I am currently working on a book that examines how the gendered nature of Kant’s vision of the Enlightenment was challenged by several female German and Polish thinkers of the late eighteenth century: Amalia Holst, Emilie von Berlepsch, and a semi-anonymous writer Karolina. Karolina, Holst, and Berlepsch each reconsider the female vocation from the perspective of women, contest the confines of womanhood of the time, and show that what makes women unfit for public participation is historically contingent and can be overcome. To date, their highly original and insightful early feminist views have not received sufficient academic attention. These texts have remained largely ignored in scholarship within modern philosophy, European intellectual history, and the history of feminist thought.
Kant is known for his progressive Enlightenment ideas, but his views on women are quite controversial. Though he was not unequivocally opposed to the idea of women’s enlightenment in his sense of the term (which emphasizes, e.g., the significance of thinking for oneself and speaking freely in one’s capacity as a member of the general public), he did not think that women were able to navigate the relations between home and the world. The sociopolitical circumstances of women at the time were not a fertile ground for these attempts—a situation Kant apparently believed was unlikely to change in any significant way over time. Though women’s enlightenment is not deeply at odds with his theoretic commitments, he failed to account for or explore women’s participation in enlightenment and related matters.
Many thinkers in Kant’s time saw gains in scientific knowledge aimed at solutions to chronic human problems as the focus of enlightenment. For Kant, increases in theoretical knowledge or understanding of what makes humans happy are not the source of enlightenment. Its source, rather, lies in each of us, not in scientific experts: we must always stand ready to question the authorities we rely on and not blindly accept another person’s word. The opposite of enlightenment, for Kant, is the weak state of immaturity, which can be cured by taking responsibility for our own knowing, not simply acquiring information. Thus (as Kant suggests in “What is Enlightenment?”) one makes good use of one’s understanding by guiding it with the maxim “think for yourself.” Later, in works such as the Critique of Judgement, he adds two more maxims: “think from the standpoint of others” (make public use of reason) and “think consistently.” To make public use of reason means addressing the entire educated, learned public as a “scholar.” In order for this to be possible, however, we must be allowed a realm of free debate, separated from the realm of obedience to our employers, tax collectors, priests, or others. There needs to exist a realm of free public discussion where people can criticize the duties assigned to them in their “private” roles. (For Kant, “private” means being deprived of our common humanity and being limited to some specific aspect of ourselves.) Kant believes that if freedom of expression is granted, the educated public will gradually enlighten itself—thus, the privileges of free debate in the public sphere are reserved for the “learned community.” But while enlightenment of the appropriately educated public is attainable and not too difficult, the enlightenment of the entire nation (the masses, including all women) is an extremely difficult task.
Kant himself does not reject women’s enlightenment either normatively or as a matter of possibility. However, the sociopolitical circumstances of women at the time were (again) far from fertile ground for their attempts to strive toward enlightenment, and Kant often mistakenly takes the historically-embedded examples of womanhood around him to be representative of female nature as such. In the 1760s, when Kant’s attitudes towards women are articulated in the greatest detail, his view is that the sexes are and ought to be different, and that “equality” between men and women is found in a unity within which women are beautiful and men noble. In Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Kant praises women for their distinctive “beautiful” virtue, claims that a man and a woman can be a “united pair” that would “as it were constitute a single moral person,” and that women can both “refine” and “ennoble” men. But Kant’s major works in moral philosophy such as the Groundwork may be read as degrading distinctly female virtue. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant further claims that husbands are superior to wives and legitimately able to command over their wives, and that women (like children) are merely “passive citizens” who lack civil personality. However, Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” suggests that even though women presently lack the intellectual and material ability to be active citizens, they have a right to work themselves into active citizenship if they can prove themselves capable of scholarly work and public participation. This makes it plausible that Kant was open to the possibility that the traditional anthropological picture of women, which is empirical and historically contingent, cannot set the parameters within which freedom must operate.
The gendered nature of Kant’s vision of the Enlightenment was challenged by several understudied female German and Polish thinkers of the late eighteenth century: Amalia Holst, Emilie von Berlepsch, and a semi-anonymous writer Karolina. By challenging the confines of womanhood at the time, these proto-feminist philosophers show that these conditions are historically contingent and can be overcome. They explore the same questions as Kant in relation to humanity’s enlightenment, express ideas central to his practical philosophy, and—like Kant—notice the conditions that limit female participation in the Enlightenment. But they recognize that the Kantian project of the Enlightenment, left in the hands of one of the sexes, is unjustly limited. In their own ways, Karolina, Holst, and Berlepsch each reconsider the female vocation from the perspective of women. The neglected views of these thinkers exhibit insightful early-feminist arguments against the Kantian picture of women as incapable of making public use of reason and against the discouragement women received from pursuing enlightenment in Kant’s sense: that is, from abstracting from the specifically female way of life and critically asking themselves whether they want to continue with this way of life.
To date, the views expressed in these treatises and essays have not received sufficient academic attention and have remained largely ignored in scholarship within modern philosophy, European intellectual history, and the history of feminist thought. At the time of their publication, moreover, the above-mentioned authors received little to no attention (and certainly far less attention than, for instance, Mary Wollstonecraft’s contemporaneous A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in England or Olympe de Gouge’s Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in France). The views of the above-mentioned female intellectuals (Berlepsch, Holst, and Karolina) therefore did not enter the mainstream debate on the Enlightenment in Polish and German intellectual circles.
