Ms. Taylor’s thesis is as follows: This essay briefly explores these dichotomous views of Woman in the Enlightenment. My focus is on Britain, partly because this is my research field, but also because it was the British, and especially the Scottish, Enlightenment that sponsored one of the most far-reaching and innovative enquiries into womanhood in western history. (79)
I think Ms. Taylor was interested in pointing out the old, and perhaps prevailing, attitude concerning women; Madonna or Puttana. She employs Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm to give two renowned philosophers opposing points of view. “Fromm's view of women was the antithesis of Adorno's…” (80).
Ms. Taylor positions herself in relation to Fromm, Horkheimer, and Catherine Belsey. She conveys the “double-edged razor” women have been living with pressed to their collective throats since the Enlightenment: Deep concerns about the impact of market values on social mores found expression in a Janus-faced doctrine of 'female influence', depicting Woman both as the extreme of acquisitive hedonism and as a paragon of self-sacrificial benevolence. This simultaneous degradation and exaltation of women was of course nothing new. (81)
Taylor mentions: Fromm, Adorno, Foucault, Millar, Alexander, Dr. Johnson, Hume, Mandeville, Smith, Hutcheson, Russell, Millar, Kames, Robertson, Wollstonecraft, and de Beauvoir. New Sections: A Revisit of Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment”: A brief overview of ‘Adorno's philippics against Enlightenment are famously history-lite, and here the price of this negligence is plain as he reiterates one of the most clichéd motifs of Enlightenment moral criticism’ (79).
Fromm Polite Reply to Adorno's Proposal & Fromm’s ‘view of women.’ Taylor summarizes Fromm’s POV: Fromm's view of women was the antithesis of Adorno's, emphasizing their maternal, caring qualities which he regarded as patterns for socialist morality. Here was another leitmotif of Enlightenment gender philosophy, this time pitching female sympathy and altruism against male selfishness and egoism. Patriarchal masculinity, Fromm argues in an unconscious echo of Enlightenment themes, fosters the aggressive authoritarianism of modern capitalism, while femininity encourages 'peace and tender humaneness'. (80) Adorno and Horkheimer's Condemnation of Enlightened Reason: - along with other post-Nietzschean attacks on Enlightenment, notably Michel Foucault's - has served to foster a feminist view of Enlightenment as a catastrophe for women. (80)
Taylor quotes Catherine Belsey, “The Enlightenment commitment to truth and reason…has meant historically a single truth and a single rationality, which have conspired in practice to legitimate the subordination of women” (80).
“Statements About Women are Always About so much More Than Women” Taylor points out, “Woman in Adorno and Fromm's writings personifies conflicting tendencies in capitalist modernity, so Enlightenment myths about women drew much of their energy from the anxieties aroused by what the eighteenth century knew as 'commercial society” (81).
“Eighteenth-Century Thinkers Viewed Their Times with Ambivalence” Taylor writes: Self-congratulatory commendations of contemporary society vied with gloomy Gibbonesque predictions of civilized corruption and downfall. The pursuit of material affluence was a particular source of moral unease. People fretted about ostentation and epicurism, about the emasculation of manners and morals by 'unmanly Dissipation.' A Very Different Mood was also Evident in Enlightenment Britain as Austerity and Self-Denial, those Old-Fashioned Protestant Virtues.
Taylor refers to Dr Johnson when she writes: ‘…extolled as the 'innocent pleasures' of money-making. Acquisitive 'passions' previously condemned as venal and anti-social were revalued as 'interests', while 'self-love,' that perennial target of Christian moralizing, was vindicated as a healthy drive for self-improvement. (81).
Those who Fretted about Selfish Individualism and the Unravelling of Communal Ties” Taylor writes, “Human beings were naturally disposed to care for one another, a host of Enlightenment theorists insisted” (82). And she mentions the latitudinarian theology, neurophysiology, and moral-sense theory: Like the luxurious woman, this kindly woman also had a long pedigree - too long to detail here.24 but now she took on unprecedented cultural significance. (83)
Taylor points out the 'domestic ideology' and the 'social affections,' which has created that double-edged sword I mentioned earlier: The foundations for what we call gender history were laid in the second half of the eighteenth century by Scottish Enlightenment philosophes working in the tradition of 'conjectural' or 'stadial' history. (83)
Here Taylor helps bring to light the ‘Changes in women's lives and status at each stage were carefully analysed, with improvements in their position treated as indices of social progress’ (83). She examines the differences in the way women are treated in “primitive” and “evolved” societies. She writes, “A truly modern society was one that respected its womenfolk. (84)
The wild wish inaugurated western feminism She quotes Wollstonecraft, “the 'de-sexing' implications of her demands for 'absolute equality.' (84)
Taylor explains that even with all the work done for women’s equal status that there remains: Gender is inevitably mythologized because the boundary between the sexes is not fixed but a shifting frontier defined by desire, fantasy, anxiety. Male desires and anxieties have played too large a part in delimiting this border - and it is to the credit of Enlightenment philosophes that they began to expose this, while at the same time promulgating new myths about women which still have echoes in modern gender attitudes. (85)
This article, while enlightening, no pun intended, was not of great help to my research topic. The only useful idea is that in the Irish poetry tradition, women were seen only as “object,” but are now being seen as “subject.”
Works Cited
Taylor, Barbara. "Enlightenment and the Uses of Women." History Workshop Journal (2012): 79-87. Print.