Abstract

Kant has recently been hailed as a radical precursor to contemporary feminism , yet onecan easily find a deep-seated conservative misogyny in what Kant actually wrote about women. For instance,marriage automatically makes the wife the servant of her husband, and Kant automatically excludes women fromactive citizenship. One of my aims here is to –as much as is possible– make sense of the tension between the focuson equality, universality, respect for persons and autonomy in Kant’s overall philosophy, and his endorsement ofrather misogynistic 18th century Prussian views on women’s place in the family and in society.I contrast others’ attempts to explain this tension, with an alternative: that his particular conclusions result from ametaphysical picture of humankind’s place in the natural world. His deriving these conclusionsabout women from the Moral Law and the Laws of Nature , becomes somewhat understandable.The question arises, however, as to whether Kant is actively defending his culture’s mores and laws regardingwomen, or unthinkingly endorsing them. The rather devious logical tactics I show Kant to employ in making thesederivations, suggest that Kant is force-fitting these conclusions about women to premises involvingthe Moral Law and the Laws of Nature, rather than drawing the conclusions that would naturally flow from suchpremises.Thus we can safely ignore his particular pronouncements about women, while not necessarily rejecting their foundation and its support for certain aspects of feminist thought, since these conclusions should not be drawn fromthat Kantian foundation