Little to argue with there, I think you’ll agree.
On the positive side I noticed on one of the course reading lists some papers produced by Dr Catherine Hakim, a sociologist formerly working at the London School of Economics (now with the think-tank The Centre for Policy Studies) whose work is mentioned favourably in The Glass Ceiling Delusion. There’s also a session on women who commit violence so maybe – just maybe – such courses (or at least those at the University of York) aren’t quite as woefully imbalanced as I’d anticipated. I should really investigate the matter further but I find that if I spend more than a brief period reading feminist literature I lose the will to live. The absence of male students on the courses suggests I’m not alone.
What is the reality of Women’s Studies and Gender Studies courses beyond what we might deduce from materials such as prospectuses and recommended reading lists? I’m not aware of any books which provide an ‘insider’s guide’ to such courses in the United Kingdom, but there’s a remarkable book which lifts the lid on courses in the United States: Daphne Patai’s and Noretta Koertge’s Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women’s Studies (second edition, 2003). It’s an excellent but also disturbing read, partly because it depicts a world of men-hating women determined to denigrate men at every opportunity and to isolate women from men as far as possible.
The world these women dream of creating would be a depressing one for the vast majority of men and women. I came to the regrettable conclusion that I couldn’t do justice to the book without using a substantial number of very lengthy extracts, so I leave you with the suggestion that you read it for yourself. Americans might be well advised to have a stiff drink to hand, to help calm their nerves when they realise the true nature of the programmes their taxes have been funding for many years.
16| FEMINIST ACADEMICS AND MANGINAS
The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks, and extremists this side of the giggle house.
William F Buckley Jr 1925-2008 American conservative author and commentator: ‘On The Right’ 17 January 1967
Militant feminists of the American persuasion take some beating. To illustrate the point let’s consider a book written by four of them: three are (or at least were at the time of their book’s publication) academics, indeed professors. The book is Women’s Ways of Knowing, first published in 1986, and is said by some feminists to be central to many feminist theories of the modern era. After reading comments on the book by the psychologist Steven Pinker I was intrigued to buy a copy, and duly bought the tenth anniversary edition. To give you a flavour of the book’s content I selected a page at random. From page 54, in a section titled, ‘The Emergence of Subjective Knowing’:
‘The kind of change that Inez experienced is the center of our discussion in this chapter: from passivity to action, from self as static to self as becoming, from silence to a protesting inner voice and infallible gut.
For many of the women, the move away from silence and an externally oriented perspective on knowledge and truth eventuates in a new conception of truth as personal, private, and subjectively known or intuited; thus, we are calling this next position subjectivism or subjective knowing. Although this new view of knowledge is a revolutionary step there are remnants of dichotomous and absolutist thinking in the subjectivist’s assumptions about truth. [Author’s note: are you losing the will to live yet?] In fact, subjectivism is dualistic in the sense that there is still the conviction that there are right answers; the fountain of truth simply has shifted locale. Truth now resides within the person and can negate answers that the outside world supplies.’
I’d like to invite you to join the four authoresses of Women’s Ways of Knowing and myself on a journey. We’re strapped into our seats in a plane just before a flight from London to New York. A young actress – playing the role of a pilot – emerges from the cockpit and announces breezily to the passengers:
‘Ladies and gentlemen, good morning! My name’s Candy. [Author’s note: she seems to be of the American persuasion.] I shall be your captain on today’s flight, and I’ll be responsible for taking off and landing the plane. I’ve had little flying training but I’ve read lots of books about flying planes, and with my woman’s ways of knowing I’m sure we’ll all be just fine. Now, let’s get this baby into the air! Stewardess, why are the four ladies over there screaming hysterically?’
For a more sophisticated critique of ‘women’s ways of knowing’ than I can muster, we turn to Christina Hoff Sommers, an American former professor of philosophy, and a self-described ‘equity feminist’. You may recall that in her book Who Stole Feminism? (1994) she distinguished between equity feminists and gender feminists, the latter being feminists who believe in creating privileges for women. We turn to the start of a chapter titled ‘New Epistemologies’ in Ms Sommer’s book:
‘Some gender feminists claim that because women have been oppressed they are better ‘knowers’. Feeling more deeply, they see more clearly and understand reality better. They have an ‘epistemic’ advantage over men. Does being oppressed really make one more knowledgeable or perceptive? The idea that adversity confers special insight is familiar enough. Literary critics often ascribe creativity to suffering, including suffering racial discrimination or homophobia. But feminist philosophers have carried this idea much further. They claim that oppressed groups enjoy privileged ‘epistemologies’ or ‘different ways of knowing’ that better enable them to understand the world, not only socially but scientifically.
According to ‘standpoint theory’, as the theory of epistemic advantage is called, the oppressed may make better biologists, physicists, and philosophers than their oppressors. Thus we find the feminist theorist Hilary Rose saying that male scientists have been handicapped by being men. A better science would be based on women’s domestic experience and practice. Professor Virginia Held offers hope that ‘a feminist standpoint would give us a quite different understanding of even physical reality.’ Conversely, those who are most socially favored, the proverbial white, middle class males, are in the worst epistemic position.
What do mainstream philosophers make of the idea of ‘standpoint theories’? Professor Susan Haack of the University of Miami is one of the most respected epistemologists in the country. She is also an equity feminist. In December 1992 she participated in a symposium on feminist philosophy at meetings of the American Philosophical Association. It was a unique event. For once, someone outside the insular little world of gender feminism was asked to comment on gender feminist theories of knowledge. Watching Professor Haack critique the ‘standpoint theorists’ was a little like watching a chess grandmaster defeat all opponents in a simultaneous exhibition, blindfolded.
Haack told the audience that she finds the idea of ‘female ways of knowing’ as puzzling as the idea of a Republican epistemology or a senior citizens’ epistemology. Some of her arguments are too technical to review here. I cite only a few of her criticisms:
I am not convinced that there are any distinctively female ‘ways of knowing’. All any human being has to go on, in figuring how things are, is his or her sensory experience, and the explanatory theorizing he or she devises to accommodate it; differences in cognitive style, like differences in handwriting, seem more individual then gender-determined.
She pointed out that theories based on the idea that oppression or deprivation results in a privileged standpoint are especially implausible: if they were right, the most disadvantaged groups would produce the best scientists. In fact, the oppressed and socially marginalized often have little access to the information and education needed to excel in science, which on the whole puts them at a serious ‘epistemic disadvantage’. Professor Haack also observed that the female theorists who argue that oppression confers an advantage are not themselves oppressed. She asks: if oppression and poverty are indeed so advantageous, why do so many highly advantaged, middle-class women consider themselves so well situated ‘epistemically’?