Gender and Modernity

AuthorAnne Phillips
DOI10.1177/0090591718757457
Date01 December 2018
Published date01 December 2018
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591718757457
Political Theory
2018, Vol. 46(6) 837 –860
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591718757457
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Article
Gender and Modernity
Anne Phillips1
Abstract
In contemporary renderings of modernity, it is patented to the West and
assumed to include gender equality; a commitment to gender equality
then risks becoming overlaid with hierarchies of country and culture. One
way of contesting this, associated with alternative modernities, takes issue
with the presumed Western origins of modernity. Another, associated
with feminism, subjects the claim the modern societies deliver gender
equality to more critical scrutiny. But the first is vulnerable to the charge
of describing different routes to the same ideals, and the second to the
response that evidence of shortcomings only shows that modernity has not
yet fully arrived. The contribution of the West to the birth of modernity
is not, in my argument, the important issue. The problem, rather, is the
mistaken attribution of a “logic” to modernity, as if it contains nested
within it egalitarian principles that will eventually unfold. Something did
indeed happen at a particular moment in history that provided new ways of
imagining equality, but the conditions of its birth were associated from the
start with the spread of colonial despotisms and the naturalisation of both
gender and racial difference. There was no logic driving this towards more
radical versions. It is in the politics of equality that new social imaginaries are
forged, not in the unfolding of an inherently “modern” ideal.
Keywords
gender equality, modernity, post-colonial theory, feminism, alternative
modernities, inner logic
1Department of Government, London School of Economics, London, United Kingdom
Corresponding Author:
Anne Phillips, Department of Government, London School of Economics, Houghton St,
London WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: a.phillips@lse.ac.uk
757457PTXXXX10.1177/0090591718757457Political TheoryPhillips
research-article2018
838 Political Theory 46(6)
Problems with modernity are by now reasonably well rehearsed: the pre-
sumption that it is a primarily European accomplishment; the implied con-
trast with the premodern, always to the disadvantage of the latter; the way the
values supposedly associated with it are held up as a model for more back-
ward peoples to follow.1 Less fully rehearsed is the association with gender.
Yet from (at least) the eighteenth century onwards, European philosophers
and historians have taken the status of women as a crucial marker of a soci-
ety’s level of civilisation. This does not mean they turned a critical eye on
their own society’s past and present treatment of women. The preoccupation
with stages of development and levels of civilisation was bound up with the
exploration and conquest of lands where social relations often took markedly
different forms, and it was in the differentiation of their own societies from
these more “savage” lands that the status of women played its important role.
The issue, at this point, was not whether and where women enjoyed equality
with men: it would have been odd to single this out as the mark of modernity
in a Europe that still patently denied women that status. The perception,
rather, was that women from the “less civilised” lands lived in a state of deg-
radation, lacked moral refinement, and (this was a frequent complaint) were
disturbingly unrestrained in their sexuality. In her analysis of conceptions of
modernity in the eighteenth century, Kathleen Wilson argues that all the key
theorists—including Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, John Millar,
William Falconer, and David Hume—agreed “that the status of women
marked civilisation and progress.”2 She gives as one illustration William
Robertson’s 1777 History of America: “To despise and degrade the female
sex is the characteristic of the savage state in every part of the globe.”3 The
effects of this degradation were typically traced in what was perceived as a
lack of femininity. In the Americas, for example, enslaved women from
Africa were depicted as “masculine, muscular, aggressive and strong”—con-
sidered, at the time, exceedingly bad characteristics for a woman—“devoid
of feminine tenderness and graciousness.”4 Similar charges were laid against
Irish women, who were perceived as wielding too much power over their
rather supine husbands.5 Slavery and/or colonial settlement could then be
represented as assisting the civilising process.
In the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels similarly employed the status
of women as a marker of progress, though more as a critique of the degrada-
tion brought about by capitalism than a celebration of its modernity. In their
account, “the change in a historical epoch can always be determined by the
progress of women toward freedom, because in the relation of woman to man,
of the weak to the strong, the victory of human nature over brutality is most
evident. The degree of emancipation of woman is the natural measure of gen-
eral emancipation.”6 (Here, women appear as the weak, not the unsuitably

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