. Her queries and observations about her sons and daughters made their way into Some Thoughts Concerning Education, as Locke worked out answers to her questions. Although Locke dedicates the volume to her husband and his quest to educate his oldest son, one could argue that Mary Clarke’s dogged pursuit of Locke’s perspective on childrearing was the strongest impetus for his decision to circulate his ideas to print. Locke also wrote his educational treatise while living on the Masham estate, where Damaris Masham provided for him the support and care he needed to work. He certainly observed her education of her son Francis and, less certainly, exchanged ideas with her about the shape of an excellent education. It is tempting to argue that Masham in particular must have radically transformed

84  Emily C. Nacol

Locke’s views on women’s capabilities for learning and reason, but, as Melissa Butler reminds us, “this is a highly speculative matter.”35 Locke’s nods to an equal education for girls in Some Thought Concerning Education are only that— a few gestures rather than fully developed arguments, and those are likely due to the pressure that Mary Clarke placed upon him to work out a systematic justification for the nurturing of reason and knowledge in her daughter, as Mendelson argues. There is no comparable evidence that Masham pushed him in this direction, even though she figures anonymously in Some Thoughts Concerning Education as a mother who is reasonable and well educated enough to teach her son. Rather, it was Masham herself who worked out a two-pronged justification for the education of women, in her Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life. In this text, she argues for women as deserving of a rigorous education by dint of their status as rational creatures. That is, for her, education is an intrinsic good for women, one that helps them cultivate their reason and virtue for themselves. But Masham also makes an instrumental argument for women’s training by insisting that it will make them more useful to their families. She singles out mothers as primary teachers of their children, arguing that women’s education is thus of “exceeding consequence to Men throughout the whole remainder of their Lives, as having a strong and oftentimes unalterable influence upon their future Inclinations and Passions.”36 That is, women must be well educated so that they can perform effectively the kind of domestic labor that Locke briefly acknowledges in his treatise on childrearing: they are the essential first teachers of children who are able to help them cultivate the habits of reason and virtue that will support good private lives and, perhaps more importantly, good public lives. In Occasional Thoughts, Masham thus offers in robust form arguments that are only suggested by Locke’s treatise on education. In this case, too, her work remained hidden for many years. Occasional Thoughts was published anonymously, and, for much of the eighteenth century, it was widely believed to be written by Locke.37

Notes 1 John Locke, “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” in Some Thoughts Concerning Education and On the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Nathan Tarcov and Ruth Grant (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, Inc., 1996), § 6. 2 Ibid. 3 Of Locke’s biographers, Maurice Cranston pays the closest attention to his relationships to Masham and Mary Clarke; he even draws periodically on Masham’s memoir of Locke’s life for his own narrative; see Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1957). 4 Sara H. Mendelson, “Child Rearing in Theory and Practice: The Letters of John Locke and Mary Clarke,” Women’s History Review, vol. 19, no. 2 (April 2010), pp. 231–43. 5 As Jacqueline Broad highlights in her exploration of the possibility of Masham’s influence on Locke’s revisions to his Essay on Human Understanding, Locke’s years (1691–1704) at Oates were the most productive of his life. There he produced three editions of Some Thoughts Concerning Education, two editions of The Reasonableness

The Women of Locke’s Circle  85

6 7 8

9 10

11

12 13

14 15 16 17 18

of Christianity, the first and second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity, and major revisions to the Essay; Jacqueline Broad, “A Woman’s Influence? John Locke and Damaris Masham on Moral Accountability,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 67, no. 3 ( July 2006), p. 495. Locke to Mrs. Mary Clarke, May 7, 1682. In The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. de Beer, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 511. Ibid., p. 512. Wit is a less rigorous mode of discernment than judgment or reason, in Locke’s estimation. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke comments that “wit [lies] most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures, and agreeable visions in the fancy.” This is different from the slow deliberation of judgment, which allows people to separate what is clear and true from what is pleasant or entertaining; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), II.11.2 Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Dedicatory Letter. Emphasis added. Mendelson, “Child Rearing in Theory and Practice: The Letters of John Locke and Mary Clarke,” p. 232. Emphasis added. Mendelson’s critical intervention is a recovery of Locke’s correspondence with Mary Clarke for the purposes of showing how Locke effectively erases her contributions from the final treatise—by dedicating it to her husband; by framing it as advice to fathers who wanted to raise sons into rational, virtuous gentlemen; and by occasionally scolding mothers in the text for cosseting their children too much (e.g., Some Thoughts Concerning Education, § 4, 8, and 130). As Mendelson argues, Mary Clarke’s letters to Locke highlight that these were editorial choices on Locke’s part that did not adequately reflect the whole history of the volume. This chapter follows Mendelson’s argumentation, supplementing it with a reflection on the influence of Damaris Masham, another obscured contributor. Joanne Wright notes that Locke tended to Mary Clarke’s physical and mental health during her pregnancies and also gave her advice about the merits of employing a wet nurse for her babies; Joanne H. Wright, “Recovering Locke’s Midwifery Notes,” in Feminist Interpretations of John Locke, ed. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Kirstie M. McClure (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), p. 228. Locke to Mrs. Mary Clarke, January 28/February 7, 1685(?). In The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. de Beer, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 686. Nancy Hirschmann argues that these qualities— “truth, virtue, and obedience”— are “hardly the stuff of reason,” but are instead nods to “sensibility and intuition,” which belong more squarely to women in Locke’s estimation; see Hirschmann, “Intersectionality before Intersectionality was Cool: The Importance of Class to Feminist Interpretations of Locke,” in Feminist Interpretations of John Locke, ed. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Kirstie M. McClure (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), p. 168. Obedience and perhaps even virtue aside, the mention of truth implies that women can participate in reason and judgment, which aid people in discerning truth. Cf. Locke’s account of wit replicated in fn. 8. Locke to Mrs. Mary Clarke, January 28/February 7, 1685, p. 687. Mendelson, pp. 237–38 Locke to Mrs. Mary Clarke, January 28/February 7, 1685, p. 686. Ibid., p. 688. Some of this advice reappears in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, too, but there Locke frames it largely in terms of what boys require: movement and activity unhampered by restrictive clothing or forced stillness. He comments that girls have

86  Emily C. Nacol

19 20

21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

been ill- served by overly straitlaced clothes as a way of arguing for boys to have looser clothing (§ 12), and he notes that young girls can be seen playing for hours as a means of arguing that all children have a tendency to activity that ought to be nurtured and properly directed (§ 152). Here young girls stand as further proof for his arguments about boys’ education, not as independent objects of interest and nurture. Mrs. Mary Clarke to Locke, February 16, 1688. In The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. de Beer, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 373–74. Some of Edward’s difficulties may have been caused by encephalitis, which he nearly died from the year before Mary Clarke wrote this letter; Mendelson, “Child Rearing in Theory and Practice: The Letters of John Locke and Mary Clarke,” p. 239. Mrs. Mary Clarke to Locke, February 16, 1688, p. 373. Locke to Mrs. Mary Clarke and to Edward Clarke, February 28/March 9, 1688. In The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. de Beer, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 385–86. Locke also corresponded with Edward Clarke about the benefits and drawbacks of “the rod” in his letters of February 8, 1686, and April 29, 1687, but his advice is cast in the most general terms. In contrast, Locke responds directly and specifically to Mary Clarke’s notes about her young son, who is the inspiration for Locke’s reflections on childrearing; see Locke to Edward Clarke, January 29/February 8, 1686. In The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. de Beer, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 773; and Locke to Edward Clarke, 19/29 April [1787], In The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. de Beer, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 176. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §78. Emphasis added. Ibid. Mrs. Mary Clarke to Locke, February 16, 1688, p. 373. Locke to Mrs. Mary Clarke, December [30?], 1692. In The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. de Beer, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 611. Elizabeth Clark to Locke, January 21, 1704. In The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. de Beer, vol. 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 172–73. Mendelson, “Child Rearing in Theory and Practice: The Letters of John Locke and Mary Clarke,” p. 241. Cranston, John Locke, p. 214. Locke to Phillipus van Limborch, March 13, 1691. In The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. de Beer, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 238. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, § 178. Locke to William Molyneux, July 2, 1695. In The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E.S. de Beer, vol. 6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 406. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §177. Emphasis added. Melissa Butler, “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke’s Attack on Patriarchy,” ­ in Feminist Interpretations of John Locke. ed. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Kirstie M. McClure (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), p. 117. Broad also urges a similar caution when it comes to how much influence Masham had on Locke’s revisions to his Essay, which he worked on in her home. As she pointedly comments:

The Women of Locke’s Circle  87

History, after all, is full of examples of women who were essential helpmeets and confidantes to great male intellectuals. But it is an entirely different question whether or not we ought to attribute to these women any influence on the key philosophical themes of these men. Broad, “A Woman’s Influence?,” p.  494. One of the contentions of this chapter is that both Mary Clarke and Masham influenced Locke’s views on education by performing and reflecting on their domestic labor. 36 Damaris Cudworth Masham, Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life (London: Printed for A. and J. Churchil at the Black Swan in Pater-noster Row, 1705), p. 12. 37 It was even published under Locke’s name in 1747, so widely was it thought to be his radical, posthumous intervention for women’s education. Broad; “A Woman’s Influence?,” pp. 489–90.

References Broad, Jacqueline. “A Woman’s Influence? John Locke and Damaris Masham on Moral Accountability.” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 67, No. 3, July 2003, pp. 489–510. Butler, Melissa. “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke’s Attack on Patriarchy.” In Feminist Interpretations of John Locke, ed. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Kirstie M.  McClure. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007, pp. 91–121. Cranston, Maurice. John Locke: A Biography. London: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1957. de Beer, E.S., ed. The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke: The Correspondence of John Locke. 8 volumes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976–1989. Hirschmann, Nancy J. “Intersectionality before Intersectionality Was Cool: The Importance of Class to Feminist Interpretations of Locke.” In Feminist Interpretations of John Locke, ed. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Kirstie M. McClure. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007, pp. 155–85. Hirschmann, Nancy J. and Kirstie M. McClure. “Introduction: Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye.” In Feminist Interpretations of John Locke, ed. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Kirstie M. McClure. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007, pp. 1–16. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1689] 1975. ———. Some Thoughts Concerning Education and On the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Nathan Tarcov and Ruth Grant. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, [1693] 1996. Masham, Damaris Cudworth. Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life. London: Printed for A. and J. Churchil at the Black Swan in Pater-noster Row, 1705. Mendelson, Sara H. “Child Rearing in Theory and Practice: The Letters of John Locke and Mary Clarke.” Women’s History Review, Vol. 19, No. 2, April 2010, pp. 231–43. Wright, Joanne H. “Recovering Locke’s Midwifery Notes.” In Feminist Interpretations of John Locke, ed. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Kirstie M. McClure. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007, pp. 213–40.

6* JEANNE DE LARTIGUE, MADAME DE MONTESQUIEU Calvinist Refugee and Wife of an Enlightenment Philosopher Bryan A. Banks

Jeanne de Lartigue (1692?–1770) was the baroness de La Brède, a Calvinist from a wealthy family, and the wife of the French philosopher Montesquieu.1 Her husband wrote two of the most iconic texts of the French Enlightenment, the Lettres persanes (1721) and De l’esprit des loix (1748), and was a prominent member in the Enlightenment epistolary network of the first half of the eighteenth century. Yet, despite his copious writings, Montesquieu rarely mentions Lartigue. Scant letters from Lartigue survive, which is surprising for two reasons. First, there was a veritable correspondence explosion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, attributed most often to rising literacy rates and growing cosmopolitan networks. As Dena Goodman has argued, the ability to write was part of the equipment of a modern woman and a primary means of social mobility,” as much as it was a means of social networking and expressing a gendered subjectivity at a time when gender expectations were changing and contradictory.2 Lartigue and Montesquieu maintained a large, landed estate and Montesquieu’s cosmopolitanism meant that correspondence would have been necessary between the two, especially given that they never hired an estate manager. Lartigue could certainly write and yet very few of her letters remain. The second reason this should come as a surprise is that Montesquieu’s descendants and admirers carefully archived the philosophe’s correspondence; it seems strange that the couple’s letters have disappeared. Lartigue outlived * Revisions of this chapter took place during the COVID19 pandemic. Such revisions would not have been possible without my wife Tiffany Sirignano-Banks whose labor, especially watching our two-year old daughter Cecilia, made it possible for me to devote time and energy to this project at this stage.

Madame de Montesquieu  89

Montesquieu by 15 years, and in that time, her correspondence with her husband would have been in her sole possession. Most likely, she destroyed her letters. Making this assumption—indeed such a speculation may make historians nervous—means Lartigue deliberately silenced herself from the historical record, a secondary effect to what was likely and would have been primarily an effort to eliminate her trace from the records of the repressive Catholic Bourbon regime that continued actively persecuting Calvinists through the eighteenth century. If not Lartigue, then her descendants deliberately weeded her correspondence out of their father’s collection, either because Montesquieu’s place as an intellectual giant cast a long shadow and obscured the role that Lartigue played in his life or out of a sense of self-preservation. The former would certainly have been gendered, indicative of the perceived and real subservient role that women often played in the intellectual production of the Enlightenment era. The latter would reflect the real anxiety that the Calvinist community carried, especially in the realm of inheritance law. That a record existed between Lartigue and Montesquieu seems entirely likely. Montesquieu travelled around Europe and often spent great lengths of time away from his estate, whereas -Lartigue did not. She acted as the estate manager and liaison between Montesquieu and the family’s lawyer. Such a position, even if she were solely the latter, would mean letters would have to have been exchanged between the couple throughout their marriage, and yet their epistolary record is non-existent. Without a material record from which to write a history that included Lartigue, historians have tended to ignore her all together—to leave her in the dustbin of history or to characterize her in ways that reproduced the gendered power dynamics of the period. The only records of Lartigue that exist are those that related to her role as wife and mother. Punctures of light in an otherwise shadowy archival existence come from the registration of her marriage, the birth and baptism of her children, and her death. These few records were all produced by the paternalistic state working in tandem with the Catholic Church. Each was required to validate Lartigue and Montesquieu’s marriage, and their children’s claim to their inheritance. But she is absent in nearly every other instance. What material traces remain of her life emphasize her role in relationship with that paternalistic state as a mother and with the Catholic Church as a non-believer. She is passively recorded in these documents and therefore assumed to be passive. But in Lartigue, as I argue, we also find an opportunity to rethink the historical erasure that archival silences normally lead to. Moreover, by reconstructing the conditions of her life—to the extent possible—we gain critical purchase on the gendered politics which not only produce archival silences around women, but further reify those silences in the scholarly record as evidence of women’s relative absence or passivity in intellectual life. In Lartigue’s case, I argue that the politics of silence in the archive is a byproduct of three cultural knots in the eighteenth century and the historiographical record it inspired. The first of these knots concerns the rife religious

90  Bryan A. Banks

context that informs the apparent erasure of Lartigue from the family’s archive, the second involves gendered notions of intellectual production in the eighteenth century, and the third considers how women’s role in the production or maintenance of archival knowledge might have afforded figures like Lartigue agency to silence themselves as a matter of self- or familial protection. All together, these knots point to the ways in which archival silence might be produced—not by the passivity of the women in question, but by various contextual pressures and the intentional responses to them. Many of the contributions of this volume focus on the ways in which “wives” of western philosophers have been silenced in representational terms. Certainly, the workings of a paternalistic intellectual sphere operated to maintain its gendered hierarchy and did so by sexualizing women, demeaning the intelligence of women, and denigrating the domestic labor of women and the links between such domesticity and the day-today concerns that made the authorial practice possible. While this chapter hits on these themes, it also argues that women played a role in shaping their own representations through their control over the material resources that bore their mark.3 Recognizing that women could shape their own archival image also opens up new possibilities for understanding gendered activism in the eighteenth century. The first section of this chapter examines two prominent mechanisms that have obscured Lartigue: namely, the roles that religion and gender have played in the historiography. The second section reconstructs the relationship that existed between Lartigue and Montesquieu in light of this re- casting of religion and domesticity. The third section reassesses Lartigue’s agency through a rereading of Montesquieu’s corpus as well as linking Lartigue’s silence in the archives to the Calas Affair— a sensational case that forced the French monarchy to recognize certain “rights” of French Calvinists— and later the pro-religious tolerationists’ efforts to erode the anti- Calvinist legislation in France prior to the French Revolution. In this section, I call for historians of the period to recognize the role Calvinist women could play in Enlightenment discourses related to religious toleration but also the role that women increasingly played in representational terms that undercut the Catholic sacral absolutist state model of governance embedded in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Gendered Religion and Lartigue as Calvinist Refugee Jeanne de Lartigue was born in the early 1690s during a period of severe sectarian violence.4 In either case, Lartigue was born just a few years after Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and thus into a France dominated by Catholic-Protestant strife and violence. Many Calvinists in southern France fled the country, often for religious reasons, but as Carolyn Chappell Lougee has shown, where to, when, and by what means they left France depended on a variety of social considerations, ranging from availability of transport to family and business connections.5 Equally complicated was the position of those who

Madame de Montesquieu  91

remained in the country. Whether concealed in rural lands from the violence of Louis XIV’s dragonnades (those paramilitary forces entrusted with converting Calvinists), protected by aristocratic privilege and power, or safeguarded by their numerical majorities in certain southern cities, many Calvinists found ways to weather the storm of the Revocation from within France. From the seventeenth century onwards, Calvinists and historians of French Calvinist persecution refer to the period between the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and the Edict of Toleration (1787) as the Désert, an obvious allusion to the exile of the Jews in the book of Exodus as well as a commentary on the desiccation of the Calvinist religious community many felt. Lartigue was trapped in this Désert, a Calvinist refugee trapped in her own country of origin, who likely chose a secluded lifestyle for her own sense of self-preservation. Silencing can be performative, intentional, and strategic, just as it can be mobilized to maintain gendered hierarchies.6 Paola Bertucci argues that some women participated in the Enlightenment while cultivating “layers of selective visibility” as a means to evade the satirists who would have loved nothing more than spread “poisonous gossip.” 7 In her article, she focused on Mariangela Ardinghelli, who is best known for her translations of two texts by Newtonian physiologist Stephen Hales as well as being the informal correspondent for the Paris Academy of Sciences in Naples in the eighteenth century. Unlike Ardinghelli, it is likely Lartigue crafted her silence to ward off more than just gossip. Her letters would have verified her religion and her relationship, and by extension would have implicated Montesquieu in her Calvinist “crimes,” not to mention would have jeopardized the futures of their children. Louis XIV’s 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes outlawed Calvinism in France and expelled over 200,000 Huguenot refugees from the kingdom. His Revocation also drove over 500,000 Calvinists underground, forcing them to adopt silence as a mode of survival. Lartigue was one of them. This context makes it likely that as Montesquieu stood in staunch opposition to the Revocation, he intentionally kept Lartigue in the shadows, concealing her identity and her faith. Despite the differences between Ardinghelli and Lartigue’s visibilities, Bertucci’s method represents an important interpretative intervention in a historiography that normally reads a woman’s silence as emblematic of her lack of agency. Here we need to confront two of the most powerful prongs of female disempowerment in the eighteenth century—religious dogma and domesticity. Reading both as forms of captivity replicates an overly teleological understanding of the eighteenth century as a stepping stone to secular modernity and gender equality, as a period of transition, wherein abandonment of the dogma and the domestic sphere represented the only outlet to the modern world. Such an understanding is deeply problematic as the historian Mita Choudhury and the anthropologist Saba Mahmood have shown. Choudhury examines the French scandal that surrounded Catherine Cadière, who had accused her Jesuit confessor of seduction, heresy, and bewitchment in the 1730s. Choudhury argues

92  Bryan A. Banks

that religious mysticism “represented a feminized form of spirituality because it defied the boundaries between the rational and the emotional.” “Female mysticism” became “a mutant product of female intellect.” Choudhury pushes beyond such facile and gendered-political interpretations to show that mystical women exercised “an authoritative position within their immediate social world by placing them so close to the divine.”8 This positioning is key to understanding the ways that women could advocate for themselves and affect change. As Mahmood articulated in the context of Islamic revivalism in Egypt in the 1990s, women in nominally understood religious restrictive spaces developed modes of activism for both political and social change.9 Pious Muslim women found power in their legally and religious restricted environments. It stands to reason that Jeanne de Lartigue could do the same, using her Calvinist asceticism and persecution to shape her husband’s understandings of Christian sectarian conflict. Religion and gender were bound together. As Natalie Zemon Davis has shown for early modern France, “the female sex was thought the disorderly one par excellence,” born from “physiology” and “nature” and in need of manly guidance. For Jean Calvin, a moderate on this account, argued that “God reckoned it [namely female disorderliness] among the visitations of God’s anger.” The “proposed remedies for female unruliness,” Zemon Davis argued, was [r]eligious training that fashioned the reins of modesty and humility; selective education that showed a woman her moral duty without enflaming her undisciplined imagination or loosing her tongue for public talk; honest work that busied her hands; and laws and constraints that made her subject to her husband.10 Wrapped up in Zemon Davis’s analysis are complex issues of nature, nurture, female disorder, male order, and vice versa. A gendered bifurcation of work (male public spaces and female domestic ones) existed, especially in the realm of discourse and the opportunities for women to control the use of their dowries had arguably become more limited by the eighteenth century. Despite this, women still found ways to express themselves and their agency. Like religion, their gendered labor could be used to affect change. Lartigue’s silence today reflects her need to conceal her religious identity, but the replication of her silence in the historiography also bears the weight of gendered politics about domesticity. Nearly all the primary sources that mention Lartigue document her role as a wife or a mother and therefore reinforce the passive domesticity narrative of the period. But does domesticity necessarily equate to passivity? Scholars like Meghan Roberts have re-evaluated the productive role of the domestic housewife in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, arguing that strategic marriages and the domestic duties of a wife made it possible for men to engage in the literary and philosophical spheres of the Enlightenment, and therefore, the role of individuals like Lartigue should be recognized.11

Madame de Montesquieu  93

Wives supported and therefore made philosophical celebrity possible. Lartigue’s relative silence in Montesquieu’s writings might appear as the byproduct of this domesticity and of Lartigue’s primary role as wife and estate manager. Jennifer Popiel, like Roberts, challenges the traditional understanding of the domestic sphere as inherently oppressive and exclusionary. While Roberts focuses on the forms of support wives provided to their philosophical husbands, Popiel argues that a cultural history of “Rousseauian domesticity” emphasizes the “rhetoric of self-­control and gender difference” reveals that Enlightenment and later liberal rhetoric led to an “increased emphasis on individualism.” Women could be individual actors even if their gendered position within the family circumscribed their role in the public sphere. As individuals, women could speak in terms of individual rights and therefore played a role in the foundations of the rise of liberal societies.12 Recognizing that both religious affiliation and domestic role could provide women outlets for individual expression and protection should be the starting point for an analysis of figures like Jeanne de Lartigue. Contextualizing her faith allows us to understand her chosen silence. It also provides us with a grain against which to read Montesquieu’s commentary on intra-­Christian sectarian violence and the politics of religion in the first half of the eighteenth century as well as the Enlightenment. Refocusing our interpretation on the role Lartigue played as wife, mother, and estate manager forces us to recalibrate our understanding of the role of wives of canonical intellectuals. Exploring ­Lartigue’s gendered intellectual labor and the context of Protestant persecution of the period better explains Lartigue’s silence in the record than do any simple assumptions of her docile temperament, which reproduce the gendered power dynamics of the period. In examining Lartigue’s life and what impact she might have had on her husband’s work, it is important to unpack both the religious politics and gendered constructions behind the archive. In Marisa Fuentes’s groundbreaking book, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, she puts forth a methodology for examining gender and race through documents manufactured in service of the power that sought to regulate black female bodies. In pivoting her analysis to the archive, she encourages researchers to ask how archives commit acts of violence against the subjects they inherently silence.13 While Lartigue was not an enslaved African woman, she was a displaced Calvinist, living under a Catholic sacral absolutist regime that produced documents that served that Catholic mission. Those document producers, not directly linked to the state, still produced documents that conformed to the rules of the system, intentionally silencing those they sought to efface in order to protect. In histories of the Enlightenment, historians have often focused on the philosophical reasons for Montesquieu’s anti-­clericalism, religious toleration, and critiques of statecraft. Rebecca Kingston argued that an understanding of Montesquieu’s religious toleration required an examination of the “context of his day.” In her analysis, Kingston’s contextualization remains limited to a

94  Bryan A. Banks

brief discussion of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the intellectual context of Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, “the founders of modern school of natural law,” as well as the debates between Jansenists and Jesuits. In her chapter, she fails to mention Jeanne de Lartigue.14 If not early modern natural law theorists, then historians tend to focus on Montesquieu’s examinations of eastern cultures—Persian, Mongolian, and Japanese—whose governments could appear atrocious and yet still reflect on the positive effects of religious toleration.15 Historians have placed Montesquieu, then, in a longue durée intellectual tradition as well as within the global imagination of eighteenth-century Europe but have largely failed to recognize the most immediate context—his Calvinist wife, Jeanne de Lartigue.

Gender and Intellectual Production: Re- examining Lartigue’s Life Biographies of Montesquieu and classical works on the Enlightenment replicated Lartigue’s silence, often allowing their own gendered politics to influence the interpretation of said absence. They fail to mention her at all or include her as a footnote to the story of her husband, often diminishing her to a few reductive adjectives that prefigured any real examination of her life; the possible roles she played within the family; and, least of all, the impact she had on Montesquieu’s corpus. In Albert Sorel’s Montesquieu (1887), Lartigue received one mention: In the following year, he married Mademoiselle Jeanne de Lartigue, whose family, with its military traditions, was of Calvinist origin. She was better known for her goodness than for her beauty, for timidity than her charm, for her virtue than her loveliness.16 Émile de Perceval, in Montesquieu et la vigne, described Jeanne de Lartigue as “an ardent Calviniste.” She was “serious and sage.” She was “an exemplary mother, silent, discrete, and modest.”17 In 1989, Judith N. Shklar published Montesquieu and only referenced Lartigue in one paragraph. Shklar indicates that Lartigue and Montesquieu were wed in a “very quiet ceremony,” she was a “practicing Calvinist and continued to adhere to her faith in spite of the real dangers and disabilities that this involved,” and “[w]e known nothing more about her, except that she was the mother of Montesquieu’s children – a son and two daughters.”18 Her Calvinism appears as a curious detail in Sorel’s book and as a somber note in Shklar’s biography of Montesquieu. Lartigue was the single daughter of a noble Calvinist family caught between their faith and the need to maintain their financial security. Lartigue’s father, Pierre de Lartigue, was ennobled in 1704. He was a lieutenant- colonel and had been wounded at the battle of Namur in the Spanish Netherlands.

Madame de Montesquieu  95

He and his family were Protestants, but his service in the military and probably their considerable properties in Martillac, neighboring the La Brède estate of Montesquieu’s family, and Clairac in the Agenais county of France seemed to outweigh any deep consideration of their religious affiliation. Regardless, Pierre de Lartigue’s family was in a hard-pressed situation in both religious and social terms. As they only had one daughter, the family had “fallen into distaff,” with few options for maintaining the family’s position and providing a dowry to her husband-to-be. Protestant families had fewer options than Catholic families when finding themselves in this situation. Without a male heir to attract a dowry from another family, daughters could prove the ruin of a noble household. In a Catholic family, the patriarch could choose to send their daughter to a convent with a meager pension from the family. Doing so had the obvious benefits of maintaining the family’s financial security through the guise of respectable religious devotion. Calvinist families like the Lartigue’s did not have this option.19 Jeanne de Lartigue’s marriage to Montesquieu in 1714 was complicated, but ultimately advantageous to both sides. Montesquieu had already signed a marriage contract with Marguerite Denis, the daughter of a wine merchant from Les Chartrons. According to this contract, signed on February 12, 1715, Montesquieu would receive a dowry of 75,000 livres. Montesquieu broke the contract within two weeks and signed a new one with Jeanne de Lartigue on March 22. This contract came with a 100,000 livres dowry and by most interpretations, reflected Montesquieu’s own personal wishes and perhaps his father’s desire for his son to marry someone from their property’s environs.20 The two had three children in total. Their first was a son by the name of Jean-Baptiste, born in February 1716, followed by two girls—Marie Catherine in 1717 and Denise in 1727. From the Lartigue’s vantage point, the marriage would prove integral to the maintenance of the family unit and the security of their properties. As Jeanne de Lartigue would be married to the Baron of La Brède, the family would have some assurances over their security in the event the dragonnades returned. Above most other considerations, both Montesquieu and Lartigue shared an interest in increasing the landed capital of their family. Despite Montesquieu’s preferences for extravagances, it appears that Lartigue led a rather ascetic lifestyle, in keeping with her Calvinism.21 The importance of Lartigue’s strategic marriage needs to be underscored. It was a primary means to securing the Calvinist families in the Désert period. Historians often direct attention to those fleeing the country to the refuge, to the violence of the Camisard Wars (1702–1710), or to the underground network of pastors, educated at the Lausanne seminary, as examples of Huguenot agency in the wake of the Revocation. Those unable to relocate or unwilling to fight found other ways to secure their persons and their personal faith. For the Lartigues, this was marriage to a powerful, aristocratic family. From the captivity of the post-Revocation repressive religious regime of the early eighteenth

96  Bryan A. Banks

century, Jeanne de Lartigue entered into a system of marital “captivity,” one often dominated by “patriarchal household politics”—“integrally interconnected” with the political system of absolutism as Suzanne Desan has shown.22 Yet, because of her status as a persecuted religious minority, her strategic marriage to the Catholic Montesquieu made her marriage less about captivity—the derogation of her freedom of conscience and agency— and more about her security, from which she might encourage her husband to publish arguments beneficial to the displaced and persecuted Protestant group. While the marriage was strategic, and an argument of this chapter is that we need to strip back our gendered assumptions about eighteenth- century French women and their agency, this does not necessarily mean the pair made for fast or devoted partners. There is evidence for a disconnect between the two, but that this disconnect was born out of ill will or the domineering personality of Montesquieu and not a mutual respect for the situation of Calvinists is unfounded. Montesquieu regularly left his estate for long periods of times. He travelled and moved in cosmopolitan circles, leaving Lartigue behind to run the estate or at least to act as his intermediary with the family’s lawyer, Grenouilleau.23 Montesquieu never hired an estate manager while he was away, which meant that Lartigue’s role on behalf of the family was key. Assuming that she only played the role of an interlocutor and everything about the estate was dictated by the patriarch in absentia is too farcical a position to take seriously. Moreover, this relationship makes it even more likely that an extensive correspondence collection must have existed at some point and that this correspondence collection necessarily must have been destroyed. One might interpret the issue involving the purchase of a mill in Luzié and another property in SaintMorillon in 1738 as evidence of this disconnect. The original sale, the deed for which was signed by Lartigue, cost the family 8,200 livres. Montesquieu contested the sale, arguing that his wife did not have the authority to make such a purchase. Eight years later in 1746, Montesquieu would purchase the same properties for 5,000 livres. Does this mean that they were necessarily estranged? Might Montesquieu have used Lartigue and her gender as a scapegoat to obtain a better purchase price on the properties? It is possible. Either way, we must be weary of interpreting what evidence does exist through the veil of the gendered politics of the period. Lartigue played a role in the family. Her labor made the Montesquieu estate and Montesquieu’s travel and corpus possible.

