Alison M. Jaggar - Gender/body/knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

CONTENTS

Joan C. Tronto, Women and Caring: What Can

Feminists Learn about Morality from Caring? 172

Lynne S. Arnault, The Radical Future of a Classic

Moral Theory 188

Sondra Farganis, Feminism and the Reconstruction of Social Science 207

Ruth Berman, From Aristotles Dualism to Materialist

Dialectics: Feminist Transformation of Science and

Society 224

Uma Narayan, The Project of Feminist Epistemology: Perspectives from a Nonwestern Feminist 256

PART III: REVISIONING METHOD

Rhoda Linton, Toward a Eeminist Research Method 273

Donna Perry, Procnes Song: The Task of Eeminist Literary Criticism 293

Amy Ling, Chinamerican Women Writers: Eour Eorerunners of Maxine Hong Kingston 309

Phyllis Teitelbaum, Eeminist Theory and Standardized Testing 324

Sherry Gorelick, The Changer and the Changed:

Methodological Reflections on Studying Jewish

Eeminists 336

Contributors 359

Index 365

VI

GENDER/BODY/KNOWLEDGE

INTRODUCTION

The authors of the papers collected in this volume were all participants in one, or occasionally both, of the seminars conducted in 1985 by Alison Jaggar, a philosopher, first holder of the Blanche, Edith, and Irving Laurie New Jersey Chair in Womens Studies at Douglass College of Rutgers University. The topics of the two seminars were, respectively, Feminist Reconstructions of the Self and Society and Feminist Ways of Knowing. Susan Bordo, also a philosopher, was a Visiting Scholar at Douglass College during the first seminar and a regular participant in the second. In addition to philosophy, participants in the seminars represented a variety of disciplines; sociology, political science, biochemistry, psychology, history, literature, and theology. Some seminar participants were academics: others had no academic affiliation. The group included a playwright and actress, a therapist, an educational tester, and two homemakers. In addition, most people were or had been active in feminist politics or other political movements.

Forerunners of almost all the pieces published here were presented in one of the seminars and have been enriched by seminar discussion. Because of the seminar participants heterogeneity, our weekly meetings were lively and diverse. At the same time, the thematic focus of the seminars, coupled with the regular interchange between seminar members, generated increasing continuity and coherence in presentations and discussions. As the seminars progressed through the year, certain themes and issues continually emerged. The editors identified what they viewed as the most central themes and asked the contributors to rework their papers focusing more directly on them. The result is a collection that works on several levels.

Many of the essays open with a survey of the traditions challenged by

NTRODUCTION

feminists within particular disciplines, thus enabling this volume to serve as a guide to some central disciplinary paradigms as well as feminist reconstructions of them. In addition to traversing several disciplines, the collection also crosses a spectrum of the various theoretical and ideological commitments around which contemporary feminists have situated themselves. No one intellectual or political orthodoxy forms an invisible spine for this volume. Instead, the book includes many different perspectives Marxist-feminist, liberal feminist, cultural feminist, and various postmodern feminismsalthough the quotation marks indicate the editors discomfort with these labels, even as we acknowledge their preliminary usefulness. The essays do not explicitly address each other, but all approach recurrent themes in different ways; they can often be juxtaposed in implicit argument with each other. Thus, the volume not only maps new territory that feminists are staking out within their disciplines, but also introduces some of the most important debates, divisions, and commonalities that have emerged within the last decade of western feminism.

Underlying the disciplinary, methodological, and ideological diversity of the essays is a fundamental thematic unity. This unity, discernible beneath the interplay of several minor themes, consists of an emerging feminist challenge to conceptions of knowledge and reality that have dominated the western intellectual tradition at least since the seventeenth century.

The seventeenth century in Europe was a period of economic change and social unrest. It was marked by the continuing development of mercantile capitalism, the increasing dominance of town over country and the establishment of protestantism over large areas of Europe. Not coincidentally, the seventeenth century was also a period of intellectual revolution. Ideals that had been fermenting for two hundred years finally matured into compelling new models of physical and social reality. Just as prevailing views of the cosmos were metamorphosed in a series of scientific revolutions so accepted understandings of human nature and society were transformed through the development of secular epistemologies and political theories.

Revolutionary as these new understandings were in many respects, they did not break entirely with the earlier western tradition. Instead, they can in some respects be seen as rearticulating themes that had been prominent in Greek and medieval thought. Nevertheless, the new understandings did constitute a distinctively modern formulation of these themes and reworked them into a tacit framework that has shaped most western philosophy and science until the twentieth century.

The decisive formulation of this framework was achieved in the seventeenth century by Rene Descartes. Elis successors made various modifica

INTRODUCTION

tions of the Cartesian framework but generally accepted a number of Descartess most crucial epistemological assumptions, including:

1. Reality has an objective structure or nature unaffected by or independent of either human understandings of or perspectives on it. Philosophers sometimes refer to this assumption as metaphysical realism.

2. The structure or nature of reality in principle is accessible to human understanding or knowledge. When considered with the first point, this assumption sometimes is called objectivism.