Kathleen Crowther, Gender and Race in the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was a political and social movement as well as an intellectual one. Leading Enlightenment thinkers throughout Europe and America believed that science and reason, rather than religion and tradition, held the key to the reform and improvement of society. So, for example, most Enlightenment thinkers believed that men should be judged on their merits, not on the family they happened to be born into. It led to calls for universal education, a more democratic political process, and for rank and position being determined by a person’s worth, not his inherited title. It also led to serious, and eventually violent, challenges to the political dominance of monarchs and a hereditary aristocracy. The American Declaration of Independence, written in 1776, is a quintessential Enlightenment statement of these new beliefs. Let’s look at the beginning of this document (for a complete transcription, click here Links to an external site.):

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Note first that the Declaration of Independence asserts that Americans colonists are “separate and equal” to the English. Further, it goes on to stress that “all men are created equal” and governments “[derive] their just powers from the consent of the governed.” All of these were radical propositions in 1776, because they involved a rejection of the authority of both traditional religion and traditional sources of authority. That is, although the American Congress invokes God as Creator, it flatly denies that kings and aristocrats rule by divine right. And yet, that had been an almost universally accepted idea, by both rulers and established churches (both Catholic and Protestant) until the eighteenth century. To assert that God had created men EQUAL was a profound challenge to the existing social order.

However, as most of you are aware, the Founding Fathers of the United States did not consider women to be equal to men. (Women could not vote or stand for political office in the US until 1920.) When they wrote that “all men are created equal,” they did indeed mean “all men,” not all human beings. (Actually, they meant “all white men,” but I’ll come back to that point.) Indeed, most Enlightenment thinkers agreed that men were superior to women because men were more rational. The ideas that women are less rational than men and should be subordinate to men were very very old. In the philosophical tradition, they go back to Plato and Aristotle. And they were certainly supported by traditional interpretations of the story of creation from the Bible in which Adam was created first and Eve was created to be his “helpmeet.” But in other areas of political and social life Enlightenment thinkers had challenged the authority of intellectual and religious traditions. This led a few (and I emphasize that they were in the minority) women and men to argue that the social and political subordination of women was neither natural nor inevitable. The fact that women might appear less rational than men was due to their being denied the same educational opportunities as men. In other words, the inferiority of women was socially constructed, and was held in place by religion and tradition. In a truly rationally ordered society, men and women would be treated equally. One of the foremost exponents of this view was Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) Links to an external site. (pictured below), whose most well known work is her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

Although the Declaration of Independence asserts that “all men are created equal,” the Founding Fathers did not mean that black men were created equal to white men. The principle author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, was a slave owner, and slavery was not abolished in the US until the end of the nineteenth century. They also did not mean that Native American men were equal to white men, and the slaughter, forced resettlement and dispossession of Native American tribes continued throughout the nineteenth century (something memorialized in the University of Oklahoma’s chant “Boomer Sooner,” a reference to the Land Run of 1889 in which white settlers were allowed to take over land previously allotted to Native Americans). Most Enlightenment thinkers in Europe as well as America were convinced of the superiority of white Europeans and Americans compared to other races. There were some exceptions to this. A very few black (and even fewer white) philosophers and political theorists argued that all human beings were capable of reason. One such philosopher was Anton Wilhelm Amo (ca. 1703 – ca. 1759). was an African from what is now Ghana, who was brought to Europe as a child as a slave and given to Anthony Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. The Duke had Amo educated with his own sons, and eventually freed him. Amo studied law at the University of Halle, where he wrote a dissertation in 1729 on “The Rights of Moors [Africans] in Europe.” (He wrote the dissertation in Latin, and it has not been translated into English.)  The statue pictured below is a monument to Amo at the University of Halle.

The American (1776) and French Revolutions (1789) are frequently described as the culmination of the Enlightenment political program, because both involved the overthrow of traditional monarchies and state churches and the institution of more representative forms of government. However, there is a third Revolution that is frequently left out of the account of the Enlightenment: the Haitian Revolution of 1804. This was the first and only slave revolt that led to the establishment a country governed by former slaves. It was led by François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (1743 – 1803) (picture below), a man familiar with the work of French philosophers and arguments for human equality. In conclusion, I will quote the Caribbean historian Lillian Guerra on the importance of the Haitian Revolution:

In 1804, Haiti was host to the first successful slave revolt in the history of the world and the first and only country to identify itself as “black.” Thanks to Haiti, blackness emerged as something other than a color marking inferiority; it became a banner for unity and mobilization around a common project of freedom and equality that defied racial and economic injustice worldwide. Haiti changed everything by questioning what nearly everyone in the European and European-dominated world took for granted. The history of freedom in America arguably began not with slave owners like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who called for a limited, racialized vision of anti-imperialist freedom, but in the Caribbean with the revolution in Haiti and with broader struggles for freedom from colonialism (which continued with the emergence of 20th-century US colonialism).  (From Lillian Guerra, "Why Caribbean History Matters" Perspectives on History, March 2014 Links to an external site.