Abstract
This paper explores the gendering of civil society by focusing on the moral campaigns against wet nursing and in favour of maternal feeding in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, drawing attention to the overlap between the family and market society. It argues that the organization of sexual difference is central to the social world and to the idea of civil society in Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Men enjoyed the benefits of ethical incorporation into a rich version of civil society and withheld worth from women's participation in the market. Women who immersed themselves in the world of exchange were stigmatized as mercenaries and freelance hustlers, so that they could not achieve ethical incorporation except as natural mothers in the nether world of the family.
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1For comments and suggestions on this paper, I would like to thank Julia O'Connell Davidson, Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor, Ros Hague and those who attended the Hegel in France panel of the PSA conference in Manchester in 2001. I am grateful to the two reviewers for this journal whose responses to an earlier draft were genuinely helpful, and to the University of Leicester for a period of study leave that enabled me to undertake the research for this article.
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Brace, L. The Tragedy of the Freelance Hustler: Hegel, Gender and Civil Society. Contemp Polit Theory 1, 329–347 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300055
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300055