from Hypatia Volume 19, Number 4

Excerpt from

No More Like Pallas Athena: Displacing Patrilineal Accounts of Modern Feminist Political Theory

Jim Jose

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The history of modern feminist political theories is often framed in terms of the already existing theories of a number of radical nineteenth-century men philosophers such as James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Charles Fourier, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. My argument takes issue with this way of framing feminist political theory by demonstrating that it rests on a derivation that remains squarely within the logic of malestream political theory. Each of these philosophers made use of a particular discursive trope that linked the idea of women's emancipation with the idea of social progress. I argue that this trope reproduced the masculinist signification and symbolism inherent in their particular political philosophies. I argue for a more positive, less masculinist, account of the history of feminist political thought.

With the resurgence of reinvigorated feminist ideas in the late 1960s, the history of western political and philosophical thought came to be subjected to intense scrutiny. Of particular concern were issues such as masculinist biases (conceptual, factual, methodological, and so on), the search for and recuperation of the works of women writers and thinkers, and the view that feminist ideas provided a legitimate framework for understanding politics and power. Until feminists began reappraising the received wisdom of then-prevailing histories of philosophy in general and political theory in particular, it was almost universally assumed that if there had been writings of any significance by women philosophers (political or otherwise) they would have found a place within the existing canon. The benefit of forty years or more of feminist scholarship makes abundantly clear the considerable history of feminist ideas that belies such an assumption.1
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