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NATURAL LAW IS TILE BEST PHILOSOPHY FOR WOMEN
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- LEO STRAUSS
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NATURAL LAW IS TILE BEST PHILOSOPHY FOR WOMEN1. NATURAL RIGHTS PHILOSOPHICALLY SUPERIOR TO ALTERNATIVES Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Political Activist, in Beth M. Waggenspack, THE SEARCH FOR SELF-SOVEREIGNTY, 1989, p. 111 There are certain natural rights as inalienable to civilization as are the rights of air and motion to the savage in the wilderness. The natural rights of the civilized man and woman axe government, property, the harmonious development of all their powers, and the gratification of their desires. There are a few people we now and then meet who, like Jeremy Bentham, scout the idea of natural rights in civilization, and pronounce them mere metaphors, declaring that there are no rights aside from those the law confers. If the law made man too, that might do, for then he could be made to order to fit the particular niche he was designed to fill. 2. NATURAL LAW DEMANDS ABSOLUTE GENDER EQUALITY Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Political Activist, in Beth M. Waggenspack, THE SEARCH FOR SELF-SOVEREIGNTY, 1989, p. 119 Those people who declaim on the inequalities of sex, the disabilities and limitations of one as against the other, show themselves as ignorant of the first principles of life as would that philosopher who should undertake to show the comparative power of the positive as against the negative electricity, of the centrifugal as against the centripetal force, the attraction of the north as against the south end of the magnet. These great natural forces must be perfectly balanced or the whole material world would relapse into chaos. Just so the masculine and feminine elements in humanity must be exactly balanced to redeem the moral and social world from the chaos which surrounds it. One might as well talk of separate spheres for the two ends of the magnet as for man and woman; they may have separate duties in the same sphere, but their true place is together everywhere.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Political Activist. CORRESPONDENCE, WRITINGS, SPEECHES, 1981, p. 137 Instead of leaving everything in the home to chance as now, we should apply science and philosophy to our daily life. I should feel that I have not lived in vain if faith of mine could roll off the soul of woman that dark cloud, that nightmare, that false belief that all her weaknesses and disabilities are natural, that her sufferings in maternity are a punishment for the sins of Adam and Eve and teach her that higher gospel that by obedience to natural laws she might secure uninterrupted health and happiness to herself and mould future generations to her will. 4. WOMEN~S AITACKS ON FEMINISM DUE TO IGNORANCE OF THEIR SITUATION Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Political Activist. CORRESPONDENCE, WRITINGS, SPEECHES, 1981, p. 33 The most discouraging, the most lamentable aspect our cause wears is the indifference, indeed the contempt, with which women themselves regard the movement. Where the subject is introduced, among those even who claim to be intelligent and educated, it is met by the scornful curl of the lip, and by expression of ridicule and disgust. But we shall hope for better things of them when they are enlightened in regard to their present position. When women know the laws and constitutions under which they live, they will not publish their degradation by declaring themselves satisfied, nor their ignorance, by declaring they have all the rights they want. LEO STRAUSSGERMAN PHILOSOPHER (1899- 1973)Liberal and radical scholars often contend that thinking conservatives are rare. Perhaps this is because conservatives feel they have very little to defend; the status quo, after all, is the status quo, and challenges which actually threaten the existing state of affairs are rare. But when those challenges become part of the establishment itself, when radicalism becomes the norm, then conservatives are pushed up against the wall, and like anyone in that position, they are capable of finding a great deal of creativity and aggression. Leo Strauss defended “traditional” ideas such as natural right, transcendent values, and philosophical elitism at a time when those ideas bad been discredited and shrugged off by academics and politicians as well as the general public. His stubborn refusal to give in to relativism, historicism and pluralism made him the object of ridicule and studied ignorance by other philosophers, but recently thinkers like Allan Bloom and other Neo-conservatives have revived his ideas. Life And WorkLeo Strauss was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Kirchhain Hessen, Germany on September 20, 1899. It would be another twenty five years before the scapegoating of Jews in Germany would reach unmanageable proportions, so the young Strauss was not denied the social life of most German youth; he served in the German army, then completed his education at the Universities of Marburg, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Hamburg, where he obtained his doctorate. A political Zionist from early on, Strauss was interested both in the ability of Jews to establish political power, and the tension between “Athens and Jerusalem” philosophically, or the conflict between reason and revelation. These questions would influence Stress’ thinking throughout his life, but he was forced to contemplate them elsewhere when Hitler’s rise to power sent Strauss fleeing to the United States. There, he taught at Columbia, the New School for Social Research, and the University of Chicago, among other places, while writing several important books. Books such as On Tyranny, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy and Natural Right and History all put forth the notion of transcendent values and the inherent superiority of Western notions of political good, while others such as Persecution and the Act of Writing The City and Man, and What is Political Philosophy dealt with issues ranging from natural right to liberal democracy to religion. His belief in conservative notions of political philosophy were unpopular among intellectuals, especially after World War II, but he attracted a small following at the University of Chicago, and internationally, purporting to represent a “silent” majority who still longed for the age-old traditions inherited from Ancient Greece: a natural aristocracy, traditional values and an educated class of rulers. Leo Strauss died in 1973. Over ten years later, a resurgence of interest in his ideas accompanied the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and conservatives in the debate over multiculturalism in education borrowed heavily from Strauss’ insistence that transcendent values exist and should be promoted in education. 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