Second wave feminism has always had a radical strand. It has always been about

more than equal pay. It was also, for instance, about exposing and then discarding

banal conventional unreflective ideas that led to banal conventional unreflective

behaviour. Ideas about cooking and cleaning being somehow naturally women’s

work, for example, which led to men cheerfully lounging about while women put

in what Arlie Hochschild calls a second shift. And even more than that, unexamined

ideas about what women are like, what they want, what they should be and do.

David Lodge once remarked that women became much more interesting after feminism,

and his own novels bear this out, as do those of Michael Frayn and other male

novelists who started writing in the ’50s or ’60s. The pre-1970 female characters

are non-entities, the post-1970 ones–Robyn Penrose in Nice Work, Kate

in Headlong–take up a lot of space. The very way women are perceived

and noticed and thought about changed with feminism, and that would not have

happened if mere institutional reform had been the only goal.

But there are radical ideas and then there are radical ideas. One of the less

helpful ones was difference feminism. The foundations of this shaky edifice

were laid in the ’70s, when a popular rhetorical move was to label many usually

well-thought-of attributes and tools–reason, logic, science, “linear” thinking,

abstract ideas, analysis, objectivity, argument–as male, and dub their opposite

female. So by a contortion that defies “male” logic, it somehow became feminist

to confine women all over again to intuition, guesswork, instinct, feelings,

subjectivity, and arm-waving.

This school of thought became mainstream in 1982 with the publication of Carol

Gilligan’s highly influential In a Different Voice. Gilligan claims that

women have their own special version of morality rooted in relationships and

caring rather than abstract notions of justice and equity. This of course sounds

startlingly like the patronizing pat on the head with which women were barred

from public life in the 19th century, because the dear creatures were simply

too good for that mucky arena. It is quite a feat of legerdemain to take what

had been thought a classic bit of sexist mystification and turn it into new

feminist wisdom.

But however perverse or odd it may seem, and though her research has been sharply

criticised,[1] Gilligan’s views were and are indeed popular.

The criticisms were in small academic publications, while Gilligan got an admiring

profile in the New York Times Magazine in 1990, complete with cover picture.

In the wake of In a Different Voice came epigones such as Nell Noddings’

Caring, Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking, and Belenky, Clinchy,

Goldberger and Tarule’s Women’s Ways of Knowing. The last-named book,

based on interviews with 135 women, claims that women are uncomfortable with

argument and disagreement, and that they have a different approach to knowledge

that emphasizes collaboration, consensus, mutual understanding. Women’s Ways

of Knowing declares in the final paragraph, “We have argued in this book

that educators can help women develop their own authentic voices if they emphasize

connection over separation, understanding and acceptance over assessment, and

collaboration over debate…if instead of imposing their own expectations and

arbitrary requirements, they encourage students to evolve their own patterns

of work based on the problems they are pursuing.” What a flawless recipe for

infantilization and mental abdication. If it were in a book dated 1886 we would

all point and laugh, but tragically it is dated a century later.

Women’s Ways of Knowing raises questions about the evidence its findings

are based on, and about what to do with those findings. Critics have duly pointed

out that the interview subjects were told in advance that the topic was women’s

different approaches to knowledge, which is not quite the way to elicit uncontaminated

testimony. But even apart from that, even if their findings were really findings

rather than self-confirmed prophecies, there would still be a problem with the

conclusions the authors draw. If the evidence truly supported their idea that

women prefer to maintain “connectedness”, make everyone feel good, and promote

understanding and acceptance over judgment or assessment, then clearly the response

ought to be loud and urgent demands for remedial education for women starting

yesterday. In morality, ethics, social life, friendship, there is something

(though far from everything) to be said for preferring understanding and acceptance

to judgment and assessment, but in epistemology or “ways of knowing” there is

just about nothing. Critical thinking is widely recognised to be a basic tool

for cognitive work, and surely the whole point of critical thinking is to know

what not to accept, to know how to judge and assess. It is all about

rejection, separation, negation, being “judgmental”; tolerance and love and

sympathy and sensitivity are the wrong tools for the job. A favourite move for

the different ways of knowing crowd is to quote an aphorism of Audre Lord’s,

“the Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house”, which fact perhaps

