The Degendering of Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft on Virtue and Equality

Felicity Joseph

Zoom link: https://une-au.zoom.us/j/87361754594?pwd=Y0hDTm5VbjFUdlgzWjhYYTV5VEJidz09 

Meeting ID: 873 6175 4594

Passcode: 431703

The philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft in her most famous work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) gives a compelling description of women’s situation under oppression, including an analysis of the role gendered virtue plays in that oppression.  In this seminar I identify this project of ‘degendering’ the virtues as a crucial part of the broader project of theorising women’s equal humanity.  I extrapolate from Wollstonecraft's critique to clarify the ways gendered virtue is set up as a moral trap for women, in which ‘feminine’ virtues are virtues for which women are both praised and condemned, affirming their feminine value while denying them the value of a full and equal humanity.  I argue that a program of ‘degendering’ the virtues, as embarked on by philosophers such as Wollstonecraft, and continued by others such as Simone de Beauvoir, is necessary to the program of gender justice: both to the negative program of rejecting an inherently inconsistent and unfair system of morality and to the positive program of envisioning what women could be once such a system is superseded.