The Man of Reason. "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy, and: Reclaiming a Conversation. The Ideal of the Educated Woman (review)

464 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 25:3 JULY 1987 Genevieve Lloyd. The Man of Reason. "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Pp. x + 138. Cloth, $27.50. Paper, $1o.95. Jane Roland Martin. Reclaiming a Conversation. The Ideal of the Educated Woman. New Haven: Yale University Press, x985. Pp, xi + 218. $21.5o. Genevieve Lloyd in The Man of Reason and Jane Roland Martin in Reclaiming a Conversation have similar concerns. For Lloyd it is the exclusion of the feminine from the ideal of Reason; for Martin it is the exclusion of the feminine from the ideal of education. Lloyd's purpose is to trace and analyze the exclusion of the feminine from the ideal of Reason in the history of philosophy. Martin's purpose is to "reclaim" the historical ideas about women's education which she believes have been ignored or overlooked. Lloyd and Martin come to similar conclusions. Our current ideals of Reason (Lloyd) and education (Martin) are masculine (and thus too narrow), and these ideals have contributed to the devaluation of the feminine. Contrary to the widely held belief in Western thought that Reason is gender-free, Lloyd argues that the ideals of Reason have been male. This is not simply because philosophers have used male paradigms of rationality and have (mistakenly) denigrated female rationality. It goes deeper than this, she claims. Rationality has been defined by an exclusion of the (inferior) feminine, by transcending, transforming, or dominating it. Whatever else Reason has been taken to be, it has been decidedly not female. In the history of Western thought, superior Reason, associated with males, has often been opposed to inferior Nature, passion, the sensuous, etc., associated with females. In the seventeenth century, e.g., Francis Bacon's idea of scientific knowledge involved the respect for but control of Nature; Bacon used sexual metaphors to express this. Lloyd insists that these metaphors cannot be eliminated in favor of a gender-free explanation. For Bacon, the relation of a good knower to Nature is what Lloyd calls that of a"gallant suitor" to a woman: he is respectful, shows restraint, but manipulates, controls, and dominates her. A good knower has a "male content" 06-17). Lloyd also analyzes parts of Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Hegel, Sartre, de Beauvoir , et. al., but some of her analyses are not as strong as her analysis, say, of Bacon. In her discussion of Hume, for example, she says that his claim that the passion of acquisitiveness should be, and can be, controlled only by a more reflective version of that passion, is articulated in terms of private vs. public interest. Since, Martin says, women are associated with private interests (the home), and private interests, according to Hume, should be controlled by public interests (represented, Lloyd says, by males as heads of households), then Hume's version of Reason "takes on associations with maleness," even if, she says, it is not specifically required by his philosophy (56). It seems, however, that this "association" is tenuous at best, and thus it is unclear how this helps prove that Reason has been male. Lloyd believes she has shown that standards of Reason have been male, but in her final chapter she cautions us not to reject them for this reason. She believes we should reject them only as universal and gender-free standards. Nor does she believe we should affirm the value of the feminine in opposition to the "man of reason," since femininity BOOK REVIEWS 465 itself has been too narrowly defined in terms of its exclusion from male ideals of Reason, and denigrated for this reason as well. If there's a universal, gender-free standard of Reason, it is, she says, something to be achieved in the future. Martin's task of reclaiming historical ideals about women's education is easier than Lloyd's in the sense that the five writers she considers, viz., Plato, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Catharine Beecher, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, wrote specifically about female and male education; she does not have to try to show that what these writers believed to be universal standards for education were actually male standards. But one of...