‘Mere Auxiliaries to the Commonwealth’: Women and the Origins of Liberalism

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Abstract
Married women pose an acute, but now unacknowledged, problem for liberal theory. The character and magnitude of the problem can only be fully understood if the development of liberal theory is examined in the context of the impact of the consolidation of capitalism upon the socio-economic position of married women. Because the conception of ‘natural’ individual freedom and equality was central to contract theory, Hobbes and Locke had to deal with the problem of married women in their argument with the patriarchalists. Their acceptance of patriarchal claims and assertions about women stands at the beginning of the reconciliation of liberal and patriarchal theory, a reconciliation which is now attacked by certain feminists in terms which echo Hobbes' original attack on patriarchalism. …the peculiar character of man's domination over woman in the modern family, and the necessity, as well as the manner, of establishing real social equality between the two, will be brought out into full relief only when both are completely equal before the law. F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the Slate.

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