One of the earliest female voices of the Enlightenment to challenge the social and educational inequality between men and women belongs to a Polish woman familiar to us only by her first name: Karolina. An engaged and avid reader of the sociocultural magazine Monitor (a major venue for leading Polish intellectuals of the time), Karolina published in it an essay in which she criticizes the existing norms around women’s upbringing and social interactions. Karolina’s essay affirms the value of the realm of free debate (the public realm) as one in which human beings can flourish intellectually and check their opinions against the opinions of others. However, she demonstrates that women are not able to participate in the public sphere because of the particular contingent circumstances of their upbringing and norms of socialization. First, women are not granted a sufficient education to count as the “educated public” among which scholars freely debate important issues. Consequently, they are unable to belong to the group of people that can strive toward enlightenment. Instead, they belong to the masses about which Kant was pessimistic. Second, women are unable to freely speak their minds even on the rare occasions when they can participate in scholarly debates because of their watchful, controlling tutors. Consequently, they are not permitted to abstract from the realm of obedience to others—to represent themselves as human beings as such—and thus are perpetually confined to their private role as “women:” obedient to their fathers, husbands, tutors, and their particular threefold vocation as wives, mothers, and housemakers. Karolina critiques women’s perpetual intellectual confinement to the private use of reason and lack of intellectual freedom to (learn how to) make public use of reason, and to consequently take a fully-fledged part in the life of their society.
While Karolina focuses on women’s lack of freedom within the public realm and argues that they deserve to lead a lifestyle more similar to men, the main concern of Amalia Holst and Emilie von Berlepsch is to elevate women’s traditional role and responsibilities from auxiliary to central to the Enlightenment project of humanity’s progress. Von Berlepsch’s essay “On the Characteristics and Principles Necessary for Happiness in Marriage,” published in the German literary magazine Der Neue Teutsche Merkur, argues that the Enlightenment ideal of achieving reason’s “independence [Selbstständigkeit]” through getting the right kind of education is not confined to schooling and to following figures who occupy public posts, but begins at home. A woman is therefore not only a mother, a wife, and a housemaker, but “also an educator [Erzieherin]” who takes an active and perhaps even crucial role in shaping the future generation of citizens.
Amalia Holst’s treatise On the Vocation of Woman to Higher Intellectual Development, like many of Kant’s works, emphasizes the value of pursuing the human vocation of becoming gradually enlightened. She realizes that this vocation requires participation in the public realm, where one can freely debate various matters in abstraction from the more particular roles one plays in society. She thus criticizes the fact that women are educated to be, and are thought of as, mere women before they are thought of as human beings. More specifically, their “threefold vocation” as wives, mothers, and housemakers is regarded as prior to their general vocation as human beings (which is not the case for men). Thus, women are unable to escape their more specific, private role and represent themselves in the public sphere. They are discouraged by society to pursue enlightenment in Kant’s sense: to abstract from their more specific way of life and critically ask themselves whether it merits criticism and reform. This, after all, can only be done from the position of a human being in general, where the questions we pose and answers we give are not limited by any private, specific ends. According to Holst, the woman is a full bearer of human vocation—she is, first and foremost, a member of humanity (not a woman), and thus holds an equal share in the human vocation to perfect natural capacities. Holst thus opposes women being constantly constrained to the sphere defined by their sexual nature. Like Karolina, she views womanhood as a type of private “civil office” of the sort Kant describes. In line with Kantian theory, though not with Kant’s expressed views regarding women, Karolina and Holst recognize and critically assess women’s inability to represent themselves as general human beings in the public sphere.
These three women thinkers raise related critiques of Kant in other interesting ways that I explore in my book. One thematic axis of my book is Kant’s notion of active citizenship and the three female thinkers’ critique of women’s inability to enter the public sphere. Questions relevant to this issue include: how can Kant’s notions of passive and active citizenship help us articulate their critique? Does their critique neatly map onto this Kantian distinction? Another thematic axis addresses the specific role women are supposed to play in the Enlightenment and their “centrality” to the Enlightenment project: to what extent is the female thinkers’ view that women should play a much more central role in the Enlightenment a critique of Kant’s view of women’s role, and to what extent is it a further specification of his view? A third thematic axis is the relationship between endorsing women’s threefold vocation and arguing for the enlightenment of women: to what extent are Holst’s, Berlepsch’s, and Karolina’s critiques aimed at transcending women’s threefold vocation, and to what extent are these critiques working within the threefold vocation while expanding women’s importance in the Enlightenment project? For Holst and Berlepsch, the argument for women’s enlightenment is grounded in their threefold vocation (as demonstrated by their focus on mothers as key educators). Karolina, by contrast, sees women’s enlightenment as synonymous with performing a broader public function. I hope that my work contributes to the growing interest in the exploration of understudied female figures in history and philosophy.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Olga Lenczewska
Olga Lenczewska is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She completed a PhD in Philosophy and a PhD Minor in Political Science at Stanford University while working as a research fellow at the Stanford Basic Income Lab. She is currently working on a new book, Kant and Women’s Enlightenment: Feminist Critiques from 18th Century Germany and Poland.
