Women Theorists on Society and Politics.

Allen, Judith A.

Women Theorists on Society and Politics, edited by Lynn McDonald. Waterloo, Ontario, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998, 326 pp. $54.95 (cloth).

The argument informing McDonald's extracts from writings on government, politics, war, health, and public welfare by twenty-four "unjustly excluded" women theorists, is that social sciences would be different now "if the work of these women had been given the attention it merited" (p. 4). Without them, the social sciences have been skewed or impoverished. With them, preoccupations of social and political theory would have been modified. More focus on mother-child bonds in social origins theories, less glorification of war, and more respect for compromise and negotiation; the environment and the interactions of ecosystems would have been possible, as well as earlier attention to gender and class stratification within social and political thought, as well as medical sociology, health promotion, and preventative medicine.

The women theorists selected contributed to "the mainstream subjects of political and social theory," separated, by this editor, from their writings on gender issues. Of the twenty-four women theorists, fifteen were British, two American, one South African, two German, and four wrote in French. Organized chronologically by author -- the earliest as fifteenth-century Christine de Pisan (1364-1431), the latest, Emily Greene Balch (1867-1961) -- McDonald offers a brief biography and introduction to each excerpt, then pieces of primary text. Five thematic chapters address early theorists, revolution, social reform, gendered violence, peace, war, and militarism. Sources included will interest readers familiar with some of the theorists selected in the context of the history of feminist theory, especially de Pisan, Mary Wollstonecraft, Josephine Butler, Frances Power Cobbe, Olive Schreiner, and Jane Addams.

Yet, McDonald's book occupies uncertain territory. She presents theorist and text selections as a fait accompli without a systematic rationale. Intending to fill gaps with missing contributions of theorists publishing before 1900 not otherwise widely available, her framework for the collection is paradoxical. On the one hand, the extracts do not suggest that women theorists "are more virtuous, egalitarian, socially conscious, pacific or democratic than men." Yet, on the other hand, distinctive women's perspectives emerge on various themes, and women readers, she contends, will benefit from "enlightenment regarding one's own history and identity" (p. 8), presumably on the basis of a distinctive identity as women.

McDonald chides contemporary feminist political theorists, such as the distinguished Carole Pateman, for focusing on the critique of male theorists rather than the accomplishments of women, her own preferred mission. Accomplishments arresting her attention, however, are women's input into the very mainstream political and social theory which contemporary feminists profoundly criticize. One conclusion is that here are two contrasting, incommensurate feminist projects. McDonald pursues an inclusionary, remedial logic: "women were there too," only gender prejudice deleted them; but she omits addressing reasons for gap-filling being needed or possible, perhaps because they are too obvious to restate? Yet, Pateman and others pursue precisely the causes of women's exclusion from theoretical canons in the nature and mission of these fields themselves. Thus, adding women to the canon, filling the gaps, as McDonald wants to do, takes us no closer to understanding the origins of the problem, nor to clarifying whether mainstream fields, formed partly by exclusion of women and repudiation of the feminine, are worth joining, the question posed so eloquently by Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas (1938).

This familiar feminist dilemma remains unaddressed by McDonald. Her voice is too briefly heard to develop the ambitious case she asserts, yet is scattered through the documents pervasively enough to compromise the alternative profile of document collection. This confusion is heightened by the publisher' s unfortunate decision to separate the end of text extracts and resumption of the author/editor's portions by only a one line space, with both kinds of writing in the same font and type face, leading to difficulty distinguishing who is who. Upon reaching the afterword, this reader wished McDonald had written a book, article, or an essay, using the material edited here in a carefully argued case for her central claim.

Judith A. Allen

Indiana University Gender Studies