ABSTRACT
This final chapter extends the arguments of the preceding chapters into the twentieth century and beyond. Connecting the gendered politics of intellectual labor in the history of political thought to issues of class, race, and other structures of exclusion, the editors highlight the ways in which narrow definitions of what counts as intellectual work, and the labors that contribute to it, continue to permeate contemporary academic and public life. The chapter thus emphasizes the need for continued exploration of the ways in which these same distinctions manifest with additional categories of identity, alongside that of the wife, to reproduce the figure of the lone genius. Though the myth of that exceptional genius—of the “great man” doing “great things”—permeates academia and popular culture, that myth is, as always, sustained by the figures working in the shadows. It is time to bring them out.
