Feminism

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FEMINISM

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As a social and political movement with a long, intermittent history, feminism has repeatedly come into being, generated change, and subsided into oblivion. As an eclectic body of theory, feminism entered the academy in the early 1970s as a part of the women's studies movement, where its contribution to scholarship in the arts, social sciences, and humanities has perhaps been particularly significant. Despite the variety of its political positions, social commitments, and theoretical vantage points, feminism's common concern is with the social pattern, widespread across cultures and history, whereby power and entitlements are distributed asymmetrically to favor men over women. This asymmetry has been given many names, including the subjugation of women, sexism, male dominance, patriarchy, systemic misogyny, phallocracy, and the oppression of women. A number of feminist theorists simply call it gender, and that usage will be adopted here.

The concept of gender rests on the assumption that there are two sexes, male and female. The cultural meanings assigned to those sexes through complex social processes establish a power relation in which masculinity predominates over femininity, and the things associated with masculinity predominate over their feminine counterparts. The term gender refers to this power relation, which operates through society's institutions and practices by conferring the control of resources and the right to social goods on men while relegating women to subordinate positions in service of men's interests and concerns. But because gender always works in a complicated interconnection with other abusive power systems such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, age, and disability, some women enjoy more power than some men. By the same token, these other power systems produce greater amounts of privilege for some women than for others.

One of the characteristic features of gendered power relations is androcentrism: the (usually unstated) view that man is the point of reference for what is normal for humans. According to the logic of androcentrism, if man is the yardstick or measure for being human, then women, not being men, must be defective humans. Furthermore, because androcentrism presumes that men are the point around which everything else revolves, the feminist insistence that women too are full–fledged human beings is just as much about men as everything else is—it is a threat to masculinity, or an attempt to usurp men's rightful place in the natural order of things.

Racism and discrimination against gays and lesbians employ the same sort of logic: the white race and heterosexuality are the norm for human beings, so anything other than the norm must be defective—not just statistically but morally abnormal. From this it follows that the demand to de–center the dominant group (or, to use another spatial metaphor, to dismantle the hierarchy that puts the dominant group on top) must be seen as a threat to the group—a threat to "the Southern way of life" or to "the family as we know it." Looking at the demand in this way keeps the focus on the dominant group, so that it, rather than unjust treatment of the subgroup, remains the center of attention.

Criticism and Construction

As a political movement, feminism has sought to undermine or overthrow the social mechanisms through which gender operates to oppress women. Because gender identity cannot be understood or even perceived outside its complicated interaction with other abusive power systems, feminists resist those as well. A feminist politics is not only a politics of resistance, however. It is also a politics of construction. It seeks to build a more just society—one that is as good for all kinds of women as it is for all kinds of men. So, for example, "first-wave" U.S. feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, and Lucretia Mott worked for the right of women to own property, not to be enslaved, and to vote.

As a field of scholarship, feminism likewise pursues two goals. The first is criticism. Feminists have uncovered and opposed gender bias in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, the arts, and professions such as law and medicine. Sandra Harding, for example, has criticized the view, widely shared by scientists themselves, that science is value–free. She argues that scientific knowledge is produced largely by men who command significant amounts of social prestige, and that the perspective of these men is necessarily colored by assumptions and values arising from the kinds of activities in which they engage. As science leaves this perspective unexamined, it assumes an objectivity that it does not in fact possess.

What Donna Haraway has dubbed the "god trick"—the ideal of a perspectiveless and timeless view from nowhere that purports to secure objectivity—strikes many feminists as both politically suspect and impossible to achieve. Feminist epistemologists such as Lorraine Code and Helen Longino argue that greater objectivity is attained by taking careful and rigorous account of knowers' social locations than by ignoring the effects of power on what kinds of knowledge is legitimated, whose knowledge is considered authoritative, and which knowers are ignored or excluded as a result.

