Mary Astell and the Feminist Critique of Possesive Individualism

IT LONG HAS BEEN ASSUMED that democracy-that egalitarian political practice expressed in the simple formula that "all men are created equal" -is good for women and compatible with feminism. It is assumed that women, however devalued and disempowered, will benefit from the democratic extension of powerand be counted among those who are considered equal. Our culture's stories about women's participation in the revolutions of the eighteenth century-Betsy Ross and her friends stitching the new flag or the fierce Frenchwomen in the streets of Paris calling for the blood of aristocrats-reinforce this impression. Yet by the time Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, it was clear that the political inequality of the sexes was not ameliorated by a belief in democratic process. Engels theorized that it was their unequal participation in the productive labor force that kept women subordinate. When women participated equally in waged labor, he predicted, political discrimination would wither away. Yet we have seen that equal participation in productive labor has simply lengthened women's work day without changing the political reality that government is largely of men, by men, and in the interests of men. We also know by now that a belief in enfranchising the underclass does not necessarily entail a belief in women's rights. It is a notorious fact that the present women's movement emerged from the new left movement of the 60s-a movement which insisted on the more equitable distribution of society's resources and power-and that women's liberation began as a protest on the part of women activists to their devaluation, as women, within the movement. Contemporary feminists theorize that a chronic cultural misunderstanding of the relationship between production and reproduction causes political and economic sexual inequality.' The point of this article is to demonstrate that some