Appendix B - On Women in the Social Contract?

Summary

Reasonable questions have been raised concerning the role of women in Rousseau’s constructive political thought. These questions can and must be asked for at least two reasons. First, Rousseau has a history of making what contemporary readers consider overtly misogynistic observations. Evidence supporting this view is commonly drawn from two of his works from the same period as the Social Contract: his Emile (1762) and the Letter to d’Alembert (1758). It is not especially difficult to find passages in either that would raise suspicions in any fair-minded reader. The Letter to d’Alembert admits that it is “possible that there are in the world a few women worthy of being listened to by a decent man,” but only to set up the question, “in general, is it from women that he ought to take counsel, and is there no way of honoring their sex without abasing our own?” And in the Emile, Rousseau infamously observes that “woman is made specially to please man.” Any reconstruction of Rousseau as someone friendly to women, thus, obviously, faces significant obstacles. The second reason why readers must raise the question of women in the Social Contract is because Rousseau fails to do so himself. It is odd that a thinker who thought and wrote a great deal about women should never even have raised the female sex in his most celebrated political treatise. In what follows, I sketch Rousseau’s understanding of women, largely from the material of Book V of his Emile, offer thoughts on the possible role of women in the Social Contract, and survey how some contemporary scholars seek to make sense of his conception of women in relation to his politics.