As well as questioning sexist understandings of objectivity, feminists have criticized the gender bias that inheres in other key theoretical concepts and indeed in mainstream theories themselves. But like political feminism, academic feminism does more than criticize—it also constructs. Feminist economists, for example, have not rested content with condemning the masculine bias inherent in the individualism and competition of much economic theory; they have constructed economic models that begin from the fact of human dependency and connection. Feminist historians have not only pointed to the gender gaps created by their profession's focus on military campaigns and other male–dominated activity in the public sphere, but have used women's diaries, letters, and other writings to construct histories of women and of domestic life. Feminist constructions in philosophy include a shift from mainstream epistemology's preoccupation with necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge, to the theoretical importance of the social location of the knower. Equally significant has been the construction of feminist moral theory, particularly the ethics of care and feminist responsibility ethics.

Feminist Epistemology

While on its face there seems to be something paradoxical about feminist criticisms of reason, given that the forms of argumentation on which these criticisms depend are themselves a part of what is under attack, the burgeoning literature on this topic may be understood, not as a repudiation of reason tout court, but as a dissatisfaction with a particular picture of reason. This picture, which underlies much of contemporary nonfeminist ethics as well as other areas of mainstream philosophy, is that of a pure, universal reason, abstracted from historical and social contexts, operating dispassionately and objectively to produce true propositions. Feminists fault this picture as much for what it excludes as for what it portrays.

For one thing, the picture excludes the emotions, rather than acknowledging that feelings such as empathy, resentment, or anger play a useful role in reasoning—especially moral reasoning. The picture in particular excludes what people care about, rather than acknowledging that what they care about can itself be a reason for thinking or acting the way they do. It excludes trust, rather than acknowledging that trust is what keeps one's reasoning from becoming paranoid. And it excludes narrative or figurative modes of reasoning, rather than acknowledging that people often use stories and images to make sense of the world.

One important strategy for feminist epistemologists, then, has been to identify the tension between the explicit content of philosophical arguments, which appears gender–neutral, and the models, metaphors, and imagery underlying these arguments, which covertly favor the experiences and preoccupations of privileged men. A second important strategy has been to question the tradition that divorces reason from other human attributes. Many feminists have emphasized the role of the emotions in rational reflection, while others have emphasized the point that human reasoners are embodied, and that the social constructions surrounding differences in embodiment count among the conditions that make knowledge possible. Still others have emphasized the essentially social nature of human existence, arguing that knowledge is not "in the head" of solitary reasoners, but rather is produced and imparted in communities of knowers, and that abusive power systems operate in these communities to discredit unjustifiably certain kinds of reasoning while authorizing others.

Borrowing from Marxist analysis, in the 1980s feminist standpoint theorists such as Nancy Hartsock and Patricia Hill Collins drew an analogy between women in gendered societies and workers in capitalist societies. They contended that just as the false presuppositions that sustain the ideology of capitalism are most visible from the hard–won perspective of the worker who has participated in consciousness–raising and political engagement, so too the false presuppositions that sustain the ideology of gender are best seen from the standpoint of those who have had to acquire detailed, self–reflective knowledge of the gender system simply in order to be able to function within it. Feminist standpoint theorists are less interested in claiming a single, unified standpoint that is representative of all women, however, than in taking seriously the knowledge that informs women's practices—whether domestic, emotional, intellectual, or professional.

Ethics of Care

One such practice is that of giving care. In the United States, but also in many other societies, women do far more unpaid, hands–on caregiving than men—they change the diapers, wash the dishes, clean the bathrooms, take the dog to the vet, feed and dress the children, take care of sick or disabled family members, and provide long–term care for elderly relatives. Even when married women have full–time jobs, they still almost invariably do the vast majority of the housework, childcare, and elder care. Nearly 75 percent of unpaid elder care is done by women, and after a divorce or in cases where the parents never married, 75 percent of dependent children live with and are cared for by their mothers rather than their fathers—a figure that approaches 100 percent when the children are infants or toddlers. Paid caregivers are mostly women, as well. Almost 96 percent of professional nurses are women, and the percentage of women providing daycare for children is close to 99 percent. In Canada, women do 80 percent of all caregiving, both paid and unpaid.

The Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan, taking seriously the idea that women's experience of caregiving produces its own kind of moral reasoning, questioned whether the scale of moral maturity developed by her colleague, Lawrence Kohlberg, was as universally applicable as he supposed. At the first stage of Kohlberg's scale, morality is conceived of as a system of punishment and obedience. At Stage Two, it is motivated by personal reward. At Stage Three, it is taken to be a matter of helping and pleasing other people. At Stage Four it is understood as a set of rules for maintaining the social order. Those who reach Stage Five can sum up those social rules in a principle such as "the greatest good for the greatest number," while those at Stage Six are able to think of morality in terms of self–chosen universal principles of justice. Not everyone, claimed Kohlberg, reaches the more advanced stages of moral maturity.

Gilligan, noting that men consistently scored higher on the Kohlberg scale than women, questioned the reliability of the scale rather than accept its implication that women tend to be less morally mature than men. She claimed that many of the girls and women in her own developmental studies simply reasoned about moral matters "in a different voice." Instead of talking about rights and rules, they were using the language of relationships and connection. Rather than reasoning abstractly, their thinking was contextual and concrete. She called this a "care" orientation toward morality, and opposed it to the "justice" orientation displayed at stages Four, Five, and Six on Kohlberg's scale. Gilligan was careful not to say that the "different voice" is the voice of all women across cultures and through time, any more than the voice of justice is the voice of all men. She did, however, argue that gender shapes the experience of men and women differently, and that gendered experience—particularly the experience of living in a society that expects girls and women to perform vast amounts of caring labor—produces "different modes of moral understanding."

Nel Noddings, Virginia Held, Sara Ruddick, Joan Tronto, and Eva Kittay are among the most prominent of the feminist theorists who have used Gilligan's moral psychology to construct an ethics of care. They have examined caregiving for the moral understandings internal to the practice, offering accounts of not only what it is to care well, but also of the social and political framework in which this practice takes place. While care theorists have by no means created a unified account, it is nevertheless possible to identify three characteristic features of the ethics on which most, but not all, care theorists agree:

a caring relationship;
engagement with another's will; and
particularism.

Caring well both requires and is an expression of a caring relationship. The caregiver must care about the person she cares for, not only to keep the caregiving from becoming impersonal, cold, or self–serving, but because caring is a value in itself. To care in this sense is to feel concern for one's charge (Kittay's term for the person receiving the care). But while caring engages the emotions, the word does not refer solely to a cluster of feelings. As Held points out, it is also a moral term. It is a good thing to care about others; a bad thing not to care. Because it is a moral term, it can be used to guide how and when to act on one's feelings, as well as to evaluate specific instances of caregiving.

On the view of a number of care ethicists, the caring relationship requires engagement with another's will—the caregiver must treat her charge not simply as an object of her care, but as someone with wants, intentions, and desires of his own. Noddings calls on caregivers to practice what she calls engrossment, which consists of such close attention to the feelings, needs, ideas, or wants of their charges that the caregivers' own will is displaced. Other care ethicists emphasize the importance of self–knowledge, lest the caregiver confuse her own will with the will of her charge.

Caring well also requires the caregiver to pay attention to the particulars of a caring relationship rather than being guided by abstractly formulated rules or principles. It is by being closely attentive to this particular person, who needs this particular kind of care, in these specific circumstances, rather than by reflecting on general moral precepts, that morally admirable care is given. This is not to say that caregivers ought never to engage in abstract thinking. But the point is to remain within the caring relationship, which requires attention to the person for whom one cares rather than attention to moral abstractions.