demonstrates the result of eschewing logic. Why on earth would the Master’s

tools not dismantle his house? If he goes to town or gets drunk and falls asleep

in the corn crib, his tools will work very nicely. But in any case feminists

need to resist any rhetorical move to hand those tools over to the Master, that

is, to claim that logic and reason and evidence and “linear thinking” and judgment

belong to men, and women should claim what’s left over. Carl Sagan used to like

to say, echoing Hume, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,

and we should demand very very good evidence indeed (better than 135 women summoned

to describe their different way with knowledge) before accepting the notion

that logic is male.

And the evidence is not particularly good, to put it mildly. The notorious

1990 American Association of University Women study of the putative fall in

self-esteem of adolescent girls was assailed from all sides for its flawed methodology,

but it got a flood of media attention all the same. It inspired more studies

and books such as Peggy Ornstein’s Schoolgirls and Mary Pipher’s best-selling

Reviving Ophelia, and wasted the time of countless girls in “self-esteem”

classes when they might have been learning history or math. Bizarre claims resting

on flawed evidence generated even more bizarre claims resting on yet more flawed

evidence, in a spiral of epistemological breakdown. If only everyone had done

less accepting and more judging. Susan Haack sums the matter up:

“But even if there were such a thing, the case for feminist epistemology would

require further argument to show that women’s ‘ways of knowing’ (scare quotes

because the term is tendentious, since ‘knows’ is a success-word) represent

better procedures of inquiry or subtler standards of justification than the

male…[W]hat my experience rather suggests is that the questions of the epistemological

tradition are hard, very hard, for anyone, of whatever sex (or gender),

to answer or even significantly to clarify.”[2]

We have certainly gone to a great deal of trouble in order to come back to

where we started. Women are sweet, women are soft-headed, women are nicer than

men and don’t like all that pesky judgmental science and logic and reason and

argument and disagreement. If this were true it ought to be changed, but there

is little reason to think it is true. We thought we had escaped the tyranny

of low expectations for women, we thought we had crashed that prison and freed

ourselves to be as tough and hard-headed and autonomous and wide-ranging as

men–and now here come the beaming Ed School professors to tell us No, no, that’s

all wrong, that’s the male way of doing things. We are women and we have to

park our brains at the door and be nice and warm and caring and empathic and

fuzzy. That’s the sort of thing that makes a self-respecting feminist want to

be as opinionated and cold and uncompromising and downright ruthless as she

can find it in her to be. Janet Radcliffe Richards puts it this way:

“It is hard to imagine anything better calculated to delight the soul of patriarchal

man than the sight of women’s most vociferous leaders taking an approach to

feminism that continues so much of his own work: luring women off into a special

area of their own where they will remain screened from the detailed study of

philosophy and science to which he always said they were unsuited, teaching

them indignation instead of argument, fantasy and metaphor instead of science,

and doing all this by continuing his very own technique of persuading women

that their true interests lie elsewhere than in the areas colonized by men.”[3]

Feminists need to keep their eyes on the prize, as the saying goes, and resist

with every fibre of their being attempts to persuade them that the most fascinating,

inspiring, exhilarating, productive, truth-generating fields of intellectual

endeavour are the private property of men and that authentic women are too maternal

and caring and touchy-feely to be good at them. A more perverse, backward-looking,

destructive idea is hard to imagine, and the fact that it comes from friends

rather than enemies is one of the surrealistic jokes of modern life.

Footnotes

1 Colby, Anne & William Damon. “Listening to a Different

Voice: A Review of Gilligan’s In a Different Voice.” Merrill-Palmer Quarterly

29, 4 (October 1983). Walker, Lawrence J. “Sex Differences in the Development

of Moral Reasoning: A Critical Review.” Child Development 55 (1984).

2 Haack, Susan. Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate The

University of Chicago Press (1998).

3 Radcliffe Richards, Janet. “Why Feminist Epistemology Isn’t”.

The Flight From Science and Reason ed. Paul Gross, Norman Levitt, Martin

Lewis, New York Academy of Sciences (1997).

OB