Enlightenment and the Uses of Woman

In November 1937 Theodor Adorno wrote to Erich Fromm with a proposal. Both men were members of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. Both had recently fled Nazi Germany: Fromm for New York, where he was directing the Institute in exile along with Max Horkheimer; Adorno for Oxford, from where he wrote to Fromm suggesting an investigation into the 'feminine character'. He had been led to this proposal, Adorno told Fromm, by some reflections on 'the glue that binds [capitalist] society together'. Having previously identified 'the state, religion and family authority' as the adhesive agents, he was now convinced that the real culprits were women. 'Women and their specific consumer consciousness must be regarded as the social glue.' Would Fromm pursue an investigation into this phenomenon? The tone of the letter is strikingly misogynistic, as Adorno bewails women's 'stupid', 'irrational' immersion in consumer culture and its corrosive effects on modern life. Women's 'infantile' 'bedazzlement' by consumerism, the corruption of their personalities by 'economic fetishism', had made them into instruments of capitalist hegemony. 'Woman today . . . is . . . [an] agency of the commodity in society.'¹

It is fascinating to revisit Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) in the light of this letter, where Adorno, that great debunker of Enlightenment as resurgent myth, unwittingly reproduces a favourite Enlightenment myth about women.² 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: the identification of women with consumerist excess - 'luxury' in early modern vocabulary. This was an anti-woman theme with a very long pedigree. From antiquity on, luxury had been depicted as a quintessentially feminine vice, with critics from Cato to Augustine to Montesquieu loud in their denunciations of female extravagance and indulgence, especially erotic indulgence. The sexual woman, seeking and supplying lascivious delight, was the luxurious figure par excellence; or as Adorno puts it, in his marxisant version of this notion, 'sexually uninhibited women . . . bear the worst features of the bourgeois character'.³

Fromm replied politely to Adorno's proposal, telling him 'I believe that women simultaneously embody the qualities of commodities in the most and the least pronounced ways', but offering no collaboration.⁴ Fromm's meaning here is not clear (in her introduction to the exchange, Eva-Maria Zieger suggests that the comment was intended as a subtle parody on Adorno's dialectical style, which seems possible), but his lack of enthusiasm is unsurprising. 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'.⁵

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. But first a word about the Dialectic of Enlightenment in relation to modern feminism.

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. As Catherine Belsey wrote in 1991: 'The Enlightenment commitment to truth and reason, we can now recognise, has meant historically a single truth and a single rationality, which have conspired in practice to legitimate the subordination of . . . women'.⁶ Many other postmodern feminists have similarly condemned what they dub the 'Enlightenment project'. This is a critique, or rather I should say a caricature, that cannot survive even a cursory glance at the noisily argumentative world of Enlightenment, with its multiple renditions of reason and truth purveyed by lively minds of diverse sorts, from Encyclopedists and philosophical theologians...