There is no doubt that Immanuel Kant has a woman problem. His anthropological studies of women are full of cutting remarks, and despite a generation of feminist Kantian scholarship, it is an open question whether he meant to include women as full, equal agents in either his moral or political philosophy.Those who engage this question within Kant's political philosophy ask whether or not women can "work their way up" to full, active citizenship.1 If women can achieve equality in this way, the argument goes, then we can solve Kant's woman problem. But this approach, I argue, asks the wrong question. It focuses on the status of wives rather than on the structure of the domestic sphere as a whole, and therefore obscures the ways in which the valuation of domestic space and reproductive labor shape access to rights and equality in Kant's political philosophy. I will argue that this approach misses the deeper structural and gendered inequalities built into Kant's conception of the state. Re-examining Kant's "woman problem" points us toward a larger problem with labor and inequality in the Kantian state: Kant's map of the rightful institutional order normatively requires that someone do the dependency work that makes independence possible.In making this argument, I am responding to a recent move to reframe the Kantian state as a model of welfare state liberalism.2 Critics have examined Kant's defense of unconditional poverty relief and distributive justice and his critique of the nobility in order to offer a robust account of the obligations of the public authority in the face of socioeconomic inequality.3 Although most of these analyses have focused on inequality in the public and market spheres, a few have taken up questions about dependency within the domestic sphere. Tamar Schapiro contends that the limits on rights for those within the domestic sphere is merely a temporary and nonideal feature of Kant's account of right. Helga Varden and Ernest Weinrib argue that if this is the case, the state must foster the conditions that will allow women, domestic servants, and other dependents to "work their way up" to full, active citizenship. 4 I will show that these arguments fail to grapple with the relationship between reproductive labor and the independence of active citizens in Kant's account of the state, and therefore, that they underestimate the ways in which the domestic sphere operates as a distinct sphere of rights, labor, and relations within the Kantian state.
This Element examines Kant's innovative account of labour in his political philosophy and develops an intersectional analysis of Kant. By demonstrating that Kant's analysis of slavery, citizenship, and sex developed in inter-linked ways over several decades, culminating in his development of a 'trichotomy' of Right, the author shows that Kant's normative account of independence is configured through his theory of labour, and is continuous with his anthropological accounts of race and gender, providing a systemic justification for the dependency of women and non-whites embedded in his philosophy of right. By examining Kant's arguments about slavery as intertwined with his account of domestic labour, the author argues that his ultimate rejection of slavery may owe more to his changing conceptualization of labour than to his theory of race, and that his final arguments against slavery rehearse strategies for embedding intersectional patterns of domestic dependence in his account of the rightful state.
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