Lloyd Response

Sammy Karon

25 January 2014

           

Genevieve Lloyd’s paper deals with the issue of “separate but equal,” which can be seen as a binary opposition of the male and female intellect. She starts off by noting that since the beginning of philosophy, women have been differentiated by men based on their assumed mental capacity. Lloyd notes that historically, women have been considered to be emotionally burdened while men have been considered intellectually gifted. While women have been associated with confusion, men have been associated with clarity. This first dichotomy between male and female mental capacity was clearly separate and unequal: men were more capable than women. However, a later philosopher, Gilligan, argued that it was possible for women to different but not less than men. Descartes contributed to the issue of separate but equal by arguing that the mind and body were separate entities. This concept made it possible for women to have different physical bodies and yet still have equal mental capacity. Because Descartes believed the mind was separate from the body, that meant that reason was separate from emotion, so it would no longer be logical to argue that because women have more emotions they have less mental capacity. Lloyd takes issue with this still, because she believes that differentiating between male and female intellect can lead to “complementary” arguments. Some people believe that because women are more emotional and men are more intellectual, together they form a perfect union. However, Lloyd believes that the “complementary” emotional attributes of women result from suppression. Women do not need to complement men to be significant in their own existence. Thus, Lloyd believes that the idea of separate but equal should not be used to understand the differences between the male and female mind. Although women have historically been perceived to be more emotional, that does not make them less intellectually competent. Female intellect does not exist to fill in the failings of men, and the idea that women and men exist to complement each other—with one side doing more work than the other—is not logically sound.