 “If Aristotle had cooked” said seventeenth century philosopher and poet Sor Juana de la Cruz, “he would have written more philosophy”. In her experience, standing in the little kitchen adjoining her convent room, experimenting with eggs was the most fruitful way of studying matter and causation. Less neat, perhaps, than Hume’s billiard balls, but richer in the conclusions that could be drawn. But even cookery is a bit more glamourous than something men tend to steer clear of (as a topic for philosophizing, and often as an activity), which is plain cleaning and tidying: dusting, hoovering, folding and putting away laundry. Women philosophers, however, sometimes address it. Simone de Beauvoir famously dismissed housework as unrewarding and soul-crushing, something that only women who are victims of ‘bad faith’ can pretend to enjoy: Few tasks are more similar to the torment of Sisyphus than those of the housewife; day after day, one must wash dishes, dust furniture, mend clothes that will be dirty, dusty, and torn again. The housewife wears herself out running on the spot; she does nothing; she only perpetuates the present; she never gains the sense that she is conquering a positive Good, but struggles indefinitely against Evil. It is a struggle that begins again every day. The Second Sex, 539. Beauvoir was not the first woman philosopher to reject the life of housewifery. Sei Shonagon, fashionable lady-in-waiting for Empress Sadako, in 10th-century Japan, and author of the Pillow book, a collection of memories, anecdotes, lists, and philosophical reflections, also had little time for tidiness. “I greatly dislike a woman’s house when it is clear that she has scurried about with a knowing look on her face, arranging everything just as it should be, and when the gate is kept tightly shut” (tr. Ivan Morris, 1967, p.182) A (single) woman’s house she said, should instead be ‘extremely dilapidated, the mud wall should be falling to pieces, and if there is a pond, it should be overgrown with water-plants. It is not essential that the garden be covered with sage brush, but weeds should be growing through the sand in patches, for this gives the place a poignantly desolate look’. It is hard for a twenty-first century reader who is not acquainted with 10th century Japanese culture to figure out what is meant exactly in this passage. Is there a particular significance to an overgrown pound, or sage brush? It is tempting to say that the lack of attention to the building and the garden signals the absence of a man in the house, and perhaps works as an advertisement, or makes a show of helplessness, which will attract a potential husband, make him feel needed. Or maybe not – Sei Shonagon does not say, nor does she speak anywhere of the desirability of marriage.  What this passage has in common with the rest of Sei Shonagon’s book, is a strong sense of what is aesthetically pleasing or not which goes beyond the sensory realm and into ethics. Being the kind of woman who scurries about making everything neat is not aesthetically pleasing. But this also relates more deeply to a sense of the good life. A life concerned with neatness and tidiness is not a life worth living: it is a closed life, one that excludes interesting interactions with others of the kind that will enrich us. It is closed in a very literal sense: the gate is ‘tightly shut’. In the following text, she takes up this theme again. It is good, she says, for a woman to stay with her parents when she is away from the palace. That way she will benefit from a lively household with comings and goings and will not worry about receiving her own visitors. Yet, the parents may be mean-minded in the way that the neat woman was: they sometimes spy on visitors, ask when they are living, and make a fuss about closing the gate at night. What Sei Shonagon wants instead is: ‘a house where no one cares about the gate either in the middle of the night or at dawn, and where one is free to meet one’s visitor, whether he be an imperial Prince or a gentleman from the palace. In the winter one can stay awake together all night with the lattices wide open. When the time comes for him to leave, one has the pleasure of watching him playing upon his flute as he goes; if a bright moon is still hanging in the sky, it is a particular delight. After he has disappeared, one does not go to bed at once, but stays up, discussing the visitor with one’s companions, and exchanging poems; then gradually one falls asleep.’ (Morris 184). So the good life, the one she ‘really likes’ is that where the time of day is of no concern, and details will not interfere with love, friendship and poetry. The woman who leaves alone, who does benefit from a busy household where people come and go, must at least show that she is poetically inclined, by leaving her gate open, and not caring overmuch about neatness and tidiness. Sei Shonagon’s dislike of the domestic virtues brings to mind Simone de Beauvoir’s description of the diligent housewife as a masochist, because she is engaged in a Manichean fight against dirt and mess which she is bound to lose: the dust will always come back, the food will always need replenishing and the dishes will always get dirty. Beauvoir’s own answer to this problem was to choose to live in a hotel: no cooking, no cleaning, and infinite disregard for her surroundings: they are someone else’s responsibility and to her, only a place where she sleeps and receives lovers. In a hotel, as in the ideal house Sei Shonagon tells us about, the door is always open, and questions are rarely asked. If Sei Shonagon is not a household name, Marie Kondo definitely is. Her books, her Netflix series, her shop, even, made her rich and famous. Her method for tidying (the KonMari method) has meant that millions of people who were happily folding their clothes in their drawers or shelves are now rolling them up, and lining them by colour, hoping they don’t collapse into a messy pile of shirts or a nest of unpaired socks. Marie Kondo doesn’t just want us to be neat. She asks us to engage with our surrounding, not scurry along, but stop in one place, get everything out into a pile, sort it, then arrange it according to category, function, colour, etc. It’s an emotional engagement: we need to ask ourselves whether a particular item ‘gives us joy’. This has received a lot of criticism: not everything we must keep gives us joy. The stick I use to walk because of arthritis does not give me joy. But do I want to get rid of it? No, because then the quantity of joy in my life will be even smaller, there will be more pain and less movement. But maybe, if I focus on the stick long enough, if I reflect on my reaction to it, I will realise that it is not the stick’s purpose to bring me joy, but to enable me to continue living my life as fully as possible until I can receive surgery. I am grateful to my stick for this. And if there is something that bothers me, it’s that I have been a bit slow about doing the things I need to do for surgery to happen. This is a useful thought, and one that’s brought about by considering Marie Kondo’s question mindfully: does that stick bring me joy?  