Abstract:

Marriage has long been a subject of outsized concern for women. This is hardly surprising given the control marriage exerted over the trajectory of women’s lives. Noticing this, many historical Anglophone women philosophers from the 17th to early 20th century wrote at length about marriage as the supposed purpose for women, the harms that it visits upon them, and the potential for its reform and greatness for men and women alike. They did so in treatise form, as Astell in Some Reflections Upon Marriage (1706), in plays, as Cavendish (1662, 1668), in speeches, as Woodhull and Goldman (1872, 1910), and in novels, as Wollstonecraft and Austen (1796, 1811). And yet, as a subject of historical, philosophical concern, marriage tends to be overlooked. This is unfortunate since marriage is not only a matter of feminist theorizing, but also iterative of these women philosophers’ political philosophical engagement.

Many feminist philosophers theorized about marriage as a kind of unfreedom; a large subset described it as a kind of slavery. This trend persists across hundreds of years, and spans women active during the time of chattel slavery in Europe and North America (such as Mary Astell) to those writing in Reconstruction-era and early 20th century United States (such as Victoria Woodhull and Emma Goldman). This comparison is, at best, inapt: the actual conditions of enslaved persons, especially Black women, were much worse than wealthy white wives who lived circumscribed lives.

While this persistent pattern of comparing marriage to slavery is no doubt informed by (at minimum) white ignorance, if not racial animus, in this paper, I propose an additional explanation: first, I will argue that for many historical Anglophone women philosophers, marriage is a microcosm of political theorizing which links gender injustice to broader contemporary political movements, and so they were coopting the concepts and language of contemporary debates as a deliberate strategy to get cultural buy-in for their criticisms of marriage. Second, there are at least three models of marriage operating in the history of Anglophone women philosophers’ theorizing about marriage, and “marriage as slavery” is not one, but in fact two models: the authority model, which problematizes servitude, and the alienation model, which problematizes gendered labor.

Aside from what I take to be interesting implications for how to understand understudied figures on an understudied topic, I take there to be two important upshots for contemporary scholars. First, this provides an occasion for considering the ethics of recovery projects: while non-ideal circumstances might necessitate non-ideal strategies, it is still deeply uncomfortable to consider how this comparison to slavery hurt actual enslaved persons and might have impeded abolition efforts. What are our obligations as interpreters of folks with callous views/strategies? Second, if these philosophers were right that marriage is a useful tool for engaging in political theorizing, what are we to make of the contemporary tradwife movement? Is such a marital relation captured by the authority or alienation model? I close by suggesting that tradwives have much in common with their feminist predecessors’ contemporaries.