Feminism and Epistemology

It has become conventional (following Sandra Harding's influential The Science Question in Feminism (1986)) to distinguish three approaches to this issue: what she calls ‘feminist empiricism, ‘feminist standpoint epistemology' and feminist post-modernism.

Feminist Standpoint Epistemologies

The second sort of approach to the question of feminism and knowledge is ‘feminist standpoint epistemology'. This approach emerged from debates in the late 1970s among feminists concerned with the ‘masculinism' of the natural sciences, and especially with biology, the science most intimately connected with defining women

as a ‘natural’ category. The pioneering work of Jane Flax, Sandra Harding, Nancy Hartsock, Hilary Rose and others drew upon the campaigning activities and new forms of understanding generated by the women’s movement, in particular the revaluation of women’s experience as a resource for critically addressing orthodox biomedical knowledge.

Nancy Hartsock’s Feminist Materialism

Perhaps the most comprehensive melding of these influences was to be found in the work of Nancy Hartsock (1983a, b). She takes from the humanist Marxian tradition a materialist understanding of the relationship between forms of knowledge, on the one hand, and social relations and practices, on the other. In the Marxian tradition from which she draws, social divisions are the basis for different and opposed ontologies and epistemologies (not simply different or conflicting factual beliefs). Sohn-Rethel had argued that the division between mental and manual labour, intensified under modern capitalism, was the basis for the abstract thought of modern science, and also the abstraction of the dominant social and political ideologies of capitalism. Lukacs had developed the Marxian notion of the relationship between ideas and social divisions into a historical ‘grand narrative’. According to this, the working class’ experience of being rendered a ‘thing-like’ commodity was in fundamental conflict with its potential for subjectivity and historical agency, and would eventually lead to an explosive transformation of consciousness and socialist revolution. Lukacs’s conviction that the liberation of the working class represented and in some sense contained the liberation of all oppressed and exploited groups led him to see it as a ‘universal’ class, whose revolutionary role was the culmination of human history. Since working-class revolutionary consciousness was in this sense the most all-inclusive, and its vantage point one which encompassed all of history, it followed that the knowledge contained in it was superior to rival ‘bourgeois’ beliefs.

This version of standpoint epistemology is critically endorsed by Hartsock. She accepts the Marxian critique of the dominant, capitalist ideology, and the academic theories which refine and develop it. For these theories, the key concepts are abstract categories of exchange, and they are rooted in experience of market relations. However, the experience of male wage-workers under capitalism provides a basis for a different and rival understanding of reality, both social and natural. This derives from workers’ direct participation in the more fundamental level of social activity - the production of the commodities exchanged in the market. This productive activity avoids the abstraction of mental labour, uniting mental and manual aspects of practice, engaging with the natural world and being alive to qualitative differences (as against the capitalists’ merely quantitative concern with money and profit).

However, like Lukacs, Hartsock recognizes that the workers' experience and consciousness is subordinated to the power of capital, so that this alternative consciousness, or form of understanding, exists only in a contradictory and partial state. It is, rather, a potential form of understanding, just as Lukacs's representation of the revolutionary consciousness of the workers was an idealization, ‘imputed' to them on the basis of Lukacs's own version of history. But in Hartsock's view, the workers' alternative knowledge is limited and partial for another reason: the Marxian tradition does not carry its insight into the relation between social divisions and knowledge to its logical conclusion. The division between capital and labour, between manual and mental labour are primarily divisions of male labour. In the gender-blind categories of this tradition, women's contribution to the social division of labour disappears from view. Just as Marxism exposed the limited and distorted character of knowledge based on market exchange from the standpoint of workers engaged in production, what was now needed was an exposure of the limitations and distortions in Marxian theory from the standpoint of women's distinctive role in ‘reproduction'.

There are three distinct stages in Hartsock's argument here. One is to show that women do, in fact, occupy a distinctive position in the overall division of labour in society. The second is to show why and how that can form the basis for a distinctively female, or feminist, way of knowing and experiencing the world. The third is to show that this is more than just different but also superior, better grounded or more reliable as knowledge. Only if this third claim can be made good can the approach count as an epistemology.

On the sexual division of labour, Hartsock notes the dual presence of women both in wage labour and in work in the household. As wage-workers they share the experiences of male workers of productive labour processes, but they also work in the home, outside the wage labour system, under male domination. Here they perform work which is concerned with necessities of survival, bodily and psychological renewal and the reproductive activities of childbearing and upbringing. Although Hartsock claims that the sexual division of labour is central to the general organization of human social labour, she tends to confine her analysis to Western class societies. She accepts that, even here, there are many differences in the life experiences of individual women. She is also sensitive to the specificity of the experiences of lesbians and women of colour. However, her concern is to identify commonalities in the lives of women that cut across these differences, and to focus on institutionalized practices which might ground a distinctively female or feminist outlook.