Ruth Ozeki, buddhist nun, journalist and novelist, brought her own take to the KonMari method in her latest novel, The Book of Emptiness and Forgetting. Tidying, cleaning, are a way of engaging with the world fully. Perhaps Ruth Ozeki’s take on Kondo may help us address Simone de Beauvoir’s worry: a housewife, who cleans the living room carpet day in, day out, but rarely dirties it herself because she does not leave the home, or when she does, she is never so fully taken up by her activities that she would forget to take off her shoes on coming home, is not in a position to engage with the world. She is not in the world. Or if she is, it is not as herself, but an accessory, a domestic robot, whose sole function it is to facilitate others’ being in the world. Calmly waxing the floor, even with a Mr. Miyagi ‘wax-on wax-off’ movement, will not teach her how to be a better person, or how to respect herself and her environment, because she is prevented from having the sort of free interaction with the world where questions of respect arise. Simone de Beauvoir may well be right about the futility of the fifties’ housewife’s life. But not about housework itself. Women often say that they would enjoy coming home from work early to spend the time looking after their home. Is this a flashback to earlier oppression, a sign that we are unable to let go of the roles that were imposed on our foremothers? Or is it the sign that at least some people (mostly women still) are finding that quiet focus on their immediate surroundings is actually a good way of being in the world?  This is an edited version of a text published earlier on the Blog of the APA.
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Thanks to Manon Garcia, I came across an interview Betty Friedan conducted with Beauvoir in 1975. I found that it illuminated certain dialogues we are still having on the limits and purpose of feminism, in particular with reference to domesticity. Beauvoir, 26 years after she wrote the Second Sex, has not given up on the idea that domestic work was a drudgery impose on married women to keep them subordinated to men . Friedan, who once claimed that 'no woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor' nonetheless fights back against Beauvoir in her attempt to uphold the values of marriage, family and motherhood. 'A dialogue between Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan'. 14 June 1975, Saturday Review Reprinted in Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement (New York: Random House, 1976), pp. 304-16.
Friedan travelled to Paris to interview Beauvoir in her home. She felt that the feminist movement was floundering, and that an alliance between the most famous feminists in France and the United States might help revive it. The feminist movement in the States needed to be unified, Friedan thought, because it was loosing strength due to the dissociation of some 'extreme' feminists, possibly 'agents provocateurs' who want to make 'a political ideology out of lesbianism' and are 'down with men, childbearing and motherhood'. One way to bring power back to 'non-extremist' feminism, Friedan thought, is by arguing for a minimum wage for housework. Does Beauvoir agree, she wonders? Beauvoir strongly disagrees. And she feels that the problem with feminism is a failure of widespread societal change. Tokenism, and individual women breaking the glass ceiling isn't going to bring that about. She thinks that in many ways, women are better off taking jobs as teachers than they are becoming presidents of universities as this is more likely to bring overall change. Friedan asks 'how are they to eat' in response to Beauvoir arguing that women do not need to take the top jobs. In an interview conducted four years later with Alice Jardine, she comes back to that point: Yes, that "we want to be just like men," that is, men as they are today, when in truth we need to change the society itself, men as well as women, to change everything. It is very striking in Betty Friedan: What she wants is for women to have as much power as men do. Obviously, if you are truly on the left, if you reject ideas of power and hierarchy, what you want is equality. Otherwise, it won't work at all. (A. Jardine. Interview with Simone de Beauvoir. Signs, 1979 5:2. 224-236, 226) She doesn't want women to become what men are: she wants both men and women to change. This means refusing to play the game, and that includes the 'star system': many younger feminists, she says, are not signing their names to their writings. Beauvoir gives an example of what a universal feminist movement can look like: the pro-abortion movement in France. It worked because it engaged women from all classes: peasant, working class, bourgeoises. When Friedan proposes the minimum wage for housework idea, Beauvoir rejects it immediately: it would reinforce the division of the spheres. It would make it much harder to bring the sort of change that doesn't regard women as cleaners first. Friedan objects that the women who currently do this work and have been doing it for years should nonetheless be rewarded for it, but Beauvoir doesn't budge. She now says that women should not be offered the choice of staying home to raise children, 'precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.' She gives a Chinese example of communal washing and socks darning, where every man, woman and children get together to darn socks - not necessarily their own. Friedan opposes a 'pluralistic situation of real options' that takes into account the fact that 'the sense of individual family and the values of motherhood are so strong in people that I don't see any viable or even valuable political attempt to wipe them out. If people should choose a communal life-style such as you spoke of, that possibility should soon be open to them'. Beauvoir replies that we need to destroy the 'myth of the family and the myth of maternity and of the maternal