ABSTRACT
Hegel is infamous for his view that in properly constituted societies women are confined to the family and excluded from the public spheres of work and politics. In his very well-known discussion of the matter in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, published in 1821, he claims that:
The one [that is, the male sex] … divides itself up into personal self-sufficiency with being for itself and the knowledge and volition of free universality, that is, into the self-consciousness of conceptual thought and the volition of the objective and ultimate end. And the other [that is, the female sex] … maintains itself in unity as knowledge and volition of the substantial in the form of concrete individuality and feeling … [T]he former is powerful and active, the latter passive and subjective. Man therefore has his actual substantial life in the state, in science, etc., and otherwise in work and struggle … so that it is only through his division that he fights his way to self-sufficient unity with himself. In the family, he has a peaceful intuition of this unity, and an emotive and subjective ethical life. Woman, however, has her substantial vocation in the family, and her ethical disposition consists in this piety.
(Hegel, 1991: §166, 206) 1 Hegel thinks, then, that women's role is to tend their families within the household. He considers women to be inherently unfit to participate in the worlds of (extra-domestic) work and politics or to engage in sustained intellectual activity. Many feminist scholars have argued that these views do not merely reflect Hegel's acceptance of the prejudices of his time, but follow from his legal and political philosophy more broadly, in a way that makes Hegel's entire political philosophy problematic from a feminist viewpoint. A leading figure among these scholars is Pateman, who argues in her now-classic book The Sexual Contract (1988) that Hegel held these views about women because, although critical of social contract theory, he retains (what Pateman sees as) the traditional contractarian belief in an opposition between female body and the status of being a contracting individual.