ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I will take Moderata Fonte’s work The Worth of Women (1600) as an early example of a text that criticizes women’s subjugation to men and closely examines the link between marriage and heteronomy. This dialogue contains arguments for women’s equality as well as stinging critiques of marriage. Interpreters agree that its radical elements depart from earlier critiques of women’s inequality in Europe, but they argue that Fonte’s dialogue does not offer any straightforward feminist vision or appear to offer any clear prescription for social redress. I challenge this view and argue that Fonte’s critique anticipates a shift to the modern paradigm in political philosophy which regards the legitimate relations of power and authority as having their source in the voluntary will, or the autonomous authorization of the individual. However, since Fonte could more clearly recognize the conditions that were most oppressive to the women or her class and time, her critique of heteronomy and its conditions is prior to any positive conceptualization of the general social and material conditions necessary for women’s autonomy.