instinct'. But, Friedan asks, shouldn't women be paid for their work? Why women? asks Beauvoir, why not get both men and women and indeed everyone in the community to share the work, and then, why pay in separately? No Gods, No GoddessesFriedan, clearly disappointed, published, in the same issue, a short article where she steps back from Beauvoir (whom she calls throughout 'de Beauvoir'). The piece, entitled 'No Gods, No Goddesses' traces her history with Beauvoir: it was the Second Sex which introduced her to Existentialism (not feminism), but it also caused her to be depressed for years - until she wrote her own book. Friedan then proceeds to deal with her disappointment by launching a number of accusations on Beauvoir. Her disagreements with Friedan are merely a product of her repeating Sartres's Maoism - just as she had once repeated his existentialism. Beauvoir's repudiation of elitism, she says, elevates ' the anonymous working-class woman in the abstract' and her praise of anonymous feminist writings doesn't stop her from collecting her royalties. Also, although she says women should make do with normal teaching jobs so as not to fall into the 'equality with the top men' interpretation of feminism, she herself has had 'exceptionally good jobs' - this is not entirely true as Beauvoir spent a great deal of her life teaching in high schools. Finally, Beauvoir wanting to keep the interview with Friedan down to one hour because she wants to visit Sartre in hospital demonstrates her life-long dependence on a man, which is hypocritical in the light of her rejections of the traditional values of marriage and motherhood. Friedan ends by saying 'I wish her well'.
Roman Stoics, like Hierocles and Musonius, wrote about more than metaphysics, psychology or religion. They wrote about human affairs, and in particular marriage, the family, and household management. They regarded these topics as properly philosophical, a feature of their thought that later accounts and editions of their work have tended to obscure. So what did they think? Stoics beleived that the purpose of marriage is not merely procreation, but the common pursuit of the good life. For Musonius this meant that husband and wife belong to each other body and soul and he pretty much left it at that. Hierocles went into more details in his discussion of what husband and wife must have in common. Being married, he says, is a solace in old age and illness, as it provides companionship and the sharing of burdens. A wife is a blessing because she will help her husband in all areas of his life, and where she cannot reach physically, because she is not allowed to be out in the public place, she will listen to him recount his day, and either help him resolve problems, or if that is not possible, bring him comfort and relief. But marriage is more than just sharing emotional burdens, Hierocles tells us: a husband and wife must also share physical ones. Household management is ‘a matter of shared activities between husband and wife.’ We know what to expect from the Stoics. No matter how generous they are in their principles, nothing will convince them to attempt to effect changes in the way human society works. They are more likely to recommend that we work on acceptance and try to achieve peace of mind than start a revolution. So does Hierocles draw back from the claim that all activities are to be shared by husband and wife? Yes, to some extent. His treatise on Household Management makes the claim that household tasks ought to be divided between husband and wife according to their appropriateness: These, then, should be divided according to what is most [pertinent to each spouse]: thus, to the husband are referred tasks concerning fields, marketplaces, and city business, whereas to the wife are referred those relating to the spinning of wool, breadmaking, and, in general, domestic tasks. (93)  Egyptian man ploughing, The Met https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/544255 But although Hierocles thinks that some activities are better suited to men than to women, he does not believe that the two sets of tasks ought to be strictly separated, and indeed, thinks that husbands should receive some training in womanly duties and vice versa: ‘But one must not think that the one group should be without a taste of the other tasks’ (93). He also believes that women ought to be physically strong, so as to be able to do agricultural work, and that their husband should share with them business and political concerns, so that they may solve problems together and take over from them when the husband is sick or traveling: And in truth, in festivals she can take care of sacrifices and rites along with us; during her husband’s trips abroad she can maintain the house in order and not altogether without a manager; she can take charge of the slaves; she can be an assistant during illnesses—it would be a long story to go through everything one by one. (73-75) For of other domestic tasks should not one believe that most, indeed, are suitable to husbands rather than to wives? For some are very tiring and require bodily strength, such as grinding, kneading flour, splitting wood, drawing water, moving furniture, shaking out bedding, and all that is similar to these things. But about what about more delicate work, such as spinning? There is nothing wrong with men doing these things, says Hierocles, unless their masculinity is not secure: Men who are too respectable feel something not unreasonable, indeed, in imagining that taking up weaving is not for them. For since for the most part shabby little manikins and a tribe of effeminate and womanish types rush headlong into wool-working in their zeal for femininity, stooping to these things does not seem to be in line with a true man. Thus I myself would not advise any men who did not exhibit complete confidence in their own masculinity and restraint to touch such a thing. If, however, through a life of this kind he should have rendered himself free of every absurd suspicion, what will prevent a husband from sharing in these things too with his wife? (95).  Detail from Attic lekythoi depicting two women at a standing loom. (Metropolitan Museum of Art) The best woman is she about whom there is least talk - for better or for worse. So said Pericles, in his funerary oration, when he was attempting to comfort the Athenians grieving for their dead (Thucydides II45). It is ironical that Plato, in Menexenus (236a), claims that the speech in question had been written by Pericles's mistress, Aspasia of Miletus. But since when is it a requirement that we hold men to consistency when they talk about women? One housewife who did not pay heed to Pericles’s injunction was Xanthippe, Socrates’ younger second wife. Xanthippe is ‘known’ to Socrates’ disciples, Plato tells us in Phaedo (66b), even to those who come from distant foreign cities.