Mary Jo Mac Donald
Research Projects
The idea that human beings are equal is often thought to be an appeal to some positive quality, such as reason or dignity, which all human beings share. This project uncovers different ways of thinking about equality by turning to neglected women philosophers. By staging dialogues between canonical thinkers and their female interlocutors—such as Michel de Montaigne and Marie de Gournay, Thomas Hobbes and Margaret Cavendish, as well as John Locke and Judith Drake—my project spurs a reevaluation of theories of equality that have been forgotten or dismissed. I ultimately defend a Hobbesian view of equality—that human beings are equal because of our equal capacities to kill. While this idea of equality has often been dismissed as brutal, I argue that we can appreciate its rhetorical and normative force by turning to those who leveraged the idea that women are dangerous to advocate for their social inclusion. My project concludes that theories of equality which stress the dangers equals pose, rather than the similarities of our rational minds, have greater emancipatory potential than is typically assumed.
Dangerous Equals: How Women Philosophers Transformed Natural Equality
MARRIAGE AS SLAVERY: THE INFLUENCE OF OROONOKO ON EARLY ENGLISH FEMINIST THOUGHT
The comparison of marriage to slavery is an almost ubiquitous feature of early feminist texts, exemplified most famously by Mary Astell’s question in her Reflections Upon Marriage (1706): “If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?” The scholarly consensus today suggests that women did not intend to compare marriage to racial slavery, but were instead invoking the neo-Roman definition of slavery as any form of arbitrary rule. This project challenges this assumption. Centering the literary work of Aphra Behn, I show how her novel Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave (1688) offered an account of slavery in the colonies which strongly influenced feminist authors who came after her. By describing the dynamics and harms of racial slavery, Behn’s work allowed for the emergence of new strains of feminist thought, providing women with theoretical resources, beyond the neo-Roman tradition, to understand and diagnose their own oppression. My project shows how anti-slavery arguments were appropriated for feminist aims, even by feminists who refused to condemn racial slavery. In doing so, this project sheds light on historical origins of the intertwined, and often fraught, relationship between white feminism and abolitionism.
