In this article, I trace lines of materialist pedagogies in the history of women workers’ education following feminist interpretations of Spinoza’s assemblage of joyful affects. More particularly, I focus on the notions of laetitia [joy], gaudium [gladness] and hilaritas [cheerfulness] as entanglements of joy and trace their expression in practices and discourses inscribed in archival documents that I have reassembled around the theme of women workers’ education. My reading of Ethics follows a range of feminist thinkers that have engaged with (...) Spinoza’s ‘ethics of joy’ in education and beyond. The article draws on extensive archival work with personal auto/biographical documents and public essays of women workers/educators/writers in Paris and New York that span the period between 1830 and 1950. What I argue is that it is the experience of creative and radical education that has created a platform for workers to re-imagine themselves in the world with others. (shrink)

This paper outlines Spinoza’s two diametrically opposed views on the question of sexual equality. In the Political Treatise, he contends that women are naturally inferior to men, and that they are unable to practice virtue. Yet, he presents an antithetical portrait of Eve in his retelling of the Fall in the Ethics. There, Eve’s nature accords perfectly with Adam’s, and their relationship might have promoted virtue in each of them. Attention to Spinoza’s version of the Fall reveals the profound importance (...) of the human bond for the enjoyment of freedom, and the possibility that women are not categorically excluded from Spinoza’s vision of virtue. (shrink)

This paper examines Spinoza's remarks on women in the Political Treatise in the context of his views in the Ethics about human community and similitude. Although these remarks appear to exclude women from democratic participation on the basis of essential incapacities, I aim to show that Spinoza intended these remarks not as true statements, but as prompts for critical consideration of the place of women in the progressive democratic polity. In common with other scholars, I argue that women, in Spinoza's (...) system, are deprived of freedom and political participation not by their essential natures, but by their social and historical circumstances. I differ from other scholars, however, in basing this conclusion on the different critical functions of the Political Treatise and the Ethics. Following that critical comparison, I consider Spinoza's views on the `natural right' of women and their equal capacity for political participation in terms of his arguments for the compositional similarity of men and women. Finally, I argue that Spinoza offers an explanation for women's actual disempowerment through his account of economic dependence within marriage. (shrink)