[1] This means that she had a bit of a reputation, and certainly, we find plenty of anecdotes about her in the ancient gossip literature. She is reported as having thrown water on her husband (‘I knew that after her thunder, rain would come’, he apparently remarked), chased after him in the market place and torn his coat off him. His friends thought her a shrew and asked why he tolerated her. The answer was ‘Because she is my wife and the mother of my children’.  Xanthippe pouring water on Socrates by Otho Vaenius, from: Emblemata Horatiana, Imaginibus In Aes Incisis Atque Latino, Germanico, Gallico Et Belgico Carmine Illustrata, 1607. Xanthippe had plenty of reasons to be angry, of course, expected as she was to run Socrates’ home and bring up his children, without any financial security – as he was not working – and to cater for his rich friends, at a moment notice, with only cheap fare to offer them. As to her reputation, one must consider that she had very little to protect. A wive’s reputation was a husband’s guarantee for social standing. But Socrates’s own place in society was far too unusual to require that his wife be anything other than she wished or could be. So he had not interest in ‘training’ her to be a proper housewife, and no reason to make her homelife more satisfactory or easier for her. Xanthippe, was probably, as other women have been since, the victim of her husband’s ill thought-out ideology: her life was not regulated by the sort of superficial social mores Socrates disliked, but nor was it an examined life, as she was still expected to make sure food was on the table, and that the children were washed and fed. She might have been less angry had she been instead encouraged to follow Socrates around the market place, asking and answering questions. Xanthippe's life may have been not unlike that of Abby May Alcott’s (the mother of novelist Louisa May) whose transcendentalist husband took his family to live in a commune called Fruitland. During this failed Utopic experiment, the women worked day and night to make sure the philosophers did not starve, without any access to the usual tools and goods that would make that task easier. Abby May and her daughters, much like Xanthippe, were living the applied philosophy of the men, but without any help in implementing the principles, and under the blind assumption that the principles had to be right, and should not be questioned by failure. [1] Arlene Saxonhouse, 2018 “Xanthippe: Shrew or Muse” Hypatia, 33(4): 610-635, 617
 When a philosopher seems insensitive about the plight of a class of people, we are tempted to say that they are writing from the perspective of the ivory tower, and that they lack the knowledge needed to understand what the people they write about are really going through. Some commentators have been skeptical of Wollstonecraft’s views on marriage and love in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman because she was still single when she’d written it. Those same commentators don’t stop and note that her last work, written when she had been in two relationships and was a mother, gave an even straker account of the marital state, reaffirming all the caution she had put forward in the Vindication and more. It is tempting to take a similar attitude to early 18th century philosopher, Mary Astell, who wrote a book about the marital state without having ever been married herself. But here, we have evidence that she knew in some details what she was talking about, even if not from personal experience. She was writing about the marriage of her famous neighbour, Hortense Mancini, the Duchess of Mazarin, who had just died, at the age of fifty-three, when Astell published her Reflections on Marriage, in 1700. Mancini who was the niece of the Cardinal Mazarin, had run one of the most celebrated literary salon in 17th-century London, a salon infamous because she allowed women to drink and gamble as well as men. Married at 15 to a very rich man, who inherited through her the wealth and title of the Cardinal of Mazarin, Mancini ran away from her husband’s home after seven years of unhappy and abusive marriage, leaving behind their four children. Mancini survived – and indeed, thrived - through the patronage of powerful men, including Louis XIV and Charles II, while having affairs with both men and women. All these details Astell almost certainly knew as Mancini had recorded them on one of the earliest Memoirs published by a woman in 1775. Although she kept some details to herself (she was after all still alive), Mancini did not hold back when describing her marriage, and although we might be tempted to attribute some of the goriest details to spite, they are in fact confirmed elsewhere. Given that Astell knew of the details of the Mazarin marriage, her diagnosis seems a little harsh. She writes that Mancini sought ‘Consolation under Domestick troubles from the Gaieties of a Court, from Gaming and Courtship, from Rambling and odd Adventures, and the Amusements mixt Company affords’. But this, Astell carries on, could only provide temporary relief, ‘Plaister up the Sore, but will never heal it; nay, which is worse, she makes it Fester beyond a possibility of Cure.’ Certainly there was no real way out for Mancini, no escape from the need for dependence on men for her survival. She could not take up a profession, or even receive an income – as she did from Louis XIV – without her husband being allowed to confiscate it. As a married woman in the seventeenth century, she had no right to property of her own. Nor did she have a right to her children. Had she attempted to take them with her, they would have been captured again and brought back to their father. So Mancini could not choose to take up a quiet domestic life, away from her tyrant of her husband, where she would be a virtuous mother to her children. Nor was retiring to a convent apparently much of an option: her husband did send her to a convent, but this was another way for him to control her. And shortly after he had her released, she escaped. Mancini’s only options were to put up with the domestic conditions that were her lot, or to set up on her own as a courtesan and a saloniere. Astell does not argue that Mancini simply ought to have made the best of her domestic situation. She pities Mancini for having been forced into marriage with an extremely unsuitable husband and without having been prepared for it through education. Mancini, as a teenager, was a party girl, not a studious one. She did not have the resources to make the best of the isolation her husband inforced on her, or to attempt to reform her husband by modelling virtuous behaviour. In her Memoirs, Mancini portrays her husband as extremely religious, mentally unstable and with a pronounced mean streak. Distrustful of his young wife’s fidelity, he took her away from Paris whenever the King did not require his presence there. And noting how she did not like to travel to remote parts of France, he made sure to take her with him whenever the King sent him on business, even insisting she travel long distance while heavily pregnant. Not only did h forbid her to have male visitors, but he conducted midnight searches to make sure she wasn’t smuggling them in. While they were not traveling, he required his wife to spend hours every day praying. The Duke of Mazarin’s unstability was well-known as it affected not only his wife, but his extensive art collection, in part inherited from his wife’s uncle. He was known for attacking and emasculating his sculptures with a hammer – either because he disapprove of sexual organs on display, or because he was jealous of the admiration they’d received from one of his wife’s friends. The Mazarin Adonis at the Louvres (now restored) was one of the statues he mutilated. Although she cannot condone the wife’s running away, Astell aslo strongly condemns the husband’s treatment of the wife: To be yoak'd for Life to a disagreeable Person and Temper; to have Folly and Ignorance tyrannize over Wit and Sense; to be contradicted in every thing one does or says, and bore down not by Reason but Authority; to be denied ones most innocent desires for no other cause, but the Will and Pleasure of an absolute Lord and Master, whose follies a Woman with all her Prudence cannot hide, and whose Commands she cannot but despise at the same time she obeys them, is a misery none can have a just Idea of, but those who have felt it. But Astell does not believe that even documented cruelty of a husband justifies a woman leaving home: The Christian Institution of Marriage provides the best that may be for Domestick Quiet and Content, and for the Education of Children; so that if we were not under the tye of Religion, even the Good of Society and civil Duty would oblige us to what that requires at our Hands. Domesticity, Astell thinks, is a natural way for people to live with one another in mutual dependence, and improve one another. An older, patient husband may educated by his wife, so that she is better able to live with him in peace and harmony. An educated wife may set the example for her husband, helping improve his character, and also educate her children, so that they may in turn have happier lives. But just as importantly, an educated woman will have the inner resources to bear an unhappy marriage, to have the necessary patience to live with a tyrannical husband, and to preserve themselves from falling into a slave-like dependency, their spirits crushed by the constant need to obey.  This is cross-posted from my other blog, with some corrections. Phillis Wheatley Peters was born circa 1753 in Africa. At the age of 7 or thereabouts she was captured and transported to the coast where she was sold to a slaver on his way to Boston. The ship that transported her, and many others, as cargo was called The Phillis. This was the name the man who bought her in Boston gave her, along with his own surname, Wheatley. Phillis was taken to the Wheatley family home, and, we are told by biographers, some who knew people who had met her, that she was treated as ‘one of the family’. Boston philosopher, Hannah Mather Crocker reported that “Mr Wheatley purchased her [Phillis] he bought her to wait on his only daughter. She was a pretty smart sprightly child. they grew very fond of her and treated her as well as if their own. her young Mrs who was Miss Mary Wheatly [sic], and was afterwards the very amiable wife of Dr John Lathrop [1740–1816]. Phillis was sent to school and educated with Miss Mary. She soon acquired the English language and made some progress in the latin She never was looked on as a slave she could work handsome [i.e., sew and do needlework skillfully], and read and write well for that day.” (Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of A Genius in Bondage, 23) We know, however, that she worked as a maid, she ‘tended tables’ at 13 and later was a ‘sempstress’. While the daughter of the family, Mary, (grown up when Phillis was bought) may have done some sewing, or at least embroidery, it is unlikely that she waited tables. Phillis’s biographer Caretta also suggested that was treated somewhat better than the indentured servant who ran away from the Wheatly home (22). But Phillis was a child at the time the young male servant ran away, and with no prospect of being freed. Her escape would have led to an advert being placed for her capture with a reward. One thing that is clear is that the Wheatley family taught Phillis to read and write. And when it became clear that she had talent as a poet, they encouraged it, had her work published, in newspapers, and later as a book, for she travelled to London. This could have been kindness on their part, or the recognition that genius had to be encouraged, wherever it was. Or perhaps they benefitted from her fame socially and financially. So where was ‘home’ for Phillis? Phillis’s writings rarely talk about home life. The word ‘home’ itself is used in her poems to refer to heaven. Many of her poems are elegies, addressed to bereaved mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, or in one case of the preacher Whitefield, to his patron, an English aristocrat. The dead have gone ‘home’ in her poems, suggesting that any previous dwelling was not that. In one letter, Wheatley refers to her masters’ house as ‘home’, when she writes to Obour Tanner in 1773, and again to John Thornton, one of her London friends. These letters are written upon her return from England, where she spent a mere six weeks (after a passage lasting …) and was celebrated and shown the attractions of the town. Rather than staying in England where she would be free, Wheatley extracted a promise from the son of the man who had purchased her as a child that she would be freed upon her return. And