SOURCE: Léon, Céline. “(A) Woman's Place within the Ethical.” In Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard, edited by Céline Léon and Sylvia Walsh, pp. 103-30. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997

In the following essay, Léon discusses Judge William's paradoxically negative views on women and women's liberation.

Unlike an aesthete who oscillates between envy and commiseration, Judge William (B), in the second volume of Either/Or (1843) and in Stages on Life's Way (1845), praises women and declares himself against altering them for self-enjoyment or self-aggrandizement. In effect, not only does Kierkegaard's paradigmatic ethicist and married man invest women with new strengths, he finds them just as capable as men of realizing the universal human: “My brief and simple opinion is that woman is certainly just as good as man—period. Any more discursive elaboration of the difference between the sexes or deliberation on...