Throughout history, the female gaze has been silenced, repressed, and eliminated. Women who dared to think were disregarded, considered crazy, and even killed. Only a few women have walked the sands of time and left footprints so deep not even the patriarchal system could erase them. Mothers, fighters, queens, protectors, nurturers… victims of invisibility. 

One might be led to think that given that feminism dates back as early as Plato’s time, political philosophers would have thought about this significant section of the population. Alas, that is not the case. As often happens in social movements, the affected were the only collective to raise awareness about this matter. What sets feminism apart from other social movements, however, is its history. Inequality due to gender has been around for centuries, unlike perhaps racism as understood by 21st-century Americans. No, the only people anaylising the power structure and fighting against an oppressive model were women who, thanks to their fathers or husbands, were educated enough to know what was happening around them. Some examples of notorious feminist philosophers are Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, 1949), Christine de Pizan (The Book of The City of Ladies, 1405), and Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792). But women don’t only write about women, and it’s a form of suppression to just study female philosophers when it comes to feminism when their contribution to philosophy transcends far beyond. The notorious Hannah Arendt made headlines with her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, a Report on the Banality of Evil. Hypatia taught at the Neoplatonism School of Philosophy in Alexandria. Although little is preserved from her philosophical work, we know through other sources that her contribution to the philosophical education of her time was outstanding. She was murdered by a fanatic Christian mob for “black magic” during the religious conflicts of the 5th century. Akka Mahadevi took a rather unorthodox approach to religion by relinquishing all material possessions and social norms in her search for enlightenment. 

So how does this relate to Rousseau and Hegel? While I agree that their ideas might have some sprinkle of equality, this never extended to the opposite sex, and even if they did they could easily be misinterpreted and twisted into serving as a tool for further oppression. Let’s take Rousseau’s social contract for instance; The core of his social arrangement resides in self-determination and the right of the individual to self-govern. 

According to him, the evil in human nature came from private property, for at some point, in what he calls “the state of nature”, men were free and equal. In modern society, where men have become obsessed with status and comparison, morality is also affected. Rousseau talks about how men should be free to choose their own morality, and sadly society has pushed that morality to be vice over virtue. 

 ‘to a multitude of new needs, to the whole of Nature, and especially to those of his kind, whose slave he in a sense becomes even by becoming their master’ (Rousseau, 1997b, p. 170)

Another point that I’d like to discuss is Rousseau’s “general will”. For him, all citizens should participate in the creation of laws for these to be valid, and although he contradicts himself when he states that ‘by itself the people always wills the good, it does not always see it. The general will is always upright, but the judgement which guides it is not always enlightened’, he does not touch upon the subject of this essay.

The truth is that while Rousseau advocated for equality, he did not believe that more than 50% of the population of his time should have it. It’s ironic, however, when we circle back to the root of evil in humanity; Property. Until the Revolutions in 1791 France, women were rarely allowed to own property, for it was reserved for their brothers, husbands or fathers. Rousseau also stated that women are not rational enough to participate in politics, however, they are free from the so to speak “original sin” and thus more morally responsible. Taking some creative liberties, I dare say Rousseau should have let women be the lawgivers and let the men stay with their properties, obviously taking into account the need of non-contemporary philosophers to assign roles to genders which I am completely against.

Hegel was one of these philosophers who liked to assign roles. More specifically, he believed that men’s and women’s roles were complementary, but the male one dominated over the female one, which goes against his concept of a perfect society.

Hegel’s theory of metaphysics, essential to understanding his political theory, is dialectic. This means that, according to him, existing implies not existing, and thus we have a reality that has things that exist and don’t exist. Dialectics is the process by which one has a thesis (we can call it the status quo), but that implies an opposite, an antithesis (which challenges the status quo) and these two ideas proceed to complement each other in what we would call the synthesis. This method of reason can be applied to pretty much everything, but it is better understood in history. Let’s take the French Revolution:

– Thesis:  Nobles accumulate all the wealth and peasants die of hunger.

– Antithesis: Peasants have enough, revolt against the nobility, and a lot of people die.

– Synthesis: To the sounds of ‘Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!’, the monarchy is overthrown and the people of France gain more rights, leading to the rise of the middle class.

But the cycle doesn’t end there. The synthesis then becomes the new thesis, which leads to a new antithesis and the cycle starts again. One might be led to think that progress is thus unavoidable, even if the monarchy is restored the seeds of the revolution have already been planted and no one can erase their footprint, but Hegel thought otherwise. He wrote that the so-called end of history had already arrived, and that was the perfection of the Prussian state. Whether he wrote this to please his leaders or actually believed it, we might never know. 

His views on politics were tightly intertwined with his views on religion. He thought God was the epitome of rationality and thus perfection. That is why he also believed it was the duty of the more rational civilisations to colonise the less rational ones because through a process of dialectics, history and humanity advance towards rationality and God, and once we reach the utmost rationality we will be one with God. In his opinion, that had been achieved through the Prussian state.

Prussian laws around the time Hegel was alive were not very favourable towards women, to say the least. The purpose of high-class ladies was to marry and only be educated enough to be a pleasant interlocutor to their husbands, while lower-class women were expected to work to help their husbands make ends meet. A woman had rights of property only over her dowry, given that due to the rate of mortality of the time successive marriages were prominent. Other than that, they were under the economic responsibility of their fathers or brothers until they married. I would like to remark that around the time Hegel lived in Prussia, there were more women than men. 

As it was previously mentioned, Hegel did not deem women as equal to men, and thus he put a “dialectic stop” to their narrative, overlooking their experiences at work, their fight for rights, their biological struggles, and the list goes on. It seems that a large majority of pre-contemporary male philosophers view women as static objects that cannot undergo change and evolution. They are simply there. 

But according to Hegel’s dialectics, nothing is simply there. The implication of something existing requires an opposite. If there is a dependent woman, there must be an independent woman. If there is a woman that dreams of being a wife and a mother there must be a woman who doesn’t dream of that. And by failing to include half of the population in his dialectical equation, he is falling behind in his journey to reach God. Because in order to reach full rationality, everyone must be rational enough to belong to a collective mind.

I would like to end by circling back to the title of this essay. In the old Trojan myth, Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba. The most accepted version of the tales says that the god Apollo sought her love, and to win it over, he blessed her with the gift of prophecy. When she rejected him, he cursed her so that no one would believe her prophecies. This led to the defeat of Troy by the Spartans, for she knew that the wooden horse at the doors of the city was not a gift from the gods but a trap. As she tried to warn the people of Troy, they insulted her and called her names. In some versions of the myth, she is killed at that moment to not awaken the fury of the gods. Cassandra is a symbol of powerful women being silenced and disregarded, hence why I chose her story to title this essay. While the overlooking of the female perspective in political philosophy can be blamed on the times, it is undeniable that rational, intelligent, capable, and powerful women have always existed, and their inclusion in philosophical debates improves their outcome. We cannot fix the mistakes of the past but we can, however, modify present ones and avoid repeating them.

References

Becker, S. O., & Cinnirella, F. (2020, September). Prussia disaggregated: the demography of its universe of localities in 1871. Cambridge University Press, 86(3), 259 – 290. https://doi.org/10.1017/dem.2020.12

O’Neill, A. (2024, February 2). Population of France 1801-2020 by gender. Statista. Retrieved May 26, 2024, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1009665/male-female-population-france-1801-2020/