'The woman should reign and the man govern': gendering Kant's body politic.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Benbow, Heather Merle
• Date: 01 January 2005

Abstract

This article is inspired by a reference in Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View in which he invokes the relationship between a minister and his monarch to discuss the relative authority of a bourgeois husband and wife. This image is unpacked within the context of the idea of the 'body politic' and it is argued that the passage is indebted to an understanding of female embodiment as irrational and incontinent. The feminine may thus serve for Kant as a means of satirising sovereign rule.

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This article--inspired by Kant's depiction in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View of a wife as a spendthrift monarch and her husband as a thrifty minister-is a contribution to the recent feminist unveiling of Kant's attitude to gender. (1) It will be suggested here that the intrusion of the language of politics into a discussion of the bourgeois spousal bond is an 'especially revealing' (2) Kantian moment, connecting the domestic realm with the public sphere of politics and Enlightened debate. It will be argued that the power of Kant's portrayal of domestic relations in political terms relies on two distinctly gendered models of embodiment, models which have been explored in feminist critiques of the notion of the body politic. The symbolic embodiment of political authority in the figure of the 'body politic' provides the context for an interpretation of the passage from the Anthropology, in which the wife is depicted as male sovereign. Whilst the notion of the body politic usurped the literal incarnation of political power in the body of the monarch, (3) feminists have argued that eighteenth-century understandings of female and male embodiment continued to inform the conceptualisation of political power. This point will be demonstrated here with reference to Kant's discussion of domestic power in the Anthropology. Three instances of the 'body politic'--those of Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant--will be portrayed here as more than mere metaphors; as representations of ideal, rationalised masculine embodiment, they symbolise the necessary exclusion of women's bodies from political power.

The Woman's 'Reign'

The passage which launches this analysis is a metaphor invoked by Kant to answer his own question of who, of the husband and wife, should be the highest authority in the marital home:

 Who should have the highest command in the home? [...] I would say [...]: the woman should reign (herrschen) and the man govern (regieren); for the inclination (Neigung) reigns and the understanding (Verstand) governs. [...] But because the man must know best how he stands and how far he can go: he will, like a minister to the order of a monarch who thinks only of his [the monarch's] pleasure, and begins, say, a festivity or the building of a new palais, at first declare his dutiful compliance; however that, for example, for now the money is not in the treasury, that certain, more urgent necessities must be arranged beforehand etc., so that His Royal Highness can do everything he wishes, albeit on the condition that this wish is delivered to him from the hand of his minister. (4) 

In this analogy, woman represents the outmoded reign (herrschen) of monarchy, and man the rationality of governance (regieren). In invoking the male monarch as analogous to a bourgeois housewife, Kant feminises sovereign power. This is no easy task and the verb he uses--herrschen--itself refers to masculinity explicitly (derived as it is from the German noun Herr, meaning both 'master' and 'gentleman'). Kant's Anthropology emerged from a series of lectures delivered in the years between 1772 and 1796. The philosopher apparently prided himself on the entertaining nature of these lectures. (5) There is a distinctly wry tone in Kant's analogy and the incongruous comparison of husband and wife with a sly and thrifty minister and his extravagant and none-too-bright monarch might have been one of the more entertaining moments of Kant's well-attended lectures.

Kant was all too cautious in his critique of absolutist rule while the benevolent Frederick II was on the throne--it is perhaps in this humorous aside that Kant displays the extent of his disdain for monarchical rule. Shell has argued that scholars might find in Kant's Anthropology evidence for the philosopher's 'fundamental assumptions and concerns'. (6) Thus it can be argued that Kant's apparently frivolous association of femininity with monarchy is doubly revealing: in the first instance for the disdain expressed there towards absolutist rule, and secondly, for the association of femininity with a particular kind of (irresponsible and outmoded) political reign. There is something about femininity that is well-suited to a disparaging account of an impotent monarch. Perhaps Kant is relying on the apparent ridiculousness of the image of a woman in a position of authority to convey that the days of absolute monarchical rule are numbered. Or--as was not unusual at the time--the ornamental style of the aristocracy is being pilloried as effeminate. Barbara Vinken writes that the eighteenth-century 'man of court' appeared as 'effeminate and grovelling' (7)--courtly grace and elegance were on the wane, to be usurped by more practical men such as Kant's rational minister. However, it seems just as plausible that, to borrow a term from Laqueur, the newly asserted 'incommensurable difference' between the genders is being used in the service of this political critique.

