Tag: #MalePatternBlindness (page 1 of 1)

February 14, 2024 / 0 Comments

The Secret of Love: What we’ve always known but are only beginning to understand

An famous painting of Plato's Symposium by Anselm Feuerbach — The drunken Alcibiades joins Plato’s Symposium on love.
(Anselm Feuerbach, 1869)

Love is a sublime, but complicated, part of life. Here, though, is a secret about love that ought to be straightforward: It has always been known that authentic love requires seeing the interests of another as your own. The Buddha emphasized love focused on the good of others. Aristotle described love as one soul in two bodies. Jesus and Muhammad called on us to love our neighbors as ourselves. The German philosopher Georg Hegel wrote that “Love means in general the consciousness of my unity with another.”

Hegel by Jakob Schlesinger — Hegel (1831)

Consider, then, what Hegel had to say about women. In his Philosophy of Right, just after emphasizing unity as the essence of love, he shared this bit of patronizing profundity:

Women may well be educated, but their minds are not made for the higher sciences, for philosophy, and certain artistic products which require a universal element. Women may have insights, taste, and delicacy, but they do not possess the ideal. The difference between man and woman is the difference between animal and plant.
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, (1820) para 166

Um, Georg, how is love as “unity” supposed to work under those conditions?

If authentic love between adults requires identifying with another person and taking their interests as your own, it must also require seeing the other as an equal. If their interests are just as important as yours, you must accept them on the same level, with the same standing and agency.

For most of history, however, our great (male) thinkers have insisted that women are inferior to men. Aristotle, the first person credited with the systematic study of biology, thought women were “misbegotten males,” the result of some procreative defect. He said you could tell women were inferior by the sound of their voices. After more than two-thousand years of thinking it over, the state of the art had advanced only so far as nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s confident assertion that you could tell women were inferior by the shape of their bodies.

The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer comes about as close to sainthood as Protestants allow. He is known for his resistance to Nazism and for his argument that ethics requires learning to see “the view from below.” He challenges us to overcome the ways power and privilege distort our understanding of what it means to care for others. Nonetheless, he called it a “rule of life” established by God that “the wife is to be subject to her husband,” and criticized marital equality as “modern and unbiblical.”

Bonhoeffer was surely right that women’s equality is a thoroughly modern idea. Apart from a few lonely voices, there was no organized movement for women’s equality before the nineteenth century. A full-spectrum effort for equality in the home and workplace only began to gain traction in the 1970s.

If equality is required for authentic adult love, that means that throughout history such a love was not a real option for most people. Even today, in much of the world the equality of women is more an aspiration than a reality. Authentic love between men and women remains beyond the reach of those constrained by persistently patriarchal institutions and cultures.

Given this reality, it is noteworthy that the one place love has been less encumbered by patriarchy and paternalism, even if not by other prejudices, is in same-sex relationships. Indeed, the Athenian philosophers better understood love in the context of male friendships than in relationships between men and women. Aristotle saw the pinnacle of human connection in the mutual caring between men of equal status and power.

On Valentine’s Day, let’s appreciate that the rising, if still imperfect, acceptance of women’s equality makes the possibility of authentic love between men and women widely possible for the first time in history.

The secret to authentic love has been known forever. But understanding this “secret” and giving men and women the potential to experience authentic love with each other is something new. Our world is built on thousands of years of thought and practice that rejected the equality of women. If we aspire to a world of authentic love, we must continue the hard work of personal and social change to make that possible. This means grappling with everything from who does the dishes to who serves in Congress. It particularly depends on changing the attitudes and behaviors of men.

Valentine’s Day is a fine occasion for cards and flowers, but now the secret is out. If true love is the goal, we must commit to the equality that is its essential foundation.

March 2, 2021 / 5 Comments

Four Men Who Should Have Known Better:
Dr. Charles Meigs

The Agnew Clinic at the Jefferson Medical College (painting by Thomas Eakins, 1889)

My current project on the idea of women’s equality has led me to ponder why so many men who had both intellectual and circumstantial reasons to understand and endorse women’s equality failed to do so. I have been using this blog to briefly profile a few prominent examples of this male pattern blindness. My previous post highlighted the illustrious philosopher and infamous misogynist Arthur Schopenhauer. This time, I offer for your consideration the nineteenth century physician Charles Meigs (1792-1869).

Dr. Meigs was a distinguished faculty member at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. In the middle of the nineteenth century he was widely considered the leading American specialist on women’s medicine and obstetrics.

