The Women Were Up to Something

On Patriarchy

In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego. - Iris Murdoch

Four women were born in 1919-1920. The year of their birth is of great consequence, as they were born after the First World War and before the Second. In addition to the unimaginable suffering these wars caused, the wars presented a significant cultural change. Not only were old alliances breaking and old monarchies falling, but the moral clarity that had accompanied them was also dissolving. In Barbara Tuchman’s words, “on history’s lock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”¹

Growing up at the end of history would have its challenges, but also its opportunities. As the conventions of the old world were certainly showing their wear, and shopworn hierarchies fraying, new opportunities for women materialized. Some of these opportunities were at the Oxford colleges. Though Oxford’s first female graduates completed their degrees in 1920, in 1927 the number of women admitted was capped to no more than 840, less than a quarter of the men allowed.² But with a majority of Europe’s men off to war, the full participation of women, and the dominance of their voices, was historically unique.

And yet the women under discussion did not benefit solely from the absence of men at Oxford. They were among the sharpest philosophical minds of their generation, gender notwithstanding. All four of them were sharp enough to hold their own amidst Oxford’s notorious infighting and turf wars.

But Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch and Mary Midgely did not merely carry on the legacy of Oxford philosophy. No, the Great Wars- the end of the First and the advent of the Second- brought with them a moral complexity that in 2023 we might call trauma but that in 1940 was called thought. The women thought up to and into the abyss that the Wars had opened up in the moral life. Starting into the abyss, they dared to think about Goodness.

As Benjamin Lipscomb tells it in his marvelous book, The Women are Up to Something, one of the questions that prompted the philosophical work of Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgely was the question of fact and value.           

The question of “fact” versus “value” identifies a distinction between those things that can be verified and those that cannot. Such a distinction can be critical, particularly when the intent is to discern what is “fact” and what is “opinion”, or propaganda.  

But there is a grey area between those things that are “true and verifiable”, and those things that are “true but unverifiable”. Much of the realm of morality belongs to that latter class. Evil is certainly true, but how might it be proven to be such, in a way that is universally agreed upon? If evil is largely an evaluation of a state of affairs, is it not an opinion about the state of affairs, an opinion about which others might disagree? Isn’t “any evaluative statement is an opinion, no matter how well grounded” (9)? According to the philosophical arguments of their day, “values can never be facts”, but only opinions (9).³

The women of 1919, however, had seen the newsreels. When in 1945 the British government released the reel- entitled German Atrocities- the British people could not deny what had happened. Conservative MP Mavis Tate narrated the images and directly addressed its viewers, insisting that “the reality was indescribably worse than the pictures” (3). The women saw “the piles of bodies, the remains charred in ovens or tangled in electrified wire, the emaciated survivors stumbling around in a daze, the adolescents clutching the bowls of thin soup they’d been given, flinching instinctively as anyone approached” (3).

When Philippa Foot finally went to view the images, she emerged in shock. As she told her friend and mentor Donald MacKinnon, after seeing those images “Nothing [was] ever going to be the same again” (4). No, he agreed, nothing would be the same. But it was clear to both of them- “if philosophy was going to have any point, it had to be able to speak to that horror”. It had to think with the gravest challenges of human living in order to face them head-on.

To allow a distinction between facts and values would yield an ethics that emphasized the consistency of human actions more than the correspondence between human actions and an unyielding picture of truth. The problem with such a view was the gravity of evil that was rendered visible in the newsreels. The atrocities of Nazi Germany especially yielded a resolute ethical paradigm that, though not overdetermined, certainly mandated very specific ethical behaviors in certain circumstances. Virtuous living made demands that trumped consistency.

Perhaps values could never be facts- but they could be certain. Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgely were certain that evil’s grasp had been tight around Europe in 1945. Perhaps evil could not be proven, but its scars were apparent. The newsreels of 1945 had cut apart the division between fact and value. As Lipscomb writes, as Foot 

stepped through the Keble College gates onto Parks Road, she knew what she wanted to say, if only she could find the words: that what the Nazis had done was wicked. As she put it years later, looking back on the moment of realization: “this is not just a personal decision… or an expression of disapproval. There is something objective here ( 21).

