Abstract

This paper argues that the widespread Hegelian legacy that feminism has inherited from Beauvoir is highly problematic and that feminists, in particular, should be suspicious of philosophies of history and histories of philosophy that take Hegel too seriously. Any such history or philosophy will fail to take into account the deep roots of women’s comparatively equal status in the West in the long history of women’s political, ethical, theological, and philosophical theorizing since the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, in a reformulation of Beauvoir’s Hegelianism, this paper proposes a new historical dialectic understood as a conversation in which female and male voices are equally represented and the unfolding of spirit is transformed into a dialectic of sex.