A useful launching point for delving into the character of Dr. Meigs is the tragic death of pioneering feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft in September 1797. Wollstonecraft, then 38 years old, was one of countless women who suffered painful deaths in childbirth from puerperal sepsis, an infection of the genital tract. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were several theories about the causes of puerperal fever, most of which were categorized as what were then called “putrid miasmas” or “atmospherical influences.” Dr. Meigs described puerperal fever as “an unspeakable terror” and attributed it to bad air and bad luck.

An alternative possibility was proposed by the physician and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (who was also, of course, the father of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.). Early in his medical career, Holmes, Sr. published a paper advancing the argument that puerperal fever was infectious and was carried on the unwashed hands of midwives and obstetricians: “the physician and the disease entered hand in hand into the chamber of the unsuspecting patient.” Despite the strong evidence he marshalled, this thesis was surprisingly controversial.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. reading his 1843 paper on puerperal fever to the men of the Boston Medical Society

The illustrious Dr. Meigs took the intimation that doctors were at fault for the death of so many women as a great affront. In his 1854 book, On the Nature, Signs, and Treatment of Childbed Fevers, he criticized Holmes’s contagion theory as “nonsense.” Meigs offered a chilling description of his own practice: “I have proved it in my own case, over and over again, since I have gone from the houses of persons laboring under the most malignant forms of the disease, and from participating in necroscopic examinations, without carrying the malady with me.” Meigs expressed his confidence that doctors were gentlemen, and “a gentleman’s hands are clean.”

Charles Delucena Meigs — Dr. Charles Meigs

The same stubborn arrogance that contributed to Dr. Meigs’s error on puerperal fever also made him a lifelong opponent of anesthesia. Meigs was concerned about the risks of this relatively new technology, but he also argued that pain was a natural and appropriate part of childbirth. Labor-pain, Meigs wrote, is “a most desirable, salutary, and conservative manifestation of life force.”

Cast out from the Garden
(William Foster, 1891)

Meigs connected his acceptance of painful labor to the biblical decree that suffering in childbirth would be the punishment for Eve’s original sin. He warned against the “doubtful nature of any process that the physicians set up to contravene the operations of those natural and physiological forces that the Divinity has ordained us to enjoy or to suffer.”

In addition to his callous endorsement of women’s pain, Meigs expressed the soft misogyny of putting women on a pedestal. In a medical school lecture on “Some Distinctive Characteristics of the Female,” he warned that without the influence of women, society would relapse into “the violence and chaos of the earliest barbarism…. It is not until she comes to sit beside him… that man ceases to be barbarous.”

The connection between Meigs’s caricature of women on a pedestal and their subjugation was made clear in the same medical school lecture. Surrounded by his eager male students, Dr. Meigs shared his deep insights into the female character: “she has a head almost too small for intellect but just big enough for love.” His description of woman’s “intellectual nature” follows along this line:

She has nowhere been admitted to the political rights, franchises, and powers that man arrogates to men alone…The great administrative faculties are not hers. She plans no sublime campaigns, leads no armies to battle, nor fleets to victory. The Forum is no theatre for her silver voice, full of tenderness and sensibility. She discerns not the courses of the planets. Orion with his belt, and Arcturus with his suns are naught to her but pretty baubles set up in the sky.
C. D. Meigs, “Some Distinctive Characterstics of the FEmale” (1847)

Dr. Meigs surely knew women whose intellect and character could have disabused him of this prejudice. On the subject of “pretty baubles in the sky,” for example, he could have turned to Hannah Bouvier, a fellow member of the small and insular “Old Philadelphia” elite. Bouvier was a popular science writer and the author of a leading astronomy textbook.

And, of course, there was Meigs’s wife, Mary, who was described as having “great intellectual powers and common sense, with a strong love of justice.” The Meigses began their life together in Georgia, where his father was the first president of the University of Georgia. After two years in the South, however, Mary was revolted by slavery and had the fortitude to insist that they move to Philadelphia.

Charles Meigs dedicated his life and his science to the health of women. That is an admirable thing, to be sure. Nonetheless, his experience and expertise failed to open his eyes to the equality of women. Dr. Meigs was a man who should have known better, but didn’t.

Moral: A scientific disposition is a weak competitor to cultural hegemony and pig-headed stubbornness.

Next up: Alfred Marshall—a social scientist who urged economics to turn toward social welfare, but turned away from the brilliant woman standing next to him.

