Gender Ascendant: The Dawn of Feminist Theory in Eighteenth-Century German Writing

Does feminist theory—the theoretical grasp of exactly how a patriarchal oppression of women operates and has operated in Western societies—arise simply as women’s response to the experience of oppression? Bennett argues that no such substantial current of thought ever arises in this manner, and that feminist theory is not truly grasped until we uncover in intellectual history the not-yet-feminist body of thought from which it emerges. He approaches this matter by discussing an anti-aesthetic tendency in the work of major eighteenth-century German authors, both male and female, a tendency which develops (he claims) in the direction of proto-feminism. Especially notable is the kind of feminist theory in question here, a theory which focuses uncompromisingly on the hardest possible problems it encounters: on a gender-based logic by which women writers, precisely in asserting themselves as women, run up against an imperative of silence; on the recognition that in a strictly ethical feminist view, gender difference is inaccessible to the understanding; and on the problem of a future for feminism in a world where the aesthetic approach to art and literature has apparently prevailed once and for all.