The Power of Women. A Challenge for Democracy (6/8)

A civilizing presence. Women in the Enlightenment.
Pagden, Anthony

In 2020, the Haut Conseil pour l’Égalité entre Femmes et Hommes published a report on the state of sexism in France. The picture that emerges seems to have come out of the library of an antiquarian. Women experience their scarcity in positions of high responsibility as an intrusion into a supportive ‘fratriarcal’ universe. Under these conditions, they are led to doubt their legitimacy. We listen and ask ourselves: what can women do? This question challenges us to rethink the very notion of ‘power’. Power is not only domination. The word ‘power’ expresses first of all possibility and capacity. The ‘possible’ as a right to do, to say, to decide implies the questioning of another subjective modality: am I able to do, to say, to decide? The subordination of right to ability, is essential in the history of gender difference. For in this history, women have not simply been excluded from places of power: they have been considered unable to exercise power. This workshop sheds light on intellectual history and its banal way of thinking: in doubting women, we are on safe ground, on the side of Aristotle, both in ancient Greece and in the premodern world that the Aristotelian tradition has intellectually shaped. This tradition of interconnected knowledge has formed a true paradigm. Natural Law – namely the principle that Nature teaches us norms and precepts, first of all in the domain of sexuality, gender and marriage –, is its touchstone. But the turning point in the cultural history of gender is the Enlightenment. It was the attribution to all human beings of a truly “common sense”, susceptible of flourishing through education, that created the conditions of possibility for a paradigm shift: “The rights of human beings result solely from the fact that they are sentient beings, susceptible of acquiring moral ideas, and of reasoning on these ideas. Thus, women having these same qualities, have necessarily equal rights” (Nicolas de Condorcet).