Hannah Arendt and Feminist Politics

Mary Dietz, "Hannah Arendt and Feminist Politics"
In: Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994) 231-260.

Dietz begins by recalling that in the 1970s and 80s, feminist critics Adrienne Rich and Mary O'Brien attacked Arendt as a great political thinker who, as female, was all the more culpable for strengthening traditional gender differences in her writing. These critics primary challenged Arendt's hard line between labor and action. Dietz agrees with these critics that since the duties of body and household that characterize labor traditionally fall to women, Arendt's conceptual distinction has the potential to reinforce gender roles that have excluded women from the public realm. Action, in contrast to labor, occurs in an explicitly political sphere modeled on ancient Athens, where men debated the future of the city.

In Dietz's account, much of broader feminist thought celebrates the very spheres of life that have traditionally been relegated to the household and family. She, in contrast, sees Arendt as offering a way to not to look inward, but to value all voices in the public realm. In "Arendt's existential analysis [...] there is nothing intrinsically or essentially masculine about the public realm, just as there is nothing essentially feminine about laboring in the realm of necessity" (248). In other words, she removes the inner anchors of the public realm in some see in gender difference and replaces it with and alternative spatial conception. In terms of a critique of "essence," and thinking of recent work on Heidegger's influence on Arendt, this insight might be understood as expanding what Heidegger terms "existential spatiality" in Being and Time into the political realm.

A second advantage of Arendt's though that Dietz sees as relevant for feminist thought is the emphasis on speech. While Arendt does not go into the specifics of how speech should work in the political realm, Dietz asks if women potentially bring a different voice to plural deliberations.

Perhaps most compellingly, Dietz concludes by arguing that Arendt actually brings the body into the political realm: "In fact, Arendt's account of politics in the public realm brings courage, the spontaneity of passion, and "appearance" to the foreground" (250). Here she emphasized Arendt's specific definition of "reason" in the political realm, which is not just instrumental but includes an expansive representational thinking.

Reflecting on Dietz's argument suggests a parallel between scholarship on Hegel and Arendt. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel at times says that spirit moves from a lower to a higher level, implying a hierarchy of meaning. In recent years though, commentators have emphasized that "absolute knowledge" does not simply cancel out the earlier stages but brings them together in a new way. In other words, they work to redefine the key term "sublation" (Aufhebung). Similarly, Arendt does clearly value action over work and labor from the point of view of the threatened political realm. However, the impression that Arendt leaves labor behind may be a matter of tone more than logic. A close reading of the Human Condition shows that all three spheres of labor, work, and action are important and interconnected. A rereading of Arendt that takes into account earlier conceptual clarifications but looks for new links can work out exactly how these connections operate.

-Jeff Champlin