when she did return, it was to the house where she had been a slave. Nations also take on family roles in Wheatley’s poetry: England – Britannia - is in many poems the mother of America, who should not overtax her child. In later poems, England’s sons are the soldiers she sends to fight Americans, and they are recalled in shame and disgrace. Africa is never a parent. It is the place untouched by religion. The only time when her going back to Africa was suggested (by others) was so that she could chase ‘away the thick Darkness which broods over the Land of Africa’ and trave ‘to her Native Country as a Female Preacher to her kindred, you know Quaker Women are alow’d to preach, and why not others in an Extraordinary Case’ Phillis refused, perhaps because she would have had to travel with two men she did not know, and take one of them as her husband, or perhaps because she saw herself as a writer more than a preacher. Phillis’s own attitude to Africa has been harshly criticized by some modern critiques who thought she was turning her back on her own heritage and participating in America’s and Europe’s racism. Her short poem, ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’ describes her being taken from her native land as a ‘mercy’ because it brought Christianity to her, a blessing she would not have known had she stayed: Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, The last four lines address the issue of racism. All are equal in the eye of God, and all can be taught to worship so that they will go to heaven. This suggest that she should have found the idea of Christian missions to Africa attractive – many of her country men and women would receive the same ‘mercy’ that she did, without having to be kidnapped and enslaved. But her biographer, Caretta, reminds us not to read her poems as autobiographical. She was a manipulator or words, and wrote elegies on demand, so why not also a defense of the slave trade in the name of religion? It could also be that she felt no ties to Africa as she had left at a very young age. She never mentions her childhood there in the writings we have.
Later in life she might have wanted to revisit memories of her childhood, reacquaint herself with the land and the people she grew up with. She might even have recalled that she once had her own religion, whether Pagan, as she writes in the poem, or Islam, as has been suggested by Wheatley scholar Will Harris and the author of a beautiful Wheatley biography in verse by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis. But Wheatly died at the age of 31, after a mere ten years of freedom, which is too young, perhaps to turn back to one’s childhood. Phillis Wheatley was freed when she returned from London in 1773. Had she remained in England, she would have become automatically freed. But she would have had no home, and no friends she had known for more than the six weeks of her visit. In Boston, she had connections. So she extracted a promise from her master, in writing, and sailed back to Boston. She stayed with the Wheatleys for some years, probably working as a maid still, perhaps paid, or simply granted the right to sleep and eat in the house. She stayed with them until the death of her mistress in 1774, and then moved in with John Peters, a free black man, educated, and with a business of his own. They were married a few years later. But his business failed – as many during the war – and the couple had to move around to avoid prison. They had three children who did not survive infanthood. Peters eventually did go to prison, and Phillis died shortly afterwards, in 1784. Mary Wollstonecraft was not known for her dedication to domesticity. She is said to have once entertained the Marquis de Talleyrand in her lodgings on George Street, and served him tea, then wine, in a breached teacup (Elizabeth Pennell, 1885. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. London: W.H. Allen &co, p.72). Wondering where Pennell had gotten the anecdote from, I asked the Twitter Wollstonecraft community, and got the following story: First Emma Clery, specified the source of the Pennell reference: John Knowles, the 19th century biographer of the man who rejected Wollstonecraft in 1792, Henri Fuseli, described her as a 'sloven ', citing the breached teacup anecdote as evidence. Fuseli found in her (what he most disliked in woman) a philosophical sloven: her usual dress being a habit of coarse cloth, such as is now worn by milk-women, black worsted stockings, and a beaver hat, with her hair hanging lank about her shoulders. These notions had their influence also in regard to the conveniences of life; for when the Prince Talleyrand was in this country, in a low condition with regard to his pecuniary affairs, and visited her, they drank their tea, and the little wine they took, indiscriminately from tea-cups.  Derby porcelain teacup, c1790. But this, it turns out was not the first reference to the anecdote, but Eileen Hunt Botting pointed me to one published 4 years before that, in a Vermont journal: Perhaps their idea of an "educated lady" is associated in their mind with nothing better than some starched nun, or round mouth pedant; or the famous authoress of England, M. Woolstonecroft [sic], who could appear before her guests in a ragged garment, and serve their drink in a broken tea-cup; because, forsooth, her literary occupations would not allow her otherwise. Note that the Vermont piece, but not the Knowles or Pernell ones, mentions that the cup was breached! Knowles's biography was published six years after Fuseli's death. Knowles claims that his evidence came from letters from Wollstonecraft to Fuseli, letters that Fuseli had refused to return when Wollstonecraft asked him to. Knowles was Fuseli's literary executor, so had access to the letters straightaway. The Vermont piece appeared three years before the publication of Knowles's memoirs, and two years after Wollstonecrafts' death? Was there another source? Or could someone else have seen the letters and quoted from them? Certainly Sophia Fuseli, Henry's wife saw them – possibly before Fuseli's death. Godwin asked to see them after Wollstonecraft died, so he could use them for his biography, but was refused. Their grandson, Sir Percy Florence Shelley ('Percy Jr annoys me to death' twitted another Wollstonecraft expert), bought them and had them burnt. According to Emma Clery, C Kegan Paul, friend of Godwin and supporter of Wollstonecraft, did see the letters before they were destroyed and claims there was nothing in them that could bring shame on Wollstonecraft (not that a breached tea-cup is shameful!).  