Rethinking Silence as an Act of Agency in Montesquieu’s Corpus and Beyond We should be weary of reading Montesquieu as a simple cipher for Lartigue. Just as it is easy to filter what few material traces of Lartigue’s existence through our gendered assumptions, we also need to read Montesquieu against, not through, his relationship with Lartigue and the Calvinist community. Operating under

Madame de Montesquieu  97

such a strict linear logic would fail to account for their time away from each other, for their differences of opinion, and ultimately for their individual motivations. So rather than transplanting Montesquieu’s words into Lartigue’s mouth, we should read and interpret Montesquieu against his context in religious as well as gendered terms. Montesquieu was a nobleman, with a taste for extravagance and cosmopolitanism. The former probably stood in stark contrast with Lartigue’s ascetism. Montesquieu, an avowed Catholic, travelled to Rome as well as Protestant centers in England and the German States. What lessons he gleaned from growing up in southern France, where Calvinists were not as rare as in other parts of the country, and being married to Lartigue were undoubtedly reinforced in his travels—where he even encountered another Calvinist, Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt, who was a prolific contributor to the Encyclopédie and avid critic of Louis XIV’s Revocation. His cosmopolitanism and understanding of religious difference is borne out in his Lettres persanes (first published in 1721, six years after marrying Lartigue). As Ronald Schechter has noted, the Lettres represented Montesquieu’s first real engagement with the origins and “possibility of difference.”24 Montesquieu’s stance, especially on religious difference, was often contradictory. Through a series of epistolary exchanges, Montesquieu’s fictitious Persians, Usbek and Rica, reflect on their travels through Europe. On several occasions, their letters contain full sections describing curious features of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim communities and cultural beliefs. Throughout, there is an air of triviality to the Persians’ remarks, as if only “little” differences kept mankind in perpetual sectarian conflict. In these missives, Montesquieu laid blame at the feet of those heads of state—read Louis XIV—who “worried the Christians” over minute theological differences: We trouble the state, we torment even ourselves, to make men receive the non-essential points of religion; and we are like that conqueror of China, who forced his subjects into a general revolt, because he wanted to oblige them to cut their hair and their nails.25 Little differences and non- essential points sparked discord and underscored the futility of projects designed to create a homogenous, religious population. Montesquieu effaced differences between Catholics and Protestants for the rhetorical purpose of ridiculing the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but elsewhere in the same text, he accentuated those differences. Where Montesquieu chose to place Protestantism and Catholicism in starker relief reveals the importance of his relationship with Lartigue. In 1716, two years after their marriage, Lartigue gave birth to their first child, a son. In Catholic countries, fathers “condemn their children” to the celibacy of the Catholic cloister and convent, according to his Persian letter writers. “The practice of continence has meant the loss of more men that ever has been

98  Bryan A. Banks

destroyed by plague or warfare.” Patriarchs sentence their children to these places “like so many pits, wherein future generations are buried alive.” Fathers forced sons and daughters to take vows of abstinence, binding them forever in the name of faith, privilege, and perhaps as a way to calm their own financial distaff.26 Such strong words owed particularly to the fact that Montesquieu’s family had clothed quite a few family members in the cloth. Jacob de Secondat, Montesquieu’s father, was one of ten children— six boys and four girls. Of the six boys, three entered the church, and of the four girls, three became nuns. Calvinists, on the other hand, the Persians noted, protected and guaranteed the “rights of propagation.” Calvinists rejected the monastic existence as artifice or lacking any biblical basis on which to abandon generations of children. Calvinists purported to regenerate the Church, back to its origins before the Catholic Church led Christians astray. Montesquieu even notes that Calvinists looked like Romans who had instituted penal laws against anti-marital practices. Romans and Reformed alike recognized the utility of marriage and the social and economic benefits of propagation. The “rights of propagation” were almost certainly on Montesquieu’s mind as he wrote the Lettres persanes—he ­ was then a father of two (his son was born in 1716, his first daughter came in 1717, while their second daughter came after its publication in 1727). Why did Montesquieu draw this distinction? He could have just as easily leveled critiques at the Catholic Church without using a Calvinist cipher, if not to reveal his debt to Lartigue? Recognizing his familial influences provides an important lens through which to consider how Montesquieu theorized the role of the family in relation to political society. Montesquieu saw the family body as conjoined with the body politic through the topic of labor. Cloistered Catholic children did not produce for the kingdom, according to Montesquieu, whereas Protestant families and therefore kingdoms flourished because they had more bodies to work. The Protestants have grown richer and more powerful, and the Catholics weaker. The Protestant countries ought to be, and really are, better peopled than those of the Catholics: from whence it follows, first, that their public revenues are more considerable, because they are augmented in proportion to the number of those who pay them: secondly, that their lands are better cultivated: lastly, that trade flourishes better there, because there are more people who have their fortunes to make.27 Montesquieu carries the critique forward by attacking the pedagogical imperatives of Catholic seminary education. Usbek reported that Catholic countries neglected the cultivation of their lands and industry in favor of “learning five or six words of a dead language”—those needed to say mass.28 Usbek predicted that “if the present state of affairs continues in Europe, it is impossible for the Catholic Church to last five hundred more years.”29 The family’s labor

Madame de Montesquieu  99

portended the fate of the body politic, just as Lartigue’s management of the family estate in Gascony made Montesquieu’s philosophical career possible. How much this perception on Protestant parenting owes to Lartigue is difficult to gauge. The family’s two daughters were educated in convents, not forced into the sisterhood, but educated in the Catholic tradition nonetheless.30 Montesquieu regularly extrapolated from the particular to the universal. He was the author of De l’esprit de loix (first published in 1748) after all. Whereas, in his Lettres persanes, Montesquieu represented Protestants in order to analyze the relationships between religion and society or religion and the economy, in De l’esprit des lois, Protestantism became an ideal type, whose nature was predetermined by climate and geography. The [Protestant] people of the north have, and will forever have, a spirit of liberty and independence, which the people of the south have not; and therefore, a religion which has no visible head, is more agreeable to the independency of the climate than that which has one.31 Whether this spirit of independence reflected his encounters with other Protestants or travels through Protestant countries is hard to ascertain. How much Montesquieu’s notion of Protestant freedom of conscience depended on the work of earlier Huguenot writers, especially people like Pierre Bayle or Pierre Jurieu, is difficult to gauge. Independence developed the freedom of conscience that undergirded the Protestant Reformation. Jean Calvin, who “having behind him either people who already lived in republics or obscure bourgeoisie leaders living in monarchies, was easily able to do away with honors and dignities.”32 Independence encouraged Protestants to develop a “culture of work,” to focus on economic and commercial productivity, and to reduce the importance of dogma and ritual. Both the links between Calvinism and independent thought and economic vitality were common French cultural constructs in the eighteenth century. It may prove too far a stretch to attach Montesquieu’s notion of independent freedom of conscience to the largely independent lifestyle Lartigue cultivated, but it does seem that his relationship with her would have reinforced some of these ideas. Writing the history of religious toleration in the Enlightenment requires us to recognize the role that Calvinist women played. The 1762–1763 Calas Affair is probably the best known example of French persecution of Calvinists in the eighteenth century and an example of the marginalization of French Calvinist women from the Désert period’s historiography. In 1762, the son of Anne-Rose Calas (née Cabibel, and referred to as such here so as to avoid confusion) and Jean Calas, Marc-Antoine Calas, committed suicide in Toulouse. Jean Calas originally reported that an unknown assailant had killed his son in their home. Catholics in the city spread rumors that the father killed the son to stop his conversion to Catholicism. In the face of considerable Catholic outcry, Jean

100  Bryan A. Banks

Calas later recanted his earlier statement, revealing that his son had committed suicide. Calas had hoped to save his son’s body from public humiliation, which was custom in the city. Unfortunately, Calas’s new testimony only fueled antiCalvinist feelings in the city. Soon, Jean Calas was placed on trial for his son’s death, convicted, and then executed on the wheel. During the trial, Cabibel had also been imprisoned and her knowledge of her son’s suicide had been contested based on her earliest testimony. Yet, after her husband’s sentence was passed, she and most of her family were released, with the exception of Pierre Calas who had been banished for irreligious talk.33 For Voltaire, the “veuve Calas” (widow Calas) played a central role in the rehabilitation of the Calas family. She was a matriarch left without the resources to lead the family back from the brink of dissolution. Voltaire published a tract on tolerance and began working on gaining the attention of the Parlement of Paris, a court with the authority to overturn the rulings of lower courts like the Parlement of Toulouse, which convicted Jean Calas. Their endeavor proved difficult, but ultimately successful. The case was overturned, and restitution was eventually decided upon. In 1765, the Calas family would be granted money directly from the king’s purse—12,000 livres to Cabibel directly, a considerable amount of money. Nanette and Rose, Cabibel’s two daughters, were released from their convents in Toulouse and returned to her custody. Cabibel became such a prominent part of the campaign for justice for Jean Calas that, in 1791, a play was put on at the height of the French Revolution entitled La veuve Calas à Paris, ou Le triomphe de Voltaire, pièce en un acte, en prose by M. J.-B. Pujoulx. The play retells the journey Cabibel made to Paris that ultimately saw the highest court in France strike down the Parlement of Toulouse’s decision, which ended her husband’s life.34 Plenty of records exist detailing the life of Cabibel, mostly because of this infamous affair, but the historiography has similarly effaced her from much of the story. David Bien’s classic text, The Calas Affair (1960), references her mostly in passing, replicating her role as a passive figure rather than tracing her prominent role throughout. In the history of the pursuit of religious toleration for Calvinists in the eighteenth century, a tension exists between the role that the Enlightenment of Montesquieu and Voltaire, and the efforts of legists in the 1760s and 1780s to break down the legal barriers that kept Calvinists second- class subjects to the king. Those men trained as lawyers often wrote tracts that derided the legal restraints placed on Calvinists as inimical to the monarchy’s interests and to those of the public— an idea mobilized in a way to assert authority beyond the king’s grasp.35 Most of these tracts, like Condorcet’s Réflexions d’un citoyen catholique sur les lois de France relatives aux protestants (1778) and Chrétien- Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes’s Mémoire sur le marriage des Protestants (1779), and many others, focused on the issue of the Protestant family, on issues related to bastardy, and on the inheritance of widows like Lartigue and Cabibel.36 In their arguments, legists focused on the civil realities of French subjects rather

Madame de Montesquieu  101

than their religious affiliations. They focused on the ability of Calvinist family members to act on behalf of the family unit, to register their births, marriages, and deaths. These legists argued that it was in the benefit of the state to have transparent records of the people in order to govern more efficiently and ideally more justly. Montesquieu’s arguments against the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and his depictions of Calvinists across Europe undoubtedly contributed to the swelling tide of pro-religious tolerationists that pushed Louis XVI to issue the Edict of Toleration in 1787. If we recognize that Lartigue supported Montesquieu and Montesquieu championed religious toleration for Calvinists, then we should also recognize Lartigue’s role in the advancement of religious toleration. Lartigue’s story sheds new light on the advancement of religious toleration in the eighteenth century while complicating our understandings of the gendered intellectual labor that promoted its cause. Her story also challenges us to question gendered silences in the archive and the ways we re-introduce those voices into our histories. Erring on the side of agency does greater justice to silenced women and women choosing to silence themselves than does assuming and propagating gendered understandings of women as timid, quiet, reserved, and maternal. In the end, it is quite possible that Lartigue’s progeny or their descendants destroyed Lartigue’s records. We may never know what exactly happened to them. Regardless, historians need to wield the power of speculation in ways that do not replicate the gendered or religious power structures of the past. Lartigue did not leave a strong material trace and Montesquieu did not explicitly mention her in his work. This does not mean that she necessarily was meek, mild, virtuous, or living happily in her domestic bliss; instead, a contextualization of their relationship and the religious policies of the French Old Regime rather paint a picture of Lartigue’s safe haven amidst persecutory violence. Montesquieu was an oasis during the Désert period of French Calvinist persecution and her marriage to the philosophe certainly shaped his understandings of the Reformed faith.

Conclusion On July 13, 1770, Lartigue died. She was buried in Bordeaux and, through some politicking, was inhumed in accordance with her faith so as to “avoid scandal that could occasion such affairs.”37 That the place and ritual of her burial could incite controversy stood as a testament to the precarity of the French Calvinist population. Lartigue’s attachment to Calvinism during the Désert period of French history shaped her existence as much as her gender and her domesticity, if not more, and it was through the latter that Lartigue found refuge and a means to have her own religious self-interest advocated. Persecution against Calvinists remained fairly constant into the second half of the

102  Bryan A. Banks

eighteenth century. The Calvinist pastor, Francois Rochette was executed in Toulouse in February 1762, and—the lesser known—Francois Charmuzy died in a prison cell in Meaux after several days of detention in April 1771. Placing Lartigue in the context of eighteenth-century French religious history also forces us to take stock of the myriad experiences of Huguenot refugees— either abroad or internally displaced in France— as they carved out lives for themselves, as they survived, and as they pushed back against the Catholic, paternalistic Bourbon state. Too often, histories of French Calvinist persecutions in the eighteenth century lose sight of the role that women played. Jeanne de Lartigue’s silence in the archival and historical record was the byproduct of three cultural knots—religious persecution, gendered intellectual labor, and the production of the archival record itself, which reinforced the power structures determined by the first two. To conclude this chapter and to provide one final piece of evidence for these three knots, I want to revisit the only sustained, albeit minor and somewhat ironic, debate that surrounds Jeanne de Lartigue. In his “Madame de Montesquieu with some considerations on Thérèse de Secondat,” Robert Shackleton identified one, particularly colorful, letter that has often been attributed to Lartigue. The letter, a “single sheet of paper 22.7 cm long and 16.5 cm high, which was folded in two to create four pages and folded again for dispatch,” has one signature on it, Madame de Montesquieu.38 Given the letter’s amorous content, it seemed like a safe assumption that the author of the letter was Jeanne de Lartigue, Madame de Montesquieu, and not one of the other adult women of the Montesquieu family. Shackleton’s attention to detail is methodical and calculating. He traces the letter through the literature on Montesquieu back to its earliest printing, in the two-volume 1914 edition of Correspondence de Montesquieu, edited and published by François Gebelin. From Gebelin’s curation of Montesquieu’s letters, a number of historians have assumed Lartigue was the author of this particular letter. Yet Shackleton convincingly shows the letter’s provenance was that of Montesquieu’s sister, Thérèse de Secondat, superior of the convent of the Filles de Notre-Dame at Saint-Paulin. Analyzing the content, contextualizing the content against opinions of Thérèse de Secondat’s acquaintances, and even sleuthing his way through dilettante handwriting analysis, Shackleton’s aim thoroughly disproved Lartigue as the author. Shackleton does not unpack the gendered sentimental language of the letter, nor does he address the gendered interpretation of the surname (Madame de Montesquieu) that, in part, led to this archival misidentification. Shackleton cast Lartigue back into the archival shadows. The subject of Shackleton’s chapter was explicitly the letter and not Lartigue at all. How should we view this false identification? For this, we need to return to Gebelin, the initial compiler of Montesquieu’s letters. Born in 1884 in Bordeaux, Gebelin became a librarian and French art historian of considerable reputation. He authored several books on primarily French Renaissance sculpture and architectural history, having also published on French intellectuals like Montaigne

Madame de Montesquieu  103

and Montesquieu. His thesis was a political history of the Maréchal de Matignon in Guyenne during the first years of Henri IV’s reign (1589–1594). While his status as an early modernist remained tried-and-true, one wonders why his interest shifted in such ways. Little work has been done on Gebelin and his role in twentieth-century French academe, but his obituary in the Bibliothèque de l’école des Chartes, from 1974, does reveal one very important detail. Placed at the end of the two-page paean to his character and life’s work is a note describing his burial as a “somber and moving funeral” in the Calvinist “temple of l’Oratoire du Louvre.”39 Gebelin was a Calvinist. Identifying the letter as Lartigue’s made sense on the surface, and Gebelin’s Calvinism likely made any attempt to further interrogate the document to find its original author unlikely. Gendered assumptions about who Madame de Montesquieu was combined with a culturally rife religious context of a Reformed (i.e., Calvinist) compiler to produce an imperfect archive. In that production, Gebelin reinforced the gendered role of Lartigue (one especially amorous in nature) while also attempting to bring out her voice from a historical record otherwise void of her, yet his misstep came in not fully contextualizing Lartigue and Montesquieu’s relationship against the backdrop of religious persecution that led to her silence in the first place.

Notes * Revisions of this chapter took place during the COVID19 pandemic. Such revisions would not have been possible without my wife Tiffany Sirignano-Banks whose labor, especially watching our two-year old daughter Cecilia, made it possible for me to devote time and energy to this project at this stage. 1 For purposes of clarity so as not to have Jeanne de Lartigue mixed up with her husband, Montesquieu, I have chosen to refer to her by her maiden name. 2 Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 1–2. 3 This approach borrows from the historical school of thought often referred to as “history from below,” a phrase popularized by E.P Thompson; see E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980). 4 Most accounts of her death note she was 78 years old, which would place her birth in 1692, while some place her age at 81, putting her birth year at 1689. For 78, see Pierre Meller, Familles protestantes de Bordeaux: D’après les registres de l’état civil avant 1793 (Bordeaux : Imprimerie Générale É. Crugy, 1902), 36. For 81, see Jules Delpit, Le fils de Montesquieu (Bordeaux: Paul Chollet, 1888), 79. 5 Carolyn Chappell Lougee, Facing the Revocation: Huguenot Families, Faith, and the King’s Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 3–4. 6 On silencing in the historical record, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (New York: Beacon Press, 1995). 7 Paola Bertucci, “The In/visible Woman: Mariangela Ardinghelli and the Circulation of Knowledge between Paris and Naples in the Eighteenth Century,” Isis, 104, no. 2 ( June 2013), 228. 8 Mita Choudhury, The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint: A Tale of Sex, Religion, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 43–45. 9 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: ­ Princeton University Press, 2011), 4.

104  Bryan A. Banks





­







Madame de Montesquieu  105

33 David Bien, The Calas Affair: Persecution, Toleration, and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Toulouse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 128. 34 Pujoulx, M. J.-B, La veuve Calas à Paris, ou Le triomphe de Voltaire, pièce en un acte, en prose (Paris, 1791). 35 Keith Michael Baker, “Public Opinion as Political Invention,” in Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 167–202. 36 Geoffrey Adams, The Huguenots and French Opinion, 1685–1787: The Enlightenment Debate on Toleration (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1991), 269; Bryan A. Banks, “The French Protestant Enlightenment of Rabaut Saint-Étienne: Le Vieux Cévenol and the Sentimental Origins of Religious Toleration,” French History 32, no. 1 (March 2018), 25–44. 37 Delpit, Le fils de Montesquieu, 79. 38 Robert Shackleton, “Madame de Montesquieu with Some Considerations on Thérèse de Secondat,” in Women and Society in Eighteenth-Century France: Essays in Honour of John Stephenson Spink, ed. Eva Jacobs, W. H. Barber et al. (London: Athlone Press, 1979), 229. 39 Verlet Pierre, “François Gébelin (1884–1972),” Bibliothèque de l’école des Chartes, 132, no. 2. (1974), 385–86. The temple of l’Oratoire du Louvre was transferred to the Parisian Calvinist community under Napoleon I in 1811.

References Adams, Geoffrey. The Huguenots and French Opinion, 1685–1787: The Enlightenment Debate on Toleration. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1991. Baker. Keith Michael. “Public Opinion as Political Invention,” in Inventing the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 167–202 Banks, Bryan A. “The French Protestant enlightenment of Rabaut Saint-Étienne: Le Vieux Cévenol and the sentimental origins of religious toleration,” French History 32, no. 1 (March 2018), 25–44. Bertucci, Paola. “The In/visible Woman: Mariangela Ardinghelli and the Circulation of Knowledge between Paris and Naples in the Eighteenth Century,” Isis, 104, no. 2 ( June 2013), 226–49. Bien, David. The Calas Affair: Persecution, Toleration, and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Toulouse. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960. Callanan, Keegan. Montesquieu’s Liberalism and the Problem of Universal Politics. Cambridge: ­ Cambridge University Press, 2018. Choudhury, Mita. The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint: A Tale of Sex, Religion, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century France. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. Dalat, Jean. Montesquieu: Chef de famille en lute avec ses beaux-parents, sa femme, ses enfants. Paris: Lettres modernes, 1984. Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays by Natalie Zemon Davis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975. Delpit, Jules. Le fils de Montesquieu. Bordeaux: Paul Chollet, 1888. Desan, Suzanne. The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Eylaud, J.-M. Montesquieu chez ses notaires de la Brède. Bordeaux: Delmas, 1956. Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

106  Bryan A. Banks

Goodman, Dena. Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. Kingston, Rebecca E., “Montesquieu on Religion and on the Question of Toleration” in Montesquieu’s Science of Politics: Essays on the Spirit of Laws, ed. David W. Carrithers, Michael A. Mosher, and Paul A. Rahe. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, 375–408. Le Mao, Caroline. Chronique du bordelaise au crepuscule du grand siècle: le memorial de Savignac. Bordeaux: Presses University de Bordeaux, 2004. Lougee, Carolyn Chappell. Facing the Revocation: Huguenot Families, Faith, and the King’s Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, PA: Princeton University Press, 2011. Meller, Pierre. Familles protestantes de Bordeaux: D’après les registres de l’état civil avant 1793. Bordeaux: Imprimerie Générale É. Crugy, 1902. Perceval, Émile de. Montesquieu et la vigne. Bordeaux: Delmas, 1935. Popiel, Jennifer. Rousseau’s Daughters: Domesticity, Education, and Autonomy in Modern France. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008. Roberts, Meghan. Sentimental Savants: Philosophical Families in Enlightenment France. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2016. Schaub, Diana. “Of Believers and Barbarians: Montesquieu’s Enlightenment ­Toleration,” in Early Modern Skepticism and the Origins of Toleration, ed. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. and Dan Mahoney. New York: Lexington Books, 1999, 225–47. Schechter, Ronald. Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715–1815. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. Shackleton, Robert. “Madame de Montesquieu with some considerations on Thérèse de Secondat,” in Women and Society in Eighteenth-Century France: Essays in Honour of John Stephenson Spink, ed. Eva Jacobs, W. H. Barber et al. London: Athlone Press, 1979, 171–81. Shklar, Judith N. Montesquieu. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Sorel, Albert. Montesquieu. Paris: Librarie Hachette, 1887. Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. ­ Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. New York: Beacon Press, 1995. Volpilhac-Auger, Catherine. “Montesquieu, Jeanne de Lartigue, baroness of La Brède and (1692?–1770),” translated by Philip Stewart, A Montesquieu Dictionary [online], directed by Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, ENS Lyon, September 2013. Accessed on August 16, 2019. http://dictionnaire-montesquieu.ens-lyon.fr/en/article/1484926549/en ­ ­

7 THÉRÈSE LEVASSEUR’S IMPROVISED LIFE WITH ROUSSEAU Jennifer M. Jones

Thérèse Levasseur (1721–1801) lived with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) for 33 years as his lover, caretaker, housekeeper, and ultimately, wife. This liminal position in Rousseau’s life was deeply troubling to contemporaries. Did Levasseur deserve pity as an abject and abused mistress who was forced to change Rousseau’s catheter but not allowed to keep their children?1 Or was she herself the abuser, a gossipy, eighteenth- century Xanthippe, who spoiled Rousseau’s happiness, health, and even sanity during his life, and turned “abusive widow” after his death?2 Uncomfortable questions about Levasseur’s presence in Jean-Jacques’s life continue to haunt modern scholarship, but they are pushed below the surface with a quick dismissal of Levasseur as an ignorant, unworthy bit player in Rousseau’s life who was unable to appreciate his ideas and philosophy. Rousseau’s modern biographers prefer to focus on his relationship with Mme de Warens—Rousseau’s beloved maman— or Sophie d’Houdetot, with whom he fell briefly, but passionately, in love while finishing his novel, Julie, La Nouvelle Héloïse.3 The point is clear in many scholarly and popular treatments of Levasseur: she did not belong in Rousseau’s life and had illicitly crossed some boundary by being there. Levasseur’s position in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s life and thought has not yet been fully and impartially explored by scholars.4 Yet, as the constant companion, and ultimately wife, of the most celebrated author of the eighteenth century, Levasseur’s life is worthy of exploration for its own sake, for our understanding of Rousseau, and for our understanding of the Enlightenment as a lived experience that shaped the lives of non-elite women like Levasseur who lived far from the salon and academy. I argue that Levasseur improvised a life alongside Rousseau, working within and against the constraints of a culture that had difficulty acknowledging that she was his legitimate wife or widow.

108  Jennifer M. Jones

Neither fully wife nor solely mistress, she and Rousseau crafted a hybrid partnership that drew on well-known eighteenth- century female categories— nurse, cook, housekeeper (gouvernante), aunt, sister, mistress, and wife— and transformed them into a relationship that, although perplexing to others, was remarkably adaptable and able to weather crisis upon crisis for over 30 years. In this essay, I focus on Levasseur’s and Rousseau’s romantic relationship and the ways in which Levasseur shaped her life as an independent woman after Rousseau’s death. My reading of Levasseur’s experience as Rousseau’s companion, wife, and widow cuts against the grain of much feminist scholarship of the past half-century that has emphasized the negative implications for women of Rousseau’s gender ideology and his celebration of feminine difference and inequality. Instead, I will argue that observing the day-to- day negotiations of power within the Rousseau-Levasseur household reveals that Levasseur enjoyed a measure of autonomy and that her relationship with Rousseau challenged key tenets of eighteenth-century gender norms. Their “marriage” throws into relief the ways in which the Enlightenment empowered radical experiments in living that included the likes of Levasseur while also highlighting the social forces and cultural prejudices that exiled her from the Enlightenment (and even the role of “Rousseau’s wife”) during her own lifetime. To tell this story requires making sense of Levasseur’s “two bodies”: first, her “real” body that lived with Rousseau, cooked for his friends, and bore his babies, all while quietly incorporating the language and sentiments of the Enlightenment into her sense of self; and second, her “monstrous” body, a specter Rousseau himself played a part in crafting in his Confessions, which haunted Rousseau’s contemporaries and biographers and disrupted their vision of an Enlightenment not designed for the likes of Levasseur. Both stories need to be told in order to “let Thérèse Levasseur speak.”

The “Wife” of a Philosopher who “Passed for a Bachelor” Born in Orléans on September 21, 1721, Marie-Thérèse Levasseur was the daughter of François Levasseur, an official in the royal mint in Orleans, and his wife, Marie Renoux, a small- scale merchant. Levasseur was neither formally apprenticed in a trade nor married by her early 20s. She was still living with her parents, perhaps assisting in her mother’s business, when they fell on hard times. She moved with her parents to Paris where she supported them while working in a rooming house near the Luxembourg gardens in the Latin Quarter. Years later, Rousseau described the Hôtel Saint- Quentin as a “wretched building” on a “wretched street.”5 There, probably in 1745, she met Rousseau.6 Rousseau provides the only source available for reconstructing the early years of their relationship. In an extended nine-paragraph account in book seven of the Confessions, he introduces his readers to Levasseur.7 Recorded two

Thérèse Levasseur  109

decades after he met her, Rousseau’s memories of his first years with Levasseur in Paris (from 1745 to 1756) provide a double perspective, describing Rousseau’s memories as filtered through the gauze of hindsight and coupled with his burning desire in the 1760s to justify his moral choices regarding love and paternity. Rousseau wrote his Confessions during the darkest periods in his life when he suffered from paranoia, a sense that he had been abandoned by his friends, and shame at the public denunciations that he was a hypocrite whose life didn’t measure up to the model of virtue he preached. Rousseau’s indebtedness to Levasseur for standing by him during his exile to Môtiers (near Neuchâtel) and to England surely played a role in casting particular features of his memories into relief. Upon first meeting Levasseur at the communal dinner table at the Hôtel Saint- Quentin, Rousseau recalls that he was struck by her sensitivity, gentleness, and lively expression. Rousseau enjoyed playing the role of Levasseur’s defender against the bawdy taunts of his fellow guests and Levasseur repaid her protector with darting glances of gratitude and affection. Rousseau explains, The sympathy that united our hearts, the compatibility of our dispositions, soon produced the usual effect…. Love, esteem, and artless sincerity, these were the agents of my triumph, and it was because her heart was tender and honest that I won her without needing to woo her.8 He clearly found Levasseur attractive and appreciated her clean and modest dress.9 Rousseau admits that although his relationship with Levasseur began as his personal “amusement,”10 he quickly found that she was an excellent companion. She became “the only real consolation that heaven has vouchsafed me in the midst of my misery, and that alone makes it tolerable.”11 Within a matter of weeks, Rousseau had organized his life around Levasseur and “the sweetness of our intimacy was soon everything to me.”12 They enjoyed taking walks in the country together and stopping for refreshments along the way. Rousseau remembers that Levasseur’s lodgings, which she shared with her parents, became “almost my own” and he went out only to visit her. Because of the large amount of time they spent together with her extended family, Rousseau slipped into the easy familiarity of calling Levasseur “Aunt” and Levasseur and her niece began to call Rousseau “Uncle.” Rousseau’s use of “Aunt” as a term of endearment for Levasseur surely evoked deep memories of his Aunt Suzon, who had cared for him after his mother’s death in childbirth. In Levasseur, Rousseau had at last found not only someone to fill his heart but also a home and potentially a surrogate family. What Levasseur found was clearly someone to love. Rousseau never expresses any doubt that she loved him with sincerity of heart and her devotion to him cemented and sustained his devotion to her.13 As their romance blossomed, Levasseur continued to work and gave her wages to her aging mother and father

110  Jennifer M. Jones

while Rousseau helped maintain her “decently…to protect her from pressing need.”14 But if Levasseur had hoped to find a husband who would marry her and make her an honorable woman, she must have been disappointed. Rousseau reports that he declared in advance before they consummated their relationship that “I would never abandon her but nor would I marry her.”15 What motivated Rousseau to vow never to marry Levasseur? If Rousseau had continued the path his father had laid for him at the age of 13 and settled into the rhythm of the life of an artisan in Geneva, he might very well have been married to a woman such as Levasseur by his late 20s. Yet Rousseau proclaimed that he was in “no hurry to imitate” his good friend Diderot, who married Antoinette Champion, a “harpy and a fishwife,” in Rousseau’s description.16 Rousseau’s limited economic resources surely played a role in his decision not to marry.17 But perhaps more significantly, during the decade (1728–1738) Rousseau spent with Mme de Warens, he had learned that love and companionship could be found outside the norms of wedlock and that such an arrangement served his emotional needs while preserving the freedom he believed he needed to realize his great ambitions. Rousseau devoted considerable attention in book seven and eight of the Confessions to graphically portraying the spectrum of non-marital sexual relations available to a philosopher on the make in the mid-eighteenth century, from the whores of the Saint-Roch neighborhood, to Venetian courtesans, to kept women. The proximity of these graphic descriptions of commercialized sexual relations to his lyrical portrayal of meeting Levasseur suggests that Rousseau’s choice to pursue an “improvised” relationship with Levasseur was made with a clear-eyed view of his options for fulfilling his distinctive emotional, sexual, economic, professional, and moral needs.18 For Rousseau, to benefit from Levasseur’s companionship as an unofficial wife while officially “passing” as a bachelor was perhaps the best of all possible worlds.19 The relationship Rousseau constructed with Levasseur was indeed enormously helpful to his intellectual and artistic productivity. In the Confessions, Rousseau underscores this point by transitioning abruptly from a description of their early romance to a ten-paragraph narration of the success of his first opera, The Gallant Muses: “This retired way of life was so favorable to my work that in less than three months my whole opera, words and music, was completed.”20 By 1749, Rousseau had moved Levasseur and her parents to lodgings closer to his own so that Levasseur’s mother could serve as his secretary and perform small household tasks for him. And in 1750, Rousseau was finally able to fulfill his long-held desire to set up house with Levasseur. The couple rented a small apartment on the Rue de Grenelle- Saint-Honoré where they “lived peacefully and pleasantly for seven years.”21 Levasseur provided much of the furniture for their apartment and the young couple installed Levasseur’s parents in an apartment two floors above theirs. This was not the apartment of a “kept woman”; this was the young couple’s home.

Thérèse Levasseur  111

Rousseau’s description of living with Levasseur in Paris in the 1750s is among the most lyrical passages in the Confessions and deserves to be quoted at length for its ability to capture the essence of their relationship in these years and the pleasure they took in each other’s company. Rousseau’s description of his private life with Levasseur voices the sentiments that fueled the emerging eighteenthcentury cult of domesticity and new valorization of companionship in marriage: I enjoyed six or seven years of the most perfect domestic happiness of which human weakness is capable. My Thérèse had the heart of an angel; our mutual attachment grew with our intimacy and we were every day more persuaded that we had been made for each other. If our pleasures could be described, they would seem laughable in their simplicity. We took walks alone together in the countryside surrounding the city, where I would spend, magnificently, eight or ten sous at some refreshment stall. Then there were our little suppers at my casement window, seated opposite one another on two little chairs places on a large trunk that occupied the full width of the embrasure. The windowsill served as a table, and from this vantage point we could breathe in the good air, watch the surrounding scene and the passers-by and, although we were on the fourth floor, immerse ourselves while we ate in the life of the street below. Who could describe, who could feel the full charm of these meals, whose full complement of courses consisted in quarter of a loaf of bread, a few cherries, a little piece of cheese, and half a gill of wine which we drank between us? Friendship, trust, intimacy, and peace of mind, how deliciously you season our pleasures! We would sometimes stay there until midnight, neither noticing nor suspecting how late it had become….22 Rousseau’s acknowledgment of Levasseur as a true companion, and not just as a sexual partner or domestic servant, endured for the rest of their life together. Rousseau enjoyed having meals with Levasseur, going on outings with her, and benefitting from her sound advice. As Rousseau wrote, She has often in Switzerland, England, or in France, when some catastrophe has overtaken me, seen something I did not see myself; she has given me the best advice I could have had; she has rescued me from dangers into which I was rushing blindly.23 If Rousseau improvised his relationship with Levasseur to allow him to enjoy a wife while remaining a bachelor, what did the relationship provide Levasseur? In a culture steeped in sexual double standards, it is hard to imagine inverting the phrase “married, while remaining a bachelor” and finding any positive outcome for Levasseur. “Married, while remaining a spinster” seems like an unappealing option. But it is worth playing with the idea. Because she had no

112  Jennifer M. Jones

dowry, Levasseur was unlikely to marry and perhaps the liaison with Rousseau was her “best offer.” Perhaps it allowed her to live with a man she loved whom she would never have been able to marry on the traditional marriage market. We’ll never know if Levasseur made a pledge never to leave Rousseau that was parallel to his pledge never to abandon her. But her fierce loyalty and flares of jealousy suggest that her commitment to Rousseau was built on more than just her practical desire for economic security. Perhaps the unconventional relationship also gave Levasseur tacit permission to consider bold questions such as these: If Rousseau was not her legal husband, did she owe him sexual fidelity? If they were not married, was she morally bound to raise their children? In the absence of the formal bonds of marriage, Rousseau’s and Levasseur’s relationship becomes a laboratory to imagine the boundaries of a relationship with no contractual constraints. Considered in its most positive light, it begins to look a bit like a heterosexual relationship in that beloved place of the enlightened philosopher’s imagination, the state of nature.24 Yet for Rousseau’s and Levasseur’s critics, shadows of abuse and dysfunction haunted the murky boundaries of their relationship.

Maternity and Paternity without Motherhood and Fatherhood The steady foundation of the domestic life Rousseau created with Levasseur in the decade after 1745 created the conditions for the burst of creative energy that propelled him to celebrity status within the Parisian Enlightenment.25 Ironically, the improvised relationship that proved so productive for Rousseau also provided the condition for the greatest moral challenge of his life and cast the shadow that darkened his public reputation: Levasseur gave birth to the couple’s first “natural child” in the winter of 1746–1747, followed by four more in quick succession. Rousseau records that, at the time, he felt little compunction about his decision to consign the children they bore to the Parisian foundling hospital (the 26 Enfants-Trouvés). ­ He explained that he was simply following a common practice when dealing with a birth out of wedlock.27 Rousseau protected Levasseur from accusations of being an uncaring mother by emphasizing that he had “the greatest difficulty in the world” persuading her “to adopt the only course of action that would preserve her honour.”28 Rousseau suggests that Levasseur might well have kept the babies if her mother, whom Rousseau cuttingly accuses of fearing the burden of feeding another baby as much as her daughter’s dishonor, had not joined the campaign to give up the baby. In the face of Rousseau’s and her mother’s joint insistence that she give up the baby, Levasseur “groaned, but obeyed.”29 Despite Rousseau’s entirely plausible confession of fathering five children with Levasseur, his subsequent and alternate explanations for his decision have raised questions for some scholars: Were the children really his? Was Rousseau physiologically capable of fathering children? Did Rousseau make up the story

Thérèse Levasseur  113

about his children as a kind of performance of his masculinity?30 ­Typically, these questions are explored by scholars as they analyze Rousseau’s malformed urethra, sexuality, and psychology. Yet these questions also implicitly concern Levasseur, suggesting that a promiscuous Levasseur made a cuckold of Rousseau. Questions around Levasseur’s sexual agency underscore concerns about her legitimacy in Rousseau’s life and have swirled around her from the 1740s down to our own times. What we do know is that if Rousseau was deceived in 1747, it was in believing he could easily and lightly rid himself of his children. His journey as up-and- coming musician and bel esprit was dramatically redirected by the experience of giving up his five children. 31 The temporal proximity of the arrival of the first and second babies to Rousseau’s illumination on the road to Vincennes in the summer of 1749 was no coincidence. Rousseau’s decision to answer the prize question, “Has the progress of the arts and sciences done more to corrupt or to purify morals,” in the negative launched him as a major critic of civilized society. As historian Keith Baker elegantly summarized, “Thus erupted from the bitter wellsprings of personal experience, the ‘great and melancholy system’ that transformed Rousseau’s life and revolutionized modern consciousness.”32

A Stupid Woman for whom Rousseau Felt “Not a Glimmer of Love” Rousseau himself bears primary responsibility for shaping his contemporaries’ and biographers’ repugnance and confusion concerning Levasseur’s role in his life. Scholars have returned time and again to two passages in the Confessions as indicative of Rousseau’s feelings about Levasseur. In one of these passages, Rousseau ridicules Levasseur’s intelligence; in the second he declares that he never loved her. Together, they doubly negate Levasseur: Rousseau presents her as lacking the capacity to serve either as a reasoning subject or as a love object. Deprived by Rousseau’s text of Reason and Individuality, it is hard to imagine Levasseur playing a part in an Enlightenment that celebrated the reason and passions of individuals. One can well imagine that when Rousseau read these passages from his Confessions aloud to friends in the 1760s and 1770s (the book was not published until after his death), his audience must have been puzzled by these confessions about Levasseur, especially because these two passages are jarringly at odds with Rousseau’s full-throated declarations of love for her and praise for her wisdom and good sense in other passages in the Confessions. The most perceptive members in his audience may have understood that denigrating Levasseur was part of the complicated performance of a philosopher whose lover, unlike the lovers of Diderot, Voltaire, and Grimm, passed for his housekeeper (gouverneuse).

