Current issue

Kant and Gender Oppression: Privileged Eighteenth-Century Women, ‘Indirect Domination’ and Gender Emancipation

DOI

10.5922/0207-6918-2025-3-1

Pages

7-42

Abstract

This paper critically addresses the unwitting gender oppression underpinning Kant’s anthropological and legal approach to domestic labour, highlighting the helpfulness of his analysis of reproductive tasks for casting light on some of the historical causes behind the current view of such labour. With this general aim in mind, I first address the multiple meanings of the term ‘social domination’ as it is used in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Second, I focus on the figurative sense Kant assigns to this term in his account of the domestic order in the section ‘The Character of Sex’ from the same essay. Third, I highlight the social class biases that determine Kant’s examination of the role that women play in bourgeois families, where they are expected to outsource their caregiving and childrearing tasks thanks to the patrimony their husbands have accumulated. Finally, I draw some conclusions regarding the social agency that Kant considers available to women, suggesting that his account prioritises the privileged circumstances of wealthy women in eighteenth-century Prussia, neglects key challenges faced by more vulnerable groups in his time, and fails to support the extension of citizenship rights to the entire commonwealth.

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