‘Mere Auxiliaries to the Commonwealth’: Women and the Origins of Liberalism

Abstract

Abstract The peculiar character of man’s domination over woman in the modern family, and the necessity, as well as the manner, of establishing real social equality between the two, will be brought out into full relief only when both are completely equal before the law. F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State Women, more specifically married women, constitute a permanent embarrassment and problem for liberal political theory. If this is not usually acknowledged, it is only because theorists rarely bother to consider whether their arguments have any relevance to women as well as men. Both the character and magnitude of the problem posed by married women, and the form of certain popular contemporary feminist arguments, can only be properly appreciated through an examination of the origins of liberal theory in the social contract theory of the seventeenth century. The arguments of Hobbes and Locke, which we shall discuss here, were developed as part of a con-flict with patriarchal theorists.