Workshop: SLAVERY, FIGURATIVE AND LITERAL, IN EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY

Monday 19 May, 10:45 - 18:00, King’s Manor, K/122 - Huntingdon Room

This is free to attend, but please register here by 11 May as places are limited. 
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​Program:
 
 
10:45 Sandrine Bergès, University of York and Bilkent University.
 
Welcome and introducing the project
 
11:00 Sam Rickless, UC San Diego, on behalf of Esraa Wasel (UCSD) and himself. 
 
Does Mary Astell Think that Marriage is a Form of Slavery?  
 
Abstract: In Some Reflections Upon Marriage, Mary Astell issues a famous challenge: “If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves?”  This comment has occasioned a debate over whether Astell thinks that marriage is a form of slavery.  Some (e.g., Joan Kinnaird and Patricia Springborg) argue that Astell’s comment is rhetorical or ironic, a subversive stratagem designed to expose to ridicule the tenets of contractarian liberalism.  Others (e.g., Jacqueline Broad) argue that Astell adopts Locke’s account of slavery as the state of subjection to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown arbitrary will of another, and that in this sense wives are indeed the slaves of their husbands, and wrongfully so.  In contradistinction to both of these interpretations, we argue that, according to Astell, there are two kinds of slavery, bodily and mental; that a wife is, by divine institution and hence permissibly, the bodily slave of her husband; and that, although mental slavery would indeed be wrongful, it is, by the very nature of the case, impossible for a wife to be her husband’s mental slave.
 
Chair: Sandrine Bergès
 
12:15 lunch
 
13:30 Bianca Monteleone, University of Rome La Sapienza
 
Loving In/As a Condition of Unfreedom: Mary Wollstonecraft on Women’s Affective Slavery
 
In describing and criticising the condition of women, Mary Wollstonecraft makes extensive use of the language of slavery: women appear enslaved to their bodies, their impulses, their husbands, social customs, and reputations—rendered slaves by the education and institutions that confine them to domestic life. Interpretations differ regarding the origins and significance of Wollstonecraft’s use of this terminology: some, such as Moira Ferguson, argue that it was shaped by abolitionist discourse and the slave uprisings in the colonies, while others - including Lena Halldenius and Carol Howard - emphasise instead the influence of republican and Protestant theological traditions, in which slavery is conceived either as subjection to arbitrary power or as moral corruption and complicity in one’s own oppression. 
This paper adopts the latter approach, arguing that Wollstonecraft uses the term “slavery” to denote a condition of subjugation in which individuals come to embrace their own chains and to reproduce the circumstances of their oppression. Such a condition is common to all institutionalised forms of domination and finds one of its primary means of reproduction in the affective sphere—particularly in love. Central to this reading is the claim that, in Wollstonecraft’s thought, female character and subjectivity are shaped by forms of love deformed by unjust relations of power. By placing her work in dialogue with contemporary feminist theories of intersectional domination, the paper argues that it is precisely in her analysis of moral slavery that Wollstonecraft articulates the most radical features of her psychology of oppression.
 
 
Chair: Sarah Hutton
 
14:45 break
 
15:00 Alan Coffee, King’s College London
 
Harriet Jacobs, Sexual Violence and Feminist Republicanism
In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs challenges two longstanding and widespread misnomers about republican theory. The first is that we should be reluctant to read historical women into this tradition because it has been written exclusively by men and from a masculine perspective. The second is the influential belief that only those who are willing to defend their own, and the collective, freedom even in the face of death are deserving of citizenship. In so doing, I argue, Jacobs lays the foundations for a distinctively feminist republicanism.
To demonstrate this, I contrast her framing of the republican paradigm in her narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with Frederick Douglass’s well-known account of his fight with the overseer, Covey. Whereas Douglass’s story highlights a lone individual staring down and overcoming an imminent and unjust threat to his life, marking his psychological transition from wretched slave to worthy freeman, Jacobs presents a much more nuanced account of the relationships both amongst slaves and between enslaved and free people. Freedom for Jacobs always entails support from and concern for others, particularly her own children. A second distinctive aspect of her account is the ever-present threat of sexual violence uppermost in the minds of female slaves.
 
Chair: James Clarke
 
16:15 break
 
16:30 Roundtable led by Sarah Hutton (University of York), Mary Fairclough (University of York), Sandrine Bergès (University of York and Bilkent University):
 
Reflecting on the ways authors used slavery in 17th to 19th century. 
 
Each participant will briefly present their thoughts on the topics raised in the talks and then the discussion will be open to the room. 

This workshop is organized by the department of philosophy at the University of York and funded by a British Academy Global Professorship Program 2023, Award (GP23\100202).

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