So possibly the reports of slovenliness are simply that – retellings of their contents, exaggerated for the sake of gossip. This could have been the work of Knowles himself, or perhaps Fuseli's widow, Sophia, who may have born a grudge from Wollstonecraft's attempts at forming a ménage à trois with Henry and Sophia. Stirring away from malicious gossip, the tea-cup story has a much more plausible explanation Wollstonecraft was poor. And at the time she lived in George Street, where Talleyrand visited her, she was just starting out as a professional writer, had debts to pay and family to support, so she had very few furnishings. Although glass objects were already a consumer item, wine glasses were nonetheless expensive, and a luxury that the singly professional woman, who had to move frequently, could perhaps not afford. It was not until she moved from George St, after meeting with Talleyrand, that she started to buy furniture: In September 1791, she removed from the house she occupied in George-street, to a large and commodious apartment in Store street, Bedford-square. She began to think that she had been too rigid, in the laws of frugality and self-denial with which she set out in her literary career; and now added to the neatness and cleanliness which she had always scrupulously observed a certain degree of elegance, and those temperate indulgences in furniture and accommodation, from which a sound and uncorrupted taste never fails to derive pleasure. Godwin. Memoirs. Chapter 6. With thanks to Eileen Hunt Botting (@EileenHBotting) Emma Clery (@austeneconomics) and Bee Rowlatt (@BeeRowlatt) for sharing all these sources and making yesterday afternoon's work much more fun than it would have been otherwise!
What does philosophy have to contribute to the understanding of 'home'? Analytic philosophy is in the business of conceptual analysis, finding the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be what it is. Plato started it with his questions about the forms: 'What is Justice?' 'What is Beauty?' etc. Descartes pursued it from his armchair by the fire, asking 'What am I?', and philosophers have been chasing concepts with definitions ever since. A conceptual analysis attempts to capture a set of intuitions we have about a concept, so that once we come up with a definition, every instance of that concept and nothing else falls under it. So for instance, armchairs cannot be defined as 'comfy seats' because there are things that are comfortable to seat on which are not armchairs, such as sofas. So is an armchair a comfy seat for one person? Perhaps, but a good conceptual analysis would look for armchairs that don't fulfill the conditions of 'comfy' or 'seat', and for things that do that aren't armchairs before settling on that definition.  Montaigne's armchair Can we use appeal to the tools of conceptual analysis to help define the home? Attempting to capture the home in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions is a task that, if not doomed to failure, turns out to be singularly unproductive. Although most of us agree on the basic intuition that we need homes, these homes tend to look different according to what needs they serve, and that varies a great deal according to places and times. A home may or may not be a dwelling, something physical or not, that ties a family together, or a community, it may or may not involve property and land. This leaves room for plural definitions, perhaps definitions that succeed in capturing a certain 'family resemblance' in uses of the word across time and space. The idea that instances of a concept sometimes shared a 'family resemblance' rather than a set of necessary and sufficient conditions comes from Wittgenstein, who, when he attempted to say what a game was, found that some games had very little in common with others (say bouncing a ball against a wall, and D&D). He concluded that games, though definitely belonging to one concept, were not tied together by a set of necessary and sufficient conditions: I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. – And I shall say: "games" form a family. Morris Weitz applied the Wittgensteinian idea of family resemblance to the concept of art, after noticing that it was impossible to bring all the things that we count as instances of that concept under a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. A definition of art would have to accommodate that have as little in common as a Greek tragedy and an 18thcentury piece of furniture. (Weitz, Morris (1956). "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics". Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 15: 27–35.) Weitz concluded that art was an open concept, that could expand in order to accommodate new forms of art. It seems that had analytic philosophers bothered to define the home, they would have come to the same conclusion, for reasons stated above. The home covers too many disparate intuitions for it to be reasonable to expect it to fall under one set of necessary and sufficient conditions. But it does not follow that the home cannot be defined philosophically: it simply needs to be stated that the definitions capture only one version of the home, at one place or one time. And in order to do that, what better strategy than to study what women philosophers of the past have written about the home?  In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir describes domesticity as akin to the fate of Sisyphus: Legions of women have in common only endlessly recurrent fatigue in a battle that never leads to victory. Even in the most privileged cases, this victory is never final. One could object that there is more to the life of domesticity than just housework: there is also the work of caring for children and other dependants. But Beauvoir also takes mothering into account: Simone de Beauvoir not only thought that domestic work was a form of drudgery, but choosing housewifery, and sometimes motherhood, struck her as examples of bad faith. Women don't really enjoy doing the housework or changing diapers, or if they do, it is because they have forced themselves to stop looking for enjoyment in more rewarding places. Bad faith for Beauvoir meant something different than what it meant for Sartre. Sartre saw bad faith as using one's situation as an excuse for one's life – 'I am a wife, I can only obey my husband' or 'I am a mother, my nature dictates that I should care for my children'. Sartre, rejecting essentialism, believed