Social order, cooperation, and the way out. A feminist reading of Jeremy Bentham, William Thompson and Anna Wheeler

Beginning with the 1975-1980 debate on Jeremy Bentham’s ‘feminism’, this essay considers the place of women in his overall theory of society, government, and the law, and then follows his legacy through the perspectives on women’s emancipation provided by William Thompson and Anna Wheeler. In the first part, the main loci of Bentham’s discourse on women are analyzed, arguing that this discourse can be fully grasped under the light of his conception of society as an order arising from exchange, where equality is conceivable only in terms of equivalence and rights are thoughts as a form of compensation of existing hierarchies of power. In the second part of the essay, William Thompson’s criticism of women’s subjection and his support for emancipation are analyzed in consideration of his different conception of society, where social cooperation takes the place of exchange as a dynamic source of order. In the final part of the essay, the political difference of Anna Wheeler’s contribution is then emphasized, due to her shift from a discourse whose subject is the order of society to a perspective whose feminism relies on a conception of women as the antagonistic, collective subject of social change.