Previous Profile: Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher of morality and misogyny.

The Overview: Male Pattern Blindness

February 22, 2021 / 10 Comments

Four Men Who Should Have Known Better: Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer: moralist and misogynist — Arthur Schopenhauer (1852)

In my previous post on male pattern blindness—a bit of collateral from my current project on the idea of women’s equality—I promised profiles of four influential men whose failure to appreciate the equality of women was particularly striking. In each case, their principles and positions should have helped them to know better. But they didn’t.

My first subject is the renowned German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). The competition is stiff, but Schopenhauer is probably the most egregious misogynist in the Western philosophical tradition.

In 1851, three years after the American suffragist movement was launched with the Declaration of Seneca Falls, and the same year as Harriet Taylor Mill‘s “The Enfranchisement of Women,” Schopenhauer published “On Women.” In this notorious essay, he wrote that women:

are “inferior to men in matters of justice, honesty, and conscientiousness”
“exist entirely for the propagation of the race, and their destiny ends there”
“remain children all their lives, for they always see only what is near at hand, cling to the present, take the appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling matters to the most important”
are “by nature intended to obey”

Arthur Schopenhauer
thinking some thoughts (1859)

Contemporary Schopenhauer scholars have been embarrassed by this misogynist screed. But here’s the thing: Schopenhauer’s misogyny is largely consistent with the main currents of Western philosophy from its birth in classical Greece right up to—well—right up to not very long ago. Aristotle wrote that you could tell women were inferior by how they sounded. Two thousand years later, Schopenhauer had progressed to assessing women by how they looked:

“One only need look at woman’s shape to discover that she is not intended for either too much mental or too much physical work.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, On Women, 1851

Schopenhauer should have known better for reasons both situational and philosophical.

Schopenhauer did not lack for extraordinary female role models. His sister, Adele, spoke several languages and was a poet, author, and artist. Her papercut silhouettes were published as book illustrations, and on their own. The German literary giant Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was inspired to write poems to accompany some of her papercuts.

Schopenhauer’s mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, was also a woman of considerable accomplishment. She was the first woman in Germany to publish under her own name. She wrote twenty-four books on a wide range of subjects, including several well-regarded works on art history. Her books remain in print to this day.

Despite the accomplishments of his mother and sister, Schopenhauer could still write that “women are and remain, taken altogether, the most thorough and incurable philistines.”

Schopenhauer’s blindness to the abilities of the women around him was a significant failing. It is made worse when we consider it in the context of his moral philosophy.

Schopenhauer built his ideas about ethics on a foundation provided by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant liberated morality from its religious moorings with his notion of the categorical imperative. This is mostly just a fancy way to say that there are some things that are right to do in and of themselves, rather than as a means to something else. Kant believed these imperatives could be sorted out with a universalized version of the Golden Rule: morality requires acting in the ways that you think everyone should act towards everyone else.

Schopenhauer argued that reason wasn’t sufficient for implementing Kant’s moral philosophy. He made the interesting point that our bodies are the only thing that we can perceive both from external observation and from internal feeling. That’s pretty cool in itself, but Schopenhauer also posited that this leads to a sense of empathetic knowledge. Empathy—the ability to understand and feel the needs of others and the effects of events on their internal feelings—is the touchstone for a humanist morality.

Empathy should have given Schopenhauer the key to seeing women’s equality. But in both his principles and his practice, Schopenhauer saw women as so different from himself that he was unable to make that empathetic connection. As a result, he failed to incorporate fifty percent of humanity into his moral schema. In addition to making him look ridiculous, Schopenhauer’s misogyny fundamentally overshadowed important parts of his contribution to philosophy.

The examples in Schopenhauer’s own family and his philosophy of empathy should have made him an advocate for women’s equality. Instead, he promoted a particularly vicious misogyny. Schopenhauer is a man who should have known better, but didn’t.

Moral: Advocating empathy is not the same as having empathy.

Charles Delucena Meigs - A man of medicine and misogyny. — Dr. Charles Meigs

Next up: One of the nineteenth century’s leading physicians, Dr. Charles Meigs—a proponent and practitioner of women’s medicine and misogyny.

The Overview: Male Pattern Blindness

The Secret of Love: What we’ve always known but are only beginning to understand

Four Men Who Should Have Known Better: Dr. Charles Meigs

Four Men Who Should Have Known Better: Arthur Schopenhauer

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Four Men Who Should Have Known Better:
Dr. Charles Meigs