The forthcoming article “Women and the double standard of ambition” by Geertje J. Bol is summarized by the author below.
We can’t seem to decide whether ambition is a vice or virtue. We need ambitious people to make society work, but ambition unchecked can destroy it. This profound moral instability guarantees double standards—if we cannot decide if something is a vice or virtue, we will inevitably judge it differently in different people. This article is concerned with one particularly enduring double standard: the case of women’s ambition. In recent years, feminists have fiercely debated whether ambition empowers women or merely reinforces the inequalities they face—with the rise and fall of the “girlboss” crystallising the tension.
To shed light on this debate, the article turns to the moment when this double standard was formed. It shows how seventeenth-century women challenged it by reimagining ambition as a feminist tool, using it not only to argue in favour of women’s equality with men, but even their superiority. Margaret Cavendish boldly declared she wanted to be “Margaret the First,” aligning her ambitions with those of kings; Mary Astell urged women to “be as ambitious as you please”; and Judith Drake turned the tables entirely, arguing that women’s more bounded ambitions actually made them superior to men. The article argues that unearthing this tradition of ambitious feminism points towards a reconciliation between feminism and ambition that sidesteps the pitfalls of corporate feminism.
About the author: Geertje J. Bol is an SNSF Ambizione fellow at the University of Fribourg. Their research “Women and the double standard of ambition” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.