114  Jennifer M. Jones

In the first passage, Rousseau underscores the intellectual gap between himself and Levasseur, and freely admits that he made fun of her verbal and numerical gaffes with his elite friends: At first, I decided to improve her mind; I was wasting my time. Her mind is as Nature made it; culture and teaching have no effect on it. I do not blush to admit that she has never been able to read properly, though she can write fairly well. When I went to live in the Rue Neuve-desPetits- Champs there was a clock opposite my window, on the Hôtel de Pontchartrain, and for more than a month I tried to teach her to tell the time. But even now she can hardly do so. She has never been able to recite the twelve months of the year in their proper order, and does not know a single figure, despite all the trouble I have taken to teach her. She cannot count money or reckon the price of anything, and the word that come to her when she is talking is often the opposite of what she means. Once I made a dictionary of her sayings to amuse Mme de Luxembourg, and her blunders have become famous in the circles in which I have lived.33 The sound of aristocratic women in salon society laughing at Levasseur is painful to imagine, and Rousseau’s encouragement of it is difficult to excuse. But it can be understood within the context of Rousseau’s world. Rousseau’s advertisement of Levasseur’s intellectual limitations served a dual purpose. First, it allowed Rousseau, with a knowing chuckle and wink, to distance himself from Levasseur and her world in order to stake his place in le monde. Second, it permitted Rousseau to turn the tables on the women of salon society: as they laughed at Levasseur, Rousseau was mocking them. Rousseau’s jokes about Levasseur’s illiteracy underscored her simplicity and innocence as much as her stupidity. To underscore this point, immediately following Rousseau’s description of his dictionary of Levasseur’s malapropisms, he concludes, seemingly without irony, In the company of people one loves the mind as well as the heart is nourished by sentiment, and one has little need to go elsewhere in search of ideas. I lived as agreeably with my Thérèse as with the greatest genius in the world.34 After calling his mistress stupid in book seven, Rousseau makes an even more striking admission in book nine: What will the reader think when I tell him, with all the sincerity that he has come to expect of me, that from the first moment I saw her till this day I have never felt the least glimmering of love for her; that I no more desired to possess her than I had desired Mme de Warens, and that

Thérèse Levasseur  115

the sensual needs I satisfied with her were for me purely sexual and had nothing to do with her as an individual?35 Many scholars have cited this passage as evidence that Rousseau did not truly love Levasseur and that the sexual needs he fulfilled with her were essentially masturbatory.36 A psychological study of Rousseau written in the 1960s by historian Ronald Grimsley sums up Rousseau’s relationship with Levasseur in a few short lines: Of his relations with Thérèse Levasseur it is not necessary to speak at length, for he never treated her as an equal or ‘loved’ her in the fullest sense. If he eventually married her, it was more in recognition of her devotion than a because of any genuine emotional dependence on his part.37 In Jean Starobinski’s classic study of Rousseau, Levasseur is mentioned a mere handful of times, often in conjunction with discussions of Rousseau’s onanistic practices. Starobinski reminds us that Rousseau commonly described Levasseur as his supplément, the same term he uses for masturbation. As Starobinski elaborates, “The use of this particular word [supplément] shows us what Rousseau saw in Thérèse: someone he could easily identify with his own flesh and who never raised the problem of the other. Thérèse was not a partner in a dialogue but an auxiliary to Rousseau’s physical existence.”38 In other words, according to Starobinski, Rousseau could not have loved her. Yet a close contextual reading of Rousseau’s proclamation that he never felt “the least glimmer of love” for Levasseur suggests that the statement tells us more about how he retrospectively made sense of a fruitful but troubled period of his life than his enduring feelings for her.39 This passage is part of an extended description of a series of struggles Rousseau faced as he moved from Paris to the cottage that he called “The Hermitage” on the grounds of Mme d’Épinay’s estate in 1756. His words reveal his inner turmoil about his deepest needs, his increasing frustration with Levasseur’s family, and his deep remorse about assigning his children to the foundling hospital. This complex passage also serves as a justification for falling head over heels in love with Mme d ’Houdetot and provides context for his explosion of creative work between 1756 and 1762 as he wrote and published Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater (1758), La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Émile (1762), and The Social Contract (1762). He explains that he became “intoxicated with virtue” to fill the void in his heart.40 Moreover, Rousseau’s denial in this passage that he loved Levasseur rests on his highly idealized definition of true love as the merging of “two souls in one body.” Although Rousseau’s description of his early months at the Hermitage with Levasseur was idyllic, over time Rousseau began to feel lonely.41 He acknowledges that he regretted he hadn’t done more to educate Levasseur so that she could fully enter into his world and sentiments. He also increasingly

116  Jennifer M. Jones

felt shut out of the tête-à-têtes between Levasseur and her mother, who accompanied the couple to The Hermitage. On balance, Rousseau laid more blame on Levasseur’s family than on her limited education for the distance growing between them. Despite Levasseur’s devotion to Rousseau, he felt that she had never sufficiently severed her ties with her family to fully share her heart with him. As Rousseau lamented, “Wholly given over to her mother and family, she belonged to them more than to me.”42 Rousseau concludes the long passage that contains the startling denial that he ever loved Levasseur by explaining that the sway of Levasseur’s family over her was why “we have always remained separate people.”43 Thérèse was enough for me, he poignantly mused; but I wasn’t enough for her.44 Rousseau’s acknowledgment that Levasseur was “a separate person,” who had needs beyond him and followed advice other than his own, may have been a source of sadness for him. But we might consider his statement from another vantage point and ask what Levasseur and Rousseau both gained by acknowledging that she was her own separate person. Could we interpret this passage as an acknowledgment of Levasseur’s autonomy and perhaps even her individuality? Is it possible that Rousseau understood the impossibility of the fusion of souls with Levasseur precisely because she was so real, so corporeal, and so resolutely not a mere fantasy of his masturbatory imagination? Perhaps this is in part why Rousseau could write so profoundly in the very same passage in which he laments that “we have always remained separate people” that “I have always looked on the day that united me to my Thérèse as the one that fixed my moral being.”45

Thérèse’s Enlightenment Rousseau seemed to revel in Levasseur’s power within their relationship by referring to her as “the boss.”46 And his friends were struck by her power within their household, if perhaps only because they believed that a “servant” should be more subservient to their master. In 1766, the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote to a friend that Rousseau’s maid, in particular, has an uncontrolled authority over him. Shall I give you an instance? He showed me the letter which he had received from the Corsicans, in which he is invited to come among them, to frame them a body of laws, and to be the Solon or Lycurgus of this new commonwealth. He told me, that he had once intended to comply with this invitation, but, on consulting Mademoiselle Le Vasseur, he found she did not approve of the journey; upon which he laid aside all thoughts of it.47 To underscore his view that it was ridiculous for Levasseur to have such influence over Rousseau, Hume compared her directly to Rousseau’s dog, Sultan,

Thérèse Levasseur  117

writing, “His dog also has great influence over him.” Whether by a dog or a mistress, Hume found it amusing and perhaps a bit troubling that Rousseau allowed himself to be so controlled. For Hume, a confirmed bachelor, Levasseur’s power over Rousseau revealed the dangers posed to the Enlightenment by the prospect of a “woman on top.”48 Evidence of Levasseur’s agency in her relationship with Rousseau is witnessed in the only extant letter written in her hand.49 In 1762, Rousseau was forced to flee his home in Montmorency, France, when the French parlement condemned his educational novel Émile and ordered his arrest. In Rousseau’s hasty departure, there was no time for Levasseur to pack up their house or discuss whether she would accompany him in exile. When Levasseur finally received news that Rousseau had arrived safely in Yverdon in the Swiss canton of Berne, she poured out her heart in a letter that is worth quoting at length: My Dear Friend, What joy to have received your precious news. I assure you that my heavy heart is filled with nothing but sadness because we separated without my being able to tell you all my feelings. My heart has been always for you and that will never change as long as God gives you and me days to live. What pleasure for me to join you so that we can pass all our trials together. I wait only the moment to rejoin you and to embrace you from the depth of my heart. You know well that my heart is for you and that I’ve always told you that wherever you are I would want to join you, even if there were seas to cross and mountains to cross to find you. 50 Rousseau did not force, cajole, or even expect Levasseur to accompany him in exile. She chose of her own free will to leave the comfortable world they had created together in Montmorency to flee with Rousseau to the small Protestant mountain village of Môtiers, near Neuchâtel, where they would live until 1766 when they fled yet again to England. Levasseur’s decision to join Rousseau in exile marked a perceptible shift in the balance of power in their relationship. Indebted to Levasseur for accompanying him in exile and experiencing increasing attacks of bad health in the cold, damp mountain climate, Rousseau obsessed over plans for providing for Levasseur after his death. Several years earlier, he had notarized a document that awarded Levasseur 1,950 livres in recognition of the work she had done for him for over 13 years.51 Knowing how important independence was to Levasseur, Rousseau begged their friend and patron, Mme Luxembourg, to help Levasseur safeguard her freedom after his death. Alternatively, Rousseau proposed to Levasseur, a practicing Catholic, that she might enjoy retiring to a convent after his death. When she responded with a forceful “no,” he dropped the suggestion. In the winter of 1763, when Rousseau redrew his will, he made Levasseur his only heir and clarified that she would inherit everything he owned,

118  Jennifer M. Jones

including his papers.52 In some sense, granting Levasseur the financial support to live independently as the “veuve Rousseau” was the most powerful way in which he recognized and valued her desire to control her own life. Rousseau’s anticipation of Levasseur’s future needs as a widow stand in strange antithesis to his difficulty meeting her needs in the here-and-now as her lover. This was clearly a point of contention in the Rousseau-Levasseur household. At some point in the 1760s, perhaps because of Rousseau’s chronic urinary condition, they stopped having sexual relations. This seems to have created more frustration for Levasseur than for Rousseau. There are hints in snippets of diaries and gossipy letters written by Rousseau’s friends to suggest that Levasseur found some outlets for sexual satisfaction outside of marriage. James Boswell wrote in his diary that he had sex with Levasseur 13 times while chaperoning her to England to be reunited with Rousseau in 1766.53 The Baron d’Holbach, no friend of Rousseau or Levasseur, wrote a gossipy letter in 1770 to the abbé Galiani that Rousseau had been cuckolded by a monk.54 And, likely repeating the same gossip, Jacob-Henri Meister wrote to Paul- Claude Moultou that Rousseau had caught Levasseur in flagrante delicto.55 The timing of Rousseau’s decision to “marry” Levasseur in 1768 suggests there may have been some truth to these rumors about her liaison with a monk.56 Rousseau may have finally decided to marry Levasseur to win back her affections. Or perhaps, as they entered middle age, they tired of the subterfuge and social opprobrium that attended their unconventional relationship. In any case, their marriage did not end all their troubles, and in 1769, Rousseau wrote a long, heartfelt letter to Levasseur, vowing that if she promised not to leave him, they would once again share a bed.57 The sexual agency and financial autonomy that Levasseur had advocated during her life with Rousseau was perhaps most visible in her widowhood. She refused to play the role that Rousseau’s final patron, René Girardin, envisioned for her as the weeping widow in his memorial to Rousseau at Ermenonville. She flouted social norms by marrying Girardin’s 34-year- old valet, Jean-Henry Bally, in 1779, despite the scandal it provoked. And Levasseur worked every angle during the Revolution— sending letters to the National Assembly, to Mirabeau, and to Catherine the Great—to stake her financial claim as the Veuve Rousseau and guardian of Rousseau’s literary estate and legacy. A watercolor portrait of Levasseur made by Johann Michael Baader in 1791 shows an aged but still attractive woman wearing both a large cross around her neck and a tricolor ribbon on her bonnet. Levasseur proudly claimed her part in a revolution that had canonized her husband and celebrated the rights of individuals.

In the Shadow of the Enlightenment By the 1760s and the 1770s, the “savage” author of Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1750), On the Origins of Inequality (1755), The Social Contract (1762), and

Thérèse Levasseur  119

Émile, or Education (1762) was a celebrity who cut a distinctive figure with his Armenian gown and renunciation of civilized society. Contemporaries were naturally curious about Levasseur as well. When Rousseau and Levasseur arrived in England in 1766, Hume wrote to his friend Hugh Blair, “Even his Maid, La Vasseur… is more talkd of than the Princess of Monaco or the Countess of Egmont, on account of her Fidelity and Attachment towards him.”58 Despite people’s curiosity about Levasseur, there was always a gulf between the world in which Rousseau lived with Levasseur and his broader social, professional, and intellectual networks. For all of Rousseau’s complaints about salon society and his discomfort and awkwardness within it, by the mid- eighteenth century, authors like Rousseau were considered essential participants in le monde (French elite society): the presence of authors, musicians, artists, and men of letters in elite society helped shape a new code of elite merit.59 Levasseur was tacitly accepted (or ignored) as long as she remained peripheral to those parts of Rousseau’s life that intersected with le monde. But when Rousseau “dragged”60 (to play on a word Voltaire used to describe Rousseau’s treatment of Levasseur) Levasseur into the world of the Enlightenment, many of his contemporaries, and indeed subsequent biographers, were perplexed and, in some cases, viscerally disgusted. The abbé Morellet commented that Rousseau “could see that his friends didn’t approve of the ridiculous marriage he contracted with his disgusting Thérèse.”61 David Hume complained that Rousseau insisted on his “gouvernante sitting at table” in the home of a wealthy English gentleman.62 Levasseur’s critics could perhaps imagine a role for her as a sexual partner, maid, or nurse, but they could not imagine a salutary role for her as Rousseau’s intellectual companion or object of his love. Yet those who knew Levasseur found it difficult either to canonize or vilify her. James Boswell described her at 43 as “a little, lively, neat French Girl.”63 Claude Eymar, an admirer of Rousseau’s work, visited the couple’s apartment in Paris in 1774 and was pleasantly surprised to find that Rousseau’s wife did not resemble the hideous portrait Voltaire had painted of her: “I found her neither beautiful nor young, far from it; but I found her honorable, polite, well dressed in a simple style and radiating the care of a good housewife.”64 But for those readers and contemporaries who did not know her and had no cause to care personally about her, Levasseur became a handy device for explaining the gulf between Rousseau’s lofty ideals and his failures as a man. Readers made sense of Rousseau’s life (and even his major works) by projecting their fantasies and concerns onto Levasseur. For some contemporaries, she was the perfect “natural woman”; for others, the “abused mistress,” and for still other readers, Levasseur was the despicable “other woman” who stood in the way of their own unmediated relationship with Rousseau. Rousseau’s Confessions encouraged readers to admire Levasseur as a natural woman living in a fallen world. In the decades after Rousseau’s death in 1778, this narrative of Levasseur as the perfect “natural woman” to complement

120  Jennifer M. Jones

Rousseau the “natural man” was deployed by some of Rousseau’s supporters, but was rarely accepted without reservation. The image of the good, simple Levasseur is most poignantly expressed in novelist Isabelle de Charrière’s firstperson Plainte and Défense de Thérèse Le Vasseur (1789), in which Levasseur responds to accusations that she is a “snake.” The greatest honor one can pay to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charrière pleads, is to accept Thérèse for the good simple girl who Rousseau chose “to clean his linen, cook his food, and share his bed.”65 During this decade, Marie Antoinette and her ladies at court set up a charity for abandoned children in Levasseur’s name. During the Revolution, the National Assembly granted her an annual pension of 600 livres as “the widow of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” In 1794, the Convention increased her pension by 300 livres. A play performed at the Théâtre de l’Égalité during the Revolution presented Levasseur as “the best and sweetest of wives.”66 Yet, while Levasseur might be depicted as a “good girl” or a “natural woman,” public opinion never sanctified her and it was easy for public opinion to slip from “good wife” to “abused wife” to “abusive widow.” The Convention granted Levasseur a pension out of pity and gratitude for her services but was insistent that she needed to be kept at a distance from the canonized Rousseau. She was not allowed, for example, to accompany the procession of Rousseau’s ashes when they were removed from Ermenonville and reburied in the Panthéon in 1794. Almost as soon as Rousseau died in 1778, rumors began to swirl that, far from a perfect wife or an abused victim, Levasseur was somehow responsible for his death. Pierre–Alexandre Du Peyrou and Le Comte de Barvel suggested that she murdered him with herbs he himself had collected during their frequent walks.67 Others, such as Germaine de Staël, claimed that Rousseau committed suicide upon finding out that Levasseur was having an affair with a domestic servant of Rousseau’s patron, the Marquis de Girardin.68 While there is no evidence that Rousseau’s death resulted from anything but natural causes, the fact that Levasseur quickly began a new relationship with a much younger domestic servant of the Marquis only lent credence to these rumors. But what really fueled the rumors was the desire of those who loved and admired Rousseau— such as Germaine de Staël, who describes him as mon père—to distance Rousseau from the woman with whom he had lived for 33 years, a woman de Staël longed symbolically to replace with her worthier and more virtuous self. In addition to blaming Levasseur for Rousseau’s suicide, de Staël placed all the blame for the abandoned children on Levasseur’s shoulders, thus absolving Rousseau and transforming him into the “abused father/husband” while condemning Levasseur as the detested “other woman.” Although de Staël had never met Levasseur, she lashed out at the appalling character of this “atrocious, denatured mother” and concluded that “it was a great foolishness to listen to and to love such a woman.”69 Note that although de Staël presents Levasseur in the harshest light of any of her critics, she does erase her from the story of Rousseau’s life as twentieth-century biographers would. Instead, de

Thérèse Levasseur  121

Staël grants Levasseur tremendous influence over Rousseau, including power over his life and that of his children. Equally important, she does not deny that Rousseau loved her.

Conclusion: The Role of Minor Characters in Biographies In her insightful biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Janet Malcolm reminds us that minor characters in the biographies of towering figures rarely receive their due: The minor characters of biography, like their counterparts in fiction, are less tenderly treated than major characters. The writer used them to advance his narrative and carelessly drops them when they have performed their function…. As he turns the bracing storylessness of human life into the flaccid narrativity of biography, he cannot worry about the people who never asked to be dragged into his shaky enterprise.70 Malcolm’s observation about scholars’ and biographers’ inclination to give short shrift and unsympathetic treatment to the minor characters in a biography is useful in understanding Rousseau scholars’ treatment of Levasseur and, more broadly, scholars’ treatment of other “wives of the canon.” While biographers’ treatment of Levasseur may be understandable, there is value in telling her story in such a way that she is understood as something more than a one- dimensional “supplement.” Exploring Levasseur in her own right helps us understand that in Rousseau’s fantasy- driven— some would say masturbatory—life, Levasseur was in fact the most “real” presence in his life. Rousseau had to acknowledge that Levasseur’s womb swelled as a result of their carnal desires; her arm stirred the pot in their kitchen; and her hands sewed his shirts, changed his catheters, and brought him sexual release. Moreover, one could argue that Levasseur alone offered the one “healthy” relationship in his life, the one person he related to in a “natural,” non-romanticized way. Perhaps because she knew him before he became the celebrated “Jean-Jacques,” she was able to see beyond the image of the savage philosopher that he and the public created, and embrace him simply as the man she loved. Weaving Levasseur more fully into Rousseau’s story also reveals that in the day-to-day experience of his relationship with his “illiterate laundress,” Rousseau was forced to negotiate the boundaries of individual freedom, human agency, and personal autonomy in ways that were concrete rather than abstract. There were certainly many requests that Rousseau didn’t grant Levasseur and many ways in which he didn’t acknowledge her needs. We’ll never know, for example, how many requests for a new dress went unheeded, the intensity of her shame if she caught wind that Rousseau and his elite friends snickered at her malapropisms, or the extent of the pain and guilt she suffered when

122  Jennifer M. Jones

her newborn babies were forced from her arms. But there are clear signs that, throughout their long relationship, Levasseur sometimes asserted herself and negotiated terms agreeable to her. Rousseau was forced to reckon with her sexual desires as a woman even when he did not fulfill them. And he honored her longing for security and independence in old age. I won’t go so far as to argue that Rousseau’s precepts and sentiments as expounded in works like On the Origins of Inequality, Julie, La Nouvelle Heloïse, or Émile were influenced directly and consciously by Levasseur or by Rousseau’s relationship with her. But only through exploring Levasseur’s irradicable presence in Rousseau’s life can we raise the possibility that they were. Levasseur’s life presents some of the ways that a woman who might be considered a classic victim of the gendered expectations and status- driven mores of the ancien régime absorbed and responded to important Enlightened and Revolutionary debates about companionship in marriage, freedom, and autonomy, as she improvised a life as the wife and widow of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Notes 1 Rebecca Kukla, “The Coupling of Human Souls,” in Feminist Interpretations of ­Jean-Jacques ­ Rousseau, ed. Lynda Lange (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 2 For the conjecture that Rousseau did not father children with Thérèse, see the article by J. Roussel in J. Grand- Carteret, J.-J. Rousseau jugé par les Français d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Perrin et cie, 1890), 173; see Antoine John Barruel-Bauvert, Vie de J.-J. Rousseau (London, 1789) for the origins of some of the most negative depictions of Thérèse; see Bonnie Smith, “Historiography, Objectivity, and the Case of the Abusive Widow,” History and Theory 31 (4) 1992: 15–32. For more on Xanthippe and her reception in the history of political thought, see Arlene Saxonhouse’s chapter in this volume. 3 Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), offers a balanced assessment of Thérèse; see also Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Raymond Trousson’s work on Rousseau paints a more negative portrait of Thérèse; see Raymond Trousson, JeanJacques Rousseau, (Paris: Tallenier, 2003). 4 Exceptions include Charly Guyot, Plaidoyer pour Thérèse Levasseur (Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes, 1962), which offers a comprehensive and sympathetic biography of Thérèse; see also A. Benit, “Thérèse Levasseur compagne de J.-J. Rousseau,” Bulletin de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de la Goële, 16, 28–37, and H. J. Wille, Träume und Tränen: Das Leben der Therese Levasseur mit J.-J. Rousseau (Leipzig: Günther, 1936). 5 Jean-Jacques ­ Rousseau, Confessions, trans. Angela Scholar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 274. Unless otherwise indicated, I use this translation of the Confessions in this chapter. 6 Ibid., 320. 7 Rousseau began to write his autobiography in 1766 while staying in England and he completed it in 1769 after his return to France; see Bernard Gagnebin, “Vérité et Véracité dans Les Confessions,” in Jean-Jacques ­ Rousseau et son Oeuvre: problèmes et recherches (Paris: Librairie Klincksieck, 1964).

Thérèse Levasseur  123





















­



­

124  Jennifer M. Jones

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), and Paule Adamy, Les Corps de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris: Champion, 1997). Rousseau reflected that, “While I was philosophizing on the duties of man, an event occurred that made me reflect more deeply on my own. Thérèse became pregnant for a third time”; Confessions, 347. Keith Michael Baker, “On the Road to Vincennes,” Washington Post, May 22, 1983. Confessions, 322. Confessions, 322. Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1953), 385–86. “In Thérèse I discovered the substitute I needed; through her I have found such happiness as the course of events has allowed me”; Confessions, 322. Ronald Grimsley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Study of Self-Awareness (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1969), 108–09. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 179. The entire passage is haunted by Rousseau’s accusations of an unnamed “violence” that Levasseur has wrought upon his heart during the period from 1766 to 1769; Confessions, 404. Confessions, 406. Confessions, 408. Confessions, 405. “Nous ayons toujours continue d’être deux,” Confessions, translated by Jennifer Jones; Angela Scholar translates this passage as “We have always remained divided”; Confessions, 405 Confessions, 411. Confessions, 401. Throughout the Confessions, Rousseau refers to Levasseur and her mother as the gouverneuses, a term often translated into English as “the bosses” and sometimes as “governesses”; see Confessions, 372. Hume to the marquise de Barbentane, February 16, 1766, C.C., Letter 5059. See Natalie Zemon Davis’s analysis of the “woman on top” in her classic essay, “Women on Top” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975). We know that Levasseur sometimes disobeyed Rousseau. For example, she allowed her extended family to visit the Hermitage in his absence and sometimes she accepted gifts from his patrons. C.C., vol. 40, 139–41. This translation is my own. “Reconnaissance et Obligation,” Œvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond et al. (Paris: Gallimard Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959–), vol. 1, 1221–23. Hereafter referred to as O.C. O.C., vol. 1, 1877–1878; see Maurice Cranston, The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 53–54. C.C., vol. 28, 347–50; Raymond Trousson, Rousseau, 630. “Qu’une moine l’a fait cocu.” D’Holbach to Galiani, August 25, 1770, C.C., vol. 38, 90. Meister to Moutou, July 10, 1770, C.C., vol. 38, 59–61. Their marriage was more of a performance than a legally binding act; see Trousson, Rousseau, 678. Rousseau to Levasseur, August 12, 1769, C.C., vol. 37, 120–24. David Hume to Hugh Blair, December 28, 1765, C.C., vol. 22, 112. Antoine Lilti, The World of the Salons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Voltaire described Levasseur as “the unfortunate woman” (la malheureuse) whom Rousseau dragged (traîne) from village to village and from mountain to mountain; Voltaire, Le Sentiment des citoyens (Geneva: 1764).

Thérèse Levasseur  125











­

­

­

­

126  Jennifer M. Jones

Kahn, Andrew (ed.), Representing Private Lives of the Enlightenment. Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 2010. Kushner, Nina. Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Lilti, Antoine. The Invention of Celebrity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017. ———. The World of the Salons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Lange, Lynda (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. “Preface.” In Les Enfants du secret. Enfants trouvés du XVIIe siècle à nos jours. Paris: Magellan et Musée Flaubert et d’histoire de la médecine, 2008. Malcolm, Janet. Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Pulcini, Elena. Amour-passion et amour conjugal: Rousseau et l’origine d’un conflit modern. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1998. Roberts, Meghan. Sentimental Savants: Philosophical Families in Enlightenment France. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Correspondence Complète de Jean Jacques Rousseau, ed. R.A. ­ Leigh. Geneva: Institute et Musée Voltaire, 1965–1998. ———. Confessions. Translated by Angela Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. Œvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond, et al. Paris: Gallimard Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959–1995. ———. Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Translated by Charles Butterworth. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992. Seth, Catriona. “Nobody’s Children? Enlightenment Foundlings, Identity and Individual Rights,” ed. Werkgroep 18e Eeuw: Dutch-Belgian Society for EighteenthCentury Studies. Utrecht: Hola Press, 2012. Smith, Bonnie. “Historiography, Objectivity, and the Case of the Abusive Widow.” History and Theory 31, no. 4 (1992): 15–32. Staël, Anne-Louise- Germaine. “Letters sur le caractère de Rousseau.” In Oeuvres completes de Mme la Baronne de Staël. Paris: Chex Truettel et Wurtz, 1820. Starobinski, Jean. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Trousson, Raymond, and Frédéric Eigeldinger. Dictionnaire de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Paris: Champion, 2001. ———. Jean-Jacques ­ Rousseau. Paris: Tallenier, 2003. Wille, H. J. Träume und Tränen: Das Leben der Therese Levasseur mit J.-J. Rousseau. Leipzig: Günther, 1936.

8 THE HIDDEN LABORS OF MARY MOTTLEY, MADAME DE TOCQUEVILLE1 Ross Carroll

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on how marriage in a democratic society provides a haven in which the male citizen can find relief from the turbulence of public life.2 Soothed by his wife and the placid domestic environment she provides, he argued, the husband in a democracy enters public life determined to reproduce there the calm orderliness he enjoys at home. This, for Tocqueville, was in sharp contrast to aristocratic marriages in Europe, which, as the products of chance or family alliance, were characterized by mutual contempt, rampant infidelity, and tumultuous passions that spilled over into public life. As with so many of Tocqueville’s schemas, this neat dichotomy between the democratic and the aristocratic struggled to capture many actual nineteenthcentury marriages. This was nowhere truer than in the case of Tocqueville’s own marriage to Mary (or Marie) Mottley.3 Despite Tocqueville’s aristocratic background, this union was in many respects the antithesis of the aristocratic marriages described in Democracy in America. Far from being arranged, it was a marriage of choice between two people who had known each other for years and whose decision to marry was carried out in spite of early reservations in the Tocqueville family. From the perspective of that family, everything about Mottley was wrong— she was too old (at six years Tocqueville’s senior), too liberal in her politics, too Protestant, too middle class, and too English, shortcomings that some members of the family evidently never forgave. Moreover, although their relationship was plagued by frequent bouts of mistrust, infidelity (on Tocqueville’s part at least), and occasional rancor, they respected each other deeply and there is little reason to doubt Tocqueville’s sincerity when he described Mottley as perhaps his only true friend.4

128  Ross Carroll

Nor, however, did their relationship reflect Tocqueville’s idealized democratic marriage. Although Mottley labored continuously to make the chateaux de Tocqueville a restorative respite from the demands of Tocqueville’s political and intellectual life, she refused to subordinate herself exclusively to managing the domestic sphere. If a commitment to rigid gender roles was essential to a democratic marriage, then theirs did not qualify as such. Mottley was an effective domestic manager and provided emotional support for her husband, helping him to better know his own thoughts and reassuring him in times of acute distress (the home she provided was, as he put it to her, “the port from all his storms”).5 However, she also carved out a limited set of roles for herself as a political and intellectual interlocutor to Tocqueville, and did so with his encouragement. In what follows, I tease out these roles from a sample of the evidence available and reconstruct, where possible, Mottley’s own political opinions and activities. By the end, I will hopefully have cast light on Mottley’s formidable presence in Tocqueville’s working life as well as on the unacknowledged intellectual labors typically performed by wives of philosophical and political men in nineteenth- century France. As I proceed, I will also reflect on the frequent reluctance on the part of Tocqueville’s biographers to take seriously their subject’s own insistence on the importance of Mottley’s contributions to his career.