One reason why Hartsock thinks the sexual division of labour is such a central feature of social organization is that, for her, it is not wholly socially constructed. Although not all women give birth (at least so far), no men do. This fact depends on bodily differences between the sexes, and Hartsock speaks of the ‘sexual', not ‘gender', division of labour so as to emphasize the importance of embodiment and its consequences for the gendering of the social division of labour, and also of other dimensions of life experience.

This already takes us to the second stage of the argument: the different ‘way of knowing’ associated with women’s place in the division of social labour. This interweaving of the social and the bodily aspects of experience tells against any absolute duality of biology and society, and so suggests a more integrated and holistic form of understanding. Women’s work in the domestic sphere involves the development of skills which acknowledge concreteness, qualitative difference and the basic materialities and necessities of life, often demeaned in the wider cultural value-system, and shunned by men. Women’s bodily experiences of menstruation, lactation, coitus and childbirth give them a less strong sense of their bodily boundaries than is the case for men, and so make possible a greater sense of continuity with the world around them. Finally, in childbearing and upbringing women’s reproductive activity is quite different from the male engagement with material production. Reproduction involves a transition from a foetus experienced as part of one’s own body to the formation of an independent being. The process is one which engages many different and unique layers of experience and relatedness.

Hilary Rose: Hand, Brain and Heart

Hilary Rose’s version of standpoint epistemology (1983, 1994) has much in common with Hartsock’s emphasis on the division of labour. Rose also criticizes the Marxian approach for limiting its interest in the division of labour to the mental/manual divide only, and ignoring emotional work - the labours of caring and nurturing which are mainly allocated to women (hence the title of her pioneering article: ‘Hand, Brain and Heart’). Rose argues that caring work potentially engages thinking and feeling, bodily and cultural dimensions, autonomy and relatedness in ways which undermine fixed oppositions between nature and culture, reason and emotion and self and other. It is, potentially, the basis in women’s lives for an alternative rationality to the polarizing, abstract and destructive rationality of the patriarchal world.

An important qualification needs to be spelt out at this point. Neither Hartsock nor Rose is committed to a romantic celebration of women’s caring and reproductive work as it is currently institutionalized in patriarchal and capitalist societies. Rose points out the differences between caring for children, for sick or aged dependants, and for husbands or partners, and emphasizes the contradictory character of many of these caring roles when carried out under social and cultural conditions which distort them through coercion, devalue them and fail to resource or reward them. Hartsock makes very similar points, and notes the resistance of the male ruling class to attempts by women of colour and working-class women to overcome the isolation of domestic work by collectivizing it.

So, the standpoint theorists are not arguing that the feminist alternative to established knowledge is already present and fully formed in women's actual life experience. It is, rather, a potential to be realized through practical struggles for new kinds of social relations: new forms of rationality and understanding are seen both as emerging through these struggles and as, in turn, serving as a resource for them. There is, then, an internal relationship between the new forms of knowledge, and the struggle for liberation from oppressive and distorting social relationships. In this respect, the standpoint epistemologies can be seen as an extension and deepening of their predecessors in the Hegelian and Marxian traditions. However, that legacy raises serious questions about the relationship between the feminist theorists who identify and elaborate the liberatory potential in women's ordinary lives and the contradictory and distorted common experience of those women. Both Hartsock and Rose are clear in their responses to this issue: the key resource for theorizing must be the forms of knowledge and experience generated through the practice of the wider feminist social movement itself. And the potentials identified by them for a liberatory knowledge can have no basis other than the prefiguring of unalienated experience in the midst of the current contradictions:

How far is women's caring part of what Hilary Land and I have called compulsory altruism? For caring, whether paid or unpaid, like other forms of labour, exists predominantly in its alienated form but also contains within itself glimpsed moments of an unalienated form. It is important with all forms of labour to insist that the experience of the unalienated form is located - however fleetingly - within the alienated, as otherwise we have no means of conceptualizing - however prefiguratively - the social relations and labour processes of a society which has overcome alienation.

(Rose 1994: 40)

The Psychological Dimension: Feminist Object Relations

These social-structural accounts of the different life experiences of men and women, together with their consequences for gendered ways of knowing, are complemented by accounts of gendered personality development derived from the ‘object relations' tradition in psychoanalysis (see Craib 1989, esp. chs 8-10). This approach focuses on the process of personality formation from a very early stage - often before birth - and gives a central role to the relationships in reality but also, and often more importantly, in fantasy between the developing personality and the person (or people) who take the primary role in caring. In effect, we are here dealing with the caring work of women which is at the core of Hilary Rose's version of standpoint epistemology, but from the perspective of the infant and child who is the recipient of the care.

