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The Gender‐Neutral Feminism of Hannah Arendt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Kimberly Maslin
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Abstract

Though many have recently attempted either to locate Arendt within feminism or feminism within the great body of Arendt's work, these efforts have proven only modestly successful. Even a cursory examination of Arendt's work should suggest that these efforts would prove frustrating. None of her voluminous writings deal specifically with gender, though some of her work certainly deals with notable women. Her interest is not in gender as such, but in woman as assimilated Jew or woman as social and political revolutionary. In this paper, I argue that Arendt recognized that what frequently passes for a gender question is not essentially a matter of gender at all, but rather an idiosyncratic form of loneliness that typically affects, though is by no means limited to, women. In her work one finds the conceptual tools necessary to understand the “woman problem” rather than an explicit argument or a solution to it.

Type
Open Issue Content
Information
Hypatia , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , Summer 2013 , pp. 585 - 601
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Jennifer Ring, Jim Young, and Hypatia reviewers for their comments, and especially Aaron Simmons for his timely feedback and limitless enthusiasm.

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