The Foreign Wife Mary Mottley was born on August 20, 1799, in Alverstoke in Hampshire, the eldest of George and Mary Martin Mottley’s 13 children. Her father worked as an agent for the Royal Hospital at Haslar in Portsmouth before transferring, in 1833, to an equivalent position in Plymouth (where Tocqueville would go in 1835 to meet the family and request Mary’s hand). At around four years of age, she went to live with her maternal aunt, Elizabeth Mottley Belam, who she accompanied to France in 1815 to set up home in Versailles, joining a sizable community of English expatriates attracted by the low cost of living. Although Mottley would remain, in Tocqueville’s words, “profoundly English in her heart, habits, and ideas,” she would never return to her homeland.6 This was doubtless in part due to her difficulties with travel (she was prone to seasickness), but her friend Harriet Grote would later cite English class prejudices as the real reason for her staying away.7 It was at Versailles, around 1828, that Mottley met Tocqueville, who had taken up a position as a magistrate and rented a house nearby with his friends Gustave de Beaumont and Ernest de Chabrol. Although little remains of their early correspondence, it is clear that from the beginning of their relationship that Tocqueville believed Mottley to be a cut above the other women he encountered (he wrote excitedly to Beaumont that Mottley spoke to him with a refreshing openness that set her apart from other women).8 After a seven-year

Madame de Tocqueville  129

liaison, the couple married in October 1835, not long after the publication of the first installment of Democracy in America, with Mottley’s aunt and the Tocqueville family (who must have swallowed their objections) in attendance. After living for a brief time in Baugy with Tocqueville’s brother Édouard and his wife Alexandrine, the couple moved into the chateau de Tocqueville in 1836, which would be their main home for the remainder of the marriage. Mottley quickly took charge of the restoration of the building and converted part of the grounds into an English- style garden. She also took in hand the household expenditures, and Tocqueville memorably referred to her as his “minister of finance” so effectively did she manage their affairs.9 The couple never had children and Mottley had to endure the suggestion from male friends that this lack of “another interest in life” was the source of all her unhappiness.10 Tocqueville seems to have got on well enough with the Mottley family during his brief encounters with them and eventually would use his connections with the First Lord of the Admiralty to advance the naval careers of Mottley’s brothers (he eventually secured Joseph Mottley a long sought-after promotion).11 By contrast, Mottley’s introduction to life in the Tocqueville family was not easy. Tocqueville’s brother Édouard, writing to Beaumont six months after Mottley’s death in 1865, recalled that Tocqueville’s decision to marry “a foreigner, a protestant, without fortune” had “afflicted” the family terribly.12 But he also blamed Mottley’s personality for the failure of true bonds of affection to form, tetchily accusing her of failing to reciprocate the love they did eventually show her.13 Tocqueville himself was painfully aware of the initial difficulties Mottley had with his family, even if he occasionally felt she exaggerated the mistreatment she suffered.14 In the second installment of Democracy in America, written during the first years of their marriage, Tocqueville commented ruefully on the difficulties faced by couples that defy the class snobberies of aristocratic society, foremost among them being the “sway of custom and tyranny of opinion.”15 (Hugh Brogan has suggested that Tocqueville in these passages was “vindicating his decision to marry Marie”).16 But Mottley’s foreignness meant that she invited a degree of prejudice surpassing the usual scorn that a bourgeoise marrying an aristocrat could expect. While Tocqueville was endeared to Mottley’s Englishness (he affectionately scattered English phrases into his letters to her), his sisters supposedly mocked her accent.17 Tocqueville may well have had such treatment in mind when, in an exchange of letters from 1857 with his American friend Edward Vernon Childe, he solemnly advised that a woman should never choose a husband from “outside of her nation, whatever that nation might be.” Expanding on his theme, he noted how “rare” it was that “marriages turn out well when races are mixed” and “when different educations and religions are blended.” And while Tocqueville conceded that occasionally such unions do “turn out well,” more commonly “the outcome is a false situation and a painful inner torment.”18

130  Ross Carroll

Whether Tocqueville meant to imply here that his own marriage to a foreign Protestant fell among the few cases that truly turn out “well” is unclear. Far more certain is that the letter demonstrates sensitivity on Tocqueville’s part to the difficulties that foreign wives such as Mottley encountered. What Tocqueville hoped to get out of his marriage to Mottley were two things that he admitted were difficult to combine: namely, a “busy intellectual and a tranquil calm home life.”19 What Mottley sought is less clear, though she seems to have viewed marriage partly as a getaway from the oppressive and monotonous existence reserved for single bourgeois women. Whereas Tocqueville disdained arranged marriages, Mottley herself was happy to act as a marriage broker for young women born, as she had been, “without fortune” and in one case even persuaded the mother of a potential groom to call off her son’s engagement and have him marry Mottley’s protégé instead.20 While highly aware of the limitations placed on married women in nineteenth- century France, Mottley was also sensitive to the plight of single women who were largely confined to their mother’s side, tightly regulated in the kinds of interaction they could have with men, excluded from conversation, and forced to be selfeffacing lest they incur male displeasure.21 Marriage, for Mottley, may have been an imperfect liberation from such confinement, but a liberation of sorts it nonetheless could be. In seeking insight into Tocqueville’s marriage, his biographers have engaged in plentiful speculation about Mottley’s personality, much of it unflattering. They have variously described her as mentally disturbed, a “hypochondriac,” 22 prone to “fits of sulking”23 (when Tocqueville, in a rage that she was eating her pâté too slowly, smashed her plate upon the floor, she allegedly responded by calmly requesting more pâté), deficient in wit, humorless, plagued by the “insecurity” of a “childless woman,” 24 full of “British phlegm,” 25 and endowed with a “true Englishwoman’s” preoccupation with gardening. 26 To several scholars, Mottley’s jealousy and distrust of Tocqueville during their long separations was a source of needless distraction to him, and some have expressed disappointment that she did not listen better to Louis de Kergolay, who advised her not to confuse Tocqueville’s notorious “bad habits” with “infidelities of the heart.” 27 One goes so far as to portray Tocqueville’s infidelities as the sort of revenge often taken by “husbands who feel they are being ruled by a despot.” 28 In spiritual matters, too, Mottley is said to have tyrannized her husband, badgering him about his piety and ultimately pressuring him into seeking absolution from a priest in his final days (more on which below). 29 The aversion toward Mottley found in these biographies partly stems from frustration at how Mottley erased much of the evidence concerning her relationship with her husband. Although we have over 200 letters from Tocqueville to her, Mottley destroyed without exception the letters that she wrote to him. She also exercised considerable control over how the letters Tocqueville

Madame de Tocqueville  131

wrote to her have come down to us. She redacted several passages (some of which have been recovered), and in many cases the only versions we have of the letters are copies produced in her own hand-writing, with no original to compare them against. The image we have of their relationship, in other words, is one largely constructed by Mottley herself.

Spiritual Confidant However severe they might have been in judging her personality, few Tocqueville biographers doubt Mottley’s importance to Tocqueville during the 24 years of their marriage. Even so, they have tended to reduce her role to that of Tocqueville’s idealized democratic wife; that is, a capable domestic manager and provider of the emotional support her husband needed to act and write as he did. This trend began with Tocqueville’s very first biographer, his friend Gustave de Beaumont, whose brief Notice sur Alexis de Tocqueville celebrated Mottley as precisely the kind of “auxiliary force” that a public man like Tocqueville needed, a never- ending source of “care, devotion, and energy” throughout “all his trials.”30 Others have followed Beaumont’s lead in playing up Mottley’s ability to counterbalance Tocqueville’s stormy personality and buttress him psychologically at crucial junctures in his life. Brogan, writing very much in this vein, saw Mottley as Tocqueville’s “harbor,” albeit one capable of generating storms of its own.31 André Jardin similarly recognized Mottley’s importance as a stabilizing influence in Tocqueville’s life but concluded that, whatever her own ambitions might have been, her influence “did not extend beyond the couple’s domestic life.”32 In an important recent study of Tocqueville’s ideal citoyenne, Cheryl Welch has noted that Tocqueville demanded more from a citizen-wife than mere domestic succor, and insisted that wives look beyond domestic concerns to nourish their husbands’ public spiritedness. But while Mottley may have come closer to approximating this ideal than most, Welch nevertheless concurs with the biographers that she was mainly “a private soul without public ambitions who managed the household” and who served Tocqueville primarily as a “psychological and spiritual ballast necessary to moor his life and work.”33 There is admittedly no shortage of evidence that Mottley was a domestic and psychological prop to her husband.34 Her letters (from what we can gather from Tocqueville’s replies) were often concerned with domestic matters as she kept him up to date on work at the châteaux and on the health of their beloved dogs (Blackey and Jem appear to have been particular favorites). Her capacity to restore Tocqueville’s mind to an even keel is in evidence everywhere, and his letters to her abound with gratitude at how she has not only calmed him but accurately interpreted his “smallest thoughts” and actions.35 She was, he declared in one of his more hyperbolic moments, a gift from Providence, sent to relieve the great miseries of his nature.36

132  Ross Carroll

It is tempting to dismiss these effusions of praise and gratitude as cynical attempts to appease a wife who seems to have required (not without reason) regular reassurance of Tocqueville’s devotion. After all, many of his more ardent declarations of his reliance on her arrive in letters where he is clearly on the defensive or seeking to placate Mottley for one reason or another. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of correspondence that passed between them (during some absences they wrote to each other daily or, at times, even more frequently than that) and Tocqueville’s impatience at any delays in their communication testifies to a profound psychological dependence. The degree of detail he went into in his updates to her, moreover, went far beyond what was necessary, had reassurance been his main aim. Indeed, in some cases, he sent her details that were anything but reassuring. During his first trip to Algeria in 1841, Tocqueville explained that while the other men on the expedition were withholding mention of a forthcoming military excursion from their wives for fear of alarming them, he would disclose everything to her. 37 Even during a yearlong crisis in their marriage that flared up when Mottley suspected that Tocqueville was lying about how he spent evenings during the 1842 Parliamentary session in Paris, Tocqueville continued to be impatient to hear from her (even though he was reticent about having her leave the châteaux to join him in the capital). At times, he could sound almost desperate to hear from Mottley: “I need your letters. I need for them to arrive often. I need them to save me from dejection and sorrow. I need them in order to work and make an effort.”38 These letters were, he wrote later, his “daily bread.”39 Tocqueville’s emotional dependence on Mottley can also be glanced in what third parties said of their relationship. Writing to his own wife during Tocqueville’s last days, Beaumont described how Mottley had “spoilt” Tocqueville for the duration of their marriage and that her dedication to serving his needs was total, a view not unusual among those who knew the couple best.40 Dedication, however, can take many forms, and over the course of their marriage, Mottley consistently transcended the role of domestic helpmeet and psychological prop in ways that even the more sympathetic of the biographers have overlooked. To see how this was the case, I will next analyze Tocqueville’s idolization of Mottley as the kind of political wife who could exercise a powerful, if necessarily indirect, influence on French political life before providing some illustrations of Mottley’s political intelligence at work.

The Work of a Public-Spirited Wife In order to present Mottley as merely a domestic manager and comforter to her husband, much of the commentary on her has had to downplay Tocqueville’s assessments of Mottley’s other contributions. Tocqueville himself, if not always his biographers, appreciated that Mottley disrupted any sharp distinction between the sphere of politics and that of the personal or quotidian. This comes

Madame de Tocqueville  133

across with special clarity in the favorable contrasts Tocqueville made between Mottley and the wives of other political men. To appreciate that contrast fully, we need to take stock of just how appalled Tocqueville was with the influence wielded by most wives in French politics, particularly during the dying days of the July Monarchy. In a recent study of Tocqueville’s views on political corruption, William Selinger notes Tocqueville’s dismay at how a craving for money encouraged the abuse of office for private gain among France’s bourgeois ruling class.41 Less noted by Selinger, however, is that Tocqueville attributed much of this rot to the infectious materialism of politicians’ wives. In 1850, the English economist Nassau William Senior recorded Tocqueville’s disappointment at how wives were sapping their husbands’ appetite for grand public deeds instead of propelling them toward political greatness as their more public- spirited counterparts during the ancien regime had done. By thinking and acting as wives rather than as citizens, these women “destroy[ed] political independence,” deflecting the attention of their husbands away from the public good and toward securing the money that fashionable living required.42 Tocqueville was careful to attribute this decline in the public virtue of politicians’ wives not to any essential female traits but to the bad effects of their education. In a pair of letters to Madame Swetchine, Tocqueville repeated an argument from his second Democracy in America, namely that women excluded from public life nevertheless exercise considerable indirect influence over politics, making it all the more imperative that they be educated properly.43 In the second of these letters, he related to Swetchine how he had seen “weak men” demonstrate a strong degree of “public virtue” owing to the support and direction they received from their wives.44 But such occasions, he soon clarified, were very much the exception that proved the rule. Far more typical was for domestic commitments to “transform” a “noble and unselfish” man into a “vulgar and egoistical” place- seeker who treats public life as a means for private enrichment.45 To Tocqueville’s mind, the worst culprit among political wives was not the greedy or dishonest woman but rather the “faithful wife” and “excellent mother.”46 It was precisely because such women demonstrated private virtue that public men were willing to exploit public office to satisfy their needs. Tocqueville even extended this critique to members of his own family. Much as he thought well of Alexandrine, the wife of his brother Édouard, he ultimately judged her to have been a terrible political wife for the very reasons he had related to Senior and Swetchine. Consider the following scathing portrait of her in Tocqueville’s account of the 1848 revolution: Never before did I realize so vividly that, while a brave helpmeet is a great support in times of revolution, a craven, even if she has the heart of a dove, is a cruel embarrassment. What made me most impatient was that my sister-in-law had no thought for the country’s fate […] She was, after

134  Ross Carroll

all, very kind and even intelligent, but her mind had contracted and her heart frozen as both were restricted within the narrow limits of a pious egotism, so that both mind and heart were solely concerned with the good God, her husband, her children, and especially her health […] She was the best woman and the worst citizen that one could conceive of.47 Tocqueville was no less dismissive of wives who threw themselves into the thick of the revolution with patriotic fervor. The wives who ran to the barricades in 1848 to carry ammunition to the men were, to his mind, acting only with their husbands and children in mind, and brought the passions of a housewife ahead of true public spiritedness to the struggle.48 Tocqueville made clear on numerous occasions that his own wife escaped this mold entirely. While he might have complained to Senior that most women were prone to act as “wives” rather than “friends,” he had no such misgivings about Mottley whom he addressed repeatedly using the language of friendship.49 Moreover, to the extent that Mottley influenced her husband’s political conduct, this in Tocqueville’s eyes was only to the good. Observing the troubling influence of Mary Ann Elisa Birch, Madame de Lamartine (another English wife and a friend of Mottley’s) on her husband’s actions, Tocqueville took the opportunity to comment on what a healthier spousal influence on a politician might look like. Lamartine, he explained to Mottley, had put himself forward to be President of the Chamber of Deputies, a calamitous move that would result in a damaging split among his supporters. Behind this decision, Tocqueville surmised, lay Birch stoking her husband’s ambition. In relating these suspicions to Mottley, Tocqueville expressed gratitude that his own wife’s influence was of a different sort entirely: I said to myself that Marie would never act this way. And if I ever allowed myself to be led by my pride and ambition into an error of that kind, at least I would receive warning of the pitfall, and from a kind and devoted friend who would have the courage to tell me the truth in time.50 This is not faint praise. Nor can it be described as just another example of how Tocqueville leant on Mottley for psychological comfort. Tocqueville credits Mottley not only with exerting a calming influence on his passions, but also with being capable of correctly reading the political situation. What Tocqueville finds repellant in Birch’s behavior is not that a woman is exercising political influence, but that she is exercising the wrong kind of political influence. Mottley, by vivid contrast, emerges from this letter as an astute judge both of Tocqueville and politics itself. Tocqueville reserved his greatest tributes to Mottley’s public spiritedness, however, for his political memoirs. In his Recollections, the same work in which he had castigated his sister-in-law for her narrow-mindedness, Tocqueville

Madame de Tocqueville  135

extolled Mottley’s virtue as “a devoted wife of penetrating insight and staunch spirit, whose naturally lofty soul would be ready to face any situation and triumph over any setback.”51 And while Mottley hardly plays a central role in Tocqueville’s narration of the events of 1848, she emerges from it as a wife who combined personal devotion to her husband with service to the public. It is Mottley, for example, who successfully warns Tocqueville of the beginning of the end of the July Monarchy, imparting to him the “anxiety” she herself took from Birch, who had called on her in a panic.52 On other occasions, Tocqueville credits her with prudently delaying news of events. When gunfire announces the beginning of the June insurrection, Mottley hears it first but decides not to rouse Tocqueville immediately. When he finally awakes after an hour and enquires about the noise, she reveals its source and then (in a rare direct quote from her) justifies her decision in terms that made clear her understanding of what the day had in store: “I did not think I should wake you, as you will certainly need all your strength today.”53 Elsewhere in Recollections, Tocqueville illustrated Mottley’s determination that conjugal happiness come second to the needs of the public. When a political crisis prompts Tocqueville to hurry from Germany to France, Mottley’s health threatens to delay them, only for her to insist that he go on alone. He eventually agrees, but only after she overcomes his reluctance to abandon her in a country “still torn by civil war” and thus deprive himself of her “courage and good sense.”54

Political Advice and Analysis Fortunately, we are not forced to rely on Tocqueville’s idealizations alone for evidence of Mottley’s “good sense.” Her political acumen is very much evident in some of the few letters by her available to us. During Tocqueville’s second trip to Algeria, he took Mottley along with him in place of Beaumont, his usual travelling companion. Once there, she took it upon herself to keep friends and relatives back home informed of what was going on. In one update to her brother-in-law Édouard, Mottley showed herself ready not only to analyze in detail a political dilemma that Tocqueville was faced with but also to criticize some of his choices. Tocqueville had departed on an ambitious tour of the Algerian coastal settlements with Governor General Marshal Bugeaud, whose heavy-handed military rule Tocqueville would later denounce. Mottley spied the political risks in such a venture, correctly predicting that the Marshal would organize the trip in such a way that Tocqueville would only see what the Marshal wanted him to see. (As it happened, Tocqueville slipped free of his guides to talk with Arab leaders directly.) But also, more worryingly, she saw that by associating so closely with Bugeaud, Tocqueville could alienate the very colonists whose concerns about military rule he was there to report on. She continued the letter with a teasing jibe about her husband’s weak political judgment, steering

136  Ross Carroll

her analysis from events in Algeria to a more global assessment of Tocqueville’s struggle with Thiers, his opponent on France’s political left: You see, dear brother, that I am more political than Alexis himself: politics, for me, is him, and for him I forget everything else. I know the difficulty of his position […] Not even I, who observe political men up close, can predict their behavior. My husband cannot fight face to face with Thiers and yet that would be the only sure way to destroy him. […] Alexis will do, for sure, all that a passionate man can do, and as he has not ceased to do since he entered political life, but from now on, for a long time, I don’t expect him to have much of an effect.55 The letter concludes with Mottley summing up what she takes her role to be during this trying time. Because she often reads the letters addressed to Tocqueville before passing them on to him, she learns first of any bad news and reflects on how she may “cushion the blows” (adoucir les coups) that she cannot deflect.56 It is a poignant description, though one doubtless crafted to appeal to Édouard’s own notions of how a loyal and steadfast wife should behave. It also marks the difficulty of neatly separating the realms of personal care and politics in Mottley’s case. For while Mottley might have collapsed her political interest into a concern for her husband (“politics, for me, is him”), she also demonstrates throughout this letter a kind of strategic nous that belies any easy description of her as a mere soother of cares. Other episodes suggest that Mottley was not always so reluctant to predict the behavior of political men she observed. In the atmosphere of profound disorientation following Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’état, Tocqueville and his circle struggled to gauge how the new regime would conduct itself on the European stage. Mottley correctly predicted that, whatever else he may do, Bonaparte would strive to keep France at peace with England. Tocqueville disagreed, judging it possible that Bonaparte would find a patriotic war with England an enticing prospect.57 That Bonaparte would not long thereafter seek alliance with England reveals Mottley to have been the better reader of Bonaparte and his intentions. These forays into political analysis were unlikely to have been an exception. From the outset, Tocqueville held that he and Mottley enjoyed not only a fusion of hearts but of minds as well (this is what made their marriage “superior” to any other). 58 Throughout their marriage, Tocqueville sought out Mottley’s advice (“your impressions, even on politics, are precious to me”) and she expressed frustration with him if he withheld political news or his assessment of public affairs from her. 59 In some cases, Tocqueville reserved his most frank and illuminating political analyses for her eyes alone. It was to Mottley, for example, that he sent his predictions

Madame de Tocqueville  137

for the “great democratic revolution” of 1848, an analysis that surpassed anything he shared with other family members.60 In this letter, as Laurence Guellec has noted, Tocqueville addressed Mottley as his equal, revealing to her how the revolution had quickly ceased to be an “adventure” and was now set to inflame Europe, leaving in its wake a profound reconfiguration of class relations.61 Aside from analysis and advice, the political tasks Mottley took on were numerous and varied. She acted as Tocqueville’s proxy in local affairs under the July Monarchy,62 managed some of his correspondence, and advised him on his entry into journalism as the editor of Le Commerce in the mid-1840s (Kergolay would refer to Le Commerce, in a letter to Mottley, as “your” [votre] journal, using “your” in the plural to refer to Mottley and Tocqueville).63 Her letters to Francis Lieber in relation to this latter project reveal an expansive intellect keen to both demonstrate a knowledge of current affairs and a hunger to know more of goings on in America (“Write to me, I take an interest in everything”).64 She comes across as particularly well versed in Tocqueville’s proposals for prison reform, sizing up where the key players stood on the issue (she finds Beaumont, a close Tocqueville confidant, to be disappointingly apathique), and imploring Lieber to send anything along to her that might lend support to Tocqueville’s scheme.65 Crucially, Mottley also appears to have weighed in on Tocqueville’s speech writing. In September 1850, an ailing Tocqueville was tasked with delivering an address welcoming Louis Napoleon to Cherbourg for a review of the navy. It was a speech that required a great deal of delicacy as Tocqueville sought to use the occasion to press the Prince-President to support a Cherbourg to Paris railway line, a project dear to his heart since at least the early 1840s. When his speech was met with universal acclaim (including from the President himself ), Tocqueville was quick to credit Mottley with having suggested important alterations to the draft.66 Mottley’s interest in politics was no mere function of her role as a political wife and was never going to pass away along with her husband. In the years following Tocqueville’s death, she would continue to vigorously debate political topics with their common friends. During one of the last conversations recorded in Senior’s memoirs of the Tocqueville household, Mottley lambasted the British government for their neutrality in America’s civil war and sympathized with the North’s indignation that the British would not support a struggle against slavery. It is a conversation that not only reveals her hatred of slavery but also shows her reading of international diplomacy to have been on point. Senior, responding to her argument, defended British policy by insisting that all that the North could legitimately expect was for Britain to remain neutral between belligerents. Mottley’s cool retort was that the British had been far too “avid” to recognize the southern rebels as belligerents in the first place.67

138  Ross Carroll

Critic and Editor During their marriage, Tocqueville relied not just on Mottley’s political sense but also on her analytical powers and editorial eye. He had good reason to. Mottley was an excellent reader, an accomplished linguist (she spoke Italian and German), and intellectually curious. She debated the style and substance of Tocqueville’s published articles in her letters to Kergolay and served as a critical soundboard for Tocqueville when he was producing new work.68 In the summer of 1852, when writing Ancien Regime and the Revolution, Tocqueville and the philologist JeanJacques Ampère would work during the day and then read what they had written to Mottley, their “only audience,” for feedback in the evenings.69 During this time, Tocqueville appears to have taken Mottley’s suggestions concerning style particularly seriously. In a note in the manuscript of Ancien Regime, Tocqueville registered some of her criticisms and conceded that she had been correct: “Marie thinks this chapter is difficult to understand and boring, which unfortunately seems to me true enough.”70 Similarly, in the margins of the manuscript of his Recollections, he recorded how Mottley found “somewhat labored and colored” the passage relating how the revolutionaries of 1848 could only imitate the revolution of 1789 rather than continue its work.71 It is difficult to know whether Mottley ever wrote anything substantial of her own. It is conceivable that she did, particularly given the precedent set by some of her acquaintances. Her friend Harriet Grote published a defense of property in a pamphlet on pauperism. Closer to home, Mottley’s compatriot and friend Elizabeth Birch performed vast amounts of secretarial, editorial, copying, and translation work for her husband, Lamartine, and even composed whole sections of his Voyage en Orient.72 It is possible that Mottley undertook similar tasks, but if she had plans to write, then they likely went unsupported by her husband. For all of his professed commitment to democracy, Tocqueville was generally cool on the idea of female authors (he admitted detesting “women who write”).73 He made certain exceptions, admiring Grote’s work in particular (in the letter telling her so, he expressed embarrassment that, in French, auteur was a masculine noun).74 All the same, for Tocqueville women authors never ceased to be women and the condescending compliment he paid to Grote was that she had brought the imagination of a woman to bear on a dry subject like economics.75 Finally, had Tocqueville been keen to include Mottley directly in the writing process, then he could have drawn on her bilingualism to aid the translation of his work into English (as Birch had done for Lamartine). But there is little indication that he did so, instead entrusting the work exclusively to his English friend Henry Reeve. Much as Tocqueville relied upon Mottley’s critical faculties, therefore, there were clearly some skills of hers that he felt little desire to exploit. Mottley’s interest in Tocqueville’s research never wavered. If anything, it grew toward the end of their marriage. The year before he died, Tocqueville noted with fondness how while Mottley had always been important to his work, her

Madame de Tocqueville  139

assistance was increasingly “practical and effective” and her “encouragements and advice” invaluable.76 She was always anxious for updates on his research and his health (the two things that “interest you the most”), and, when away from the châteaux, Tocqueville expressed impatience to return to “our studies,” a phrase that suggests, if not collaboration, then at least an intimate exchange of ideas.77 He shared with her all of the petty frustrations he encountered in researching the second volume of his Ancien Regime, complaining to her bitterly about the classification system (or lack thereof ) in the papers on the French Revolution he was rummaging through at the British Museum.78 She learned of his anxieties about how his works would be received by different political factions in France and offered him much needed reassurance on that front.79 Tocqueville recognized Mottley’s level of investment in his writings and wholly trusted her abilities as an editor. This is particularly apparent from the will he drew up in Saint- Cyr-les-Tours in 1854. The document is remarkably light on mentions of other family members and it ends with a passionate declaration of his love for Mottley reminiscent of his letters to her. But of greater interest is the detailed set of responsibilities he conferred upon Mottley regarding his literary estate. In the first place, Tocqueville made clear that she alone would be responsible for handling his papers after his death and for making any decisions concerning what materials should be published. Trusting her “fine judgment and good taste,” he also entrusted her with choosing any co- editors from among their inner circle (she would eventually call on Beaumont’s services) and with choosing the appropriate time to publish the manuscript of Recollections, the memoir of 1848 that Tocqueville deemed particularly sensitive. Not only that, he authorized Mottley to amend the text itself by suppressing any judgments of individuals that may come across as “too severe” (one wonders if the savage description of Alexandrine discussed above featured among those he deemed fit for deletion).80 That Tocqueville would entrust his manuscripts to his wife rather than to a male colleague or collaborator should not come as a surprise. As Bonnie Smith has recently shown, the wives of nineteenth-century French intellectuals were often the “natural editors” of their husbands’ works, particularly as many of them assisted in the production of the work itself.81 Scholars, however, have often either downplayed the widow’s role or resented her activities.82 Criticism of Mottley’s handling of her husband’s archive has followed this pattern, much of it focusing on her treatment of Tocqueville’s correspondence. Tocqueville’s will stipulated that Mottley should either return to their senders or destroy all letters written to him without exception. That this was Tocqueville’s declared wish, however, has done little to shield Mottley from accusations that she meddled with the letters during the five years between Tocqueville’s death and her own. Brogan, to take a recent example, regrets that it fell to Mottley to edit Tocqueville’s papers and charges her with pushing the “prerogatives of a widow to their limit.” Only Mottley’s death and the intervention of a more

140  Ross Carroll

“honorable” editor in Beaumont, he writes, put an end to her “lamentable” quest to destroy and doctor evidence.83 Contemporary witnesses to her editorial labors, by contrast, judged Mottley’s handling of Tocqueville’s literary estate far more sympathetically. In the preface to the first volume of the Oeuvres Complètes, Beaumont credited Mottley with the idea of publishing the complete works as a monument to her husband’s memory.84 As Mathew Mancini has argued, the decision by Mottley to publish previously unseen work in this way sparked a Tocqueville revival in America where the English translation of the Oeuvres Complètes was well received.85 Furthermore, in his Avant-Propos to the 1866 Nouvelle Correspondence, Beaumont confirmed that the compilation of the Oeuvres Complètes began under Mottley’s direct “supervision” (sous ses yeux), and he praised her for setting everything in order so that the work might be completed after her own death.86 Here, he doubtless alluded to Mottley’s decision to bequeath her husband’s papers to Beaumont (thereby allowing him to complete the editorial work they had started together) rather than to the Tocqueville family, who would have to wait until the 1890s before finally recovering them through a financial settlement. This could have been Mottley’s parting shot against a family who had been cool to her from the beginning, but it more likely reflected her recognition that Beaumont would prove the more reliable guardian of Tocqueville’s literary legacy and could finish what they started (the very final touches on the project would be made by Beaumont’s widow).87 The charges leveled against Mottley as widow- editor have extended beyond tampering with letters, however. It has also been alleged that she used her control over Tocqueville’s papers to misrepresent her husband’s final days. Controversy has long simmered over whether Tocqueville embraced Catholicism on his deathbed or whether he persisted in his religious doubts to the end. Not only is the evidence patchy, but there also exist two different versions of a key source, namely Beaumont’s account of Tocqueville’s death. In the version of this text published by Mottley and Beaumont in the first edition of the Oeuvres Complètes, Beaumont insisted that Tocqueville had no need to convert to Catholicism because he had been strong in his faith all along. A second version of the account, however, seems to tell a different story entirely. In it, Beaumont recounts how Tocqueville rebuffed Mottley’s suggestion that he confess to a priest because he detested the idea of insincerely endorsing Catholic dogmas that he had long disbelieved. Mottley eventually succeeded in reassuring him, Beaumont continues, that the priest would not ask him to subscribe to any doctrines but would only listen to his repentance. Persuaded, Tocqueville sent for the priest himself before asking that Mottley replace the priest and hear his full confession herself.88 On the surface, this revised account conflicts with Beaumont’s published portrait of a man who had not “slightest trace of irreligion in him” and has prompted speculation as to why Beaumont altered the original.89 While

Madame de Tocqueville  141

Lukacs saw Beaumont as having acted alone from his own hypocritical motives, Jardin sees Mottley’s hand at work, stating that “in all probability” she convinced Beaumont to modify the text before going to print.90 He likewise accuses her of suppressing, out of “misguided devotion,” a letter to Madame Swetchine in which Tocqueville confessed his religious doubts, a copy of which was made by Clémentine de Beaumont. This accusation, based on “unpublished texts” that he neglects to cite details of, is consistent with Jardin’s overall portrayal of Mottley as a “spiritually narrow” Catholic convert (she had abjured her Protestantism to marry Tocqueville).91 Jardin’s accusation against Mottley is likely overblown. This is not least because the version of the text that Beaumont and Mottley did publish still contained hints that Tocqueville’s Christian convictions were weak. Having insisted on Tocqueville’s piety, Beaumont’s account took a surprising turn by recognizing that Tocqueville was a man frequently “disturbed by doubt.”92 Christianity was, he suggested, ultimately part of Tocqueville’s “political creed,” and even if he had not been sincerely devout he would never have behaved irreligiously at death for fear of the bad example he would set. If Mottley had been truly determined to scotch any reference to religious doubt from Beaumont’s text, then she would have had to insist on further revisions. But she did not. Moreover, Mottley was fully aware of Tocqueville’s fraught relationship with religion from early on in their relationship and seems to have tolerated it well enough. Writing to her from America before they were married, Tocqueville conceded that she “alone” knew the “depths of his soul” on religious matters and predicted that if he “ever became a Christian” that he would be obliged to her for it.93 There is little in the letter to suggest, however, that she was actively trying to convert him.

Mottley’s Double Presence In a memorable description of Mottley from 1857, Tocqueville alluded to his wife’s passionate manner both of “feeling” and of “thinking.”94 Up to now, only the first of these has been considered of real importance for understanding Mottley and her relationship to Tocqueville. Mottley’s passionate way of feeling, it has been supposed, sheds light on her fits of jealousy and on her uncanny ability to counterbalance Tocqueville’s own perturbed mind. Her way of thinking, by contrast, has been largely passed over, presumably on the spurious grounds that thoughts must be published before they can be studied. What I have attempted to show is that traces of Mottley’s thoughts and judgments can be glimpsed, if only dimly, in her work as a political confidant, adviser, critic, editor, and conversationalist; a set of tasks that engaged her to varying degrees over the course of her married life. Once we contemplate the range of Mottley’s labors, it becomes difficult to conclude that she was little more than an emotional crutch or that her

142  Ross Carroll

influence was confined to domestic management. Yet this is the line that many Tocqueville scholars have persisted in towing. That they do so is of interest not only because they may have misrepresented the nature of the Tocquevilles’ marriage or given Mottley short shrift, but also because it reveals the extent to which Mottley has been not so much forgotten as resented. That Tocqueville entrusted his manuscripts to his wife has been a source of regret to Tocqueville’s biographers and shows that Tocqueville had a degree of trust in Mottley’s abilities that they think was misplaced. Intellectual historians are usually quite happy to recognize wives as supporting players in a great philosopher’s life. A wife promoted to gatekeeper of the philosopher’s thought, however, is a different proposition altogether. One gets the impression from some biographers that, had it not been for Mottley’s distorting influence, then a purer, more pristine version of the ­Tocqueville oeuvre could be recovered. But to say that Mottley tampered with an otherwise pure oeuvre would be misleading at best. Most wives or domestic partners of philosophers are present at those crucial moments in which a work is thought up, spoken about, and committed to paper. But particularly when her editorial labors are taken into account, we can see that Mottley was present in a second sense as well. Not only was she part of the context in which Tocqueville’s ideas germinated, but she also oversaw the packaging of those ideas into a corpus, even if she delegated much of the editorial graft to Beaumont. Her presence in this second sense is what has proved most irksome to Tocqueville’s biographers, but it is precisely this that requires the future attention of scholars keen to recover untold stories of women’s intellectual labor.

Notes 1 I am grateful to Jennifer Forestal, Sarah Drews Lucas, Celeste McNamara, Menaka Philips, Rebekah Sterling, Terah Walkup, and to the editors and reviewers of Hypatia for contributing to the development of this chapter. An earlier version of this chapter appeared as Ross Caroll, “The Hidden Labors of Mary Mottley, Madame de Tocqueville.” Hypatia 33, no. 4 (2018): 643–62. Reprinted with permission. 2 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2000), 291. 3 Throughout this chapter, I mostly refer to Mary Mottley simply as “Mottley” rather than as “Mary,” “Marie,” or “Madame de Tocqueville.” All quotations from Tocqueville’s letters to Mottley are from Correspondance Familiale, edited by André Jardin and Jean Louis Benoît as volume XIV of the Gallimard Œuvres complètes (OC hereafter). All citations to letters in OC XIV (and to other volumes in the OC) include letter number (e.g., 32M) followed by the relevant page number. Unless specified, all translations are my own. 4 OC, XIV, 32M, 420; 95M, 514; 104M, 529. According to Tocqueville, he and Mottley were united by a unique, un-nameable sentiment unknown to other couples, a kind of cross between friendship and love (more passionate than the former but more stable and enduring than the latter) (OC, XIV, 24M, 384). 5 OC, XIV, 26M, 412. 6 OC, VI (3), 139, 273.

Madame de Tocqueville  143





­































144  Ross Carroll

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

OC, XV, 19, 297. OC, XV, 19, 298. OC, XV, 19, 298. Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848, ed. J. P. Mayer and A.P. Kerr, trans. George Lawrence (New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1987), 39–40. Tocqueville, 137. OC, XIV, 104M, 529. OC, XIV, 46 M, 445. Tocqueville, Recollections, 85. Tocqueville, 24. Tocqueville, 142. Tocqueville, 188. OC, XIV, 91, 249–50. OC, XIV, 91, 250. OC, VI (2), 377–78. OC, XIV, 31M, 415. OC, XIV, 57M, 459. For Mottley’s complaints about a lack of political news from Tocqueville, see OC, XIV, 59M, 461. On Tocqueville’s praise for her “good counsel,” see OC, XIV, 104M, 529. For an example of how Tocqueville discussed political strategy with Mottley, see OC, XIV, 85M, 494–95. OC, XIV, 99M, 521. Laurence Guellec, ‘Tocqueville à Travers Sa Correspondence Familiale’, in Tocqueville et l’esprit de La Démocratie, ed. Laurence Guellec (Paris: PNFSP, 2005), 405. Benoît, Tocqueville, 21. OC, XIII (2), 204, 151. Mottley to Francis Lieber, 8 January 1845. Italics and French in original. Tocqueville, Tocqueville on America After 1840: Letters and Other Writings, 80. Tocqueville, 79. OC, XIV, 119M, 547–48; Benoît, Tocqueville, 21. OC, VI (2), 519. OC, XIII (1), 204, 151. OC, VI, 134. These “little readings” were commonplace; see OC, XIV, 132M and 189M. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, ed. Francois Furet, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 385. Tocqueville, Recollections, 53. Lise Schreier, ‘Invisible, Illisible, endeuillée: Madame de Lamartine En Voyage En Orient’, Nineteenth Century French Studies 37, no. 2 (2008): 20. Tocqueville, Recollections, 134. Tocqueville to Harriet Grote, July 24, 1850. Alexis de Tocqueville, Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Roger Boesche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 251. Tocqueville, Alexis de Tocqueville, 250. OC, XIV, 187M, 638. OC, XIV, 184M, 630; Guellec, ‘Tocqueville à Travers sa Correspondence Familiale’, 407. OC, XIV, 168M and 172M. OC, XIV, 157M. The relevant passage from the will is reproduced in Benoît, Tocqueville, 572–73. Recollections would be eventually published in redacted form by Tocqueville’s grandnephew. Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 85.