A number of feminist ethicists have argued (repeatedly) that each of the three central features of the ethics of care reinforces the stereotype of the self–effacing wife and mother, prescribing courses of action and ways of thinking that are bad for women. In particular, the critics have identified three dangers. First, if the caregiver cares about the person she cares for, her feelings will not permit her to leave her charge's needs unmet, which poses the danger of exploitation. Second, the caregiver might become so engrossed in the needs and wants of her charge that she gives up her own sense of right and wrong, thereby losing her integrity. And third, if the caregiver attends closely to the particular needs and circumstances of her charge, her field of vision cannot accommodate the broader concerns of social justice.

Kittay's solution to the problem of exploitation is to call for financial, economic, and logistical support for caregivers. She argues that if one begins from the fact of human dependency instead of from the assumption that "all men are created equal," then caring for those who need it can be seen as one of the requirements of justice—as can support for those who provide this care. Diemut Bubeck has a different solution. Her idea, modeled on military service, is that men and women alike could spend some period of their lives in a "caring service" whose mission would be to provide respite care for unpaid dependency workers.

As for the problem of integrity, one solution is to build self–care into the ethics of care so that it does not become an ethics of self–erasure. However, if the caregiver's only motive for taking care of herself is that she can then better care for her charge, she stands in danger of losing herself altogether. Cheshire Calhoun's 1995 account of integrity provides a different solution. She argues that integrity is not only the personal virtue of holding fast to the moral values that are central to one's self–conception, but also a social virtue, exercised by reliably standing for one's own best moral judgments to other people. If integrity involves being the kind of person others can depend on, it cannot be threatened by caring well. Indeed, for the caregiver to do what she knows to be wrong would count as defective care, because it would mean that her charge could not rely on her.

In response to the claim that the ethics of care is too focused on the personal and the particular to attend to issues of social justice, Tronto proposes to redraw the boundary that political theorists and others have marked between morality and politics. As caregiving is a practice embedded in social life, she claims, it has to be understood in a political context and not just a moral one. A politics of care that complements the ethics of care would, in Tronto's view, recognize and support the caring labor on which every society depends. Such a politics would shift the goals of social policy from preserving autonomy to fostering interdependence; from promoting interests to meeting needs. It would value citizens even when they cannot fend for themselves.

Responsibility Ethics

The ethics of care is based on a morally crucial relationship between people that has too often been ignored or dismissed by nonfeminist ethicists, but relationships other than those involving care are also morally important, and they too give rise to responsibilities. Nor are relationships the only source of the moral demands made on people. For these reasons, several feminist ethicists have gone beyond care to develop an ethics of responsibility.

Margaret Urban Walker is less interested in the abstract questions that philosophers have traditionally raised about the conditions under which someone is morally responsible (Was he free to act otherwise? Did she form the proper intention?) than in examining how practices of responsibility operate within actual moral communities. People hold one another to their promises, excuse them, demand an explanation, give them a standing ovation, let them stew in their own juice, award them the Nobel Prize, and sentence them to death by lethal injection. In these and other ways responsibility is assigned, accepted, taken, deflected, redirected, and renegotiated.

How one is expected to participate in society's practices of responsibility depends just as much on one's gender, class, age, ethnicity, and race as it does on one's own achievements. Who gets to do what to whom is largely determined by the social power that is distributed according to these demographics, as is the matter of who must account to whom. And just as social position influences whether and to what extent one may take, assign, or avoid responsibility, so too it plays a role in determining who may set or change the rules that govern when, how, and by whom this may be done.

As Walker points out, however, the system is rigged. The social forces that allow some people to take responsibility for the things that are pleasant or rewarding, while imposing on other people the kinds of responsibility that keep them from attaining many of the good things in life, are the same forces that hide the fact that this is going on. Some of these forces naturalize the uneven distribution of responsibility, concealing the coercion that sustains the arrangement by representing it as natural—as when women are said to have a maternal instinct that qualifies them to care for children while men do not. Other forces normalize the unfairness, focusing so much attention on the norms or standards for fulfilling a particular responsibility that the question of why a particular kind of person must assume the responsibility is completely hidden from view. Incessantly barraging women with the norms for looking attractive, for example, is a wonderful way of concealing the unfairness of requiring them to take far more responsibility for their appearance than men.