that one could always choose to react differently to one's situation, except for one odd essentialism of his own: human beings, he thought, were bound to fall into the category of dominator or dominated. Beauvoir rejected this essentialism too: If Sartre thought human beings were by nature doomed to desire domination, then there really was no exit from living our own oppressors. Beauvoir's philosophy, by contrast, refused 'the consolations of lies and resignations' – it was an excuse to think that it's just human nature to dominate or submit. (see Kate Fitzpatrick, Becoming Beauvoir, loc 3475.) This was an ethical disagreement: for Sartre, a woman's bad faith is measured according to her failure to participate in males' projects of seduction (see Toril Moi, 2008, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, 150-154). Beauvoir's ethical stance was, like Sartre's underlain by a metaphysical one. Sartre believed that we became free through a situation, that we could realize our freedom by transcending that situation. But Beauvoir objected that women's situations were not and could not be transcended, because they were part of the world that made them who they were, and in many cases, that world made it impossible for them to assert their freedom. Turning away from Sartre's analysis, she went back to Heidegger and the idea that human beings are at one with their world (Mitsein) and to Husserl's phenomenology in order to make it clear that it is the lived experience of women, rather than their situation we need to focus on in order to help them achieve freedom. (see Kate Fitzpatrick, Becoming Beauvoir, loc4298, and Manon Garcia, On ne Nait pas Soumise, on le Devient). So how does this help us understand women's relationship to the home? Women, for Beauvoir cannot simply transcend their situation, nor should they accept them as inevitable: there is something that can be and should done. Resistance to any given aspect of women's lives, whether it is domesticity, motherhood, or subservience, is hard, but not futile, and it involves turning the world around, one meaning at a time. But what singularly defines the situation of woman is that being, like all humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other: an attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her to immanence, since her transcendence will be forever transcended by another essential and sovereign consciousness. Woman’s drama lies in this conflict between the fundamental claim of every subject, which always posits itself as essential, and the demands of a situation that constitutes her as inessential. How, in the feminine condition, can a human being accomplish herself? What paths are open to her? Which ones lead to dead ends? How can she find independence within dependence? What circumstances limit women’s freedom and can she overcome them? The Second Sex, 37.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman is best known perhaps for her short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper'. In that story, a young mother, suffering from postnatal depression, is cared for by a loving husband who is also her doctor in a quiet country house. Her husband makes sure that in order to recover, she does not exert herself, does not do anything too stimulating, such as seeing lively friends, or writing; that she rest, that she spends time with her baby (but with the help of her sister in law for any actual work involved caring for the baby). This sounds like a loving and reasonable way to treat someone who is depressed. But at the end of the story, the heroine has lost her mind, thinking that she has been taken over by a woman who'd been imprisoned inside the hideous yellow wallpaper of her bedroom. The story is seminal, in that it depicts clearly and painfully, a malaise that Betty Friedan would later call the 'problem with no name'. Neither the heroine nor her husband are able to articulate what it feels to be her, as a woman suffering from depression – specifically postnatal depression -, and they're stuck with some very unsatisfatory and harmful prejudices, that she needs rest and inactivity, mental and physical, that she will be fulfilled by motherhood, and that she doesn't need anything else in life. Perkins Gilman, when she penned that story, was writing from experience. She too had suffered from post-natal depression, and she too had been advised to rest and spend time with her child in order to get better. Perkins Gilman had in fact visited a famous physician Dr Silas Weir Mitchell, a pioneer of neurology who specialized, among other things, in the treatment of 'hysterical women'. His mission, when treating discounted women was to help become ‘more loving, giving, gentle with her family, and more peacefully content with herself’ through overfeeding and oversleeping. (Mary A. Hill: Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist 1860-1896. Temple University Press, Philadelphia 1980, p.148) Perkins Gilman took Weir Mitchell’s rest cure, and of course hated it. Most of her difficulties with motherhood, on top of the hormonal issues that most sufferers of postnatal depression have to deal with, was the fact that she had less time to do the work or the physical exercise she thrived on. Like her aunt Catharine Beecher, Perkins Gilman was a fitness freak, going to the gym daily, taking classes, and running. In an article published in the October 1913 issue of The Forerunner (14 years after the publication of the short story) "Why I wrote the Yellow Wallpaper" Perkins Gilman describes her experience with Weir Mitchell's rest cure: For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia -- and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to "live as domestic a life as far as possible," to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again" as long as I lived. This was in 1887. I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over. Virginia Woolf was also prescribed the rest cure, and like Perkins Gilman, she suffered much from the requirement that she not exert herself by doing what she loved best, writing and talking. Whatever the benefits of the cure, it was clearly also designed to domesticate intelligent women and keep them within the domestic circle.
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AboutThis is where I blog about my new book project (under contract with OUP): a history of the philosophy of the home and domesticity, from the perspective of women philosophers. Archives
October 2022
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