Madame de Tocqueville  145

82 Smith, The Gender of History, 96. 83 John Lukacs was less convinced by Beaumont’s editing and found that he rather than Mottley had taken “all kinds of liberties”; John Lukacs, ‘The Last Days of Alexis de Tocqueville’, The Catholic Historical Review 50, no. 2 (1964): 159. 84 Gustave de Beaumont, ‘Preface’, in Oeuvres Complètes d’Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Gustave de Beaumont and Madame de Tocqueville (Paris: Michel-Lévy, 1864), xlv. 85 Mathew Mancini, Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals: From His Time to Ours (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 77. 86 Gustave de Beaumont, ‘Avant-Propos’, in Nouvelle Correspondence Entièrement Inédite. In Oeuvres Complètes d’Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Gustave de Beaumont and Madame de Tocqueville (Paris: Michel-Lévy, 1866), iv. Mancini, Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals, 125. 87 88 This version was published by Jean-Jacques Chevalier as a footnote in OC, IX, 13–14. 89 Gustave de Beaumont, ‘Notice sur Alexis de Tocqueville’, in Oeuvres et Correspondance Inédites d’Alexis de Tocqueville Publiées et Précédées d’une Notice Par Gustave de Beaumont (Paris: Michel-Lévy, 1861), 120. 90 Lukacs, ‘The Last Days of Alexis de Tocqueville’, 165. Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville, 529. 91 Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville, 530 and 52. 92 Beaumont, “Notice sur Alexis de Tocqueville,” 120. OC, XIV, 6M, 379–80. 93 OC, XV (2), 26, 309. 94

References Beaumont, Gustave de. 1861. Notice sur Alexis de Tocqueville. In Oeuvres et correspondence inédites d’Alexis de Tocqueville publiées et précédées d’une notice par Gustave de Beaumont. Paris: Michel-Lévy. ———. 1864. Preface. In Oeuvres complètes d’Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Madame de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont. Paris: Michel-Lévy. ———. 1866. Avant-Propos. In Nouvelle correspondence entièrement inédite. In Oeuvres complete d’Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Madame de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont. Paris: Michel-Lévy. Benoît, Jean-Louis. 1998. Preface. In Correspondance familiale, ed. Jean-Louis Benoît and André Jardin. In vol. XIV of OEuvres complètes, ed. J. P. Mayer et al. 18 vols. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2013. Tocqueville: un destin paradoxal. Paris: Perrin. Brogan, Hugh. 2006. Tocqueville: A life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Carroll, Ross. 2018. The Hidden Labors of Mary Mottley, Madame de Tocqueville. Hypatia 33(4): 643–62. Craiutu, Aurelian, and Jennings, Jeremy. 2009. Tocqueville on America after 1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guellec, Laurence. 2005. Tocqueville à travers sa correspondence familiale. In Tocqueville et l’esprit de la démocratie, ed. Laurence Guellec. Paris: PNFSP. Jardin, André. 1988. Tocqueville, a Biography. Trans. Lydia Davis with Robert Hemenway. London: Peter Halban. Lukacs, John. 1964. The last days of Alexis de Tocqueville. Catholic Historical Review 50 (2): 155–70. Mancini, Matthew. 2006. Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals: From His Time to Ours. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.

146  Ross Carroll

Schreier, Lise. 2008. Invisible, illisible, endeuillée: Madame de Lamartine en voyage en Orient. Nineteenth Century French Studies 37 (2): 11–29. Selinger, William. 2016. Le grand mal de l’époque: Tocqueville on French political corruption. History of European Ideas 42 (1): 73–94. Smith, Bonnie. 2000. The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tocqueville, Alexis. 1977. Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et de Louis de Kergolay, 2 vols., II, ed. André Jardin with assistance from Jean-Alain Lesourd. Vol. XIII of OEuvres completes, ed. J. P. Mayer et al. 18 vols. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1983. Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et de Madame Swetchine, ed. Pierre Gibert with assistance from Claude Bressolette and André Jardin. Vol. IX of OEuvres complètes, ed. J. P. Mayer et al. 18 vols. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1985. Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Roger Boesche. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1987. Recollections: The French revolution of 1848, ed. J. P. Mayer and A.P. Kerr. Trans. George Lawrence. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. ———. 1998. Correspondance familiale, ed. Jean-Louis Benoît and André Jardin. Vol. XIV of OEuvres complètes, ed. J. P. Mayer et al. 18 vols. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2000. Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer. Trans. George Lawrence. New York: Harper Collins. ———. 2015. The Old Regime and the Revolution. Vol. 1, ed. François Furet. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Welch, Cheryl B. 2008. Beyond the bon ménage: Tocqueville and the paradox of the Liberal citoyenne. In Feminist interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Jill Locke and Eileen Hunt Botting. University Park, PA: University of The Pennsylvania State University Press.

9 THE “BELOVED AND DEPLORED” MEMORY OF HARRIET TAYLOR MILL Rethinking Gender and Intellectual Labor in the Canon1 Menaka Philips

To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings—the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward—I dedicate this volume.2

In 1912, Harriet Taylor Mill’s granddaughter, Mary Taylor, published a rejoinder to an article in the Edinburgh Review entitled “Famous Autobiographies.” The author of the piece in question had taken it upon himself to evaluate the relationship between her grandmother and step-grandfather—John Stuart Mill— on the basis of the latter’s Autobiography and recently published letters. “In these days of feminist agitation,” he professed, “we can scarcely pass over the interesting topic of the influence of women upon men of ability.”3 The reviewer concluded that had Mill followed the example of someone like Rousseau in his choice of companion, Mill’s literary works would have avoided the “deleterious” effect of his wife’s influence.4 Taylor responded that such admiration for Rousseau’s relationship to Thérèse Levasseur,5 a “wronged and unfortunate woman… whose deficiencies were made an occasion for jesting between [Rousseau] and his friends,” was premised on the impertinent position that no one, much less a woman, could render anything of value to these “men of ability.” To suggest so, Taylor continued, smacked of an “intellectual arrogance and conceit of which … no man of genius would be guilty.”6 Taylor concluded her reprimand with a simple assertion: “That John Stuart Mill found his inspiration and delight in my grandmother’s companionship during twenty- seven years speaks infinitely more for her mental qualities than these studied yet shallow reflections can detract from either her intellectual or moral reputation.” 7

148  Menaka Philips

One would think the story could end there. After all, Mill did on numerous occasions laud his partner’s intellect and credited their collaborative engagements with enriching his life and work. In addition to her own short essays and reviews, scholars generally agree that Taylor Mill co-wrote a chapter of Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, was influential in the development of On Liberty and Subjection of Women, and was a key editor of his Autobiography.8 Still, his statements about her intelligence and influence have not sat comfortably with most Mill scholars. Instead, “the role of Harriet is in fact one of the most contested themes in Mill’s life.”9 From his death onward, Mill’s biographers have been inexorably drawn toward settling the question of Harriet Taylor Mill in some way or other. Was she quite as smart as he thought? How much of a hand did she really have in the “great man’s great texts?” Was she “vain and vituperative, proud and petulant?”10 Or, as Gertrude Himmelfarb blithely remarked, perhaps she was merely a shrewish substitute for the domineering influence of James Mill.11 The trend in studies of their relationship has thus been to evaluate the legitimacy of Mill’s admiration for his partner by dissecting Taylor Mill’s mental capacity and personal character. This is because, as one biographer suggests, Mill’s “hyperbolic statements about her powers have offended successive generations” of readers.12 It sometimes seems as if Mill’s very status as a canonical figure must be protected from his insistence that Taylor Mill was a key collaborator in his life’s work. Contrary, then, to Mary Taylor’s assertion, however clearly Mill noted his wife’s intellectual value and contributions, “Mrs. Mill” has been on trial for more than a century. This chapter offers an alternative approach to the legacy of Harriet Taylor Mill, first by drawing attention to her experiential politics as a credible source of intellectual scholarship, and second by raising questions about the gendered aspects of how intellectual labor has itself been identified and evaluated in studies of the canon. As I argue, the reception of Taylor Mill reveals that a particular type of intellectual work— one rooted in critical perceptions of the “everyday” and in the spaces women as wives, mothers, and intimates have most often labored—has too often been rendered invisible in studies of the Western canon.

Recovering “Mrs. Mill” Over the course of the twentieth century, contemporary feminists began to take up Harriet Taylor Mill’s cause by pointing out the gendered biases that conditioned much of Taylor Mill’s reception by scholars of J.S. Mill and of historical political thought more generally. Alice Rossi argues that readers have been split between rejecting her intellect and influence on her husband, or crediting her only with those elements of Mill’s thought “the scholar disapproved of.”13 For Rossi, both positions reflect the sexist narratives that have

Harriet Taylor Mill  149

underwritten general study of their relationship. Jo Ellen Jacobs, who has given Taylor Mill’s life and work extensive attention and credit, finds that the unwillingness to believe Mill’s praise of his wife as an intellectual partner reflects an impoverished understanding of the scope and nature of intellectual collaboration more generally: recognition of the “emotional and intellectual work that hides behind the dance called collaborative writing” has consistently been sacrificed to the “glorification of written texts.”14 Working in the frame of recovery, some readers have thus sought to represent Taylor Mill as a scholar in her own right by reclaiming the value of her letters and essays for analysis: from her writings on sexual inequality, to a variety of other social, legal, and economic questions.15 I join the efforts of feminist scholars to recover and revalue Taylor Mill’s intellectual legacy. With this aim, the chapter makes two critical contributions to the literature on Harriet Taylor Mill and John Stuart Mill, and to understandings of intellectual labor more generally. First, I argue that as a result of the narrowed view of intellectual work Jacobs points to, the importance of Taylor Mill’s experiential politics has been missed in studies of the Mill-Taylor partnership. Because, as Jacobs suggests, studies in the history of political thought are focused on the architects of “great texts,” even feminist efforts to recognize Taylor Mill as a valuable scholar and resource for contemporary studies remain framed by that traditional focus. Thus her defenders and critics alike continue to debate which of Mill’s philosophical texts Taylor Mill might rightly be credited for as an author or co-author.16 Though interventions around the question of authorship are certainly valuable contributions to discussions of their collaborative partnership, the move I make is different: by examining the connections between Taylor Mill’s life and politics, my aim is to flesh out the emotional and practical labor that Taylor Mill contributed to her partnership with Mill. In this way, we can begin to illuminate and revalue the forms of intellectual labor that operate between the constructed dichotomy of authoring great texts and the ostensibly everyday, even “mundane,” acts of care and living that are often unmarked in studies of the canon. Important to note is that my argument by no means suggests that the identification and study of great texts and their authors ought to be abandoned. Rather, the intervention made here is to suggest that the traditional rubrics that have marked what counts as intellectual work and authorship ought to be expanded to critically consider the lives, experiences, and certainly the labor of wives and intimates in studies of Western thought.17 The life of Taylor Mill shows how intellectual perspectives and personal experiences combine to produce critical political thought that not only shaped her own politics, but effectively influenced as well as contrasted with Mill’s traditionally defined philosophical works. In pursuing this critique, the chapter takes its normative and interpretive cue from scholars like Rossi and Jacobs as well as from contemporary feminist scholars who have examined the politics of intellectual

150  Menaka Philips

gatekeeping within the academy more broadly. bell hooks, for instance, has noted that the racialized dynamics of scholarly gatekeeping has come at a price: Work by women of color and marginalized groups of white women (for example, lesbians, sex radicals), especially if written in a manner that renders it accessible to a broad reading public, even if that work enables and promotes a feminist practice, is often delegitimized in academic settings … it is often this work that they most often claim is not really theory or is not theoretical enough.18 One consequence of this form of gatekeeping is that it too easily sidelines other sources of intellectual work and, just as important, the political experiences and perspectives that give rise to that work. This practice has both scholarly and political implications for how we read, interpret, and evaluate intellectual labor, and to the point of this volume, the labor of the wives and partners of men credited with defining the Western political tradition. Indeed, as the extant writings of Harriet Taylor Mill speak directly to the conditions that shaped her feminism, they give us critical purchase on the importance of those spaces and experiences that later feminists have worked so hard to have counted as political. Though we have no “great texts” authored by her, what we do have are her notes, diaries, letters, and published essays that include pieces co-authored and edited with Mill. Moreover, as I show, Taylor Mill’s critical perspective as a woman, both within yet outside her time, contributed to and directly challenged Mill’s feminism. Read in line with the conditions and challenges of her life, these works reveal Taylor Mill to be a frank observer of society and a critically self- aware actor who daily negotiated between (1) commitments to social reform, (2) an unusual relationship that drew reproach from even the most radical around her, and (3) a set of obligations that (though socially imposed by virtue of her gender) she refused to wholly abandon. Taylor Mill’s writings and letters on marriage, divorce, domestic violence, work, and motherhood thus reflect a merger between experience and theory on matters of gender and justice, which at times anticipate elements of contemporary feminist thought in ways the work of her famed husband did not.19 As I argue, the conditions of Taylor Mill’s life constitute an important basis for thinking about her politics and, by extension, remind us of the ways in which experience can and does shape critical social thought and practice. By developing an account of Taylor Mill’s experiential politics and its significance, this chapter’s second contribution lies in the questions it raises about the “private sphere” of academic study—that space in which the wives and intimates of canonical men have long been kept. Taylor Mill’s life and work, as well as Mill’s recollections of her, challenge assumptions about what constitutes intellectual labor. This is perhaps one of the underlying causes of the

Harriet Taylor Mill  151

“offense” Mill’s praise of her seems to have caused his readers over the years. Consider that Taylor Mill was not educated in any formal fashion. What she learned came from being an avid reader, a reflective thinker, and an expressive interlocutor within the radical and intellectual circle of friends she and Mill belonged to. As a woman who was not afforded the resources that would have made her a formal intellect on par with Mill (whose own childhood education was exceptional), and whose observations and related writings have not been considered scholarly in the traditional sense of constituting “great texts,” Taylor Mill does not quite fit within the philosophers’ club. But their intimacy on matters not only personal but professional has meant that she could not be kept entirely out of it either. Indeed, that she did have something to say, and that her partner made sure to acknowledge it, ought to be viewed as a boon to scholars of gender and to critics of the gendered academy today. Yet given the traditional association of intellectual labor with great texts and individual authors, it is perhaps not surprising that Taylor Mill has been set aside as a figure of “limited philosophical import” whose writings, though sometimes “rhetorically powerful,” lack any “great depth or rigor.”20 Despite efforts to reclaim her worth over the years, this reclamation has not caught on in the wider scholarly orbit of the history of ideas. Instead, the best we are told of Taylor Mill is that she remains an “essentially contested” figure in the realm of canonical studies. However, this standard view of Taylor Mill in the history of political thought broadly, and in Mill scholarship in particular, relies upon a decontextualized reading of Taylor Mill’s writings on gender, which has, in turn, supported the diminishment, even the dismissal, of her feminist contributions and her role as Mill’s intellectual partner. Drawing these elements together—the experiential aspects of Taylor Mill’s political thought and the limitations of scholarly understandings of intellectual labor—this chapter calls attention to the disciplinary norms that have privileged a type of intellectual labor historically grounded in the individuated characterization of male authors and their texts. It is long past time that scholars begin to rethink such norms. Part of that rethinking, as I argue here, ought to involve confronting the troubling treatment of the wives and intimates of those “great men” who constitute the Western political tradition.

Not by Tutelage, but by Circumstance As the eldest daughter of Thomas and Harriet Hardy, Harriet Taylor Mill’s home environment appears to have been somewhat tense. Letters to her siblings and to her parents suggest that Thomas Hardy could be cold, frugal, and occasionally cruel to his family, and that Harriet Hardy had an equally contentious relationship with her children, particularly with her eldest daughter. In a meticulously presented collection of Taylor Mill’s writings, editor Jo Ellen Jacobs suggests that Taylor Mill’s marriage to John Taylor (11 years her senior) was in

152  Menaka Philips

part driven by Mr. Hardy’s less than stellar financial situation. F.A. Hayek (the unlikely curator of Mill and Taylor Mill’s correspondence) suggests that Taylor Mill’s departure from her childhood home was likely a blessing for the then 21 18-year-old. ­ Whatever the motivations for their marriage, the few letters we have between Taylor Mill and her first husband speak of a kind and caring relationship. Yet, although there was no lack of affection between them, Taylor Mill was not fully enthralled with the conditions of marital life. Notably, though John Taylor appeared willing to encourage the literary interests of his young wife, his husbandly concern for her may have at times highlighted the unequal nature of marital relationships. Vacationing near the ocean during her second pregnancy, for example, the young Mrs. Taylor received a letter from her husband instructing her that she must not remain in the sea too long, and should limit herself to just one brief dip per day. “Attend to all this,” he assured her, “and you have your husband’s permission to bathe.”22 However well intended, this display of even the so- called gentle forms of authority exercised by wellmeaning husbands on the basis of sex is hard to miss. As Jacobs notes, it is particularly striking that on the envelope of her husband’s letter of instruction, Taylor Mill composed a poem about a young woman wandering into the ocean freely and bending the world to her “own cheerful way.”23 Women, Taylor Mill would later muse, “are educated for one single object, to gain their living by marrying … and that object being gained they do really cease to exist as to anything worth calling life or any useful purpose.”24 The theme of education and utility infuse much of Taylor Mill’s early notes. She herself did not have a formal education, nor did her parents encourage any extensive habits of learning in their children. It is not difficult to surmise that she felt that lack quite keenly: women are entirely deprived of all those advantages of academical or university instruction emulation & example which are open to all men … the whole rupture of their lives is made to depend on their utter exclusion from any source of knowledge or experience of the world.25 Perhaps self-reflectively, she also points out that “girls enter into what is called a [marriage] contract perfectly ignorant of the conditions of it,” and that ignorance, moreover, seems precisely to be what is considered “essential to their fitness for it!”26 In light of this, Taylor Mill found ostensibly progressive arguments for expanding learning opportunities for women in order to benefit others to be particularly perverse. She retorts that even the reformers “do not complain of [women’s] state being degraded at all—they complain only that it is too much degraded.” What they really desire is that women be educated to be “better ministrants to the pleasures of men.” We hear nothing, she continues, in “disquisition on mens education of what sort of instruction will produce the

Harriet Taylor Mill  153

greatest happiness [for] women.”27 These were the reasoned observations of a woman not yet 26 years of age, whose experiences at home, with marriage, and in society had already shaped a critical social and political awareness. Though her politics may not have been polished by years of careful tutelage, it was obtained through the difficult work of reflecting upon the circumstances of her own conditions and having the audacity to question them. As if predicting her future reception, Taylor Mill noted, “a woman who has energy sufficient to choose and to act for herself—becomes a mark for the obloquy of the great and little vulgar of both sexes.”28 In a sense, this has indeed become her lot in the history of political thought.

It’s in the Details The link between how Taylor Mill lived and the development of her analysis of gender politics has been considerably undercut in studies of her relationship with Mill. Take, for instance, examinations of Taylor Mill’s influence on Mill’s feminism. For some readers, the worth of Mill’s Subjection lies in its contribution to his studies of the abuse of power more generally.29 This, we might surmise, is the kind of philosophical breadth that Taylor Mill’s writings on gender, although “rhetorically powerful,” lack. In fact, Mill scholars never fail to point out that her influence on texts like Subjection was likely minimal, given that Mill himself notes in his Autobiography that his convictions regarding the equality of the sexes long predated his introduction to Harriet Taylor. Therefore, Francis Mineka argues, none of Mill’s biographers can convince “us that she [Taylor Mill] was the originating mind behind his work.”30 But Mineka forces a dichotomous view of Taylor Mill: either she was the originating mind— the true author of Mill’s work on gender— or her significance was minimal. Rooted in the designation of individual authorship, this view is echoed repeatedly in Mill scholarship. In his biography of Mill, for instance, Richard Reeves suggests that there is little “reason to think that Mill’s views would have been substantially different had he ended up with say, Lizzie Flower …”31 One thinking woman, it seems, might simply be exchanged for another with little impact on the men in their company. That logic seems to underwrite H.O. Pappe’s claim that Taylor Mill’s influence on Mill’s feminism was “only one of details, not of general attitude.”32 Here, then, we see the costs of ignoring Taylor Mill’s experiential politics as an intellectual resource in and of itself. Left out of the above assessments of Mill’s independent feminism, for instance, is appreciation for how much the details matter to feminist theory and politics. First, we ought to consider the subtle strategies that may have influenced Mill’s careful reminder that his gender politics predated his relationship with Taylor Mill: Mill may have wanted to ensure that his critiques of gender inequality could not be so easily dismissed as the product of his wife’s “deleterious”

154  Menaka Philips

influence (an aim we know some of his contemporaries ignored). This is not an unlikely interpretation of what Mill was doing in the Autobiography, given that he also pointed out that he had intentionally delayed publication of Subjection of Women for nearly a decade in order to ensure its release would come at a time when the public was most ready to read it.33 Second and more significantly, Mill also insists that although his convictions regarding the necessary equality of women predated Taylor Mill, his perception of how significant that equality was in the context of everyday life was considerably shaped by her: “It was through her,” he says, “that I first perceived and understood its practical bearings; her rare knowledge of human nature, and perception and comprehension of moral and social influences, shewed me … the mode in which the consequences of the inferior position of women intertwine themselves with all the evils of existing society …”34 Mill himself locates Taylor Mill’s perception of the “practical bearings” of gender inequality as a key influence for his own feminist philosophy. Taylor Mill might not have created his feminism, but she certainly was significant to it. Yet neither of these considerations has penetrated scholarly dismissals of Taylor Mill’s influence. Indeed, to draw Taylor Mill’s experiential politics into focus requires that we reconsider the terms upon which intellectual history— often the history of “great men”—has been grounded in the academy. We have to ask: how has our reliance on traditional standards of intellectual labor and scholarly output rendered invisible the role and value of women’s experiential politics in the way we construct and interpret the history of political thought? And by extension, how have our own engagements with the history of ideas and contemporary discourses been similarly affected as a result?

Grounded in the “Everyday” It is in the details, after all, the specific experiences of exclusion and subordination, that we find the foundations of a politically grounded perspective and a critically aware feminist practice. As Patricia Hill Collins argues in relation to Black women’s experiences in the US, the “outsider-within” location of Black women and women of color can foster “new angles of vision on oppression.”35 As a woman who both challenged the norms of her time yet remained subject to them, Taylor Mill’s complicated role as a wife, mother, and partner to Mill produced a similar kind of fraught status. Her experiential politics afforded her a different kind of political vision and practical investment than we see in Mill’s works. Note, for instance, the focus given to the “everyday” in Taylor Mill and Mill’s co-authored publications. In their drafts on the rights of women, attention is consistently drawn to abolitionist activity, the improvement of schools,

Harriet Taylor Mill  155

and amelioration of prison conditions as evidence that “almost all the popular movements towards any object of social improvement which have been successful in this country, have been those in which women have taken an active part.”36 Such examples are notably absent from Mill’s own writings on the issue, which frequently turn to the figures of queens and great female artists for evidence of women’s potential capacity. We do not find in Mill’s Subjection of Women the same references to the day-to- day labor women already take up on behalf social and political causes as we do in their co- authored publications. Where Taylor Mill was directly collaborating, then, it seems that a more concrete picture of feminist practice took hold of their feminist writings. Similarly, a number of their co-written newspaper articles (which Mill often credits Taylor Mill with conceptualizing) show particular concern for cases of domestic violence against women and children, especially in the working and poor classes. Ten of these pieces, written between 1846 and 1851, focused on cases before the court and were precise in outlining not only the conditions of abuse, but also the failure of the police and legal apparatus to offer victims any measurable protection. These women, they write, feel that to the utmost limits of common decency, and often beyond, a tribunal of men will sympathize and take part with the man. And accordingly they die in protracted torture, from incessantly repeated brutality, without ever, except in the fewest and rarest instances, claiming the protection of law.37 In her Enfranchisement of Women, Taylor Mill drew attention again to the conditions of poor women, noting that men in poorer classes who have little authority over anything else “have a helpless woman for their household slave. These excesses could not exist if women both earned, and had a right to possess, a part of the income of the family.”38 Although his readers have been quick to point out that Mill’s writings illustrated the so-called philosophical breadth of the problem of gender inequality in ways Taylor Mill did not, what they miss is the fact that Taylor Mill’s contributions hammered home the depth of its impact on women’s lives. Though Mill’s Subjection (and his earlier piece “On Marriage”) certainly touch upon the brutality women’s dependency can lead to, they do not carry the gritty context found in the pieces Taylor Mill wrote and co-wrote as well as in her private letters on the issue. It is those gritty realities that offer us a sense of political vitality and urgency, and that operate simultaneously as intellectual critique and political action. Thus, when her critics diminish the rigor of Taylor Mill’s writings in comparison to Mill’s discussions of political equality and human development, they ignore the fact that Taylor Mill’s defense of women’s rights was enriched by her own experiences of exclusion from the advantages of society, and deeply grounded in her refusal to acquiesce to the limits imposed upon her sex. Given her reception, it is all the more striking that Mill had no such qualms in

156  Menaka Philips

acknowledging Taylor Mill’s perspective as a factor in what made her influence on his understanding of inequality so profound. He at least did not reduce his partner’s experiential politics or set it aside from the ostensibly grander pursuits of philosophical inquiry. Yet the dictates of what constitutes intellectual work in the academy has occluded these realities and thus foreclosed a richer appreciation of the different experiences and joint labors that shaped Taylor Mill’s and Mill’s views on gender politics.

Her Radical Vision In his biography of Mill, Reeves notes that because critics have been focused on Taylor Mill’s influence on Mill, her own “contribution has been too easily devalued.”39 Yet Reeves tempers this observation by assuring us that this devaluation is in large part driven by Mill’s exaggerated praise of her. Had Mill not offended his readers by insisting on his wife’s intellectual significance, we might have seen more respect for her work. Again, however, presumptions about what constitutes legitimate intellectual work come into play. Not only did Taylor Mill’s experiential politics generate a “practical” bearing that Mill himself benefited from; it necessitated a differentiated view from Mill. Critics of Taylor Mill often gloss over the fact that her feminism did not just align with or supplement Mill’s views; it also departed from his in comparatively radical ways.40 Contemporary feminists have noted that on the subject of divorce, Taylor Mill showed herself to be more willing to break with the status quo than was her partner.41 Where Mill had a more cautious approach to divorce (and avoided making too definitive a statement on the issue), Taylor Mill eschewed any notion that divorce should be difficult to obtain once the parties are certain. She wonders who would wish someone to remain with a person against their inclination: “Suppose instead of calling it a ‘law of divorce’ it was called ‘Proof of affection.’” And where long experience shows that proof to be lacking, “Would not the best plan be divorce which could be attained by any, without any reason assigned, and at small expence …?”42 It is notable that where both Taylor Mill and Mill would have benefited from more flexible divorce laws, only she—who felt the brunt of social censure, and the stress of managing her unusual relationship with Mill alongside her ongoing marriage to John Taylor—made an effort to explicitly challenge it. Divorce, as she argued, should not only be an option in the face of brutality, but also in the face of dwindling affection and substantive dissatisfaction. In Taylor Mill’s view, marriage itself stemmed from the poverty of education and opportunities that made women dependents and men masters: “I have no doubt that when the whole community is really educated tho’ the present laws of marriage were to continue, they would be perfectly disregarded, because no one would marry.”43 She wrote of a future in which women would not have to barter “person for bread” or bear children for the purpose of securing the support of husbands and where, instead, “fathers would provide

Harriet Taylor Mill  157

for their daughters as they did their sons.” Like feminist scholars after her, she hoped for a future where intimacy would not be governed by contracts, but by affection between equals. These more progressive ideas about marriage and divorce are not the only departures she makes from Mill’s more cautious views. Her reflections on gendered forms of work and motherhood are equally striking in comparison. Commenting on an exchange between Mill and Comte on the subject of women in the 1840s, she argues that Mill concedes too much to Comte by allowing that there is some “natural fitness” of the sexes for different occupations. “You propose,” she writes to Mill, that the same original differences that make one mind unsuitable for both “work of active life & for work of reflection & combination” might also be “sufficient to account for the differences in the characters & apparent capacities of men & women.” Yet neither you nor Comte seem to settle the other analogous question, whether original differences of character & capacities in men are to determine to which class of workers they are to belong … & there is also to be taken into account the unknown extent of action on the physical & mental powers, of hereditary servitude.44 For Taylor Mill, if Mill could accept that men and women could be reasonably separated into distinct occupations on the basis of their “original differences,” he ought also to accept that male workers could be separated into distinct classes of workers according to their “original differences.” More important, she reminds him that any assertions about differential capacities must account for the conditions in which persons develop— a prominent theme of Mill’s On Liberty and Subjection, published years later. The critique seems to have had an effect. Mill confessed to his friend Alexander Bain that he regretted having made such concessions to Comte, and even decided to never show the exchange to anyone again.45 Recalling Pappe’s remarks, one wonders how the details pointed out by Taylor Mill might have influenced Mill’s general attitude regarding claims of natural capacity. Taylor Mill also reveals more radical views on women and gendered labor in Enfranchisement of Women. Here she argues (as Mill later does), “The proper sphere of all human beings … cannot be ascertained, without complete liberty of choice.”46 But, as feminists have been quick to point out, Mill imposes a caveat on this position when he asserts also that women who choose to marry will have effectively chosen to occupy themselves with the obligations of domestic life and will thus not negatively affect the labor market or the rearing of children.47 Though feminists have rightly challenged his acceptance of traditional roles in this account, Mill scholars have paid little attention to the fact that his wife disagreed with him.48 For Taylor Mill, though a concern over the influx of women laborers into labor markets might be real, it “does not reach

158  Menaka Philips

the political question. It gives no excuse for withholding from women the right of citizenship.”49 Noting also that maternity and motherhood are usually forwarded in arguments against women’s rights, Taylor Mill responds in Enfranchisement that “It is neither necessary nor just to make imperative on women that they shall be either mothers or nothing; or if that they have been mothers once, they shall be nothing else during the whole remainder of their lives.” She points out further (and delightfully) that “No one proposes to exclude the male sex from Parliament because a man may be a soldier or sailor in active service, or a merchant whose business requires all his time and energies.”50 Once again, we have to consider her own situation as a mother and as a woman struggling against the confines of her sex in examining these views. Unlike her partner, Taylor Mill was not content to accept the notion that marriage or motherhood should conclude a woman’s occupational opportunities. In her tripartite role as a social critic, wife, and mother of three in nineteenth- century England, Taylor Mill struggled against some of the gendered expectations Mill casually accepts in his Subjection of Women. Taylor Mill’s politics thus deserves attention for the ways in which it influenced and departed from aspects of Mill’s own feminist views—but also for its critical contribution to thinking about the terms and resources of feminist theorizing itself.

In and Out of Her Time Yet even as she struggled against them, Harriet Taylor Mill refused to wholly abandon the expectations or duties visited upon her sex. Her correspondence with Mill is especially enlightening on this score for the vivid picture it paints of a woman who thinks and hopes beyond the confines of her time while remaining subject to it. Taylor Mill (not unlike many today) lived in a negotiated position between her feminism and her social reality— a negotiation that continued even after the death of John Taylor and her subsequent marriage to J.S. Mill. A most interesting exchange in 1835 (and frankly comical for what it reveals of Mill) highlights Taylor Mill’s awareness of the balancing act their relationship required of her— a balance Mill seemed not to fully appreciate. It appears that the young Mr. Mill confessed his frustrations over the unusual arrangement that allowed them to maintain a relationship, though she remained married to John Taylor. Based on what Taylor Mill quotes of Mill’s letter (which is lost), Mill complained about the effect this situation might have on his career, being distracted as he was by the suspended quality of their connection. That complaint, notably, was shared by his contemporaries: Thomas Carlyle wrote to their mutual friend John Sterling, “Is it not strange, this pining away into dessication [sic] and nonentity of our poor Mill, if it be so, as his friends all say, that this charmer [Harriet] is the cause of it.”51 However poor he appeared to be, Taylor Mill rightly rejected Mill’s appeal for sympathy: “Good heaven

Harriet Taylor Mill  159

have you at last arrived at fearing to be ‘obscure & insignificant’! What can I say to that but ‘by all means pursue your brilliant and important career.’”52 Imagine for a moment the reaction of this woman to reading such a complaint from this man. How can the pupil of Bentham, already renowned in intellectual circles and directly engaged with the famous minds of his generation, complain of fearing obscurity and insignificance to a woman who had never possessed his privileges, and who wrote frequently about the inequity of women having little usefulness beyond the task of getting married and playing “ministrants to the pleasures of men”? Mill failed to realize how much more Taylor Mill risked by maintaining their special relationship. Responding again to Mill’s complaints about their arrangement— and, it seems, some suggestion on his part that they seek a situation more amenable to their needs— she writes, I have always seen & balanced in my mind all these considerations that you write about … but I know too what you do not … that once having accepted that life I should make the very best of it. Her reasons for accepting the compromises Mill complains of are significant: I do not hesitate about the certainty of happiness—but I do hesitate about the rightfulness of, for my own pleasure, giving up my only earthly opportunity of ‘usefulness.’ You hesitate about your own usefulness & however greater in amount it may be, is certainly not like mine marked as duty. I should spoil four lives & injure others. This is my only hesitation.53 Here we have evidence of how critically aware Taylor Mill was of her precarious position vis-à-vis her family, Mill, and society. The passage is remarkable not only because it shows how little Mill seemed to appreciate her situation as a woman in these early years, but also because it provides a brutally personal context for Taylor Mill’s political writings. As she aptly points out to the man whose feminism we are told was “independent” of hers, whereas his usefulness as a public intellectual might be “greater,” hers as a wife and mother is marked as an obligation of her sex. The only earthly usefulness she is granted by society is in those roles, roles that Mill, for his own interests, wanted her to abandon.54 In these letters, Taylor Mill reminds him and us that she herself lived the consequences of gender inequity that he is so famously credited with theorizing about. Taylor Mill’s difficult position surely shaped her reluctance to leave their relationship open to interpretation— a fact that critics have interpreted less generously as a sign of shrewd meddling on her part. But again, the circumstances of her position might warrant some consideration. Before their marriage, for example, she became furious with Mill for giving his blessing in 1849 to a

160  Menaka Philips

publication of John Sterling’s letters, which included Sterling’s correspondence with Carlyle regarding the propriety of Mill’s relationship with her. Taylor Mill had at this time been caring around the clock for a dying John Taylor. After having reviewed the series of letters concerning Mill’s questionable relation to a married woman, she became incensed. Is it any wonder why? Mill was willing to “put his own hand and seal” to the praise of his name by men who had determined to judge his relations “with some unknown woman in unknown circumstances.” Taylor Mill points out, “Of course the old bugbear words ‘married woman’ were at the bottom of this unanimity of fear & sorrow which these men honoured (or disgraced selon moi) you with.”55 In these letters, Mill’s name was praised, but pitied only for its connection to this married “charmer,” as Carlyle had called her. For over a month, Taylor Mill had been nursing John Taylor as he lay dying, all the while responding diligently to Mill’s requests for editorial advice and contributing ideas for joint articles on women’s rights and current events. Yet in the midst of this, she finds him willing to bless the publication of gossip that effectively maligned her by way of commiserating with the difficult position of this “man of ability.” “That you cd be willing to have these things printed hurts me more deeply than any thing else I think cd do.”56 The letters were never published, and notably, when Mill began to compose his Autobiography, the question of how their relationship should be presented became central to him as well as to Taylor Mill. As Mill wrote to her in 1854 (perhaps now with the Sterling letters in mind), we have to consider, which we can only do together, how much of our story it is advisable to tell, in order to make head against the representations of enemies when we shall not be alive to add anything to it57 —a fair concern in light of how Taylor Mill and their relationship generally has been evaluated over the years.