Practices of responsibility look forward as well as backward. In The Unnatural Lottery, Claudia Card points out that people who have suffered from unfair distributions of responsibility can do more than make backward–looking assignments of blame for past wrongs. A woman who has been raped, for example, can adopt a forward–looking stance that allows her to take responsibility for what happened to her—not in the sense of blaming herself, but in the sense of refusing to be a victim. She can be responsible for rebuilding her life at the same time as she holds her attacker responsible for his deed.

Normally, adults are expected to know the moral rules and to be aware of the standards by which other people judge them. That is part of what it means to be a morally competent person. But in "Responsibility and Reproach," Calhoun observes that morally competent people can lose their competence in abnormal moral contexts, such as the one that feminists take themselves to inhabit. If, for instance, the normal moral context allows men to deflect responsibility for changing their babies' diapers, then even a well–meaning man is unlikely to see the sexism behind his assumption that when he does change a diaper, he is doing something nice rather than doing merely what he ought. As he is behaving irreproachably according to the standards of the moral context he inhabits, it hardly seems fair to blame him. One could, after all, excuse him for the same reason one excuses young children's wrongdoing—that he is not responsible for his attitude because he has not yet learned the moral rules that govern the abnormal moral context feminists occupy. But Calhoun thinks he should be held responsible anyway. When feminists reproach people who engage in sexist behavior, she argues, they teach them that what they are doing is wrong, motivate them to change their behavior, and show them respect rather than treating them like children. This is one way in which feminists can take responsibility (in Card's sense) for sexism.

The ethics of care and responsibility ethics display some common themes. Both reject the idea that persons are essentially self–sufficient and unconnected, insisting instead that selves are always nested in webs of relationship. Both emphasize the differences among people rather than making abstract generalizations about human nature. Both use gender as a central category of analysis. Both use the language of responsibilities rather than rights or duties. And both begin from careful examinations of actual, real–time personal interactions. This on–the–ground quality is highly characteristic of feminist ethics—it is a way of avoiding the mistake of theorizing from too limited a set of examples.

Feminist Bioethics

In Canada and the United States, the bioethics movement and second–wave feminism both began in the late 1960s, but the two discourses had little to say to one another for the better part of two decades. It was not until 1989 that the U.S. journal of feminist philosophy, Hypatia, published two special issues devoted to feminism and medical ethics. The few essays by feminists published up to that time in the premier U.S. journal in bioethics, the Hastings Center Report, dealt solely with ethical issues surrounding women's reproductive systems.

All that has changed. The 1990s saw a steady stream of conferences, monographs, anthologies, and essays in learned journals that examine bioethical issues through a feminist lens. Susan Sherwin's No Longer Patient: Feminist Ethics & Health Care appeared in 1992, as did Feminist Perspectives in Medical Ethics, edited by Helen Bequaert Holmes and Laura M. Purdy. The International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, begun in 1993 by Holmes and Anne Donchin, has some 300 members worldwide and has sponsored several conferences on feminist bioethics, in conjunction with the International Association of Bioethics. In 1995, the prestigious Kennedy Institute of Ethics devoted its Advanced Bioethics Course to feminist perspectives on bioethics, and the plenary lectures of that course were then published in a special issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. In 1996, the Journal of Clinical Ethics published special sections in each of its four issues on feminism and bioethics. That same year saw the publication of an anthology edited by Susan M. Wolf, Feminism and Bioethics: Beyond Reproduction. In 1998, the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy devoted an entire issue to the feminist ethic of care. Anne Donchin and Laura M. Purdy's anthology, Embodying Bioethics: Feminist Advances, appeared in 1999. In 2001, the journal Bioethics published an issue devoted to feminist bioethics. Textbooks and readers in bioethics routinely include essays written by feminists.