What that something was fell under the realm of morals. They sought not a rules based morality but an inextricably particular one. Each of the four lady philosophers approached the question of morals differently. For Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, the question of morality brought them into conversation with Aristotle and especially Thomas Aquinas, whose notion of “the good” is inextricably connected to eudaimonia, or human flourishing.⁴

Iris Murdoch, the most flamboyant of the bunch, was endlessly preoccupied with how one might know the good, and whether the fact-value distinction was adequate. She was especially interested in self-deception, perhaps because her own motives were so often opaque to herself. Prone to crushes and affairs, Murdoch describes herself as Mary Magdalene to a male confessor’s Christ- on two separate occasions, with two different men standing in as Christ. But her profligate devotion led to a form of human flourishing possible only to those who have loved well.

And Mary Midgley, trained as a philosopher with Anscombe, took years away from the rigors of Oxford to raise her three boys and observe the natural world. She formulated a view of the human animal that argued against many common assumptions about the distinctions between “human” and “animal” life, offering new observations about both life forms.

Philosophy at its best is reflection on the problem of life, and the women were living the problem. They fell in love with the wrong people- sometimes their teachers, and on two occasions, each other- they had too many children (Anscombe) or too few (Foot), they worked without rest and suffered the effects of childhood illnesses and neglect. They kept messy houses and raised loud boys whose presence brought forth the question- what is it, exactly, that makes this one man and not beast? They swore and smoked and argued. They held their opinions too loudly for some of those listening. They took issue with the discourse, finding it too fiddly, both too precise and entirely missing the real problem. Their lives were lived as questions.

The largest question was of course the War, whose gravity ripped a hole in the universe. The women did not shirk from this tragedy. But they also did not lose themselves in it. They bravely and boldly approached the rift and considered it for what it was- a tragic, but very real, loss. But they kept living in spite of it. They wrote letters and gave lectures and argued (always argued!) about matters philosophical. After the unbelievable loss of the Wars, they asked the only question that was left to them, which was how to now live. It was always living that was the question.

Speaking rationally about morals and about what ought to be the case required a great moral seriousness and commitment among the women. They wasted no time with small matters:“Glibness, for Anscombe, was the great intellectual vice; recognition that a problem is hard, the great virtue” (148).   

Moral seriousness, for all four, meant deep devotion. Anscombe and Foot especially worked long hours, to the point of exhaustion. Anscombe was a devout Catholic who followed the church’s teaching on contraception. She had seven children who mostly minded themselves. Lipscomb recounts an Oxford tale that says that “the younger children were sent outdoors with labels on their clothing: “If found wandering please return to 27 St. John Street” (150). Her house was filthy. When interviewed for a profile about her work and asked “how do you manage a household with a husband and six children while carrying on your full-time career?,” Anscombe replied, “You just have to realize that dirt doesn’t matter” (151). Lipscomb recounts:

This is the key to all the most colorful stories about Anscomb: she drew a firm distinction between what mattered and what didn’t. She then devoted herself unreservedly to what mattered. And she spent as little energy as possible on what didn’t (151).

So when Anscombe and Foot worked to recover the concepts of vice and virtue, as well as euddaimonia to describe human flourishing, they did this in the context of parenting seven children (Anscombe) or grieving having none (Foot). Flourishing was not a picture of a life that belonged to someone else, its idealized pixels on a screen. It was the shape of a life lived toward the good, whatever its constraints.

The philosophical question for the four women of Oxford was what always one must do and how one must live. Amidst their loves and their loss and their deep devotion to their students, the women were up to something.

What they were not up to was thinking about “gender” and its relation to their work as lady philosophers. Certainly that they were women was noted as a curiosity, but none of the four seemed to reflect on this overly much. Ludwig Wittgenstein, who disliked “lady philosophers”, was fond enough of Anscombe to call her “old man”. Mary Midgely, the one of the four who wrote about what being woman meant, sought to define what female distinctives were, not to deny them, or to insist on the disadvantages they faced having shared them.

One could speculate about the conditions that allowed for the development of these four. Certainly they benefited not from support for women or policies in their favor. They seemed to care little for the advancement of other women as a category. They cared instead for the discipline of philosophy. If women flourished as philosophers, so be it. But “women doing philosophy” was not their priority. They for the most part did not form working groups of other lady philosophers or seek to recruit women to the discipline. They simply sought to further their discipline and the truth telling it enabled.

Our day sees much and persistent writing about gender, as a well as a persistent preoccupation with women’s participation or exclusion from spheres of public influence. Some of this exclusion is named “patriarchy”.