A Feminist Partnership One might marvel at the fact that Taylor Mill’s attachment to Mill—both emotional and intellectual— could be so strong as to make her willing to endure the censure of society and to juggle the duties various parties demanded of her. Rather than having “succeeded in holding both her husband and her lover at arm’s length,”58 we might say that her success came in surviving this triangle. That she actively tried to manage the expectations of all without relinquishing her agency to any is no small feat and recommends a more considerate view of her emotional and intellectual labor in the context of her life. Perhaps then we might understand why, after her death, Mill knew her to be

Harriet Taylor Mill  161

the most regretted loss of his life. Readers, however, have not been receptive to this view: One can understand a woman’s acceptance of even extravagant flattery in a lover’s or even a husband’s letters; one finds it difficult to comprehend a wife’s coolly approving for publication as her due such extraordinary tributes as Mill paid Harriet in the Autobiography.59 This statement by Mineka reflects the fairly widespread opinion that Harriet Taylor Mill did not deserve her partner’s high estimate of her intellectual ability and contributions. With a few nods to her minor editorial skills and her limited influence on Mill’s feminism, most Mill scholars conclude that Taylor Mill’s primary worth is to be found in the “inner” support she provided him. Michael Packe thus claims that Taylor Mill’s influence was appropriately “womanly”: “she soothed him in anxiety; she worried about his health. She afforded him emotional release. In this respect she was completely adequate.”60 John Robson agrees, noting that Taylor Mill’s importance was primarily that she “gave him confidence and inspiration, coupled with an admiring affection he found nowhere else.” But, Robson assures us, “she was not in any meaningful sense, the ‘joint author’ of his works.”61 Even Susan Moller Okin, who appreciates Taylor Mill’s more radical moments, still reasons that “it is only Mill’s distorted impression of her abilities that suggests that she was endowed with any qualities of genius.”62 Pappe ventures that those distortions were probably spurred on by the fact that because their relationship was of a peculiar nature for so long, Mill never endured the normal male “disenchantment from the image he has projected into his beloved.”63 In the scholarly view, Taylor Mill seems to have succeeded at least in being a ministrant to Mill’s needs, though not qualifying as his intellectual equal and collaborator. She has, in effect, fallen prey to the very “feminine” occupation she spent much of her life protesting against. But if scholars have it right, what possessed John Stuart Mill to exaggerate his wife’s abilities? Would her reputation not have benefited (and likely more so) from a simple declaration of affection and respect? Had the dedication in On Liberty read, “to the beloved and deplored memory of she who supported me in all my endeavors and contributed some very fine thoughts,” Taylor Mill might have become the most respected wife of the canon. And perhaps that is precisely the problem. If the wives of great men are valued insofar as they keep to traditional expectations of what a wife ought to be—private ministrants and soothers—that Mill considered Taylor Mill to be a partner in the fullest sense would constitute a breach of those expectations and of the wall between the public and private worlds of canonical figures. This, I submit, is what has triggered her repeated trials over the years. In living beyond her expected role, Harriet Taylor Mill constitutes a problem for political theory and for the narrow tradition of intellectual labor to which it prescribes.

162  Menaka Philips

Scholars have succeeded in minimizing Taylor Mill’s worth in large part because the intellectual work she produced, and which Mill so valued, runs afoul of what is normally considered to be scholarly. Within the confines of the “great text” and expectations about what intellectual work should look like, the political labor of “wives” like Taylor Mill becomes background matter. The tragedy, then, is that Harriet and John went further in trying to realize their partnership than later generations of readers have been willing to accept. One of her few defenders, Jo Ellen Jacobs, has rightly asked, “John was convinced that Harriet’s ways of understanding complemented and furthered his own. Why doesn’t anyone believe him?”64 It is an excellent question, and I propose that how we answer it will reveal much about the gendered boundaries and exclusions we continue to enforce. What has upset successive generations of Mill scholars is that Taylor Mill refused those boundaries and would not remain a mere auxiliary to the great man; even more shocking, Mill ultimately refused to treat her as one. To understand why requires that contemporary readers of Taylor Mill, Mill, and the canon more broadly take seriously alternative modes of expression and sites of intellectual reasoning, especially when they involve those figures who operate on the margins of academia, those figures who stand both outside and within. In the context of political thought, this scholarly reckoning with the private sphere of academic study would have to come to terms with the fact that there is a palpable “connection between what one does and how one thinks.”65 It is a connection that will sometimes require us to move beyond our own definitional boundaries of what constitutes intellectual labor and great texts in order to recover the experiences and political insights of those wives and intimates who have been left outside the purview of scholarly interest.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter first appeared as Menaka Philips, “The ‘Beloved and Deplored’ Memory of Harriet Taylor Mill: Rethinking Gender and Intellectual Labor in the Canon,” Hypatia 33, no. 4 (2018): 626–42. Reprinted with permission. 2 Dedication, J.S. Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, 2006th ed., vol. 1, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Indianapolis, IL: Liberty Fund, 1981), 216. 3 “Famous Autobiographies,” Edinburgh Review CCCCXXXVIII (October 1911): 339. 4 “Famous Autobiographies,” 342. 5 For a critical discussion of Levasseur’s legacy, see Jennifer Jones’s chapter in this volume. 6 Mary Taylor, “Mrs. John Stuart Mill: A Vindication by Her Granddaughter,” in The Twentieth Century, vol. 71, Nineteenth Century and After: A Monthly Review (New York: Leonard Scott Publication, 1912), 357–58. 7 Taylor, “Mrs. John Stuart Mill,” 363. 8 Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays; J.S. Mill, Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, vol. 21, 33 vols., Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984); Susan Mendus, “John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor on Women and Marriage,” Utilitas 6, no. 2 (1994): 287–99; Harriet Taylor Mill,

Harriet Taylor Mill  163

9 10 11

12 13 14

15

16

17

18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, ed. Jo Ellen Jacobs and Paula Harms Payne (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998); Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (London: Atlantic Books, 2007). Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, 228. John Robson, “Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill: Artist and Scientist,” Queen’s Quarterly 73, no. 2 (1966): 170. Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974); See also H.O. Pappe, “The Mills and Harriet Taylor,” Political Science 8, no. 1 (1956): 19–30; Robson, “Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill”; Stillinger’s introduction: Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays. Robson, “Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill,” 169. Alice S Rossi, ed., Essays on Sex Equality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 45. Taylor Mill, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, xxxiv, xvii; See also: Helen McCabe, “‘Political… Civil and Domestic Slavery’: Harriet Taylor Mill and Anna Doyle Wheeler on Marriage, Servitude, and Socialism,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy Online First (May 4, 2020): 1–18; Jo Ellen Jacobs, Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill, The (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2002); Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (New York: Vintage, 1994). Helen McCabe suggests that Mill would not have become the man he was without Taylor Mill’s partnership; Helen McCabe, “Harriet Taylor Mill,” in A Companion to Mill, ed. C Macleod and D.E. Miller (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 112–25; see also Penelope Deutscher, “When Feminism Is ‘High’ and Ignorance Is ‘Low’: Harriet Taylor Mill on the Progress of the Species,” Hypatia 21, no. 3 (2006): 136–50; Janet A. Seiz and Michèle A. Pujol, “Harriet Taylor Mill,” The American Economic Review 90, no. 2 (2000): 476–79; Mendus, “John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor on Women and Marriage.” John Stuart Mill, Sexual Equality: Writings by: John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, and Helen Taylor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); Taylor Mill, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill; Jacobs, Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill, The; Dale E. Miller, “Harriet Taylor Mill,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, October 5, 2015, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/ ­ harriet-mill/. This question of “canon construction” is something Catherine Gardner takes up in her study of the writings and personal letters of writers like Catherine Macaulay and literary figures like Mary Wollstonecraft; Catherine Villanueva Gardner, Women Philosophers: Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2003). bell hooks, “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 4, no. 1 (1991): 4. Though Taylor Mill certainly offered thoughts on a variety of other issues, I focus on her feminist writings because they speak directly to the issues of gender and the politics of scholarly receptions that are the subject of this chapter. For a discussion of her other works, see Taylor Mill, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill; McCabe, “‘Political … Civil and Domestic Slavery’”; Deutscher, “When Feminism Is ‘High’ and Ignorance Is ‘Low’”; Seiz and Pujol, “Harriet Taylor Mill.” Miller, “Harriet Taylor Mill,” 9–10. As Miller observes, this has been the standard view taken by Mill scholars of Taylor Mill’s intellectual accomplishments. Friedrich A. Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, Their Friendship and Subsequent Marriage (New York: AMKelley, 1969). Taylor Mill, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, 215–16. Ibid., 221. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 5.

164  Menaka Philips

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Ibid., 23. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 5–6. Mill, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, 21:xli. Francis E. Mineka, “The Autobiography and the Lady,” University of Toronto Quarterly 32, no. 3 (1963): 306. Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, 86. Pappe, “The Mills and Harriet Taylor,” 25. Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, 1:265. Ibid., 1:252–53. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2008), 14. Taylor Mill, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, 42. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 61. Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, 217. Jacobs provides a summary of the ways in which Taylor Mill has been viewed solely as a supplement to Mill. Taylor Mill, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill. Deutscher, “When Feminism Is ‘High’ and Ignorance Is ‘Low’”; Taylor Mill, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill; Mendus, “John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor on Women and Marriage”; Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). Taylor Mill, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, 22–23. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 31. Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, Their Friendship and Subsequent Marriage, 114. Taylor Mill, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, 57. Carol Pateman, “Equality, Difference, Subordination: The Politics of Motherhood and Women’s Citizenship,” in Beyond Equality and Difference, ed. Gisela Bock and Susan James (London: Routledge, 1995); Mill, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill; Okin, Women in Western Political Thought. Reeves’s biography of J.S. Mill is an exception here. He at least notes, “Harriet was much stronger in her opinions than Mill”; Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand, 219, 229. Taylor Mill, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, 60. Ibid., 59. Friedrich A. Hayek, Hayek on Mill: The Mill-Taylor Friendship and Related Writings, Hayek, Friedrich A. von 1899–1992. Works. 1989 ; v. 16 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 85. Carlyle’s favorable impression of Taylor Mill seems in fact to have shifted over time, perhaps coincidentally alongside the growing sense that Mill’s “implicit admiration and subjection” to him had waned, in large part over Mill’s stringent objections to Carlyle’s views on race and slavery. Taylor Mill, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, 332. Ibid., 332. In an editorial she co-authored with Mill, they observe that there are no bounds to society’s “aversion and contempt for a mother who deserts her offspring”; Taylor Mill, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, 92. Taylor Mill, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, 367; see also Hayek, Hayek on Mill, 157–58. Taylor Mill, The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill, 367. Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, Their Friendship and Subsequent Marriage, 194. Mineka, “The Autobiography and the Lady,” 304.

Harriet Taylor Mill  165

59 60 61 62 63 64

Ibid., 306. Michael St John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (New York, Macmillan, 1954), 237. Robson, “Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill,” 186. Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, 206. Pappe, “The Mills and Harriet Taylor,” 28. Jo Ellen Jacobs, “‘The Lot of Gifted Ladies Is Hard’: A Study of Harriet Taylor Mill Criticism,” in Hypatia’s Daughters (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 240. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 27. 65

References Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2008. Deutscher, Penelope. “When Feminism Is ‘High’ and Ignorance Is ‘Low’: Harriet Taylor Mill on the Progress of the Species.” Hypatia 21, no. 3 (2006): 136–50. “Famous Autobiographies.” Edinburgh Review CCCCXXXVIII (October 1911): 331–56. Gardner, Catherine Villanueva. Women Philosophers: Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2003. Hayek, Friedrich A. Hayek on Mill: The Mill-Taylor Friendship and Related Writings. Hayek, Friedrich A. von 1899–1992. Works. 1989; v. 16. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. ———. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, Their Friendship and Subsequent Marriage. New York: AMKelley, 1969. Himmelfarb, Gertrude. On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. hooks, bell. “Theory as Liberatory Practice.” Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 4, no. 1 (1991). Jacobs, Jo Ellen. “‘The Lot of Gifted Ladies Is Hard’: A Study of Harriet Taylor Mill Criticism.” In Hypatia’s Daughters, 215–47. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996. ———. Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill, The. Indiana University Press, 2002. John Stuart Mill. Sexual Equality: Writings By: John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, and Helen Taylor. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. McCabe, Helen. “Harriet Taylor Mill.” In A Companion to Mill, edited by C Macleod and D.E. Miller, 112–25. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2017. ———. “‘Political … Civil and Domestic Slavery’: Harriet Taylor Mill and Anna Doyle Wheeler on Marriage, Servitude, and Socialism.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy Online First (May 4, 2020): 1–18. Mendus, Susan. “John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor on Women and Marriage.” Utilitas 6, no. 2 (1994): 287–99. Mill, J.S. Autobiography and Literary Essays. 2006th ed. Vol. 1. 33 vols. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Indianapolis, IL: Liberty Fund, 1981. ———. Essays on Equality, Law, and Education. Vol. 21. 33 vols. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Miller, Dale E. “Harriet Taylor Mill.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, October 5, 2015. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/ entries/harriet-mill/. ­

166  Menaka Philips

Mineka, Francis E. “The Autobiography and the Lady.” University of Toronto Quarterly 32, no. 3 (1963): 301–06. Okin, Susan Moller. Women in Western Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Packe, Michael St John. The Life of John Stuart Mill. New York: Macmillan, 1954. Pappe, H. O. “The Mills and Harriet Taylor.” Political Science 8, no. 1 (1956): 19–30. Pateman, Carol. “Equality, Difference, Subordination: The Politics of Motherhood and Women’s Citizenship.” In Beyond Equality and Difference, edited by Gisela Bock and Susan James. London: Routledge, 1995. Philips, Menaka. “The ‘Beloved and Deplored’ Memory of Harriet Taylor Mill: Rethinking Gender and Intellectual Labor in the Canon.” Hypatia 33, no. 4 (2018): 626–42. Reeves, Richard. John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand. London: Atlantic Books, 2007. Robson, John. “Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill: Artist and Scientist.” Queen’s Quarterly 73, no. 2 (1966): 167. Rose, Phyllis. Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. Vintage, 1994. Rossi, Alice S, ed. Essays on Sex Equality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Seiz, Janet A., and Michèle A. Pujol. “Harriet Taylor Mill.” The American Economic Review 90, no. 2 (2000): 476–79. Taylor, Mary. “Mrs. John Stuart Mill: A Vindication by Her Granddaughter.” In The Twentieth Century, 71: 357–63. Nineteenth Century and After: A Monthly Review. New York: Leonard Scott Publication, 1912. Taylor Mill, Harriet. The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill. Ed. Jo Ellen Jacobs and Paula Harms Payne. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998.

10 “MERE AUXILIARIES TO THE MOVEMENT”1 How Intellectual Biography Obscures Marx’s and Engels’s Gendered Political Partnerships2 Terrell Carver

Biographers have agreed on the “love interests” (heterosexual) and “significant others” (female), and thus their marginal role by definition, in the lives of two “great men” of social theory, Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). None of the four women intimately associated with them was known to be an author of any great works or otherwise recorded great thoughts, and they are therefore minor figures—if that—in conventional intellectual biographies. During their lifetimes, Marx and Engels constructed themselves as political activists, contributing novel ideas to various incarnations of an international movement promoting democratic understandings of communism/ socialism. The “biographizing” of Marx and Engels began in the early decades of the twentieth century, when the two “great men” were posthumously reconstructed in the political struggles of the times, and in that way remembered from the then-recent past as “great” political activists for the cause. Over the 100 or so years since that time, however, biographies of the two have drifted away from their day-to- day political activism 3 and more toward the social theory side of things, albeit with dutiful nodding to their democratizing revolutionary ambitions and their presumed political failures.4 Thus, what were novel ideas in an original activist context were framed by biographers in later years in an intellectualized context, sometimes as science, sometimes as philosophy, and sometimes as both together, rather than focusing on the more quotidian activisms that Marx and Engels and their female partners actually engaged in. Engels himself began this process, praising Marx as a new Hegel from 1859 and as the equal of Darwin from 1883.5 As the substance and mode of mid- to late nineteenth- century activisms faded, this theoretical framing was an easy cue for biographers, both sympathetic and unsympathetic, to take up. The conventions for writing intellectual biographies of these two

168  Terrell Carver

“great men,” so I argue here, have produced a highly gendered view of the personnel, politics, and projects of their lives and times that is radically untrue to the lived experience of those concerned. This misprision is especially true of their gendered political partnerships with their “significant others.” Over 40- or 50-year careers, each man had a role in presenting himself to a reading public, and in more limited ways as a political speaker, most often in clandestine circumstances. But of course neither knew of, or at least was fully aware of, the processes through which he would become a “great thinker”—or in Engels’s case, “second-fiddle” to a “great thinker.”6 And they were unaware that their selected and eventually collected and purportedly complete “great works” would become available in popular and scholarly formats. Biographers and commentators have constructed the two as an important pair and their relationship—however this is construed— as an important feature of their individual as well as joint works. Although the two are known to have conversed via the correspondence that is preserved and are known to have spoken at length when co-located, the singular authorship of the vast majority of their archive is very well established. As part of the twentieth- century process of reception, some of the thenephemeral activist writings by the two became academic social theory malgré lui. This reception took place through a process of decontextualization and reframing of the authors as theorists, thus creating a canon of major and minor works, some of which were editorial reconstructions from notes-to-self or other manuscript writings simply left aside.7 Thus this process of personaconstruction and “great man” reception does not merely marginalize women and, perforce, gendered political partnerships; rather, it is also definitional for the twin genres of intellectual biography and canonical republication, that is, the “great man” and his “great works.” Intellectual biographies already presume that it is the “great works” that interest us, so the biographical details of the “great man” are thus ancillary to that, providing explanatory contextualization and occasional “humanizing” anecdotes. These latter are typically constituted through brief episodes of tragedy, such as the births and/or deaths of offspring and/or partners, and by whatever comedic moments, as recorded, happen to appeal to the biographer as amusing.8 This zone of contrast is where the now familiar “love interests” and “significant others” arise, and where the women we are concerned with are firmly located. They appear briefly, here and there, as sexual objects, as actual or potential child-bearing subjects, and as repositories for anxieties and helpmeets for consolation. Intellectual biography is thus a masculinized genre because these terms invoke an unquestioned public/private distinction. As documented by feminist scholarship, this distinction constructs the sole and subordinated way in which women become barely visible in intellectual biographies and in malestream political theorizing generally as “mere auxiliaries.”9 Of the four women, only Jenny Marx10 speaks to us directly from the posthumously printed pages of her manuscript “Short Sketch of an Eventful Life,”

“Mere Auxiliaries to the Movement”  169

and additionally in a relatively small number of items of her correspondence as preserved, though incompletely collected, in canonical editions of Marx’s and Engels’s works.11 In this chapter, Jenny Marx figures much more than the other three women, which is a consequence of her ability to generate a historical record in her own hand, so it is mostly from those materials— and from what is recorded about her by men in the archive—that my genre-critique develops. The other three women appear only as reported speech in rare items of correspondence or very occasional public records, and in all four cases there isn’t all that much to go on.

Genre Trouble Biographers are almost always incurious about their genre, not least because any undue curiosity would undo what they are trying to do in the first place. Moreover, as Hayden White influentially argued, form determines content, 12 so Marx and Engels are secured in that way as “great men” and “great thinkers” by the genre itself. Marx and Engels—in terms of their biographical “lives”—have become the Marx and Engels we already know, so any significant departures from this would not make the “lives,” which we expect to learn more about, theirs anymore. The genre of intellectual biography secures this narrative as factual in a firmly but undramatically chronological way, moving forward from birth to death to afterlife, though this is usually enlivened, at least somewhat, by an internal dramaturgy of highlighted crucial developments, breaks, setbacks, achievements, and failures. These familiar tropes are tidily incorporated, as a rule, within an early/middle/late periodization. Biographers are not all that interested in bursting out from the characteristic framing that the intellectual biographizing of “great men” imposes, though there are very rare exceptions.13 Even in those exceptional cases, it is clear that we are meant to be interested in these women only because of their association as “auxiliaries” to the two men, who are already and indubitably known to be “great minds” thinking “great thoughts.” This well-worn framework produces oddly teleological simulacra: namely, the youthful and middle-aged subjects seem already to have grown the muchpictured grey beards, as in the cases of Marx and Engels, by which we know them from their posthumous reception. This reception has sanctified, demonized, and iconized them into familiar characters,14 and it is those “great thinkers” who stalk the younger men through the traces of their activities and thoughts to the extent that suitable materials have stuck in the records from which intellectual biography arises. The youthful avatars of Marx and Engels are thus always striving to become the “great men” and “great thinkers” that we know them to be. Other matters are generally marginalized as false starts or distractions, or in the case of people, reimagined as merely minor characters. These observations, of course, are not exclusive to intellectual biographies of Marx and Engels or to men— or, if conforming to the masculinized genre, women—who have been constructed through reception as “great.”15

170  Terrell Carver

Conventional intellectual biography is therefore teleological because it invests post facto meaning and significance into a “life” recounted as a story, whereas the subject was actually living a life which was open-ended at the time and thus indeterminate with respect to a “story.” Biographers give their game away when they slip into a characteristic verbal tense, the “was-to” locution, for example: Here Marx was to live out his life, write his best works, end his days, and so on. This merely tells us that the biographical genre is not organized around lived experience as it was to the subject, but rather around making and remaking a subject familiar to us as “great.” This reality effect is achieved by means of fictive prose and a subjunctive mood, which creates “knownness” and “factuality” through its tropes of referential certainty and “serious” stylistic dryness. Unsurprisingly, male or masculinized biographers are happy enough with these four women as auxiliaries to the “great men,” and find the marginalizing and patronizing discourse of helpmeet domesticity easy to repeat. After all, it is familiar enough, does not generally raise questions,16 and anyway, how could it be otherwise? Some people simply are more important to posterity than others, because they constitute and reference masculinity as a necessary qualification for, and criterion of, importance. Since public man outshines private woman, and because those tropes are important ways to make people and activities easily intelligible to biographers and readers alike, domesticity can hardly be the realm of “greatness.” Indeed, what would it mean to the world of public man if it were? Significance is conventionally organized around a public/political sphere, even if the “great men” as “great thinkers” were—in some cases, though not the present ones—notably self-sequestered and otherworldly. Immanuel Kant has been iconized in this way as the quintessential “great man” thinking “great thoughts” in apparently disembodied and nondomestic spaces. Or, in other words, reception itself is a gendered phenomenon, making men “great” in ways made familiar by repetition, such as being “great” by thinking. This genre-determined writing practice operates at the expense of women, whose elevation to this “great” status takes considerable effort to achieve, given the gendered character of the genre; indeed, because of genre-power, woman-asgreat-thinker, or indeed thinker at all, becomes— apart from feminist histories and biographies— almost unthinkable. This discursive politics of marginalizing women as thinking subjects has the further effect, particularly in the case of Marx and Engels, of marginalizing day-to- day activist practice, conducted— as we will see—in gendered partnerships, which are rendered invisible not simply by intellectual biographers, but also by the genre itself.

Bio-Data ­ Here is a rather telegraphic compte rendu of received truths about the four women, referenced from recent “humanizing” biographies of the two “great men.” After this brief exercise in basic bio- data, I analyze the marginalizing strategies

“Mere Auxiliaries to the Movement”  171

that intellectual biographies deploy. Note that my approach also refuses the commonplace view that bio- data is simply factual when drawn from reliable documentation and that similar basics of a life can be taken for granted as circumstantial givens. Actually, they are derived from presumptions about what is and isn’t of note about a person, and are therefore unselfconscious constructions of personhood as we understand it.17 Jenny Marx née von Westphalen (1814–1881): Karl’s childhood sweetheart through a long engagement; a faithful companion and homemaker, seven times pregnant, six live births, three surviving daughters; married “down” from a wealthy and cultured German family with Scottish aristocratic connections; smallpox victim, amanuensis, and—in rather patronizing terms— a political “fighter” yet a relentlessly domestic shadow of Marx’s genius and obsessions; predeceased her husband by a few months; generally regarded as a tragic figure battling debt, disease, infant death, and an unfaithful husband (see below under Helene Demuth).18 Helene Demuth “Lenchen” (1820–1890): servant girl from Jenny and Karl’s hometown of Trier in Rhenish Prussia; brought by Jenny to Brussels in 1845 to help her with small children, and, as often happened in such situations, remaining till death as senior domestic and sometimes nanny to Marx’s grandchildren; not notably recorded in correspondence until she succeeded to Engels’s domestic establishment after the death of Lydia Burns, known as “Mrs. Lizzie” (see below); after the archival discovery in 1962 of a typewritten copy of the hitherto unknown “Freyberger letter” of 1898, she becomes a major character in the Marx/Engels biographical register, owing to her pregnancy and delivery in 1851 of an illegitimate son, Henry Frederick Lewis Demuth; in the letter, Louise Freyberger (former wife of the socialist politician Karl Kautsky and after “Lenchen’s” death yet another Engels housekeeper, d. 1950) alleges—in prose of high-Victorian deathbed melodrama—that Marx was the father of “Freddy” (d. 1929), and thus an unfaithful husband and source of grief and shame.19 Mary Burns (1821–1863): Engels’s sometime companion in Manchester and presumed mistress; a mill girl of Irish origin, said to be uneducated and apparently barely literate; credited by Engels with guiding him through the industrial slums; subject of his grief at her early death, occasioning a much-noted remonstrance in correspondence to Marx about the latter’s and Jenny’s apparent indifference to his loss; a figure in some accounts with which to taunt the Marxes for sniffyness concerning the pair’s unmarried status, or alternatively a figure with which to congratulate Engels for his brave defiance of bourgeois marital norms; conversely a figure of a “kept” woman in the suburbs exploited by a mill-owner’s son and rich bourgeois man about town.20 Lydia Burns (1827–1878): Mary’s sister and successor as Engels’s housekeeper/presumed mistress/companion, having lived with the pair for some years; rather more recorded in correspondence than Mary, and apparently in a rather more respectable status, since the Marxes in their late years made seaside

172  Terrell Carver

excursions with the unmarried couple; occasionally mentioned as Engels’s wife, though usually without the obvious conclusion that a marriage on her deathbed meant that she couldn’t possibly inherit any of his wealth or cause any concern among his impeccably bourgeois family back in Germany; fondly remembered by Marx’s teenage daughter Eleanor, who recounted champagne- drinking with her on a hot afternoon “without stays”; also apparently barely literate.21

Centering Marginalization How does this marginalization work? A survey and analysis of the Marx/Engels biographical tradition will give us some clues and insights, which may also be of use in reconsidering other “great men.” Taking the oldest full-length biography first—Mehring 1918/1951—we can see that the four women are treated in a bio- data manner, with extreme brevity and only in relation to “humanizing” the two male subjects. From the outset, it is a given that any biography of Marx would necessarily have to include a fulsome account of his advertised partnership with Engels in which the personal and the political are assumed to be merged in ways that reinforce “great man” narratives. Mehring considers Jenny, in his first mention, as “future wife” (Mehring 1918/1951, 56) and then in relation to a repetition of certain remarks (not about her) by Engels that he made “at the grave of Frau Marx” (86); in the tale of the Marxes’ joint arrest in Brussels, briefly noting her incarceration “in the company of common prostitutes” (152); in correspondence when the biographer paraphrases Marx, writing that “his wife would follow him” into exile in England and noting that “Black care accompanied him on his third exile” (190); and from Jenny’s correspondence in praising the “calm, clear and collected strength of his [Marx’s] character,” leaving the reader to conclude that the dispatch of manuscripts in 1850 to Hamburg for a Review was wholly his and Engels’s logistical effort—unlikely, as we will see later (192); and in recording the birth of the Marxes’ fourth child, Mehring (in English translation) quotes “its mother” on the child’s and Jenny’s tribulations (210). There are further brief notes on similar family troubles (211), including quotations from “the diary of Frau Marx” regarding another infant death (217). Lightheartedness makes an entrance in an anecdote, recounted from the Marx-Engels correspondence, that “Frau Marx” had “concealed a whole budget of debts,” said by Marx to be out of misplaced consideration for Engels, which Marx had eventually to confess to his benefactor. This was in one of his routine requests for financial assistance and routine promises—in this case, including a remark on “the folly of women”—about which Engels (in Mehring’s words) was “good-humoured” (234–35). Child-death recurs under the heading “Family and Friends” (246–47), and in the succeeding pages of the biography Jenny serves the family well by inheriting enough money (from two sources) to enable them all to move (in Jenny’s words) to “a really princely home” and to recover “with

“Mere Auxiliaries to the Movement”  173

delight” her previously pawned “Scottish damask napkins” (248–49). In further passages, “Frau Marx” functions as a witness to, rather than participant in, Karl’s (apparently) sole labors as a “great thinker” (255). Then, in a remarkable passage noting Jenny’s direct logistical participation in this work—“making fair copy of the whole voluminous manuscript [of the polemical pamphlet Herr Vogt (1860)] for the printer”—Mehring frames this logistical activity as “a breakdown” for Jenny, resulting in smallpox, which was devastating (297). Mehring’s follow-up is a lengthy quotation attesting to the “natural vitality” characteristically shown by “Jenny Marx” as she recounts, in a “charming letter,” items of news concerning the Marx children to a female friend. Mehring’s view of Jenny then refers her good qualities back to his biographical subject, saying that she “possessed [them] in her own way no less than did her husband” (298–99). Jenny’s sole appearance as an activist, or indeed political consciousness, in her own right comes when Mehring quotes from her letter to the editor of Der Verbote (concerning the Second [Lausanne] Congress of the [First Socialist] International), but noting that “Marx consoled himself in a similar fashion” (389), so as to keep the biographical narrative clearly focused. Jenny makes one more appearance as a major source on family ups-and- downs (506), and then declines, in a section headed “Twilight.” In conclusion, she is honored at her interment by Engels (526–28). D. B. Riazanov’s Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels originated the brief-format but thoroughly intellectualized tradition of biographizing Marx, opening his book in an unmistakable way: In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels we have two individuals who have greatly influenced human thought. The personality of Engels recedes somewhat into the background as compared to Marx.22 Moving swiftly through two chapters of bio-data and early life (for both men), and omitting any account of Marx’s long engagement and eventual marriage in 1843, Riazanov arrives at 1844 when “Marx formulated for the first time the basic principles of his future philosophy” (43). Rather unsurprisingly from this “great man” and “great thinker” framing, none of the four women occurs in his text. By contrast, and adverting to “family” matters, Marx’s father Heinrich gets two pages (33–34), and through this patriarchal framing, Riazanov tells us how we should understand Karl’s formative years, and— of concern to some readers, evidently—his relationship to Judaism. Moreover, this woman-free framing helps to secure Riazonov’s presentation of Marx and his “philosophy” as serious and scientific over against the “present absence” of its defining opposite: a domestic zone where such things would not be conceived or understood. The biography Karl Marx: Man and Fighter, by Boris Nicolaievsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen, awards Jenny a complete though very short chapter, covering Karl’s engagement and marriage.23 She subsequently figures as a source of

174  Terrell Carver

information about his relations with her various relatives, who crop up in his life both positively (sources of money) and threateningly (secret police activity) (70, 140). Unusually, the joint biographers quote Jenny at length in a letter detailing the persecution of the couple in England by the Prussian police (173), though— as we will see later—this is an example of an opportunity missed. The account is framed as female-to-female, through which the spaces and events involved are in that way presented as merely domestic/private, though providing inter alia information about “public” men, what they do, and what happens to them. Moreover, Jenny is credited with participating in what were crucial activities at the time, but not credited as a crucial actor by the biographers, who consider such feminized matters a parenthetical aside. They spend no time considering the scale and difficulty of some of the actions involved, for example: “The money Marx brought with him [to London in 1849]—his wife had sold the furniture in Cologne and she had pawned the silver in France— quickly vanished” (251). Isaiah Berlin’s hugely influential but relatively brief Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (in the original title), authored by a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, had an especially intellectual cachet. It was indeed the first popular work for English-language readers to take a studiously sympathetic view of Marx as an intellectual rather than an account presenting him in overtly political terms. Jenny features very briefly, and only in relation to Karl’s courtship poetry (recently collected and published at the time of writing), his marriage and family poverty (humanizing detail but obviously a distraction from “great” thoughts), their children’s illnesses, and her own death prior to his.24 Succeeding Berlin’s little book was a more substantial “door- stop” biography of some 500 pages, written by David McLellan, whose Oxford D.Phil. dissertation was supervised by Berlin. This was Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, until very recently the definitive intellectual biography in English (and much translated). This work follows the genre outlined above in terms of birthto- death chronology, gendered hierarchies of significance, and domestic/ private exclusions. It offers great detail in places, yet the narrative provides further evidence of the kinds of incuriosity required of biographers in order to secure the genre-focus on a “great man” using his “great” mind to think “great thoughts.” In McLellan’s biography, Jenny’s letters of 1844 from Trier—where she recounts various money-related encounters— are a narrative prelude to a characteristic “was-to” moment: “She [ Jenny] returned to Paris in September 1844 with the wet-nurse and her [sic—their?] four-tooth baby to find that Marx had just formed the most important friendship of his life—that with Friedrich Engels.”25 Jenny’s financial backing during the revolutionary events of 1848 for Marx’s revived newspaper seems, in McLellan’s narrative, quite as unremarkable as Marx’s own contribution (whatever the legal circumstances of married women’s property at the time): “Marx had to contribute yet more

“Mere Auxiliaries to the Movement”  175

of his own and Jenny’s money to get the paper restarted and it became legally his own property” (208). Substantial quotations from Jenny’s letters to their male political collaborators, for example, Joseph Weydemeyer, on nonwifely and decidedly activist matters do not prompt any biographical opening up to gendered partnerships as a material and spatial activity. Rather, McLellan is content with the rather formulaic encomiums pronounced by Engels and others on the general character of her relationship to him (237). Nor does McLellan follow up on Jenny’s own quite detailed account of how this collective activism actually worked in spatial and material terms, as we learn from her letter to a male correspondent in October 1852: A whole office has been established in our house. Two or three do the writing, others run errands, others scrape together pennies so that the writers can continue to exist In the middle of it all my three faithful children sing and pipe. Some business! (251). Two further “door- stop” intellectual biographies have emerged in the last decade, both catching a wave of post-financial-crash interest in Marx, though both are clearly the result of many years’ work. Given the far greater resources and greater availability of archival materials, both have more Jenny Marx material to quote from, but both display the incuriosity about that material that is necessary in order to secure the “great thinker” in genre-terms. Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life frames his narrative in an impeccably malestream rank-ordering: ­ this book will place his [Karl’s] private life and political actions in their nineteenth-century context. As such, it will be a portrait, not just of Marx but of the many people surrounding him. Two of these individuals are an obvious choice: Marx’s loyal friend, political associate, intellectual collaborator, and chief disciple, Friedrich Engels, and his wife and lifelong love, Jenny von Westphalen.26 Sperber’s “spin” on Jenny’s letters, written from Trier in 1844, improves on McLellan’s by surmising her relief on finding her husband safely absorbed in a bromantic, lifelong relationship: Jenny had some anxieties about leaving her husband alone in a city [Paris] that had a well- developed reputation for sexual licentiousness, but there was no need for her to worry. In her absence Karl continued his political activities, read economists voraciously, and developed his communist ideas. His one important personal encounter was not with a chorus girl but with Friedrich Engels (134–35).

