Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T19:28:07.419Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Gender‐Neutral Feminism of Hannah Arendt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Kimberly Maslin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Though many have recently attempted either to locate Arendt within feminism or feminism within the great body of Arendt's work, these efforts have proven only modestly successful. Even a cursory examination of Arendt's work should suggest that these efforts would prove frustrating. None of her voluminous writings deal specifically with gender, though some of her work certainly deals with notable women. Her interest is not in gender as such, but in woman as assimilated Jew or woman as social and political revolutionary. In this paper, I argue that Arendt recognized that what frequently passes for a gender question is not essentially a matter of gender at all, but rather an idiosyncratic form of loneliness that typically affects, though is by no means limited to, women. In her work one finds the conceptual tools necessary to understand the “woman problem” rather than an explicit argument or a solution to it.

Type
Open Issue Content
Information
Hypatia , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , Summer 2013 , pp. 585 - 601
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would like to thank Jennifer Ring, Jim Young, and Hypatia reviewers for their comments, and especially Aaron Simmons for his timely feedback and limitless enthusiasm.

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1933. On the emancipation of women. In Essays in understanding, ed. Kohn, Jerome. New York: Harcourt Brace.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1943. We refugees. The Menorah Journal 31 (1): 69–77.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1953a. The great tradition and the nature of totalitarianism. Lecture presented at the New School for Social Research, New York. Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Container # 74.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1953b. The difficulties of understanding. Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Container # 73.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1957/1997. Rahel Varnhagen: The life of a Jewess, ed. Weissberg, Liliane. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1958a. The origins of totalitarianism. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1958b. The human condition. New York: Harcourt Brace.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1959. Reflections on Little Rock. Dissent 6 (1): 47–58.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1964. Interview with Günter Gaus. In The portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Baehr, Peter. New York: Penguin Putnam.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1965. Some questions of moral philosophy. In Responsibility and judgment, ed. Kohn, Jerome. New York: Schocken Books.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. 1978. The life of the mind: Thinking. New York: Harcourt Brace.Google Scholar
Benhabib, Seyla. 1993. Feminist theory and Hannah Arendt's concept of public space. History of the Human Sciences 6 (2): 97–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benhabib, Seyla. 2000. The reluctant modernism of Hannah Arendt. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Cutting‐Gray, Joanne. 1993. Hannah Arendt, feminism, and the politics of alterity: “What will we lose if we win?” Hypatia 8 (1): 35–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dietz, Mary G. 1995. Feminist receptions of Hannah Arendt. In Feminist interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Honig, Bonnie. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Dietz, Mary G. 2002. Turning operations. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1995. Political children. In Feminist interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Honig, Bonnie. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Hertz, Deborah. 1984. Hannah Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen. In German women in the nineteenth century: A social history, ed. Fout, J. C.New York: Holmes and Meier.Google Scholar
Hinchmann, L. P., and Hinchmann, Sandra K. 1984. In Heidegger's shadow: Hannah Arendt's phenomenological humanism. Review of Politics 46 (2): 183–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jonas, Hans. 1977. Acting, knowing, thinking: Gleanings from Hannah Arendt's philosophical work. Social Research 44 (1): 25–43.Google Scholar
Kateb, George. 1983. Hannah Arendt: Politics, conscience, evil. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld.Google Scholar
Kateb, George. 2002. Ideology and storytelling. Social Research 69 (2): 321–58.Google Scholar
Lane, Ann M. 1983. The feminism of Hannah Arendt. Democracy 3 (3): 101–17.Google Scholar
Markus, Maria. 1989. The anti‐feminism of Hannah Arendt. In Hannah Arendt: Thinking, judging, freedom, ed. Kaplan, Gisela T. and Kessler, Clive S.Sydney: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Minnich, Elizabeth K. 1984. Hannah Arendt: Thinking as we are. In Between women: Biographers, novelists, critics, teachers, and artists write about their work on women, ed. Ascher, C., De Salvo, L. and Ruddick, S.Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Nye, Andrea. 1994. Philosophia: The thought of Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Weil, and Hannah Arendt. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
O'Brien, Mary. 1981. The politics of reproduction. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Pitkin, Hanna F. 1995. Conformism, housekeeping, and the attack of the blob: The origin of Hannah Arendt's concept of the social. In Feminist interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Honig, Bonnie. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Rich, Adrienne. 1979. Conditions for work: The common world of women. In On lies, secrets, and silence: Selected prose, 1966–1978. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Ring, Jennifer. 1991. The pariah as hero: Hannah Arendt's political actor. Political Theory 19 (3): 433–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weissberg, Liliane. 1997. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, and writing of (auto)biography. In Rahel Varnhagen: The life of a Jewess, ed. Weissberg, Liliane. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar