The moral architecture of Hic Mulier

In 1620 a pamphlet appeared in England called Hic Mulier. Its purpose was to condemn women who dressed like men. What is of interest to me is the moral framework used. On what grounds did the pamphleteer oppose cross-dressing? 

Hic Mulier, title page illustration

I have previously written about a similar, companion pamphlet called Haec Vir. In this text, there are three potential reasons for supporting distinctions between men and women:

...by the Laws of Nature, by the rules of Religion, and the Customs of all civil Nations, it is necessary there be a distinct and special difference between Man and Woman

There is considerable discussion in Haec Vir about the role of custom and the rules of religion. The focus of Hic Mulier, though, is an appeal to nature. The author considers it unnatural for women to dress as men.

Appeals to nature often blend together two differing claims. The first is to suggest that a particular behaviour is wholly outside the given nature of the person carrying it out and is in this sense unnatural (like it would be unnatural for a dog to miaow like a cat). A modern example might be opposing women in frontline combat roles because the nature of a woman's body is designed around her maternal role rather than being a warrior, and that this has been generally observed in sex roles over the course of human history. 

This type of argument is not well accepted in liberal modernity. Modern philosophy has mostly rejected the idea of formal and final causes, where something is defined by its essence and its ultimate purpose. And modern philosophy often emphasises the idea that humans should be autonomously self-creating individuals, not defined by the givens of their being.

In Hic Mulier we see this kind of appeal to nature when the author argues that women who wear men's clothes are not being true to their own nature but are mimicking men, or putting on a mask or disguise - that it is merely imitation rather than a true representation of who they are and that in doing so they are being "monstrous" in the sense of becoming a deformed or hybrid creature not found in nature. 

Examples from the text include the author condemning the "folly of imitation"; claiming that the cross-dressing women were substituting for modesty "all Mimic and apish incivility"; labelling them as "mermonsters" rather than mermaids; and describing cross-dressing as "barbarous, in that it is exorbitant (wayward) from Nature and an Antithesis to kind". 

We see the language of disguise in the following:

What can be more barbarous than with the gloss of mumming Art to disguise the beauty of their creations? To mould their bodies to every deformed fashion, their tongues to vile and horrible profanations, and their hands to ruffianly and uncivil actions? To have their gestures as piebald and as motleyvarious as their disguises...

Oh yes, a world...so foully branded with this infamy of disguise. 

The author goes on to suggest that some of the mannish women might have been imitating popular stories of the time in which a woman pretended to be, or was mistaken for, a man. He later returns to the idea that cross-dressing is disguising the women's real natures in the following excerpt (note, a vizard was a strange looking oval mask worn by upper class women when outside to protect their complexions):

The fairest face covered with a foul vizard begets nothing but affright or scorn, and the noblest person in an ignoble disguise attains to nothing but reproach and scandal. Away then with these disguises and foul vizards.

So the first approach is the one that sees the act itself as being outside of nature and therefore, in the eyes of the pamphlet writer, an abomination.

It's difficult to use this first approach widely. After all, there are things that exist within our own nature, rather than outside of it, that are not morally good. So it's not as straightforward as claiming that something that is natural is therefore to be praised.

This is made clear in the pamphlet. The author recognises, and describes in detail, the differences between the higher nature of women and the lower.

So a second supplementary approach is needed. This takes the form, in Hic Mulier, of the claim that a woman is more truly herself, more truly in her nature when she acts according to the virtues of her sex. When she falls into her lower nature, into the vices characteristic of her sex, this is a deformity of her nature. It is not how she was truly made to be. 

How do we know what these virtues and vices are? In part, through the use of reason. If used well, our reason directs us to our nobler qualities, whereas a foolish person would be led to what is base. 

There is an emphasis in Hic Mulier on the virtue of temperance. A virtuous person will exercise restraint, particularly over appetites and desires. This ability to exercise a degree of rational control over oneself is a true freedom that makes us fit for civility; an absence of temperance, in which we are carried along wildly by our impulses, is both licentious and barbarous. 

And so there is a moral architecture that includes an appeal to nature, to virtue, to reason, to nobility, to wisdom, to restraint and to civility.*

Does the moral architecture of Hic Mulier make sense? I think so. In a Christian society, in which our original form is thought to be the image of God, it does make sense to believe that our higher, virtuous nature is the truer one that is natural to us (well-formed) and that the baser, vicious nature is the one that is fallen or de-formed. It fits too perhaps with the Platonic philosophy inherited from the classical world in which the closer you get to the original form, the more perfect a thing is. There might also be an influence here from the concept of the great chain of being in which there is a scale of nature from the lowest to the highest. Humans possess not only an animal like nature (such as physical appetites) but also a spiritual one (including a rational faculty). Therefore, to be fully within our nature would mean exercising rational control over our appetites - without this we would be reduced to the merely animal aspect of existence.

The moral terminology used in Hic Mulier is fitted to the overall architecture. Women are praised and criticised for a variety of reasons, but there is some emphasis, as you might expect, on the contrast between women who exercise restraint and those who do not. Virtuous women are described as modest, chaste, bashful, comely, shamefast and sober (shamefast meant being restrained in a positive sense by a sense of shame or propriety; to be sober meant having self-control, dignity and temperance). Vicious women, however, are termed wanton, loose, lascivious, shameless, skittish (inconstant, fickle), indiscreet (reckless, rash) and lustful (having excessive desires, not just sexual, as when we speak of "lust for power"). 

This is not the moral framework we commonly use today. This is to be expected as the moral architecture of our times runs almost directly counter to that defended in Hic Mulier. The current view is that we are empowered when, as autonomous individuals, we are free to choose in any direction. The logic of this position is that there should be minimal restraints on what people choose to do. 

The more traditional emphasis on qualities of self-restraint will seem alien or archaic to those brought up within the modern moral architecture. This is a pity as there is a kind of freedom and dignity in cultivating the virtue of temperance. This virtue helps us to retain our moral integrity, or, more profoundly, it permits us to continue in life as an integrated self. Everything in reality is subject to entropy. If we make no effort to uphold beneficial order either in ourselves or in society, then there will be a falling away toward collapse and disorder. If we exercise no rational control over our passions, desires and appetites, then we inevitably fall into demoralising vices that we are increasingly subject to and which are a source of disempowerment (and will likely leave us jaded and less able to enjoyably experience the passionate side of life).

Temperance is, of course, not the only virtue. The entire moral architecture should not be built on this foundation alone. But I do think we can learn something from the way that temperance was once connected to man's higher nature and to highly esteemed traits of character.

*One positive aspect of this moral architecture is that it avoids the deadlock that occurred in the middle of the twentieth century. Freud had suggested that people did need to exercise restraint in the interests of civilisation, but that in doing so they would be unhappy. They would repress their instinctive drives (sexual and aggressive) which would cause distress or even neurosis. A counterculture led by figures like Wilhelm Reich agreed with Freud that repression would lead to neuroses but concluded that people should be uninhibited in expressing their instinctive drives ("let it all hang out"). Reich took a negative view of civilisation, connecting it to a violent authoritarian opposition to human freedom. The two options here are both unattractive: you get to be either a neurotic and unhappy member of civilised society, or else a spaced out hippy with no moral self-control. The model put forward in the 1620s is more positive. The person who is "got together" in the sense of being able to moderate their own actions is thought to be more themselves, to have more freedom of self, and to be more fit to participate in a civilised society. These things (nature, freedom, civilised society) are not set against each other as they were in the twentieth century.