176  Terrell Carver

Sperber breezes through the 1848 arrest episode in Brussels when Jenny went to get her husband out of jail, but then found herself incarcerated as well. Sperber’s telling of the tale thus offers an interesting but overlooked indication that the Belgian police— as opposed to intellectual biographers—had some grasp of gendered political partnerships. Sperber notes that the family’s belongings—“a total of 405 kilos”—only “caught up with them eight months later, after a lengthy bureaucratic odyssey,” which he leaves unexamined. I wonder who unraveled all these complications. Incuriously patronizing, Sperber catches Jenny in correspondence “expressing her husband’s views [but] in starker and less sophisticated form” (375). And something goes unobserved— against the evidence of Jenny’s correspondence about politics with (male) co-activists—in this astonishing passage: “In the 1850s and 1860s, when Marx listed members of his party [sic] and he or Jenny recounted their friends, the two groups were composed of the same people. Jenny did have non-political friends, but Marx did not” (477). Here we have a clear summary that a gendered political partnership was operating, but Sperber contrasts Jenny’s involvement irrelevantly with Marx’s through a “nonpolitical” set of unnamed persons. Their role in this narrative is to remove her in the reader’s mind from the partnered situation that the biographer has inadvertently declared. The volume closes as it began, with Marx foremost in relation to his “significant others,” rank- ordered in the way that intellectual biography requires: “He [Marx] attended the [International Working Men’s Association] Congress [in 1870 in The Hague] in person... Engels accompanied him, as did Jenny, who attended the sessions” (512). The most recent and by far the longest (at 750 pages) intellectual biography of Marx is Gareth Stedman Jones’s Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, in which he credits Jenny at the outset with firm opinions and a strong-minded character. He maintains this characterization throughout, yet remains immune to the evidence that he inadvertently produces for a spatial and material gendered political partnership. Though written some 40 years after the events recounted, Stefan Born’s reminiscences of his acquaintance with the Marxes is quoted at length by Stedman Jones as a characterful vignette rather than an interesting clue as to what might be discovered or surmised by using a different “lens”: “He [Born] was particularly impressed by Jenny, commenting, ‘throughout her life she took the most intense interest in everything that concerned and occupied her husband.’”27 Leaving aside Born’s assignment of Jenny’s concerns and occupations to her husband, Stedman Jones sees no reason to explore how this testimony to an evident meeting of the minds would actually have operated in spatial and material ways other than in sexualized terms of marital fidelity/ infidelity (324). Possibly the most striking thing that Jenny actually does in Stedman Jones’s biography, in the sense of presenting an angle not much noticed elsewhere, is

“Mere Auxiliaries to the Movement”  177

to be jealous of the bromantic Engels, even though recounted in third-party memoirs (and evidently in fourth-hand terms) which are fulsomely supported by the biographer: “she [Mrs. Marx] resented and deplored his [Engels’s] influence over his great friend [Karl]. She spoke of him [Engels] to my wife more than once as Marx’s ‘evil genius’” (565). Though framed by a man as womanto-woman remarks, and therefore of subordinate importance to the “public” truths of the time concerning the Marx-Engels relationship, perhaps there is a clue here to a gendered political partnership that could not then achieve public notice. As we have learned, such a framing does not easily emerge when biographers “mine” the historical records, not because the raw material is not there, but— and perforce because of genre-necessity—biographers are not actually looking for it.

Marx Makeover By contrast with the above masculinized genre, Mary Gabriel’s recent study of the Marxes’ marriage is much more interesting.28 Gabriel has indeed highlighted and developed some historical details, and made good use of memoir material and third-party correspondence that others have overlooked or abbreviated. She has even shown some overt skepticism and caution in her interpretation of this kind of testimony, which is unusual. But we get the Jenny Marx we know already, albeit with center- stage treatment and an artful avoidance of patronizing perspectives. The subtitle is interestingly and engagingly ambiguous: “And the Birth of a Revolution,” which does seem to link the usually domestic with the importantly world-historical. Gabriel’s book inverts the usual format of the “great man” intellectual biography, not simply because it has a woman as the major subject, but also because the subject is apparently nonintellectual, or at least did not write much, and then not on any subjects outside her own life experience. The chronological spine of Gabriel’s book is thus chapterized in wholly political/geographical terms rather than mostly chapterized per “great work,” as is conventional in intellectual biography. By contrast, Gabriel’s focus on Jenny and her life experience has the effect of filling over 500 pages with quotidian detail: where and how the Marxes were living and traveling, who came to visit and conspire, what dramas played out in financial terms, how extended family relations were pursued or not, and a fair amount of gossipy who-thought-what- of-whom-and-why. Gabriel’s attention to these details—perhaps feminist-inspired—thus begins to alter what we already think we know from intellectual biographies. In that genre, for example, the flights of escape endured by the Marx family between 1845 and 1849—from Paris to Brussels, back to Paris and then on to Cologne, and back to Paris again, and on to London— all merit a mention, including the episode in which both Marxes were arrested and held in separate cells for a time. But in conventional intellectual biographies, all this revolutionary clutter

178  Terrell Carver

and clatter interrupts the familiar trek from juvenilia and early works through to later writings and manuscripts. Moreover, Marx’s and Engels’s real-life revolutionary comrades, who were in and around these quotidian upheavals, have not made it to “greatness” and so figure only as minor characters. This would not have been Jenny’s— or Karl’s—view of things at the time, whereas Marx’s intellectualized, and therefore somewhat depoliticized, encounters with other “great thinkers,” such as Hegel, Feuerbach, Smith and Ricardo, and so on, are in genre terms the center of interest, and Engels’s similarly, though rather less so. However, those apparently rarefied philosophical encounters took place at the time as political encounters in which ideas were being mobilized. Marx’s and Engels’s sometime confrères were not then already organized as associates of the “great man” Marx as the major character, and indeed many would have scoffed at the idea that he was “major” at all. But in intellectual biography he has to be, and so the genre performs this posthumous construction of an identity that will do the job. Anyway, the real-life revolutions of 1848–1849 are well known in the histories to have “failed,” even if revisionists sometimes abjure such summary judgments. Consequently, fellow activists become smalltimers in forgotten events, providing effective contrast with Marx remembered as a “great thinker,” partnered in various important senses by Engels alone. By adopting a Jenny- centered perspective, Gabriel’s chronological, diarylike chapters begin to do something different. The point of view has shifted, and not just because it is Jenny’s view of Marx. Rather, we get a view of his associates and the ongoing political projects conducted collectively by women and men, as we see from correspondence and memoir. What has happened is that what were in conventional biographies briefly recounted and supposedly uninteresting events and episodes suddenly come to life and occupy much more narrative time and page space: for example, Jenny’s incarceration— as a very respectable middle-class woman in a prison cell with “criminal-class” females and “common” prostitutes—becomes much more harrowing for both her and her husband. And Marx’s mates—Willich, Schapper, “Lupus,” and Wolf (there were two “wolves”), Herwegh, Freiligrath, and numerous others of the ‘48ers and later acquaintances along the way— all become real characters, worthy of attention, since they are significant in Jenny’s life. We do not know, in most cases, the exact significance to Jenny of any of these men— and sometimes their female “partners”—at various times. What we know is that she was there in the space where they were; there was very little space in any of these lodgings, and the spaces were hers as much as Marx’s. Moreover, females in this world were not as sequestered in terms of political activism as one might think: Gabriel recounts a number of Jenny-centered episodes in which she was dispatched over land and sea to chase up publishers and backers. Also, the girls—the Marxes had three daughters— sometimes accompanied their father to the British Museum, no doubt learning the family trade, international socialism and political agitation, as they went along. Sometimes

“Mere Auxiliaries to the Movement”  179

they also did secretarial tasks for the International Working Men’s Association, a major family focus of interest and effort, as we know from intra-family correspondence.29 However, this is not generally archived and published alongside the “great men’s” exchanges, or even at all, given the hierarchical disjunction that “greatness” requires. The Marx-Engels correspondence as published is exactly that; third-party correspondence is sometimes represented in scholarly collections, that is, letters from their correspondents back to the two principals. In the major collections memorializing and iconizing Marx and Engels as “great men,” editorially sequestered family letters are relegated to selections, quarantined in appendices, and thus out of the chronological flow of MarxEngels letters to each other and to others— overwhelmingly male— and back as “great thinkers.” Gabriel’s revisioning of Marx thus has some potentially transformative consequences, particularly in relation to what his “great works” were supposed to be about and, more specifically, what they were supposed to be for. Within Gabriel’s narrative, it is less easy to see these as purely cerebral encounters with other “great thinkers,” which is the conventional trope of intellectual biography. This is simply because there is so much political maneuvering going on in the foreground, that is, in the supposedly domestic domain. Home life is thus no longer a convenient and auxiliary space to Marx’s real, albeit supposedly quite abstract, activities. Rather, it was at the center of what he was trying to do when he was trying to write and publish as a political activist within reallife political circles, goal- driven coalitions, and fractious male-to-male relationships. Even when he was out of the house at the British Museum Reading Room, or on occasion down at the pub, or quite rarely at some kind of public or semi-public meeting or venue, it does not follow that life at home was completely “other” to these activities or that it was in any case necessarily less important as a place in which to do politics. In fact, unlike the Reading Room, where silence was enforced, the home setting actually was a place in which to do politics with what Marx and Engels and others were writing and thinking. From Gabriel’s perspective, then, the domestic tribulations sometimes mentioned in connection with Marx are not so much an interruption to his “great works” and “great thoughts” as the medium and space through which these thoughts arose in his mind as they did, whether helped or hindered by quotidian considerations, “difficult” associates, and visitors. It is through these logistical and emotional circumstances that published works emerged as artifacts, or manuscript pages were preserved and— quite carefully— stored for safe-keeping. What we see in Gabriel’s presentation is a seamless mode of production. Possibly something of the same would apply to Engels and his activist and writerly arrangements, but we don’t actually know very much about his associates and activities at work or at home or otherwise. After his death, Helene Demuth and the surviving Marx daughters, Laura and Eleanor, all had something

180  Terrell Carver

to do with the preservation of his papers, along with Marx’s, over which Engels had acted as literary executor. Some digging through Engels’s correspondence might be useful here, not just to find out what he thought, but to find out who was dropping in when he was alive. The main intellectual biographies— Mayer 1920/1933/1936; Henderson 1976; Carver 1989—do not take up this challenge, though there are some brief hints from Gabriel that the Engels household, as run by “Mrs. Lizzie,” was a safe house for Irish nationalists.30 Engels, rather more than Marx, was inclined to excoriate “bourgeois” sexual hypocrisy in print and to delve analytically into the politics of heterosexuality past, present, and future. Possibly his associations with the Burns sisters played a part in his motivations, though if so, he didn’t record it. However, there is a serious issue with social class arising here. Demuth and the two Burns sisters were at best quite poorly educated and so apparently did not, or could not, generate correspondence that could have been preserved. In any case, their lack of education— along with the lack of property or of access to propertied relations and friends— constituted their class difference. The social exclusion of Mary Burns from the activist spaces and political practices undertaken by the Marxes was ambiguously structured, both within the conventional world, wherein unmarried couples were shunned, and within the unconventional world wherein irregular associations were openly conducted.31 Lydia Burns in later life ascended to an honorary “Mrs.” in public companionship and (limited) social reception, but as “Lizzie” (158–59). “Lenchen” was sometimes noticed in correspondence, principally after the Marx household was broken up and sorted out (“awful lot of dusting required,” Engels wrote), though a moment of quoted speech is unusual. Writing to Laura in 1883, Engels said that he had found among Marx’s papers “a whole lot of mss, our common work, of before 1848... There is one I shall read to you... you will crack your sides with laughing. I read it to Nim [“Lenchen”]... [who] said: ‘Now I know why you two laughed at night in Brussels at that time so that no one could sleep in the building’” (Engels to Laura Lafargue, June 2, 1883, in Marx and Engels 1995, 29, 31).32 But like the Burns sisters, and for the same reasons, “Lenchen’s” major moment in the class- determined circumstances—through which significance is attributed or denied to a human individual— arose at her death. At that juncture, suitable condolences and encomiums could be placed on record, as they would not have been if the subject were alive, but necessarily maintained in a lower order of regard as an intellect. The People’s Press published an obituary for her, quoting Engels’s funerary address in which he had declared that “Marx took counsel... not only in difficult and intricate party matters, but even in respect of his economical writings,” information for which no other record survives. Engels’s tribute was generally more in line with the genre conventions of nonintellectual biography and encomiums on the death of servants: “what

“Mere Auxiliaries to the Movement”  181

work I have been able to do since the death of Marx has been largely due to the sunshine and support of her presence in the house.”33

Genre and Gender Intellectual biography is a masculinized genre against which feminist-inspired writers struggle with difficulty. This is not simply because the genre achieves its ready familiarity, and thus an identification with knowledge-production as such, but because it excludes women as important subjects and women- centered activities as domestic and “private,” and thus unimportant. Reconsidering the character of already important activities by reconsidering the public/private distinction in a spatial way not only includes women in supporting roles, oftentimes cast as emotional and family-related, but reconfigures the notion of writing activities as oftentimes social in a mixed-gendered mode. Moreover, these activities are spatial and material in essential ways that are usually overlooked or downgraded. In the circumstances of nineteenth- century clandestine and émigré socialist/communist political activism considered above, this includes public spaces that are in today’s terms domestic and “private,” such as lodging-house rooms and family parlors, as well as working practices involving longhand correspondence, “fair copy” preparation, unrecorded research, translating, proofreading, financial planning, and record-keeping, and even parcel-wrapping, couriering, and collection. Or, to put it another way, men later constructed and understood as “great” only achieved such status, as Marx and Engels did, in and through spatial settings and material activities where women were essential to their political activism, since without logistical support the activism would not have activated.

Notes 1 Brennan and Pateman, 1979, 196 n. 53, quoting Kant’s “mere auxiliaries to the commonwealth.” 2 This chapter first appeared as Terrell Carver, ‘Mere Auxiliaries to the Movement:’ How intellectual biography obscures Marx’s and Engels’s gendered political partnerships. Hypatia 33, no. 4 (2018): 593–609. Reprinted with permission. 3 The apparent exceptions, namely, studies of Marx as a political activist, prove the rule in that they are not framed as “intellectual biographies” but rather as necessary supplementation to “great thoughts”; see, for example, Gilbert (1981) for a particularly astute exemplar, as is Holmes (2014) from a feminist perspective. Rachel Holmes, however, focuses on Eleanor Marx, making a splendid case for her influence as an activist, but— lacking “great works” identified with its subject— the biography is not that of an intellectual with “great thoughts,” as has been the case with Marx. 4 For the most recent, see Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and illusion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016; for a critical review, see Terrell

182  Terrell Carver

5

6 7

8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

Carver, Review of Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and illusion, 2016. https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewof books/reviews/2016/2456. Terrell Carver. Marx and Engels: The intellectual relationship. Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1983; Terrell Carver. Engels: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 38–94; for contrary views, see J. D. Hunley, The life and thought of Friedrich Engels: A reinterpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991; S.H. Rigby. Engels and the formation of Marxism: History, dialectics and revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992/2007. D. B. Riazanov. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: An introduction to their lives and work. Trans. Joshua Kunitz. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1927/1973, 216–17. Jürgen Rojahn. The emergence of a theory: The importance of Marx’s notebooks exemplified by those from 1844. Rethinking Marxism 14:4 (2002): 29–46; Terrell Carver and Daniel Blank. 2014. A political history of the editions of Marx and Engels’s “German ideology manuscripts.” New York: Palgrave, 2014. See, for example, Francis Wheen. Karl Marx. London: Fourth Estate, 1999/2000; Tristam Hunt. The frock- coated communist: The revolutionary life of Friedrich Engels. Harmondsworth, UK: Allen Lane, 2009. See, for example, Jean Bethke Elshtain. Public man, private woman: Women in social and political thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981/1993; Genevieve Lloyd. 1984/1993. The man of reason: “Male” and “female” in Western philosophy. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1984/1993; Carole Pateman. The sexual contract. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1988/1997; and other sources too numerous to cite. Her eldest daughter was also named Jenny, often referred to as “Jennychen,” dying shortly after her mother and predeceasing her father by a few months. The English-language Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works in 50 volumes (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2004) contains selections; for her memoir, see Institute of Marxism-Leninism n.d. Hayden White. The content of the form: Narrative discourse and historical representation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987/1990. See McCrea (2015) for a novelization of Engels’s “love interest” and domestic relationship with “Mrs. Lizzie.” Given the feminist framing of her work, Holmes (2014) presents the Burns sisters and “Lenchen” more sympathetically than in the conventional intellectual biographies of the “great men,” though again we learn nothing that hasn’t already been presented from the very limited archival materials. Terrell Carver. Marx. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017, 16–30. Iconization has a political upside, in that it ensures a widespread interest in “great thoughts,” though the downside is the erasure (solemn nods to activism notwithstanding) of the material and spatial activities through which—in the case of Marx and Engels—their thinking was actually generated and disseminated. Of course, activists can be iconized or demonized for their efforts, but then interpreters will struggle to make them into intellectuals whose thoughts and works are genuinely the equal of already-known “great thinkers”—Lenin and Stalin are cases in point. Though see the discussion below of Mary Gabriel. Love and capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the birth of a revolution. New York: Little, Brown, 2011. Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea. Interpretation and method: Empirical research and the interpretive turn. 2nd ed. Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2013, 287–91. Francis Wheen. Karl Marx. London: Fourth Estate, 1999/2000, passim. Ibid., passim. For a contrary view, see Terell Carver. “Marx’s illegitimate son” or Gresham’s Law in the world of scholarship, 2005. https://www.marxists.org/ subject/marxmyths/terrell-carver/article.htm. ­ Tristam Hunt. The frock- coated communist: The revolutionary life of Friedrich Engels. Harmondsworth, UK: Allen Lane, 2009, passim. Ibid., passim.

“Mere Auxiliaries to the Movement”  183













­

184  Terrell Carver

Holmes, Rachel. 2014. Eleanor Marx: A life. London: A&C Black. Hunley, J. D. 1991. The life and thought of Friedrich Engels: A reinterpretation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hunt, Tristram. 2009. The frock- coated communist: The revolutionary life of Friedrich Engels. Harmondsworth, UK: Allen Lane. Institute of Marxism-Leninism, ed. n.d. Reminiscences of Marx and Engels. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Lloyd, Genevieve. 1984/1993. The man of reason: “Male” and “female” in Western philosophy. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1990. Collected works. Vol. 26. London: Lawrence & Wishart. ———. 1995. Collected works. Vol. 46. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Mayer, Gustav. 1920/1933/1936. Friedrich Engels: A biography. Trans. Gilbert and Helen Highet, ed. R. H. S. Crossman. London: Chapman & Hall. McCrea, Gavin. 2015. Mrs. Engels: A novel. New York: Catapult. McLellan, David. 1973/1987. Karl Marx: His life and thought. New ed. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Mehring, Franz. 1918/1951. Karl Marx: The story of his life. Trans. Edward Fitzgerald. London: Allen & Unwin. Nicolaievsky, Boris, and Otto Maenchen-Helfen. 1933/1973. Karl Marx: Man and fighter. Trans. Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher. London: Allen Lane. Pateman, Carole. 1988/1997. The sexual contract. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Riazanov, D. B. 1927/1973. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: An introduction to their lives and work. Trans. Joshua Kunitz. New York: Monthly Review Press. Rigby, S. H. 1992/2007. Engels and the formation of Marxism: History, dialectics and revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rojahn, Jürgen. 2002. The emergence of a theory: The importance of Marx’s notebooks exemplified by those from 1844. Rethinking Marxism 14 (4): 29–46. Sperber, Jonathan. 2013. Karl Marx: A nineteenth- century life. New York: Liveright. Stedman Jones, Gareth. 2016. Karl Marx: Greatness and illusion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wheen, Francis. 1999/2000. Karl Marx. London: Fourth Estate. White, Hayden. 1987/1990. The content of the form: Narrative discourse and historical representation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Yanow, Dvora, and Peregrine Schwartz- Shea. 2013. Interpretation and method: Empirical research and the interpretive turn. 2nd ed. Milton Park: Routledge.

11 THE FUTURE OF INTELLECTUAL LABOR Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

In March 2020, as colleges and universities around the world faced the financial challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and the emergency shift to remote teaching it necessitated, Bloomberg News published an opinion piece on the use of university endowments. In the face of student refunds, shuttered campuses, and fears of declining enrollments, many called on well- endowed universities like Harvard to spend some of their assets on COVID-19-related relief for university staff, including dining hall employees, cleaning staff, and other hourly workers who faced layoffs and furloughs. Responding to these suggestions in Bloomberg, Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University, offered a different perspective: “The real contributions of Harvard, MIT and Stanford to the world,” he argued, “are not the food-service workers they hire. They are the ideas and innovations produced by its researchers, plus the talented students they educate.”1 Though doing “something charitable” might be laudable, Cowen maintained that for institutions of higher learning, “the moral obligation to extend charity to those workers is not very strong.”2 Consider the two premises at the root of Cowen’s argument: the first is that compensation for the “domestic” labors of the university—labors which clean, cook, and maintain the campus environment—is charity; the second and related premise is that the value of these domestic labors is separate from, even at odds with, the spaces and practices of intellectual production the university more famously hosts. In this framing, Cowen presents us with a “clear division between two visions of the university,” one which protects the “well-being of its members” and another which remains “dedicated to learning above all else.”3 While they may seem callous in the context of a pandemic, Cowen’s remarks nevertheless reflect a widely accepted set of beliefs about the nature and production of intellectual work—beliefs which lay at the foundation of academic

186  Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

life. Indeed, around the same time Bloomberg published Cowen’s essay, these same beliefs were also on display in popular calls for scholars and artists to take note of the great works produced in times of plagues past. William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, amongst others, were held as examples of what a mind can produce with the “gift of solitude”4: King Lear and Calculus. And yet, as a few observers pointed out in response, these examples of the “lone genius” were woefully incomplete. These men, held up as model scholars, were in fact reliant upon the labors of others for their intellectual pursuits. Shakespeare’s wife kept their children in the country as he wrote, while Newton began developing his mathematical theories during his years at Trinity College shortly before the Great Plague, years during which, notably, College workers kept him housed and fed.4 As these past and present examples demonstrate, we continue to perpetuate ideas about the “real” contributions of scholars, and thereby undervalue and obscure the omnipresent domestic labor of the academy. The “great works” of scholarship continue to be viewed as independently produced by “great minds” and are thus seen as wholly separate from the mundane tasks and requirements of everyday life. Cowen’s approach to university obligations as well as the popular imaginings of Shakespeare and Newton as solitary geniuses are possible precisely because the academy has long held onto an unjustly narrow view of what counts as intellectual labor and of who or what should be valued as a result. As the chapters in this volume have shown, however, these lines between “intellectual” and “domestic” labor are artificial. This artificiality, moreover, is both long-standing and gendered. It therefore also requires exposure and disruption. Our aim in this project has been to initiate that kind of critical inquiry by examining the labors and experiences of unlikely—because heretofore unrecognized—figures: the wives and intimates of “great men” in the history of political thought. Through their varied relationships, the women in this volume demonstrate that it is often those domestic labors which contribute in countless meaningful ways to intellectual life across social and political contexts.

Recognizing “Wives” Starting as far back as the Ancient Greeks, Brill writes, the figure of the “wife” has represented, and maintained, the boundary between public and private, intellect and body. Indeed, it is not until Xanthippe is removed from the Phaedo, argues Saxonhouse, that the “real” work of philosophizing can begin. These divisions, defined by the idea of the wife, make it easy to uphold the hierarchy between the work of public-political life, on the one hand, and the work of caretaking— and the bodies that perform that “private” work— on the other hand; the former is the stuff of history, the latter relegated to its dust bins.5 As is again evident throughout the preceding chapters, the bifurcation of intellectual and intimate has clear interpretive effects. It has led us to, for

The Future of Intellectual Labor  187

example, largely ignore the domestic contexts, labors, and collaborations that are foundational to constructing the “great texts” of Western political thought. This, in turn, reifies the myth of “great men” with “great minds” that continues to dominate contemporary conceptions of academia, which ultimately results in an impoverished view of what matters to the production of intellectual work. In severing performance from authorship, as Litvin notes, we take a narrow view of political theorizing; we miss or minimize, as Philips points out, important collaborations and additional sources of political insight. Moreover, as Nacol and Carver highlight, because intellectual labor is always already embedded in domestic and bodily contexts, we ignore those contexts to our own interpretive and political detriment. In drawing out these patterns of reception and interpretation, this volume works to highlight the persistent gendered dynamics of intellectual life that have built the Western philosophical canon, structured our interpretations of it, and therefore informed the shape of the academy today. And yet we should also be wary of allowing these gendered patterns to similarly direct the work of critical recovery. As the chapters by Banks, Jones, and Carroll remind us, the relative archival silence around wives and intimates does not necessarily mean passivity on the part of those erased from history. Acting in thoroughly ordinary ways, many of the women discussed here were, in fact, agentive: they managed households, engaged politics, edited texts, and curated legacies. Though many appear only minimally, if at all, in the archives, we cannot discount the idea that these women may have had a hand in constructing their own place, as well as that of their partners, within the historical narrative. Indeed, taking these chapters together, the figure of the wife becomes active, complex, and collaborative. More than just a project of recovery, then, this volume invites us to reconsider the very foundation of Western philosophy: from the varied forms of work which create it to the academy which is built upon those labors. But there is clearly more work to be done, not just to interrogate but also to improve the persistent, gendered dynamics that ground intellectual life. Even as women now make up about 45% of the professoriate— an increase of 14% in over 16 years—much of that percentage reflects non-tenure-track and untenured positions; the figure drops sharply for the ranks of tenured professors.6 Those numbers are further compressed for Black women and women of color for whom the proverbial “glass ceiling” works alongside racial and ethnic biases in both institutional and cultural practices.7 Moreover, these disparities in employment are aided by uneven citation practices and journal submission and acceptance rates. There is also a recognizable gendered asymmetry in the impact of family leave policies: studies have shown that female professors, “bearing the burden of pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, and often, a larger share of parenting responsibilities,”8 tend to see their productivity (and prospects for tenure) slow, while male professors often advance their research and increase likelihood for tenure during parental leave.9 Though

188  Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

the gender composition of our departments may have changed, it seems that the underlying relationship between academic and domestic life—though increasingly a point of conversation—has not. In this context, it should not be surprising that the contributions of university staff are viewed as auxiliary to the work of scholarship. It seems clear why calls to protect them are considered charity rather than obligation. These forms of obstruction, devaluation, and dismissal are interrelated. They all rely upon hierarchical visions of what and who are actually involved in intellectual life and scholarly production. Though the “wives” of academia may have shifted, their labor nevertheless remains essential. Alongside ongoing recovery projects, then—both historical and contemporary—we must also reshape our very ideas about key concepts, relationships, and practices in academia. To that end, we conclude with some final thoughts on how we might use the critical readings provided in this volume to start changing the academy from the inside out.

Reimagining “Canons” The chapters collected in this volume work together to draw out the labors and contributions of the wives and intimates dismissed to the hidden spheres of the Western philosophical canon. By foregrounding their stories and receptions, these chapters work to challenge the traditional understanding of canon formation. They point to the need for greater focus on collaboration, for example, as well as a more expansive understanding of scholarly work. They also force us to take seriously the full experiences of key philosophers as well as the members of the households in which they lived and worked. Importantly, the interpretive implications of this project do not necessarily lead to the rejection of a canon per se. Instead, they call for a more sustained and critical engagement with the processes that help to construct the idea of a “canon” in the first place. Beyond questions of the texts and figures is selected for membership, this volume highlights the necessity of also interrogating the assumptions behind what kind of work even qualifies for consideration. Canons can be quite valuable. Indeed, this volume’s theoretical intervention is premised on the existence of a canon of Western political thought. The idea of a canon presumes that contributors, editors, and readers all share a common understanding regarding the object of inquiry. It is by virtue of that shared foundation that the points of continuity and disruption between the nine chapters become clearer; we can, with this shared background, more easily see patterns that hold across contexts as well as where deviations occur. Yet even as we recognize the potential value of having a canon, we also recognize that it is an artificial, and somewhat arbitrary, construction. This should not be surprising to readers; contestations over canon construction are now commonplace—who is included, who is excluded, and why and how these choices are made are all important questions that scholars have been raising

The Future of Intellectual Labor  189

for quite some time.10 Moves to decolonize the “Western” canon of political thought to include important works by women, people of color, and other marginalized groups or histories, for example, are all directed at diversifying the figures and texts considered worthy of canonization.11 Alongside these questions of what and who is included, however, the stories of philosophy’s “wives” collected herein should also remind us to look not just at which texts and figures are “canonized” but also at how those texts are generated and what counts as a canonical “text” in the first place. When we look closely at the products of labor by the wives and intimates in this volume, new kinds of “texts” appear, from Barbera Salutati’s performances of La Mandragola’s canzoni to Mary Mottley’s letters to Tocqueville. Taking a critical approach to canon construction thus means interrogating with an eye toward how “canonical” works are produced, celebrated, and reified— and what effects this production has on our reception and interpretation of politics.12 To that end, there is still much work to be done. Even within the Western canon, the figures highlighted in this volume are far from constituting an exhaustive list. Similar investigations into other famous thinkers and texts will likely reflect similar patterns, but these are stories that still remain to be told. How might G.W.F. Hegel’s marriage to Marie von Tucher— a woman he described as his “healer” who would “reconcile his inner self with the actual world”13 —inform his later writing on the family? What should we make of the reception of Marianne Weber, wife of Max, who prepared his work, wrote his biography, and who is yet criticized for an asexual marriage that, as one biographer claims, “certainly did not contribute to Weber’s mental stability.”14 Likewise, the chapters in this volume are largely focused on thinkers from within the European context. But similar dynamics appear—in distinct, but recognizable forms—in other geographies as well. How should we conceptualize the partnership of, for example, Dolley and James Madison, who together shaped the culture of Washington, D.C., into the political mecca it is today?15 Likewise, discussions of Booker T. Washington’s legacy at the Tuskegee Institute must include the contributions of his three wives—Fannie Smith, Olivia Davidson, and Margaret James Murray—to building and maintaining the institution, including expanding its curriculum for women.16 Extending the work of this volume means reconstructing the history of political thought with an attentiveness to the interplay of public and private in each of its unique political contexts, in order to form a better, more capacious picture of the canon, its production, and its omissions. Moreover, this kind of investigation should be conducted even for more recently produced work. It is too easy to equate the changing role of women’s place in public life with changed modes of intellectual production. But though our volume concludes in the nineteenth century, these patterns of gender and labor remain, even into the twenty-first century. John Dewey’s relationship with his first wife, Alice Chipman, deepened and improved his writings on

190  Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

philosophy and psychology, for example, while Margaret Warfield Fox not only helped to edit and produce her husband John Rawls’s books but also maintained responsibility for “keeping house” due to John’s “inability to focus on practical matters like shopping and household chores.”17 Finally, any critical interrogation of canons can— and should— extend into pursuits other than academic philosophy. Investigations into other industries will no doubt reveal similar dynamics. Evidence abounds, from artists like Andrew Wyeth, who acknowledged that his wife Betsy “made me into a painter I would not have been otherwise,”18 to the “forgotten life” of Albert Einstein’s first wife and uncredited collaborator Mileva Marić Einstein, to the largely obscured role of MacKenzie Bezos in building Jeff Bezos’s Amazon into the tech behemoth it is today.19 The product of the “lone genius” may change, but the unacknowledged role of the wife remains consistent.

