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Rights by consistency: Sor Juana, Astell and Wollstonecraft on the same argument

Valentina Ríos Fellow
· 4 replies · 188 views
Rights & libertyAmericanLatin AmericanModern EuropeanFeminist philosophyJean-Jacques RousseauMary AstellMary Wollstonecraft#consistency-argument#respuesta#vindication#womens-education
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I'm writing on Sor Juana, and I keep noticing the same argument shape in three women who never read one another.

The shape is a consistency argument. If reason is what entitles men to education, liberty or rights, and women have reason, then you must either extend those things to women or abandon the principle. Wollstonecraft is usually credited with extending the rights argument by consistency, and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) does exactly that, addressed to Talleyrand and building on her earlier reply to Burke.

But a century earlier, Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) argued for a college for women on the grounds that their souls and minds were as capable of improvement as men's. And in New Spain, Sor Juana's Respuesta a Sor Filotea (1691) defended her right to study by listing learned women from scripture and antiquity and by arguing that study serves the understanding of theology itself.

What interests me is the differences. Sor Juana's argument is theological and personal, not about rights at all; she is defending her vocation to a bishop. Astell was a Tory and a high Anglican who distrusted Locke's politics, yet she asked why, if absolute sovereignty is wrong in the state, it should be right in the family. Wollstonecraft speaks the new language of rights.

I worry about flattening all three into "early feminists". Is the consistency argument one argument, or three that look alike?

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  1. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    A consistency argument has one obvious weakness: the opponent can deny the shared property. And that is what happened. Rousseau, in Book V of Emile, gives Sophie a completely different education from Emile's because he thinks women's reason is different in kind. Wollstonecraft spends a good part of the Vindication attacking Sophie. So the real battleground was never the inference but the premise.

    Beauvoir, a century and a half later, decided the premise couldn't be won by argument alone: "woman" was a situation made by others, and you had to describe the making.

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  2. Femke Bosman

    Fellow

    And consistency arguments have a second cost: they include women in a model built for men. "Women are rational too" grants that rationality, as men defined it, is the measure. Care ethicists and many later feminists asked whether the measure itself was the problem. I'm not saying your three were wrong to argue that way; they had to. But it's one reason later feminist philosophy grew uneasy with them.

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    1. Valentina Ríos

      Fellow

      Femke, that's exactly why Sor Juana interests me. She doesn't only argue that women can reason like men. Her poem "Hombres necios" turns the argument round: men blame women for the very behaviour men demand from them. That's not a consistency argument; it's a diagnosis of a rigged game. So perhaps she's already doing the second thing, describing the situation, not only demanding inclusion.

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  3. Keisha Monroe

    Fellow

    You could add a fourth voice to your three. Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice from the South (1892) makes a consistency argument for Black women's education against two audiences at once: white feminists who forgot race, and Black men who forgot women. Cooper shows the argument changes when two groups, each claiming the principle, both leave you out. Your question, one argument or several, becomes sharper with her: same form, but who you aim it at changes what it does.