ABSTRACT
The Wives of Western Philosophy examines the lives and experiences of the wives and women associated with ten distinct political thinkers—from Socrates to Marx and Engels—in order to explore the gendered patterns of intellectual labor that permeate the foundations of Western political thought. This chapter introduces major themes in the volume, showing how the “wife” has functioned throughout the history of political thought as both an abstract conceptual tool to anchor theories of political society and a real-life collaborative partner, whose labors have not only supported but also generated the material contributions of canonical men. Moreover, this dual role of the wife, as both concept and collaborator, has been consistently deployed to shape the boundaries of the canon—not just as a set of texts but as a mode of intellectual production more generally. By interrogating the traditional understanding of “intellectual labor” as a process—and the figure of the “wife” that sustains it—the volume thus invites us to take a wider view of what constitutes scholarly pursuit and to examine how we replicate exclusionary frameworks in the way we read, write, and teach canonical figures, texts, and lives.