Rethinking Labor The efforts outlined above, to expand our ideas about who, and what, is eligible for “canonization”—as well as the implications of that categorization schema— should also push us to reconceptualize the very activity of intellectual labor, especially that of collaboration. Expanding the bounds of intellectual work, without troubling the distinction between the “intellectual” and the “support staff,” simply reifies the existing gendered hierarchies evident throughout these chapters. We cannot, as it turns out, entirely separate the “true mission” of the university—the pursuit of knowledge and the training of scholars—from the work of custodial staff and dining service employees. Yet taking these contributions seriously requires a fundamental reconceptualization of what the academic process involves. For too long, the academy has prioritized the figure of the solitary genius, working in isolation and authoring “great texts” that stand apart from their context. The effects of this conceptualization of the lone genius are felt across disciplines, evident in, for example, the way that prizes are awarded (to individuals), works attributed (the specification of “first author”), and projects acceded value (rewarding “novelty”). Yet such effects paint an inaccurate view of intellectual pursuit, where work is often collaborative, even if informally, and “breakthroughs” dependent on the initiatives of those who came before. If we are to account fully for the way that academic work is completed, then it would require more attention to the embeddedness of researchers within the networks— social, intellectual, political, institutional, and economic—that fundamentally shape their scholarship. And this attentiveness to wider contexts might, in turn, lead us to rethink traditional assignations of authorship and attribution. Should we, for example, consider Damaris, Lady Masham and Mary Clarke co-authors/collaborators due to their exchanges with Locke over childrearing? And what of the express recognition, later denied to her, of Harriet Taylor Mill as a collaborator by John Stuart Mill? These questions, raised by our

The Future of Intellectual Labor  191

authors, work to trouble the very division between public and private, authorship and “background” labors that sustains scholarly pursuits. They suggest that ideas and innovations are often the product of collective and diverse endeavors; collaboration, in many forms, is key to the entirety of academic pursuit. In revealing the myriad forms of work and collaboration that have always characterized the history of political thought, this volume has centered on questions of gender. There is good reason for this. As we have seen, wives and intimate women partners have played an outsized, though dramatically understated (and in some cases erased), role in producing the canonical texts, thinkers, and academy we have today. But the dynamics of labor, canon, and reception revealed by these investigations are not solely gendered. Thus, gender alone cannot fully account for the structural invisibility of that work or of those who perform it. Rather than the last word on these questions, the examinations of the gendered politics of scholarship within this volume open another vantage from which to examine intimate labor in its many dimensions. Indeed, we cannot fully interrogate and change the underlying labor dynamics that ground the academy unless we extend the kind of analysis presented here to also include other structures of identity and exclusion that render labor invisible: namely race, sexuality, and class. Consider, for instance, Anna Murray Douglass, wife of Frederick, dismissed as a “poor intellectual match” by her husband’s white associates, but who helped him escape enslavement, bore his children, and supported their household during his many absences.20 The intersection of these structures of experience necessarily shapes different forms of scholarship and practices of recognition. They deserve more, and more sustained, scholarly attention. By looking to the past, this volume contributes to ongoing discussions about the academy’s implicit and explicit exclusions and silences. If we are to take seriously the insights drawn from these chapters, we must also expand our understanding of the processes and relationships that contour scholarly work, revaluing forms of production that may not necessarily take the traditional form of treatise, essay, or manifesto. And we must continue to explore the ways in which these same distinctions manifest along other categories of identity, beyond that of the wife, to reproduce the figure of the lone genius. Though the myth of that exceptional genius— of the “great man” doing “great things”— permeates academia and popular culture, this myth is and always has been sustained by the figures working in the shadows. It is time to bring them out.

Notes 1 Tyler Cowen, “Universities Shouldn’t Spend their Endowments on Coronavirus Relief,” Bloomberg Opinion, March 25, 2020. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Thomas Levenson, “The Truth about Isaac Newton’s Productive Plague,” The New Yorker, April 6, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural- comment/ the-truth-about-isaac-newtons-productive-plague. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­

192  Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

­ ­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­ ­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­

­



­

­

­

­ ­



­

­

­

­

­

The Future of Intellectual Labor  193

17

18 19 20

JNHv81n1-4p31; Lawrence J. Friedman, “Life ‘In the Lion’s Mouth’: Another Look at Booker T. Washington,” The Journal of Negro History 59, no. 4 (1974): 337–51, https://doi.org/10.2307/2717315. Joshua Rosaler, “Rawls’ Career, Life Celebrated In Sanders | News | The Harvard Crimson,” The Harvard Crimson, February 28, 2003, https://www.thecrimson.com/ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ article/2003/2/28/rawls-career-life-celebrated-in-sanders/; Nancy Bunge, “Love & Logic | Issue 45 | Philosophy Now,” Philosophy Now, 2004, https://philosophynow. org/issues/45/Love_and_Logic; Samuel Freeman, Rawls, 1 ed. (London: Routledge, 2007); Katharina Rietzler, “IR’s ‘Power Couples’ | Women and the History of International Thought,” University of Sussex, Women and the History of International Thought (blog), October 28, 2019, https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/whit/2019/10/28/ irs-power-couples/; Pauline Gagnon, “The Forgotten Life of Einstein’s First Wife,” Scientific American Blog Network (blog), December 19, 2016, https://blogs. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/. Penelope Green, “Betsy Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth’s Widow and Collaborator, Dies at 98,” The New York Times, April 26, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/ arts/betsy-wyeth-dead.html. ­ ­ Louise Matsakis, “MacKenzie Bezos and the Myth of the Lone Genius Founder,” Wired, January 11, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/mackenzie-bezos-amazon-lone­genius-myth/. ­ “Black History Month Anna Murray Douglass,” OUPblog (blog), February 20, 2007, https://blog.oup.com/2007/02/black_history_m3/.

References Agathangelou, Anna M., and L. H. M. Ling. “An Unten(Ur)Able Position : The Politics of Teaching for Women of Color in the US.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 4, no. 3 ( January 1, 2002): 368–98. Allgor, Catherine. A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation. 1st ed. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2007. Antecol, Heather, Kelly Bedard, and Jenna Stearns. “Equal but Inequitable: Who Benefits from Gender-Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies?” American Economic Review 108, no. 9 (September 2018): 2420–41. Bunge, Nancy. “Love & Logic | Issue 45 | Philosophy Now.” Philosophy Now, 2004. https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/Love_and_Logic. Butler, Judith. “Against Proper Objects.” In Feminism Meets Queer Theory, edited by Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Cowen, Tyler. “Universities Shouldn’t Spend Their Endowments on Coronavirus Relief.” Bloomberg Opinion, March 25, 2020. Euben, Roxanne L. “Comparative Political Theory.” In Encyclopedia of Political Theory, by Mark Bevir. California: SAGE Publications, Inc. http://sk.sagepub.com/ reference/politicaltheory/n87.xml. “Fannie Washington Broadened Tuskegee’s Curriculum.” In African American Registry. Accessed May 31, 2020. https://aaregistry.org/story/fannie-washington­broadened-tuskegees-curriculum/. ­ ­ Finkelstein, Martin J, Valerie Martin Conley, and Jack H Schuster. “Taking the Measure of Faculty Diversity.” TIAA Institute, April 2016. Forestal, Jennifer, and Menaka Philips. “Gender and the ‘Great Man’: Recovering Philosophy’s ‘Wives of the Canon.’” Hypatia 33, no. 4 (September 19, 2018): 587–92. Freeman, Samuel. Rawls. 1st ed. London: Routledge, 2007.

194  Jennifer Forestal and Menaka Philips

Friedman, Lawrence J. “Life ‘In the Lion’s Mouth’: Another Look at Booker T. Washington.” The Journal of Negro History 59, no. 4 (1974): 337–51. https://doi. org/10.2307/2717315. Gagnon, Pauline. “The Forgotten Life of Einstein’s First Wife.” Scientific American Blog Network (blog), December 19, 2016. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/ guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ Green, Penelope. “Betsy Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth’s Widow and Collaborator, Dies at 98.” The New York Times, April 26, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/ arts/betsy-wyeth-dead.html. ­ ­ Guarino, Cassandra M., and Victor M. H. Borden. “Faculty Service Loads and Gender: Are Women Taking Care of the Academic Family?” Research in Higher Education 58, no. 6 (September 1, 2017): 672–94. Gugelberger, Georg M. “Decolonizing the Canon: Considerations of Third World ­Literature.” New Literary History 22, no. 3 (1991): 505–24. Judge, Monique. “Journal Publishes ‘Black Lives Matter’ Issue Without Any Black Writers.” The Root, May 30, 2017. https://www.theroot.com/journal-publishesblack-lives-matter-issue-without-an-1795676116. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ Käsler, Dirk. Max Weber: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Translated by Philippa Hurd. 1st ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Kelly, Bridget Turner. “Though More Women Are on College Campuses, Climbing the Professor Ladder Remains a Challenge.” Brookings (blog), March 29, 2019. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2019/03/29/though­ ­ ­ more-women-are-on-college-campuses-climbing-the-professor-ladder-remains­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ a-challenge/. Levenson, Thomas. “The Truth about Isaac Newton’s Productive Plague.” The New Yorker, April 6, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural- comment/ the-truth-about-isaac-newtons-productive-plague. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ Lewis, Helen. “The Coronavirus Is a Disaster for Feminism.” The Atlantic, March 19, 2020, sec. Global. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/03/ feminism-womens-rights-coronavirus-covid19/608302/. ­ ­ ­ ­ Matsakis, Louise. “MacKenzie Bezos and the Myth of the Lone Genius Founder.” Wired, January 11, 2019. https://www.wired.com/story/mackenziebezos-amazon-lone-genius-myth/. ­ ­ ­ ­ OUPblog. “Black History Month Anna Murray Douglass,” February 20, 2007. https:// blog.oup.com/2007/02/black_history_m3/. Pinkard, Terry. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda. “Decolonising Science Reading List.” Medium, April 25, 2010. https://medium.com/@chanda/decolonising-science-reading-list-339f ­ ­ ­ b773d51f. Rietzler, Katharina. “IR’s ‘Power Couples’ | Women and the History of International Thought.” University of Sussex. Women and the History of International Thought (blog), October 28, 2019. https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/whit/2019/10/28/irs-power- couples/. Rosaler, Joshua. “Rawls’ Career, Life Celebrated In Sanders | News | The Harvard Crimson.” The Harvard Crimson, February 28, 2003. https://www.thecrimson.com/ article/2003/2/28/rawls-career-life-celebrated-in-sanders/. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ Rouse, Jacqueline Anne. “Out of the Shadow of Tuskegee: Margaret Murray Washington, Social Activism, and Race Vindication.” The Journal of Negro History 81, nos. 1–4 ( January 1996): 31–46. https://doi.org/10.1086/JNHv81n1-4p31.

The Future of Intellectual Labor  195

Safire, William. “On Language; Dust Heaps of History.” The New York Times, October ­ 16, 1983, sec. Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/16/magazine/onlanguage-dust-heaps-of-history.html. ­ ­ ­ ­ Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. California: University of California Press, 2008. Weiss, Penny A. Canon Fodder: Historical Women Political Thinkers. Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2009. Wolfers, Justin. “A Family-Friendly Policy that’s Friendliest to Male Professors.” The New York Times, June 24, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/business/ tenure-extension-policies-that-put-women-at-a-disadvantage.html. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­

INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. academia: contemporary conceptions of 187; gendered terms and 6; status of women in 5; “wives” of 188 academic philosophy 190 Adams, Abigail 16n15, 33n16 “African white-toothed shrew” 32n3 Agamben, Giorgio 50n8 Alcestis (Euripides) 46–47 American Quarterly 1 Ampère, Jean-Jacques 138 Ancien Regime and the Revolution (Tocqueville) 138–139 ancient anecdotes, and Xanthippe 21–26 Ancient Greeks 2, 186 Anderson, Maxwell 32 animals: ēthos 42–43; female 42–44; male 42–44 Annals of the Entomological Society of America 19 Antiquity 2 Apology (Plato) 27–28, 33n17 archives 3, 8, 11–13, 88, 89–90, 93, 101, 139, 168; and acts of violence 93; gendered dynamics of 12, 101; politics of 13, 93; silences of 89 Ardinghelli, Mariangela 91 Ares and Aphrodite: children of 46–49 argument for women’s education 83–84 aristocratic marriages 9, 127

Aristophanes 21, 31, 33n12 Aristotle 2, 8, 13, 24; account of female embodiment 43–44, 49, 50n6; and active character of maternal love 38; and animal ēthos 42–43; and full citizen status 37; husband/wife relationship 50n11, 51n20; and role of the wife 38; on self-sacrifice 52n33; zoological thinking 47–48, 51n26 Aristotle’s political theory: children of Ares and Aphrodite 46–49; community of those having life in common 39–42; male and female animals 42–44; rule of women, fear of 44–46; self-sacrifice as wifely virtue in 36–49 Astell, Mary 5 authorship: and attribution 190; Foucault on 61–62; individual 153, 168; and intellectual labor 149; and interpretation 64–67; of La Mandragola 57, 62–63; Machiavelli’s 56–57, 63, 67; and performative labor 67 Baader, Johann Michael 118 Bain, Alexander 157 Baker, Keith 113 Bally, Jean-Henry 118 Barefoot in Athens (Anderson) 32 Barvel, Le Comte de 120

198 Index

Bayle, Pierre 99 Beaumont, Gustave de 128–129, 131–132, 135, 137, 139–142 Belam, Elizabeth Mottley 128 Berger, Ronna 34n23 Berlin, Isaiah 174 Bertucci, Paola 91 Bezos, Jeff 190 Bezos, MacKenzie 190 Bianchi, Emanuela 38, 50n9 Bibliothèque de l’école des Chartes 103 Bien, David 100 biographies: bio-data and intellectual biographies 170–172; as genre 169–170; role of minor characters in 121–122; ‘wife’in intellectual biography 3, 61, 73, 94, 107, 130–131, 148, 167 Birch, Elizabeth 138 Birch, Mary Ann Elisa 134–135 Blair, Hugh 119 Blommendael, Reyer van 7 Bloomberg News 185–186 Boleyn, Anne 1 Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon 136 Boswell, James 118, 119 British International Working Men’s Association 179 British Museum 139, 178 Broad, Jacqueline 84n5, 87n35 Bugeaud, Marshal 135 Burns, Lydia 3, 13, 171, 180, 182n13 Burns, Mary 3, 13, 171, 180, 182n13 Butler, Melissa 84 Cadière, Catherine 91 Calas, Anne-Rose 99 Calas, Jean 99–100 Calas, Marc-Antoine 99 Calas Affair 90, 99 The Calas Affair (Bien) 100 Callanan, Keegan 104n15 Calvin, Jean 92, 99 Calvinism 91, 94–95, 99, 101, 103 Calvinists 89–92, 96–101 Camisard Wars 95 canon: collaboration, labor, “great works” 9–11; correcting the record 5–6; creating 9–11, 163n17, 168; critical interrogation of 190; interrogating the canon 6–13, 190, 192n12; “minor characters” and 121; overview 1–2; receptions, archives, and agency 11–13; recovering the wives of the canon 2–5, 121, 161; reimagining 188–190;

remembering “the ladies” 13–14; studies of 148, 149; wife in Western philosophy 7–9, 187 canonical: intellectuals 93; philosophers 2; political philosophers 6; texts 189, 191; thinkers 11; wives and women 12–13 “The Case for Xanthippe” (Graves) 20 Catherine the Great 118 Catholic Church 89, 98 Catholicism 97, 99, 140 Cavendish, Margaret 5 Champion, Antoinette 110 Charmuzy, Francois 102 Charrière, Isabelle de 120 Childe, Edward Vernon 129 children of Ares and Aphrodite 46–49 Chipman, Alice 189 Choudhury, Mita 91 Clarke, Betty 3–4, 10; women education 73–80; see also mother Clarke, Mary 3, 190; letters on childrearing 75–79, 86n20, 86n23; Locke’s intimate companionship 4, 10–11, 85n10; women education 73–84 Clarke, Sir Edward 73 Cleopatra 1 Clizia (Machiavelli) 61, 69n4, 69n13 collaboration: attribution and 190–191; between Clarke and Locke 75; between Mottley and Tocqueville 139; between Salutati and Machiavelli 60–64; between Taylor Mill and Mill 148–149, 155; labor and 9–11; nonintellectual labor or forms of 6; scope and nature of intellectual 149; 21st century forms of xii, 189–190; wife as collaborator 187 Colwell, Robert K. 32n2 community 28, 34n21, 128; Calvinist 89, 91, 96; intellectual 149; labor 190; political 8, 37, 39, 46; of those who have life in common 39–42 Condorcet, Nicolas de 100 Confessions (Rousseau) 108–111, 113, 119, 122n5, 123n13, 123n16, 124n46 correcting, record 5–6 Correspondence de Montesquieu (Montesquieu) 102 cosmopolitanism 88, 97 COVID-19 pandemic 185 Cowen, Tyler 185–186 Cranston, Maurice 80, 84n3 Cudworth, Ralph 80 curation 102

Index  199

Damaris, Lady Masham 3–4, 10–11, 81–83; as a Lockean educator 3, 10–11, 80–83; theory of education 73–74, 190 Darwin, Charles 167 Davidson, Olivia 189 Davis, Natalie Zemon 92 De l’esprit des loix (Montesquieu) 88, 99 Democracy in America (Tocqueville) 127, 129, 133 demokratia 52n32 Demuth, Helene “Lenchen” 3, 13, 171, 179–180 Demuth, Henry Frederick Lewis 171 Denis, Marguerite 95 Desan, Suzanne 96 Désert period 91, 95, 99, 101 Deslauriers, Marguerite 41, 47, 49n6, 50n11, 51n20, 51n21, 51n22 Dewey, John 189 d’Houdetot, Sophie 107, 115 Diderot, Denis 110, 113 Diogenes, Laertius 22, 24–26 A Discourse Concerning the Love of God (Lady Masham) 81 Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (Rousseau) 118 Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women,Violence, and the Archive (Fuentes) 93 domestic labor 10, 14, 73–74, 80, 82, 83–84, 87n35, 90, 185–186; and relationship to intellectual labor 14, 73–74, 83–84, 185–186 Douglass, Anna Murray 191 Douglass, Frederick 191 Duke’s Project Vox 5 Du Peyrou, Pierre-Alexandre 120 Ecclesiazusae (Aristophanes) 33n12 Edict of Toleration 91, 101 Edinburgh Review 147 education: argument concerning women’s 25, 44, 83–84, 116, 129, 133, 152; early childhood 10, 74–80; as an element of class difference 180; labors in support of 185–186; Locke’s theory of 73–84; and marriage 156; and religion 92, 98; Rousseau’s approach to 117, 119 Einstein, Albert 190 Einstein, Mileva Marić 190 Émile, or Education (Rousseau) 115, 117, 119, 122 Encyclopédie 97 Enfranchisement of Women (Taylor Mill) 155, 157–158

Engels, Friedrich 3–4, 13, 167; MarxEngels relationship 177; Mary Burns and 171; as political activist 167; “second-fiddle” to a “great thinker” 168 Enlightenment 90, 91; in shadow of 118–121 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke) 85n8 Essay on Human Understanding (Broad) 84n5 Euripides 46–47 experiential politics 11, 148–150, 153–154, 156 Falco, Maria 58 Falconetti, Iacopo 61 “Famous Autobiographies” 147 female/feminine: animals 42–44; interpretations, of La Mandragola and the “Ligurio Problem” 58–60; philosophy 154 Feminist Interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli 58 Feuerbach, Ludwig 178 “first philosophy” 43 Fitton, J. W. 33n16 Florentine Histories (Machiavelli) 67 Forti, Simona 49 Foucault, Michel 61 Fox, Margaret Warfield 190 French Calvinist 90; persecution 91, 101–102 French Enlightenment 88 French monarchy 90 French Old Regime 101 French Revolution 90, 100, 139 Fuentes, Marisa 93 Gabriel, Mary 177–180 The Gallant Muses 110 Gebelin, François 102–103 gender: assumptions, expectations, norms, roles 2, 6, 8, 13, 96, 103, 108, 122, 128, 158; genre and 181; intellectual biographies 181; and intellectual production 5–6, 94–96; in Machiavelli’s thought 59; political partnerships 167–181; religion 90–94 Generation of Animals 48, 50n7, 50n9 genre 66, 168–170; and gender 181; intellectual biographies 181 gentlewomen, educating: argument for women’s education 83–84; Damaris Masham as a Lockean educator 80–83;

200 Index

Locke’s correspondence with Clarkes 74–80; model for early childhood education 74–80; overview 73–74 Girardin, Marquis de 120 Girardin, René 118 Goodman, Dena 88 Graves, Robert 20, 32n6 Grimsley, Ronald 115 Grote, Harriet 128, 138 Grotius, Hugo 94 Guellec, Laurence 137 Guicciardini, Francesco 62 gunaikokratia 39, 44 Hales, Stephen 91 Hardy, Harriet 151–152 Hardy, Thomas 151–152 Hayek, F.A. 152 Hegel, G.W.F. 47, 167, 178, 189 Henri IV 103 Hermias of Atarneus 36 Herpyllis 2, 8, 12, 36 Herr Vogt (polemical pamphlet) 173 heterosexual intimacy 4 hippos 32n4 Hirschmann, Nancy 85n13 History of Animals (Aristotle) 39, 40, 42, 50n9 household: and Clarke 10, 79, 83; and Engels 180; management 4, 75; managers 1, 76; and Marx 180; and Mottley 129, 131; and “patriarchal household politics” 96; and RousseauLevasseur 108, 110, 116, 118; and Socrates 33n17, 47; and Taylor Mill 155; and Xanthippe 25–26, 28 Huguenot refugees 91, 102 Hume, David 116, 119 Iliad (Homer) 19 intellectual biographies: bio-data 170–172; centering marginalization 172–177; genre and gender 181; genre trouble 169–170; Marx makeover 177–181; overview 167–169 intellectual labor: 3, 5, 9, 11, 13–14, 37, 57, 80, 93, 101, 128, 147–151, 186; future of 185–191; overview 185–186; and performance 61–63; recognizing “wives” 186–188; reimagining “canons” 188–190; rethinking labor 190–191 Islamic revivalism 92

Jacobs, Jo Ellen 149, 151, 152, 162 Jaquette, Jane 59 Jardin, André 131 Jones, Gareth Stedman 176 Julie, La Nouvelle Héloïse (Rousseau) 107, 122 July Monarchy 133, 135, 137 Jurieu, Pierre 99 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Riazanov) 173 Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (Sperber) 175 Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Jones) 176 Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (Berlin) 174 Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (McLellan) 174 Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen) 173 Kergolay, Louis de 130, 137–138 Kingston, Rebecca 93 labor: and canon construction 3, 4, 6, 9–11, 13–14, 57, 73–74, 96, 128, 140, 148, 186; collaboration and 9–11; domestic 10, 14, 73–74, 80, 82, 83–84, 87n35, 90, 185–186; gender roles and 39–40, 45–46, 84, 90; intellectual 37, 60, 149, 151, 185–191; intimate 4; performative 10, 61–63, 67–68; rethinking 190–191 La Mandragola (Machiavelli) 2, 9, 11; authorship of 60–64; feminist interpretations of 58–60; La Mandragola’s canzoni, reconsidering 9–10, 64–67 La Mandragola’s canzoni 9–10, 64–67 La Nouvelle Héloïse (Rousseau) 115 Lartigue, Jeanne de 88–103; archives 3, 9, 12, 88–89, 102; as Calvinist refugee 90–94, 101; gender and intellectual production 94–96; and gendered religion 90–94; re-examining life of 94–96; relationship with Montesquieu 96–99; religious toleration 101 La veuve Calas à Paris, ou Le triomphe de Voltaire, pièce en un acte, en prose (Pujoulx) 100 Le Commerce 137 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 81 Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater (Rousseau) 115 Lettres persanes (Montesquieu) 88, 97, 99

Index  201

Levasseur, François 108 Levasseur, Thérèse 11–12, 14; Enlightenment 116–118; maternity and paternity without motherhood and fatherhood 112–113; overview 107–108; position in Rousseau’s life and thought 3–4, 8–9, 107–108; Rousseau’s romantic relationship with 108–112; in the shadow of Enlightenment 118–121; reception of 108–116 Lieber, Francis 137 “Ligurio problem,” feminist interpretations of 58–60 Limborch, Phillipus van 81 Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Diogenes) 24 Locke, John 3, 4, 10, 73; correspondence with the Clarkes 74–80; Damaris Masham as a Lockean educator 80–83; model for early childhood education 74–80; theory of education 73–84; Women’s education, argument for 83–84 logos 48 Lougee, Carolyn Chappell 90 Louis XIV, King of France: dragonnades 90; Revocation of the Edict of Nantes 90, 91, 94, 97, 101 Louis XVI, King of France: Edict of Toleration 101 Lysistrata (Aristophanes) 33n12 Machiavelli, Niccolò 2, 56; and Ciompi workers 67; feminist interpretations of La Mandragola and “Ligurio problem” 58–60; fundamental ambivalence over manhood 58–59; La Mandragola’s canzoni 64–67 McLellan, David 174–175 Madison, Dolley 189 Madison, James 189 Maenchen-Helfen, Otto 173 Mahmood, Saba 91–92 Malcolm, Janet 121 Malesherbes, Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de 100 Mancini, Mathew 140 marital rule (gamikē) 38–39 marriages, aristocratic 9, 127 Marx, Jenny 13, 168–169; financial backing 174–175; intellectual biography 3–4, 171; political activism 11, 175, 176; relationship with Karl 172–174 Marx, Karl 3, 167, 171–178; makeover 177–181; as political activist 167

Mary Mottley, Madame de Tocqueville 127–142; critic and editor 138–141; Mottley’s double presence 141–142; overview 127–128; political advice and analysis 135–137; spiritual confidant 131–132; work of a public-spirited wife 132–135 Masham, Damaris Cudworth see Damaris, Lady Masham Masham, Sir Francis 81 Mather, Cotton 1 Matignon, Maréchal de 103 “Matilda effect” 5 Meister, Jacob-Henri 118 Mémoire sur le marriage des Protestants (de Malesherbes) 100 Memorabilia (Xenophon) 22 Mendelson, Sara 74–75, 80, 84, 85n10 Menexenus (Plato) 34n24 Metaphysics (Aristotle) 42 Mill, John Stuart 3, 10–11, 147–162 Mme de Warens 107, 110, 114 Molyneux, William 82–83 Montesquieu (Shklar) 94 Montesquieu (Sorel) 94 Montesquieu, Baron de 3, 12, 88–103; silence as act of agency in corpus of 96–101 Montesquieu et la vigne (Perceval) 94 mothers 4, 10, 148; in Aristotle 37–38; Damaris Masham Cudworth 82, 84; Harriet Taylor Mill 150, 154, 157–158, 159, 164n54; Jeanne De Lartigue 89, 92–94; Jenny Marx 172; Levasseur, Thérèse 112, 116, 120, 124n46; in Locke 74, 76–77, 82; Mary Clarke 75, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85n10; Mary Mottley 130; in Rousseau 108–110; in Tocqueville 133; Xanthippe 24, 28, 30, 33n17 Mottley, George 128 Moultou, Paul-Claude 118 Murray, Margaret James 189 Naskrecki, Piotr 32n2 “New Genus and Two New Species of Melicharini from Venezuela” 19 Newton, Isaac 186 Nicolaievsky, Boris 173 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) 38–39 Nietzsche, Frederich 20, 32, 32n5 Notice sur Alexis de Tocqueville (Beaumont) 131 Nouvelle Correspondence 140

202 Index

Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life (Lady Masham) 81, 84 Oeuvres Complètes 140 Ogilvie and Harvey 36 Okin, Susan 161 On Liberty (Mill) 148, 157, 161 On the Origins of Inequality (Rousseau) 118, 122 Packe, Michael 161 Pappe, H.O. 153, 161 Paris Academy of Sciences in Naples 91 Parisian Enlightenment 112 partnership: feminist 160–162; gendered political 39–40, 167–181; hybrid 8, 108; Mill-Taylor Mill 10–12, 149 “patriarchal household politics” 96 Peloponnesian War 25 People of Color Also Know Stuff 5 The People’s Press 180 Perceval, Émile de 94 performative labor 10, 61–63, 67–68 Pericles’s Funeral Oration 27 Phaedo (Plato) 7–8 philosophy: academic 190; feminist 154; first 43; Marx 173; Masham’s contributions 81; political 3; Western 2, 5, 7–9, 187 “pious matrons” 1 Pitkin, Hanna 58–59 Plainte and Défense de Thérèse Le Vasseur (Charrière) 120 Plato 7; Phaedo 7–8; Republic 19, 23, 33n7, 33n16, 34n20, 52n36; Xanthippe in 26–31 polis 8, 36 political philosophy 3 Politics (Aristotle) 39, 44, 48 Popiel, Jennifer 93 The Prince (Machiavelli) 57, 59 Principles of Political Economy (Mill) 148 private 2–3, 8–9, 12, 14 Protagoras 23 Protestantism 97, 99 Protestant Reformation 99 public 8–9, 14 Pufendorf, Samuel von 94 Pujoulx, M. J.-B. 100 Puligo, Domenico 61 Pythias 2, 8, 12, 36 Rawls, John 190 receptions 1, 3, 6–10, 63, 67, 148, 153, 155, 163n19, 168–170, 187, 189; and agency

11–13; and archives 11–13; effects of 14, 169, 189; of Levasseur 107; patterns of 187; process of 168, 170; of Salutati 67; of Taylor Mill 148, 153; of Xanthippe 19–20 recognizing “wives” 186–188 Recollections (Tocqueville) 134–135, 138–139 Recollections (Xenophon) 23–25 Reeve, Henry 138 Reeves, Richard 153, 156 Réflexions d’un citoyen catholique sur les lois de France relatives aux protestants (Condorcet) 100 Renoux, Marie 108 Republic (Plato) 19, 23, 33n7, 33n16, 34n20, 52n36 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes 90–91, 94, 97, 101 Riazanov, D. B. 173 Ricardo, David 178 Roberts, Meghan 92 Rochette, Francois 102 Romans 98 Rossi, Alice 148–149 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 3, 107, 122n7, 123n17, 124n46, 124n49, 124n60; death in 120; domestic life with Levasseur 112–113; and Hôtel Saint-Quentin 108–109; and Thérèse’s Enlightenment 116–138 “Rousseauian domesticity” 93 Rye House Plot 81 Salutati, Barbera 56; collaboration with Machiavelli 2, 9, 11, 14; feminist interpretations of La Mandragola 58–60; interpretations of La Mandragola 64–67; and “Ligurio problem” 58–60; overview 56–57; between performance and authorship 60–64 Schechter, Ronald 97 Secondat, Thérèse de 102 self-sacrifice 52n33; as wifely virtue in Aristotle’s political theory 36–49 Selinger, William 133 Shackleton, Robert 102 Shakespeare, William 186 Shklar, Judith N. 94 silence: as an act of agency 88–90, 96–101; archival 12, 89–90, 187, 191; gendered 3, 92; in history 2; of women’s role 11 Sissa, Giulia 43, 49n6 Smith, Bonnie 139

Index  203

Smith, Fannie 189 The Social Contract (Rousseau) 115, 118 Socratea 19 Socrates 2, 7–8, 19–32, 32n5, 32n6, 33n7, 33n12, 33n13, 33n14, 33n15, 33n17, 33n19, 34n23 Socrates, his Wives and Alcibiades 7 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke) 10, 73–84 Sorel, Albert 94 Sperber, Jonathan 175 Staël, Germaine de 120 Starobinski, Jean 115 Stein, Gertrude 121 Sterling, John 160 Strauss, Leo 33n13 Subjection of Women (Mill) 148, 154, 157 Symposium (Xenophon) 21 Taylor Mill, Harriet: feminist partnership 160–162; grounded in the “everyday” 154–156; her radical vision 156–158; it’s in the details 153–154; not by tutelage, but by circumstance 151–153; in and out of her time 158–160; overview 3, 147–148; partnership with Stuart 10–11, 190; recovering “Mrs. Mill” 148–151 #ThanksForTyping movement 6 Tocqueville, Alexis de 3–4, 12, 127–142; marriage to Mottley 128–131; Mottley’s importance to 131–132; political and intellectual life 128 Toklas, Alice B. 121 Treatise on Education (Locke) 84 Tredennick, Hugh 34n22 Tucher, Marie von 189 Twitter 6 Tylus, Jane 63

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher 1 Victorian England 9 Voltaire 100, 104, 113, 119, 124n60 von Grimm, Baron 113 Voyage en Orient 138 Washington, Booker T. 189 Welch, Cheryl 131 Western philosophy 2, 5, 7–9, 187; wife in 7–9 Weydemeyer, Joseph 175 White, Hayden 169 Wikipedia 32n3 William, Nassau, Sr. 133 wives: of the canon, recovering 2–5; recognizing 186–188; in Western philosophy 7–9; see also mothers; Lartigue, Jeanne de; Levasseur, Thérèse; Marx, Jenny; Montesquieu, Madame de; Salutati, Barbera; Taylor Mill, Harriet; Tocqueville, Madame de; Xanthippe women: education, argument for 83–84; fear of the rule of 44–46; see also education; gentlewomen, educating; Locke, John; mothers; wives Women Also Know Stuff 5 Woodbury, Leonard 20 Wright, Joanne 85n11 Wyeth, Andrew 190 Xanthippe 11; accomplishment 31–32; ancient anecdotes 21–26; Antisthenes’s characterization of 22; demanding attention from Socrates 31–32; overview 19–21, 32n2, 33n11; in Plato 26–31; portrayals 7–9; shrew 2–4, 32n3 Xenophon 7, 20–26, 29, 31–32, 32n5, 33n10, 33n13