The Concept of Woman is an ambitious book, itself a synthesis and summary of an even more ambitious project. For those of us who do not have access to the 2,300 pages of Sr Prudence Allen’s original three-volume magnum opus, it makes available the fruits of her decades of reflective research. She has three main, interrelated, aims: (i) to provide a concept not so much of ‘woman’, as of the relation between women and men; (ii) to offer a history of this and related ideas, from the pre-Socratic philosophers to the present day; (iii) to illustrate how this concept meets J. H. Newman’s seven criteria of a ‘living idea’, in order to corroborate it.
She names her key concept ‘integral gender complementarity’. This concept is adumbrated in the first chapter of Genesis and finds its full flowering in Pope St John Paul II. It has four elements: equal dignity; significant difference; synergetic relation of a man and a woman; and intergenerational fruition. In philosophy, these elements were found separately at first: Plato, for example, argued for the equality of men and women at the expense of their distinctiveness; Aristotle instead recognised their complementarity but only through patriarchal domination.
Aristotle, though, provided two ideas very important for Sr Prudence’s story. One is that of hylomorphism, i.e., the understanding of the soul as the ‘form’ or organisation of the body, meaning that a body and its soul correspond to each other. Men and women differ as unified wholes. (Contrast Plato’s idea of reincarnation, where one soul can live in many different bodies.) The second is the idea that truths in nature hold ‘always or for the most part’, so that a few exceptions to a general rule do not disprove that rule. That some people are biologically ‘intersex’ does not therefore undermine the truth that there are two sexes.
From these elements, Sr Prudence constructs a refreshingly sane and humane basis for what men and women should be. Her discussion remains, however, fairly abstract. The authors she discusses are nearly all philosophers, and are, unsurprisingly, interested mostly in the mind. For example, of the five passages referenced in the Index under ‘children, care of’, not one describes the distinctive care of ordinary mothers. (The Index does not mention ‘cooking’, let alone ‘breastfeeding’.) Some of her modern writers - Edith Stein, the Maritains, John Paul II himself - do begin to enrich the bare bones of the concept. Gabriel Marcel, for example, explored fidelity in family relations in the context of both his faith and his tender affection for his family, including his adopted son and his wife’s relatives.
It would have been good to see here a little engagement with writers such as Ivan Illich or Carol Gilligan, who explore the detailed concrete ways in which women and men have differed in their social roles or ways of thinking. It would also be helpful to situate the relationship between pairs of men and women among other fundamental types of friendship: between parents and children, siblings, groups of friends, two men or two women, colleagues, and so on. How far are the features of ‘integral gender complementarity’ exclusive to a sexually differentiated adult couple? Relatedly, how do ‘synergetic relation’ and ‘intergenerational fruition’ relate to each other, and to what extent is the latter concept used metaphorically?
The historical narrative is full of gems. Sr Prudence has an eye for the causes of momentous shifts: the creation of the all-male universities in the thirteenth century undermined the lively educational traditions of medieval women’s monasteries; after Descartes, complementarity was usually framed in ways that fractured the man or woman as a whole person; the history of scientific theories about the roles of male and female seeds exerted a hidden pressure on inequality until the nineteenth- and twentieth-century discoveries about the female egg.
The details often also sparkle. While Augustine and Aquinas play significant (not wholly creditable) roles in the story, they are joined by a vast cast (one reviewer counted 163 authors discussed!) We are introduced to the witty and courageous female characters in the plays of the tenth century nun Roswitha, and to Hildegard of Bingen’s pioneering analysis of the types of men and women and their complementary relations. A chapter on thirteenth and fourteenth century women religious includes well known mystical writers such as Catherine of Siena and Julian of Norwich. It ends, rather unexpectedly, with the warrior Joan of Arc, whose career might raise intriguing questions for Sr Prudence’s overall thesis.
The summary of Christine de Pizan’s philosophical arguments against named writers who denigrate women is one of the highlights of the book. Her range and subtlety are astonishing, and she anticipates many elements of the modern debate. Another early humanist was Leonardo Bruni, whose serious exchange of letters with Battista Malatesta (a slip describes them as married) encouraged her to widen her education in philosophy, history, and language. Two centuries later, by 1600, Lucretia Marinella was turning the tables completely against men with her The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men (a manuscript so vast that it amazed Sr Prudence when it arrived on a cart in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze!). A few generations later, Elizabeth of Bohemia was forcing Descartes himself to refine his account of the relations between body and soul; she blazed a trail for further critiques by two English women, Margaret Cavendish and the Quaker, Anne Finch Conway.
Others, meanwhile, were focusing on improving relations between men and women, notably Albrecht von Eyb who, though celibate, wrote a popular book praising the joys of a happy marriage, and Nicolas of Cusa, whose interest in reconciling opposites (he is perhaps best known as an early ecumenist) extended to theories of integrating masculine and feminine characteristics within individuals.
In the early twentieth century, Sr Prudence argues, Catholic writers, such as the Maritains, began to reinvigorate and develop the idea of integral complementarity. At the same time, however, other debates were leading to what she sees as the corruption or perversion of that idea, in philosophers such as Sartre and de Beauvoir, and in scientists such as Alfred Kinsey and John Money. Sr Prudence notes the moral as well as intellectual failings of these figures. It was not long before gender ideology had spread across the world, a process which was driven by conferences of the United Nations. Already in 1995, Mary Ann Glendon, head of the Vatican delegation to the United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing, was warning that ‘advocates of causes that have failed to win acceptance through ordinary democratic processes …. can be expected to keep on trying to insert their least popular ideas into UN documents for unveiling at home as “international norms”’.
The two final chapters expound in detail John Paul II’s theology of the body, presented as both the culmination of the ‘living idea’ of integral gender complementarity and the sane answer to the fractured, often fractious, current debate.
Of the three elements of the book, the least convincing to my mind is the use of Newman. The complexity of applying seven, fairly flexible, criteria to several elements of an integrated idea, over hundreds of examples, makes it very hard to explain clearly the relevant arguments, let alone to assess the results. It would have made for easier reading to disentangle this exercise from the main project.
The task of summarising a massive work is not easy, and the editor, Sr Mary Cora Uryase, deserves our thanks. Nevertheless, some editorial wrinkles remain to be smoothed out in subsequent editions. The Concept of Woman will provide an indispensable resource for able students seeking a balanced, historically informed understanding of gender and will also direct them, on points of particular interest, to the fuller accounts in the original volume.