Patriarchy, like divinity, does not admit of degrees. It is often deployed as a modern diagnosis of all that makes relations between men and women painful, awkward, tragic, or uncomfortable. It is rarely queried for what it is.

There are of course several species of patriarchy, some more interesting (or more vile) than others. There is chauvinism, which mimics old-fashioned conventions that assumed male strength and leadership over the same in females. This might show forth in a man opening a door for a woman, or a man stepping in first in public conversation. Chauvinism may be bad manners, depending on cultural conventions, but it is not bad morals.

There is also boorishness, which is the ill-behaviored (and ill-intentioned) form of chauvinism. This might exhibit in touching a female colleague’s breasts or inquiring about a woman’s sexual preferences. Boorishness is bad in both manners and morals but bears no necessary relation to a system called “patriarchy”- there would be boorish men even within an egalitarian landscape, though they may be penalized differently.

There is also the tragic dimension of life, which displays itself from time to time in relations between men and women. In tragic situations, men and women fall in love (or out of love) in ways that leave the love unrequited. Women fall in love with men who are married, married men fall in love with their younger students. This is tragic (and also quite ordinary), but not “patriarchy”, even if the man is your boss.

Women also often lose years, decades even, to the care and raising of children. This is ordinary, perhaps even natural. It is not tragic, and also not patriarchy. It is ordinary to inquire about the health of a colleague’s children, whether that colleague is a male or a female. It is natural for a woman who is often baking for her children to extend that same form of nurture and care to her students, who also enjoy cookies. This does not exhibit patriarchy.

There are certainly occasions where men assume they have more power or competence than women. But in such occasions, an actual display of female power or competence is often enough to correct the record. Elizabeth Anscombe became Wittgenstein’s “old man” because she had power enough of her own. The term was one of endearment and not chauvinism.

One could indeed imagine that Elizabeth Anscombe- who once informally lectured about “shitting”-  might interrogate boorishness. She would consider its habits and effects as well as the form of life that it promoted or inhibited. She would also examine the ways it impinged upon the life of others. But she would refuse an empty category like “patriarchy” if it collapsed boorishness and maternal commitment and chauvinism, all of these also being different from the conditions that lead to workplace romances, for good or ill. To name each of these things “patriarchy” demonstrates little curiosity about women’s lives and about the men who encounter them.

It is quite interesting that the women of Oxford find patriarchy so uninteresting. These women were able to focus their lives on truth telling without speaking much at all about their experience of being women, and with nearly no reflection on any systems that inhibited their truthtelling.

They were seldom interested in power. Of course they stewarded the power that they had as they filled the chairs to which they were assigned, but “power” as an abstract concept seemed uninteresting to them. What was more interesting was agency, which each of them did indeed have.

Virtue Ethics and Patriarchy

The field that these four women reinvigorated came to be called “virtue ethics”. “Virtue ethics” draws on concepts of human excellence, practical wisdom, and human flourishing that originated in Greek philosophy.⁵ Virtue ethics recognizes that human behavior is infinitely varied and differs according to the persons involved. It focuses largely on “what sort of persons we should be and how we should live”, recognizing that human behavior is not best judged as according to a standard or ideal. Human life does not accord to such formulas. Rather virtue ethics allows for a wide variety of human circumstances and hardship and assesses human nature and behavior under the conditions that exist.

The study of virtue is often strongest and most compelling when it considers the irreducibly particular circumstances that individuals find themselves in. It is not a rule-based set of criteria but a conversation about how humans might attain the good to which they aspire. It also recognizes that “what is good for the goose is not good for the gander”; put more precisely, the Good as an ideal remains the same, but the means by which it may be pursued, and the ease or vigor with which it must be pursued, may differ significantly. So, as Foot writes, “there is something particularly admirable about people who manage to act well when it is especially hard for them to do so, but the plausibility of this depends on exactly what “makes it hard”.⁶ A grieving woman who still entertains a visitor, in spite of her grief, is more admirable than a flighty, bored woman who does the same.

What virtue ethics recognizes is that human virtue is infinitely particular, and that the circumstances that individuals find themselves in shape their virtuous acts. These might be on the large scale- as in living during war time- or the small- as in dealing with a husband’s abandonment due to infertility, as Philippa Foot had to endure. Foot’s happy celebration of a friend’s wedding would reveal a form of virtue that a happily married celebrants’ participation might not. There is no broad “system” or set of rules that overdetermines the meaning of individual actions. Though there is a standard- often called the Good- the various approaches to that standard will diverge.

