Allauren Samantha Forbes

Can Nicolas Malebranche be usefully understood as a feminist thinker and, if so, in what ways? While Malebranche remains a major figure in early modern European philosophy, it is not obvious that he was a feminist ally, particularly in comparison to some of his canonical brethren. In this chapter, the author explores the case for Malebranche’s feminist potential. She argues that Malebranche might not have thought of himself as a feminist, but that his work is importantly consistent with historical feminist projects in ways that suggest he can be fruitfully understood as a part of the history of feminist philosophy. This chapter argues that several elements of his philosophical thought are consistent with feminist projects both historical and contemporary.

In this article I explore how three early modern European feminists—Marie de Gournay, Margaret Cavendish, and Mary Astell—discuss wooing in surprisingly similar ways. Independently and without the benefit of a personal or intellectual relationship, all three highlight how wooing is characterized by deception, insincere flattery, and occasional coercion to secure consent to marriage; they problematize how wooing tricks women into consenting to their own subordination. This is a feminist social epistemological project: Gournay, Cavendish, and Astell recognize wooing as a gendered socio-epistemic harm, for wooing undermines women’s abilities to exercise their epistemic agency over making what was often the single most consequential choice in their lives—who to accept as husband. I argue that for Gournay, Cavendish, and Astell, wooing not only is a gendered socio-epistemic harm but also manifests an epistemic injustice, hermeneutical obscuring, which was deployed by wooers in service of maintaining patriarchal power hierarchies. For Gournay, Cavendish, and Astell, the social practice of wooing manifests patriarchal control via a kind of gendered epistemic tyranny. Successful wooing frustrates epistemic capacities, entrenches gender hierarchies, and traps women in the epistemically and politically subordinating relation of marriage.

Margaret Cavendish sets up feminine utopias in her plays Bell in Campo (1662), The Female Academy (1662), and The Convent of Pleasure (1668). In Bell in Campo, women build a ‘feminine army;’ in The Female Academy, a school for women scholars; and in The Convent of Pleasure, a utopia intended as a pleasurable escape from courtship and marriage. All three ultimately fall apart. This raises an interpretive puzzle: why does Cavendish keep setting up these feminine utopias only for each one to crumble in a spectacular fashion? While these works are iterations of Cavendish’s politics of gender, I want to suggest that they also illustrate her larger feminist social epistemological project.I argue that across these three frustrated feminine utopias, Cavendish develops an account and critique of an epistemic dimension of patriarchy, specifically, that patriarchy undermines women’s epistemic nature –it makes them unknown and unknowable, even to themselves, and their attempts to resist are cast as absurd, liminal things. Cavendish does so by highlighting practices of silencing and distorted speech, ignorance and knowledge, and being (un)known in gender-asymmetric ways. I also argue that Cavendish has a proposed solution: for Cavendish, women ought to become mermaids and hermaphrodites –at least, in a manner of speaking. To make my case, I will present the three plays in Section 2, highlighting Cavendish’s criticisms of the epistemic dimension of patriarchy and what I take to be revealed by the plays’ dramatic conclusions. Section 3 illustrates Cavendish’s formulation of the epistemic problem of patriarchy for women. Section 4 provides a brief reconstruction of Cavendish’s implied solution to this epistemic problem and responds a concern about its potential departure from nature. I close with some final thoughts in Section 5.

In the ongoing project of recovering and (re)integrating early modern European women philosophers, scholars have been re-examining not only who counts as a philosopher, but what kinds of works are properly understood as philosophical. Madeleine de Scudéry is best remembered as a novelist, but some scholars have argued that her dialogues are richly philosophical. Here, I examine an early and overlooked text from Scudéry – Illustrious Women – which is a collection of speeches of historical women who find themselves in dire circumstances. I argue that Illustrious Women offers a sophisticated critique of patriarchal power: Scudéry exposes the conflict between epistemic and practical agency under conditions of gendered oppression and illustrates specific manifestations of this harm concerning control, autonomy, and consent. In so doing, particularly through the genre of oratory, Scudéry’s Illustrious Women is both a work of seventeenth-century feminist resistance and a subversive educational tool.