In the feminist version of object relations theory (Nancy Chodorow (1978) is the theorist most cited) there is an emphasis on the differences in the inner conflicts which have to be resolved by boys and girls in achieving an independent and (more or less) stable sense of self. Where the primary (or exclusive) carer is the mother, the female infant undergoes a more gradual and less conflictual growth towards adult independence, and learns the feminine identity required for her future mothering role through identification with the mother. By contrast, boys are required at an early stage to renounce their primary identification with the mother as a condition of learning their distinct masculine identity. Moreover, this is itself problematic due to the relative absence of the father, in both physical and emotional senses. Rather than directly learning gender identity in the concrete and practically present domestic sphere, as is possible for girls, boys must learn masculinity in a more conscious way, and on the basis of a more abstract and stereotypical model of the father's external role in the public sphere.

The resulting masculine identity is one which tends to be more fraught with inner contradictions, and which requires strong boundaries between self and other as a defence against lapsing back into an infantile dependency upon, and identification with, the mother. Primarily, this defensive ego defines itself against the mother, and, by implication, against women in general, but, secondarily, against more generalized ‘others': different races and cultures, and nature. There is a tendency to avoid strong emotion, and to devalue the concrete practical domestic sphere in favour of an ‘abstract' public world.

Both Nancy Hartsock and Jane Flax (1983) draw on this feminist development of object relations theory. Hartsock indicates a certain scepticism, referring to it as an empirical hypothesis, and combining it, as we have seen, with arguments drawn from a materialist social theory. It is more central to Flax's early contribution to the debate. She uses it to explore ways in which the dominant (masculine) traditions of philosophy, including epistemology, pose such problems as the opposition between self and other, nature and culture, subject and object and so on as universal problems of human knowledge and being, when in reality they derive from specifically male psychological dilemmas.

As with the social-structural versions of standpoint epistemology, there is a problem about overgeneralization. However, the object relations approach differs from more orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis in that it is less deterministic. It uses clinical practice as a basis for characterizing dilemmas and available strategies and resources encountered by individuals in the course of personality development, but it leaves considerable open space for each individual to resolve or deal with problems in unique ways. So, the abstract characterizations of masculine and feminine identity formation are better seen as ideal types, with most individuals located at different points along the continuum between, but with males tending toward the masculine pole, females towards the feminine. In another departure from more orthodox psychoanalysis, the approach recognizes the possibility of different kinds of gendered personality formation if the responsibilities of care were differently allocated, and if, in particular, men played a more central role in caring work, and women had more opportunities in the public sphere beyond the immediate familial context. So, as with the social-structural versions of standpoint epistemology, the psychoanalytic one posits a close relationship between the potential for new kinds of understanding and the struggle to transform social relationships in Iiberatory directions.

Whatever the specifics of their social or psychological analyses, these versions of standpoint theory yield strikingly convergent views on the character of the alternative, feminist forms of knowledge. They favour concreteness, sensitivity to qualitative difference and complexity as against abstract concern with merely quantitative relations; they anticipate the overcoming of the abstract dualisms of Western, masculine thought (nature and culture, subject and object, reason and emotion, body and mind) in favour of contextualized, holistic understandings of the relatedness of things; and they propose the reintegration of knowledge with everyday life experience. Finally, they emphasize the relationship between these alternative forms of knowledge and the struggles of subaltern social groups (primarily, but not exclusively, women) against social domination, exclusion and devaluing. In Hartsock’s summary:

The experience of continuity and relation - with others, with the natural world, of mind with body - provides an ontological base for developing a non-problematic social synthesis, a social synthesis that need not operate through the denial of the body, the attack on nature, or the death struggle between the self and other, a social synthesis that does not depend on any of the forms taken by abstract masculinity.

(Hartsock 1983b: 246)

In this way the feminist standpoint epistemology offers both an explanation of the social and ecological destructiveness of modern technoscience and posits an alternative form of understanding linked to liberation from social domination, and a new, harmonious relationship with the rest of the natural world. This broad pattern of thought is continuous with the eco-feminist claim that there is a special connection between women’s gender interests and the protection of nature. (This is deeply contested within the feminist movement; there is a vast literature, but see, in particular, Shiva 1989; Biehl 1991; Mellor 1992, 1996, 1997; Mies and Shiva 1993; Plumwood 1993; Salleh 1994, 1996; Jackson 1995; Soper 1995: ch. 4.)