Chapter 27 - Men and Women

Summary

When the heroine of Defoe’s Roxana defends her decision to remain single, she insists that the most salient distinction between men and women is essentially a political one: whether one can lay claim to rights to one’s self and one’s property. Roxana’s argument depends on the same theory of the interdependence of liberty and property that is central to John Locke’s articulation of political personhood in his Second Treatise of Government; but she echoes Locke only to expose the impossibility of reconciling this theory with the matrimonial imperative for women. Throughout his career, Defoe exposed how a husband’s authority over his wife could be perverted into murderous ’Tyranny and Oppression’. By placing the matrimonial relations of men and women in the larger context of the rights of political subjects, Defoe refused to participate in the construction of an ideal domestic sphere that insisted on its separation from the political realm.