In the ongoing project of recovering and (re)integrating early modern European women philosophers, scholars have been re-examining not only who counts as a philosopher, but what kinds of works are properly understood as philosophical. Madeleine de Scudéry is best remembered as a novelist, but some scholars have argued that her dialogues are richly philosophical. Here, I examine an early and overlooked text from Scudéry – Illustrious Women – which is a collection of speeches of historical women who find themselves in dire circumstances. I argue that Illustrious Women offers a sophisticated critique of patriarchal power: Scudéry exposes the conflict between epistemic and practical agency under conditions of gendered oppression and illustrates specific manifestations of this harm concerning control, autonomy, and consent. In so doing, particularly through the genre of oratory, Scudéry’s Illustrious Women is both a work of seventeenth-century feminist resistance and a subversive educational tool.

The question of Russell’s engagement with feminist ideas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is helpfully illuminated, I argue, by comparison to some of his feminist contemporaries—namely, Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838–1927) and Emma Goldman (1869–1940). Like Woodhull and Goldman, Russell argues for women’s right to vote, a new sexual ethic, and a significant revision to marriage. These are paradigmatic feminist projects, and so would seem to suggest that Russell, particularly within Marriage and Morals, has significant philosophical overlap with some of the feminist philosophers of his time. His similarities with feminist thinkers and activists Woodhull and Goldman on the classical feminist concerns of sex, suffrage, and marriage suggest that Russell’s views may yet find a place in the history of feminism, even if he does not.

Women thinking and writing about friendship in the early modern period were indebted to traditional interest in this topic dating back to Plato and Aristotle. This tradition was deeply misogynistic: real friendship was often claimed to be beyond the grasp of women. However, some women philosophers—most notably Marie le Jars de Gournay, Mary Astell, and Gabrielle Suchon—wrote about friendship in ways that both emerge from the history of Western philosophy and yet resist this inegalitarian framework. This chapter explores the views of these three philosophers: for each, real friendship represents a means to obtain a different kind of meaningful freedom. For Gournay, friendship is a means to epistemic freedom and epistemic justice; for Astell, friendship is a means to moral freedom and relational autonomy, and for Suchon, friendship provides support that facilitates political freedom—freedom from institutional commitments or constraints.

Marie de Gournay and Anton Wilhelm Amo, though thinking and writing in different social contexts, each offer an account of prejudice which bears a deep philosophical resonance to that of the other. This resonance is striking and mutually illuminating: Gournay and Amo develop a view of prejudice as a kind of epistemic and moral viciousness that damages both the prejudicial person and their socio-epistemic neighbors. Their accounts highlight how agents are rightly held responsible for prejudice, as it is the agents' epistemic negligence and moral failure that allows prejudice to take hold. As such, their view offers a balance between a critical examination of individuals and an acknowledgement of the deep sociality that pervades the epistemic domain.

Mary Astell is a fascinating seventeenth‐century figure whose work admits of many interpretations. One feature of her work that has received little attention is her focus on bad custom. This is surprising; Astell clearly regards bad custom as exerting a kind of epistemic power over agents, particularly women, in a way that limits their intellectual capacities. This article aims to link two contemporary sociopolitical/social‐epistemological projects by showing how a seventeenth‐century thinker anticipated these projects. Astell's account of bad custom shows that she was attuned to the kinds of institutional or structural explanations theorized by Sally Haslanger, and that she acknowledges that bad custom—as an institutional or structural explanation—is intimately linked with epistemic injustice, albeit a kind not yet captured by contemporary social epistemologists. I call this form of epistemic injustice found in Astell epistemic internalization injustice. I argue that the epistemic significance of Astell's notion of bad custom is that it enables us to understand how bad custom conditions human relations in such a way as to result in epistemic injustice. Through coming to understand her notion of bad custom, we can expand our understanding of social epistemic phenomena like epistemic injustice.