Feminist Politics and Social Knowledge

All large-scale emancipatory struggles involve challenges to established beliefs. Consider the example of the long struggle for women's voting rights in Britain through the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth.

The ideology of ‘separate but complementary spheres’, ordained by God and nature, demanded that women confine themselves to the domestic sphere, to housework, childbearing and child-rearing, combined, for women of higher status, with charitable works. Though this did not prevent working-class women from performing arduous and badly paid work in agriculture, industry, domestic service and as paid homeworkers, it did prevent them from entering higher education, or participating in elections. As Harrison (1978) points out, ‘scientific' medicine was directly implicated in providing the theoretical backing to the anti-suffrage cause. Women were held to be in the grip of emotion rather than reason, to be physically weaker than men, to be too engaged by their reproductive functions to be distracted by political concerns. Even women's activism in favour of the vote was taken to be a pathological symptom:

Physiologists wrote learned but strange letters to The Times in December 1908 ascribing suffragette conduct at public meetings to an outburst of ‘Tarantism' akin to the dancing mania of the Middle Ages. T. Claye Shaw added, for good measure, that the phenomenon was akin to ‘the explosive fury of epileptics'.

(Harrison 1978: 67) Similar medical expertise warned against the folly of allowing women into higher education.

More recent, ‘second-wave’ feminism continues to be engaged in challenging patriarchal beliefs little or no more sophisticated than these. The renewal of social Darwinism which emerged in the 1970s under the name ‘sociobiology’ used the differences between male and female ‘investment’ in reproduction to declare male domination, patriarchy and the sexual double standard as both natural and inevitable (see Caplan 1978; Goldberg 1974; Rose, Kamin and Lewontin 1984: ch. 6; Rose and Rose 2000). A television series (Anatomy of Desire) shown on UK Channel 4 in November and December 1998 confidently pronounced that ‘science’ in the shape of parental investment theory explained the supposed fact that men have more extramarital affairs than do women - to do so is programmed by their genes! Later it was acknowledged that there might be a statistical anomaly in the ‘fact’ to be explained. Just who were the promiscuous men having their affairs with, if it is in women’s nature to be faithful? As Hilary Rose succinctly put the challenge posed by the new biological determinism:

at the height of the struggle of the feminist movement to bring women out of nature into culture, a host of greater or lesser sociobiologists, their media supporters and New Right politicians joined eagerly in the cultural and political effort to return them whence they came.

(Rose 1994: 19)

However, science is not wholly a masculine enterprise (see Chapter 4 of this book and associated references). Recent feminist scholarship has given more recognition to the significant role women have played in the natural sciences when they have been able to break down the barriers to those professions (see Harding 1991: ch. 2; and Rose 1994: chs 5-8). In the behavioural and social sciences women have also made important contributions, not necessarily as self-consciously feminist researchers, in such fields as primate ethology, cultural anthropology (MacCormack and Strathern 1980), sociology and history.

But the transformative power of specifically feminist research in the social sciences has been witnessed most dramatically in sociology since the late 1960s. The link between ‘second-wave’ feminism and the wholesale restructuring of the sociological research agenda since then has been remarkable (though, of course, it remains unfinished). The ongoing debate between Marxists and neo-Weberians over the theorizing and explaining social class and stratification was thrown into disarray by feminist argument and evidence. Both traditions linked class to work and the division of labour, but in their different ways both had failed to recognize the gendered character of that division of labour, both in the wider economy and in the domestic sphere. Feminists in cultural studies have explored the production and reproduction of gendered identities in cultural and media representations, while new research agendas around intimate relationships and the social construction and regulation of emotions have been pioneered by feminist and gay writers. Feminists have also been at the forefront of questioning established methods of data-gathering in sociology and other social sciences. They have insisted on the dialogic relationship between researchers and the researched, and have pursued reflexivity about the power relations involved in research practice and the ethical implications which flow from them (see, for some examples, Gelsthorpe 1992; Hammersley 1992, 1994; Ramazanoglu 1992; and Morgan and Stanley 1993). In the process, disciplinary boundaries, too, have been broken down or transformed, as in the formation of the distinct cross-disciplinary field of women's studies.

So it is already clear that feminist work in some scientific disciplines has gone much further than simply gathering new factual information. Central theoretical paradigms and research agendas have been challenged and transformed, and alternatives tabled. Further still, this transformation of the discipline has posed questions of method, of the relation of knowledge to its subject-matter - questions about the nature of the discipline itself. For some feminist writers this has posed the philosophical question: may knowledge itself be a matter of gender? Can there be a distinctively female, or feminist, understanding of what knowledge is - a feminist epistemology?