Midi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Geertje Bol (UGent)

Ambition had long been one of the most pernicious of Christian sins. In seventeenth-century England, however, ambition became increasingly accepted as natural and even admirable. Yet at the same time, it was denied to half of human beings: female ambition remained unnatural and vicious. As I show in this article, several seventeenth-century feminists––Rachel Speght, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, and Judith Drake––challenged this emerging double standard. In their own distinct ways, these thinkers reimagined ambition as a feminist tool which they used to argue in favour of women’s equality with men––and even their superiority. Unearthing this neglected strand of ambitious feminism not only innovates the history of feminist and political philosophy, however, but also sheds light on the fraught relationship between ambition and feminism in the present. Their writings can point the way to a reconciliation between feminism and ambition that avoids the pitfalls identified by feminist philosophers today.