Ain’t I a Rational Being?

By Katerina Sergidou (University of the Basque Country and Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences)

For the past few months, in the Greek press and media, there have been numerous calls on Greek feminists to engage in “calm” and “reasoned” dialogue without “arguing loudly.” The feminists’ “loud” and “unreasonable” voices are being raised against a new law passed by the Greek parliament that enforces obligatory joint custody of children even in cases where divorce has been granted on the basis of violent and cruel behavior of parents toward each other, in general, but focuses on fathers, in particular. As these calls to feminists to engage in “rational dialogue” instead of “quarreling” were being made, three historical feminist texts have been on my mind. I see no point in arguing about their essentialist points or in making the kinds of critique and criticism we might have made had they been written today; they need to be approached from within the era in which they were written. But it does make sense to retrieve and recuperate what keeps them fiery and alive to this day. It is worth looking at the threads that connect us to the women who wrote them and identify the political affinities of those who accuse us of engaging in irrational dialogues, whether in the past or today.

Two Hundred and Twenty Years Ago

The first text is Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written in 1792. In her essay, following contemporary rules of debate, this English writer, responding to the established arguments of the time that women are incapable not only of rational discussion but also of rational decision-making, and arguing against the injunction that disallowed women’s right to education, attempted to prove that women are capable of rational thought and discussion. In some places, Wollstonecraft even defends (what she calls) “masculine” qualities in order to prove that they are not just masculine virtues. Thus, she writes, “Many individuals have more sense than their male relatives; and, as nothing preponderates where there is a constant Struggle for an equilibrium, without it has naturally more gravity, some women govern their husbands without degrading themselves, because intellect will always govern” ([1792] 2014, 33), and elsewhere she comments, “My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone” (31).

Wollstonecraft calmly and methodically claims space for her gender, using the reasoning proper to her era. Nowadays we would not use those arguments. We would defend emotions, claim that there is no such thing as absolute truth, or, in any case, defend our vulnerability. Even better, we would respect the different ways we would express our feminist ideas. But this 1792 text is not only feminist in content; it is also Wollstonecraft’s bold expression of opinion, taking on gods and demons, all the while staring Rousseau in the eye. We can almost hear her say something like, “We will sit at the table, like it or not, on our own terms.” So, in 1792 Wollstonecraft claims a seat at the table by focusing on the commonalities between women and men, rather than on their differences.

One Hundred and Seventy Years Ago

The second text is the intervention of the formerly enslaved Black woman Sojourner Truth, which she delivered in 1851 at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, entitled “Ain’t I a Woman?” Truth was the only Black woman at the convention, where, during her ex tempore intervention, and among other things, she pointed out,

“Den dey talks ‘bout dis ting in de head; what dis dey call it?” (“Intellect,” whispered someone near.) “Dat’s it, honey. What’s dat got to do wid women’s rights or nigger’s rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yourn holds a quart, wouldn’t ye be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?” And she pointed her significant finger, and sent a keen glance at the minister who had made the argument. The cheering was long and loud.” Den dat little man in black dar, he say women can’t have as much rights as men, ‘cause Christ wan’t a woman! Whar did your Christ come from?” Rolling thunder couldn’t have stilled that crowd, as did those deep, wonderful tones, as she stood there with outstretched arms and eyes of fire. Raising her voice still louder, she repeated, “Whar did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothin’ to do wid Him.” ([1851] 1875, 134–35).

Sojourner Truth’s argument seeps from every pore of the Black enslaved woman’s body. She asks her white sisters, “Ain’t I a woman?” In her world, there are only gods and women. She develops a logical argument founded on a Christian myth: Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! We can imagine her saying something like, “I have a right to sit at the table too. I am also a woman,” as she addresses her sisters, to whom she shows her Black female body and wonders how it differs from the white bodies of the women in the room.