Feminist bioethics largely consists of criticism directed at practices surrounding the care of women's bodies, and in particular, the parts of women's bodies that mark them as different from men. There has been an ongoing focus on women's reproductive practices, in the form of arguments in defense of abortion, debates about the wisdom of various methods of assisted reproduction, arguments against sustaining postmortem pregnancies, ethical analyses of various sorts of maternal–fetal conflicts, concern about HIV testing of newborns and pregnant women, pleas for better prenatal care for pregnant women, debates about the use and abuse of the birth control implant Norplant, arguments for and against amniocentesis and other genetic testing of fetuses, and discussions about hormone replacement therapy for postmenopausal women. And when feminist bioethicists have moved "beyond reproduction," as Susan M. Wolf puts it, they have tended to criticize practices of healthcare for women—weighing in, for example, on the debates over the medical management of breast cancer, arguing that tying healthcare insurance to employment disadvantages elderly women, or protesting the injustice of a healthcare delivery system that devotes a disproportionate amount of high–tech care, such as arterial angioplasty and organ transplantation, to men. While this criticism can be seen as a political and moral protest against the sexism that permeates the healthcare system, it has been argued that the preoccupation with women's bodies, and especially women's reproductive health, tends to reinforce the androcentric view that men are normal but women, being abnormal, require special accommodations both within healthcare and within bioethics.

Not all of feminist bioethical criticism focuses on women's (reproductive) health. Mary Mahowald has, for example, used standpoint theory to criticize healthcare providers who systematically discount their patients' knowledge about their illness and treatment. Virginia Warren has pointed out that medicine's preoccupation with crisis issues diverts attention from what may be called housekeeping issues, which are perceived as women's work and are on that account not valued. Susan M. Wolf has argued that gendered differences in medical treatment, suicidal behavior, healthcare insurance, and social expectations about self–sacrifice offer a reason to suppose that legalizing physician–assisted suicide would further oppress women. A number of feminists have criticized the cost–cutting measures resulting in shorter hospital stays that unfairly exploit the gendered division of labor within families, where, compared to men, women do vastly disproportionate amounts of caregiving, even if this means that they are restricted to part–time employment or give up their jobs altogether.

Feminist bioethicists' constructions have consisted mainly of reconceptualizing problems in areas of healthcare practice and policy ranging from postmenopausal motherhood to home healthcare, and then offering solutions based on those reconceptualizations. With the major exception of the work of some feminist bioethicists on the ethic of care, however, constructions in theory have been almost nonexistent. Much more could be done both to expand the ethic of care so that it furnishes conceptual tools for social and political analysis, and to use the practice of medicine itself to enrich ethical theory. That so little of this work has been done is not surprising, not only because feminist bioethics is a very young discourse but also because bioethics in general has failed to produce much distinctive theory, contenting itself with the pragmatic strategy of agreeing on middle–level ethical principles where it can, and scavenging from the standing political and moral theories when it must. Feminist bioethicists, however, do not have the luxury of that sort of pragmatism, because it is the business of feminism to be deeply suspicious of the standing political and moral theories, on the grounds that they are shot through with gender bias and so cannot be regarded as trustworthy. Many feminists argue that their task is to construct new theory rather than to refine theories that leave everything exactly as it was.

Why ought feminists theorize about ethical issues arising from biomedical practice? Why, that is, should there be a feminist bioethics at all? One answer is that medicine ought to be of particular concern to feminists because it is one of the hegemonic discourses of our time, commanding enormous amounts of social prestige and authority. Because it is so powerful that no other discourse except, possibly, that of international capitalism competes with it, it interacts with gender at many levels and in many different ways. Feminists continue to criticize that interaction, but they also wish to learn from it. By studying how power, in the guise of gender, circulates through the healthcare system, they contribute to the body of normative theory that might guide this socially valuable institution in the direction of greater justice.

hilde lindemann nelson

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