What is striking about this passage is the use of a political metaphor to describe the intimacy of bourgeois matrimony, and the apparently contradictory comparison of the wife with a male monarch. This is a self-conscious application of notions of public life to what Habermas referred to as the 'intimate' (8) sphere. For Habermas, the eighteenth-century 'public' realm was limited to the sphere of public violence (police) and the court. A further division of the large 'private' sphere--defined as that to which the private bourgeois citizen has access--yielded 'a publicity of private individuals' (9) in which literary and political activities took place. As the power of the European monarchy diminished it was this bourgeois sphere which came to dominate as the locus of Enlightenment. (10) It is this bourgeois realm which Kant refers to as the 'public', the realm in which the use of reason ought be given free reign. (11)

Whilst areas of bourgeois activity were throughout the eighteenth century gaining in influence and being redefined as 'public' activity, family and marriage were relegated to the deepest recesses of the bourgeois private sphere. (12) This domestic sphere, which enables and nurtures the (male) citizen in his humanness, depends on the domestic servitude of women, who are encouraged to dedicate themselves to the tasks of maternity and homemaking by an outpouring of Enlightenment writings on woman's proper role in family and domestic life. (13) The role of wife and mother is seen as woman's natural destiny. Yet, despite the naturalness of the role, there is a perpetual danger that women may reject it and this inclination is strenuously discouraged. Kant and his contemporaries ridicule women who step beyond the domestic sphere to participate in Enlightened public debate. Kant decries the woman who indulges in 'tiresome learning or meticulous contemplation' (14) as a 'female pedant or Amazon', (15) for learning is a naturally masculine pursuit: 'A lady with a head full of Greek, like the lady Dacier, or one who conducts fundamental arguments about mechanics, like the Marquise du Chatelet, might as well also have a beard; for this would perhaps even more clearly express the demeanour of deep thought for which they strive.' (16) Early Enlightenment hopes for the emancipation of (at least a class of) women were crushed by a vehement assertion of middle-class domesticity as the feminine ideal, such that during the late Enlightenment women's status actually declined. (17) For feminist readers, Kant's portrayal of the wife's 'reign' is bitterly ironic, for it was by means of the marriage contract that European women of the eighteenth century were removed from civil life to the domestic sphere, undergoing a diminishment in legal status. (18)

In the context of women's exclusion from the sphere of political influence, Kant's question, 'Who should have the highest command in the home?' and his conclusion that the wife should 'reign', seem disingenuous. Interestingly, Rousseau had already made a similar claim. For Rousseau, whose influence on eighteenth-century German thought can hardly be overstated, woman also 'reigns' in the home, although--in contrast to Kant--he places her in the role of the minister who reigns by connivance:

There is a vast difference between claiming the right to command, and managing him who commands. Woman's reign is a reign of gentleness, tact, and kindness; her commands are caresses, her threats are tears. She should reign in the home as a minister reigns in the state, by contriving to be ordered to do what she wants. In this sense, I grant you, that the best managed homes are those where the wife has most power. (19)

Rousseau's image--despite the interesting contrast between his wily minister/ wife and Kant's rational minister/husband--shares common ground with Kant. For both invoke the changing political power relations between the monarchy and the bourgeoisie in their discussions of spousal relationships. The apparently easy recourse to the political realm as a metaphor for the negotiation of domestic power in the eighteenth century reveals how gender relations, too, were being renegotiated at this time. A question at this time, when the monarchy was ceding power to a bourgeois bureaucracy, was whether bourgeois women might not also demand more power in a post-feudal society. In the pre-revolutionary context, Rousseau--who tended to greatly exaggerate women's power over men--posits...