Thirty-One Years Ago

The third text is a relatively modern one. I like to call it “when Nancy Fraser gets on a tractor and flattens Habermas.” It is the delightful “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” The essay was published a few months after the 1990 revised edition of Habermas’s book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which contains the well-known new preface to the German edition, where Habermas attempts to correct his conception of the public sphere by conceding, for example, that the exclusion of women was a constitutive element in the ideal bourgeois political public sphere that he had described. Habermas, of course, maintains the core of his logic on which he based his original argument of 1962, when the book was first published, namely an idealistic conception of the bourgeois public sphere and a belief in the efficacy of rational dialogue that can lead to consensus, even between unequal people.

In her article, Nancy Fraser urges us to rethink the concept of the public sphere. Drawing on the work of Joan Landes, Mary Ryan, and Geof Eley, Fraser argues that Habermas glosses over the liberal sphere and obscures the multiple exclusions on which it is founded. Using the example of women in order to show that the urban public sphere is constituted by exclusions, Fraser goes on to highlight other exclusions based on race, education, and class. She refutes Habermas’s (1990, 62) claim that “it is possible for interlocutors in a public sphere to bracket status differentials and to deliberate ‘as if’ they were social equals; the assumption, therefore, that societal equality is not a necessary condition for political democracy.” Fraser writes with the first and second waves of feminism behind her. A lot of water has flown under the bridge since Wollstonecraft and Truth claimed their seats as equals at the debating table. Fraser points out that we cannot speak “as if we were equal.” We can take this literally and metaphorically, namely that the poor, the illiterate, and other socially marginalized groups are often muted in the face of the words of the powerful, even when they theoretically have the opportunity to sit down at the table together and conduct a “rational” dialogue. In short, the question is not even whether a reasonable dialogue can take place, but whether there is even the possibility for them to speak in the first place.

So, then, we must ask ourselves: What exactly does “reasonable dialogue” mean? Does it mean one without tension? Does it mean using arguments that are free of violence? Does it mean restraining passion to a permissible low key? Is there only one way to be “rational,” and no other? Is there no room in a conversation for anger, grief, a sense of injustice, or feelings of solidarity? Should oppressed and exploited groups “watch their mouths” and sit quietly and dutifully at the corner of the debating table? Under conditions of inequality, there can, by no means, exist free zones of nonviolent speech. 

Three women, feminists in different ways, from different positions, in different times. Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, and Nancy Fraser write and speak out boldly, unruly, with “rational” yet passionate arguments that cause a stir in the room as they are being written. Nonetheless, the argument remains the same. It sits like a curse upon our heads: “You’re too angry, you’re extreme, you’re not rational.”

Hélène Cixous, in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” proposes an alternative. She enters the room loaded with ammunition words as she writes, “Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason, of which it is at once the effect, the support, and one of the privileged alibis. It has been one with the phallocentric tradition. It is indeed that same self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism” (1976, 879). She continues: “Listen to a woman speak at a public gathering (if she hasn’t painfully lost her wind). She doesn’t ‘speak,’ she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it’s with her body that she vitally supports the ‘logic’ of her speech” (881).

When all is said and done, each of us can choose the manner, place, and time of her writing and speaking. She can respond, argue, or even remain silent. She will certainly have her irrationalities (παρα-λόγους).

NOTE

The original version of this article was published in Greek on social media, in April 2021. I am grateful to Neni Panourgia for reading it and soliciting it for Insight. I am also grateful to my thesis supervisor, anthropologist Margaret Bullen, for editing this text in English.

REFERENCES

Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1 (4): 875–93.

Fraser, Nancy. 1990. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text (25/26): 56–80.

Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Truth, Sojourner. (1851) 1875. Narrative and Book of Life. Boston: Private Publishing.

Wollstonecraft, Mary, and Eileen Hunt Botting. (1792) 2014. Vindication of the Rights of Woman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Katerina Sergidou is a feminist activist and PhD candidate in Feminist and Gender Studies and Social Anthropology at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU) and Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens, Greece. She is a recipient of the State Scholarship Foundation (IKY) of Greece, and her dissertation focuses on women’s participation in the Carnival of Cadiz (Andalusia) from a feminist anthropological perspective. She holds a first degree in history from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and is currently engaged in oral history research at Panteion University.