|
|
|
Condorcet’s Legacy Among the Philosophes Key Enlightenment minds are often juxtaposed with their iconic foes, religious conservatives. When discussing the subject of women’s rights, however, this comparison creates a false impression that Enlightenment male thinkers held ideas very much opposed to a dogmatic institution such as the Catholic Church. Ironically, and damaging to their legacy of prejudice-free rationalism, nearly all of the philosophes, many of which were “freethinking” atheists, viewed woman’s intellectual nature and societal purpose through a prejudice-tainted glass, not unlike the most conservative establishments of their time. Indeed, when it came to the perception of women, the philosophes had less in common with a virulently secular feminist such as Condorcet, than they did with modern conservative Christians who believe women should be treated more fairly but still cling to gender stereotypes. Voltaire doubted that women were capable of invention. Montesquieu did not support woman’s enfranchisement, applauded rewarding warriors with the women of their choice; and failed to even consider woman’s right to govern her person when he asserted that abortion should be utilized as a means to control population. Diderot, like so many of his contemporaries, pitied women but did not respect them, in general. The only women he respected intellectually were those who have what he viewed as the fewest feminine characteristics. After all, intelligence was to Diderot a male characteristic. As Morley puts it, “Diderot had deep pity for women. Their physical weaknesses moved him to compassion. To these are added the burden of their maternal function, and the burden of unequal laws.” 1 Despite Diderot’s iconoclastic atheism, his relationship with his family was dictated by a dogmatic devotion to the prevailing mores of the day: he chooses his daughter’s husband and instructed her to obey him as she had obeyed her father; he saw woman as fundamentally weaker and less intellectually capable than men; and he believed the home was woman’s sphere, leaving only men to operate society’s political apparatus. Ironically, even the great foe of organized Christianity, Thomas Paine perceived woman in much the same way the Church does. While supporting efforts by society to save her from her natural inequality, Paine identified woman with her role as a procreator and steward of the family. Still more, the avowed atheist, Holbach, too, believed that women were by nature intellectually weaker than men, not to mention more prone to sickness; and he agreed with the Church that woman’s most fundamental virtue is chastity. In fact, Diderot and Montesquieu held similar views about woman’s chastity. The anti-clericism of the philosophes stopped when it came to replacing natural law ideas about male-female relationships with scientific principles. Not even the supposed grandmother of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, makes as strong and concerted a case for feminism as Condorcet. Wollstonecraft tethers her contention that women deserve greater liberty to the point that in order to receive such liberties women must do their duties as not only good citizens but also good wives, mothers, and educators. Women, writes Wollstonecraft, will be rendered more useful and virtuous if they receive the protection of civil laws. The significance of the difference between these two thinkers is often lost on scholars, or at very least lost on their work: Brookes casually notes that Condorcet’s work was more potent than Wollstonecraft’s in realizing nothing short of structuring society could bequeath equality to women. Schapiro rightly accords Condorcet the title of the only feminist among the philosophes, but, again, places Wollstonecraft’s feminism in the same arena as he places Condorcet’s feminism. He writes that Condorcet’s surprisingly modern feminism was “the forerunner of Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill.” 2 Again, Wollstonecraft’s works are nowhere nearly as daring and pioneering as Condorcet’s revolutionary calls for expanding equality. While the philosophes mourned the unfortunate place in which women resided in society, most agreed, nonetheless, that women were naturally unequal to men. Those who rejected such a claim did little to nothing to actively and publicly support woman’s enfranchisement. At best, some sought to uplift women, but none, except Condorcet, made a concerted effort to secure her participation in the political process. Meanwhile Condorcet rejected the obsession and unproven claim that women and men were fundamentally different. Instead he continuously pointed to education and socialization as having created these gender norms which were then, as they are now, perceived as universal truths. Condorcet not only rebuked the sentinels of conservativism, both the clergy and political conservatives, he also rebuked philosophers for seeking to secure the rights of man without so much as pondering whether or not they should seek the same for women, too. A signature of his work, Condorcet spent little to no time exalting the past. Instead, he bemoaned that a true democratic society had never yet existed, since all previous examples excluded the participation of women. Moreover, Condorcet’s ideas were not only high-minded ideals exchanged in the marketplace of philosophizing, he lived with a woman whom he treated as a perfect equal, even collaborating with, and urged his daughter to lead a life of self-sufficiency, without reliance on anyone, including a man. For all of their exhortations of reason, empiricism, and free-thinking, nearly all elite male thinkers of the Enlightenment failed to escape the Promethean bondage which left them chained to the that irrational boulder of sexism, a monument to hypocrisy as well as, ironically, one of the greatest prejudices of the time. Condorcet’s ability to recognize any and all prejudices made him the Hercules among the philosophes who frees the Enlightenment from its imprisonment by hypocrisy, slaughtering the prejudice that stood pecking at the very cornerstone of the Age of Reason’s principles. In this way he became not only the first true male-feminist of his time, but also the first philosophe to make good on the principle to fall every unsubstantiated prejudice. For men and women in the twenty-first century, Condorcet is a monument to the possibilities of life freed of the bondage of stereotypes and prejudices. He reminds us that feminism does not belong to any one gender any more than human rights belong to any one gender; and he is a beckon, calling upon all human beings to embrace the totality of the human experience and to combat injustice and prejudice with the twin swords of reason inspired truth, and empathy driven passion. In Condorcet we find the gray between the typological analyses of the eighteenth century. When all is said, Condorcet stood in the center of a bridge linking the age of passion and the age of reason, a bridge which also towered over apathetic concepts of gender which left men and women strained on separate islands, often to their own detriment. On this bridge, Condorcet realized a feminism none of his male counterparts had recognized; there he permitted himself to experience and embrace a full-range of human qualities, those associated with men and those associated with women, including rationalism and passion. In this way Condorcet is for men the key to unlocking the twin steeds of both reason, and passion and sensitivity. He stands out as irrefutable proof that a man can love as ardently as he can think rationally; that a man can feel and care as much as any woman, if only he allows himself to be freed of gender stereotypes, of the cultural pressures and prejudice that plague both sexes. Condorcet reminds us time and time again, education, not sex, is the fundamental difference between men and women. Today, this remains true. While women and men receive much of the same schooling, their cultural education, via media and marketing, is vastly different.
|
