Talkin' 'bout a Revolution

One of the more radical notions that Harriet Taylor advances in her treatise, “Enfranchisement of Women,” is that establishing a sexual hierarchy on the grounds of men’s physical superiority is a practice consistent with older, outdated forms of government:

“That those who were physically weaker should have been made legally inferior is quite conformable to the mode in which the world has been governed” (76).

That is, like Mary Wollstonecraft, Taylor implicitly makes the case that the demise of monarchy and the emergence of democratic forms of government reveal how anachronistic it is to think of men as “better” because men are “stronger.”

Another way to understand Taylor’s point is this: those who subscribe to the idea that men’s physical superiority justifies higher social and political rank are also somehow attached to the idea of monarchies and the notion that there is a transcendent order of being expressed in human physical strength. In short, this kind of thinking bears the residue of aristocratic and elitist stratification. Taylor would think it odd, then, to hear that women of the 21^st century still concede one or both of the following: a) that physical superiority helps to define the proper spheres of men and women; and b) that social and economic inequality follows, rightly and naturally, from men’s physical superiority.

Nonetheless, this idea continues to persist, and while I have long scratched my head in wonder at how this prevails, I realize now that it’s something I understood and fought against at an early age. To anyone watching, though, I’m sure it just looked like I was fighting with boys.

I went to Catholic school in a heavily immigrant neighborhood in the Bronx in the 1970s, and I was too scared to say much in class for the first few years. But running around in the neighborhood required acting “bigger” than I was, so even though the nuns were intimidating, I wasn’t scared of the boys. There was big, round Eddie McGee, my rival in spelling bees, and the rest of the circle included Alex, with his long blonde locks; Julio, who loved baseball as much as I did; and the gentle giant, Carl, who wasn’t very good at any sports. We literally formed a circle in the blindspot of St. Nicholas Tolentine of Church, before it reached the corner of Fordham and Andrews Ave.

Except for the taunting, I don’t remember much except that I used my well-packed, green knapsack as my weapon. Surrounded, I’d take a hold of one strap and whip it behind my head before slinging it across my body. With so many targets, I scored hits as often as not. And I took more than my share of blows, too. Looking back, I’d wager that may have been the point in my 9-year old mind: I was going to show them that I could dish it out and I could take it. Though I didn’t have the language for it then, I know that Harriet Taylor would have said I was challenging the same patriarchal idea that the nuns and the boys simply assumed: I wouldn’t be confined to a “proper sphere.”

Or, you could say that as a working-class girl-child of immigrants, I had a radically different sense of what one’s “proper sphere” could be:

“The proper sphere of all human beings is the largest and highest which they are able to attain to” (Taylor 76).

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The Long History of the War on Contraception

Harriet Taylor's ideal of self-determination takes another hit in the U.S. Congress today

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 12:16:12 -0500

Harriet Taylor's ideal of self-determination takes another hit in the U.S. Congress today

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The "Politics" of Women's Health

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Fight Corporate Personhood and Corporate Influence in Government

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Petition re: Susan Komen Foundation and Planned Parenthood

Photo

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:20:49 -0500

"To escape this bind [any action/no action], we must remember that we do not need, and indeed never..."

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:17:02 -0500

““To escape this bind [any action/no action], we must remember that we do not need, and indeed never will have, all the answers before we act, and that it is often only through taking action that we can discover some of them.””

- Charlotte Bunch, “Not by Degrees: Feminist Theory and Education”

Photo

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:11:44 -0500