Much recent focus on “patriarchy” fails at truth telling at the precise place that virtue ethics succeeds, because “patriarchy” like divinity does not admit of degrees. It also yields no interest in motivation, circumstance, or personal history.

What recent focus on “patriarchy” attempts to demonstrate are the ways that the "tradition" or "church practice" is stacked against women's involvement in the maintenance and repair of the local church or local institutions. But such accounts of patriarchy demonstrate little curiosity about a) the way individual women navigate these things and b) whether patriarchy is an adequate definition (and what it precisely means).

This view to the prevalence and all-encompassing effects of patriarchy does indeed seem to be the conclusion of many recent books on the topic. Whether or not such an evaluation is descriptively adequate, what such a definition lacks is any interest in virtue and the irreducibly particular forms it takes in the individual lives of women. Where virtue and the impressionistic creativity that it demands brings to the table is a consideration of real life, and only real lives can be good or holy ones.

It is not just whether patriarchy is "real" or a "real problem", it is what kind of thinking focuses on "patriarchy" generates. What are the questions that one is preoccupied with, when thinking about "patriarchy", and what forms of life do such questions generate? How does a focus on “patriarchy” inhibit the question or exercise of moral agency? Might preoccupation with it create a form of life more anemic, less free, and less interesting than the alternative?

Iris Murdoch's preoccupation with "self deception" was so fruitful because she found herself often deceived by her own desires and impulses. She was doing the Socratic philosophical-living that is so dangerous and fruitful. So she was both actually thinking, and actually living. But reflecting on "patriarchy" seems to potentially lose the "individual" and the varied moral agency there under the generic "patriarchal" collective. So not only is it boring, it dampens moral agency and does not encourage the sort of self-questioning thought that thinking of oneself as a moral agent- good bad seductive and all the rest- generates. It flattens thinking into asking how patriarchy might be hiding, behind the scenes, to constrain or enable action. Considering how virtue might enable or disable the actions of individuals introduces the question and the possibility of self-deception, which might also be at hand.

While certainly being a “woman” would have meaning for a thinker like Iris Murdoch, the forces operating on the will for her were largely psychological or egocentric, not systemic. So a woman could be lustful or self-deceptive or jealous or arrogant or powerful or deceived- but this wide range of behaviors are located in her own psychological makeup and not in social expectations about what it is to be “woman”. As far as Murdoch was concerned, it was equally possible for a man or a woman to be good.

At least one habit that produced such open curiosity was the ability these philosophical women had to know their own minds. They questioned everything, from the meaning of war and abortion to slander and jealousy. Anscombe developed a years-long interrogation of murder.

What they were not interested in, conceptually, was “gender” or “patriarchy”. The women actually did find themselves in awkward romantic entanglements that might invite a modern examination of such questions. Iris Murdoch was known for her crushes, sometimes on her professors. Philippa Foot’s husband left her for her secretary, years after she had requested a course reduction to have more time for homemaking. Mary Midgely disappeared for a decade to raise her children. All of these arrangements might be seen as derived from patriarchy, which is thought to set the rules and roles by which women live their lives. But it seems that the four philosophers saw each occasion as simply the shape that women’s lives take. The women also sometimes found themselves in awkward romantic entanglements. All of these situations were the conditions from which the lady philosophers began the work of taking up the world in all its particularities and considering what was real.

Perhaps the view of patriarchy’s systemic dominance will prove to be a true view of the world. But what a pity it would be to consider the world and find it so boring. The women were up to something, once. They found a world both deeply tragic and worth their hardest thought. I hope that this might again be the sort of work women are up to, for the conditions certainly demand this form of moral seriousness.

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1. From Barbara Tuchman’s inimitable Guns of August.

2. This quota was in place until 1957. See https://www.ox.ac.uk/about/oxford-people/women-at-oxford/centenary-womens-timeline.

3. Internal quotations are from Benjamin Lipscomb, The Women are Up to Something. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021

4. See Lipscomb 238.

5. They did not all approve of this labeling- Philippa Foot especially thought this a terrible name and wrote against “virtue ethics”. For an excellent introduction, see “Virtue Ethics” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, see the Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy

6. See the Foot 1978: 11–14, quoted in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, here. The example of the woman offering hospitality also comes from this entry.