by Bruce Bawer
There is, to be sure, a countervailing tendency in Women’s Studies. Michèle Le Doeuff, author of The Sex of Knowing, rejects the idea that women are less rational beings than men. And some women working in more rigorous academic disciplines openly resent professional feminists’ disparagement of the scientific method. In Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (1998), philosopher Susan Haack writes that she was unsettled to hear “feminists or multiculturalists” saying “that thinking about evidence and inquiry as I did revealed complicity with sexism or racism.” Then there are some feminists who seek to make the sciences more “woman-friendly” by reducing or eliminating the rational component and introducing “empathy” and other supposedly female qualities. Complaining in Feminism and Geography that “geography has historically been dominated by men” and “concentrates on the spaces, places and landscapes that it sees as men’s,” Gillian Rose proposes a more female-friendly geography focusing on “women’s spaces” and taking a “women’s perspective.” In a recent course on “Geography and Gender” at the University of Aberdeen, students could learn that “[g]eography’s ‘founding fathers’ . . . viewed the world from a position of masculinist reason,” that the study of geography traditionally involves undesirable “masculinist codes of . . . academic rigor,” and that geographers display a lamentable “[m]asculine rationality” that reflects their (apparently misguided) view that “they can separate themselves from their body, emotions, values, past etc. so that their thoughts are context-free and objective.” (The extent of such thinking about geography is testified to by the existence of a scholarly periodical titled Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography.)
A key text for third-wave feminism is Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (1982). At its most extreme, Gilligan’s book is profoundly separatist, arguing that in a society suffused with patriarchy, women are better off withdrawing into a safe, women-only setting—Gilligan’s island, one might call it (though Gilligan herself is heterosexual and has been married to a man for decades). Gilligan, who is a psychologist and ethicist, argues that there are “two ways of speaking about moral problems, two modes of describing the relationship between other and self,” each of which is associated with one of the two sexes; and although “this association is not absolute,” there is, she argues, a significant correlation, and our society, being patriarchal, operates according to, and gives preference to, the male mode while disdaining the female. The result is “a limitation in the conception of [the] human condition, an omission of certain truths about life,” for theories once “considered to be sexually neutral in their scientific objectivity” turn out instead “to reflect a consistent observational and evaluative bias.”
Gilligan quotes with approval the claim by sociologist and psychologist Nancy J. Chodorow that the differences between male and female mentalities are not biologically based but are, rather, manifestations of the fact that children are raised primarily by their mothers. Hence, writes Gilligan, “female identity formation takes place in a context of ongoing relation” with a person of the same sex, while identity formation in boys involves a distancing from their mothers—the result being that “masculinity is defined through separation while femininity is defined through attachment, male gender identity is threatened by intimacy while female gender identity is threatened by separation. Thus males tend to have difficulty with relationships, while females tend to have problems with individuation.”
Gilligan attributes to women a greater gift for empathy, a greater “[s]ensitivity to the needs of others,” and “an overriding concern with relationships and responsibilities.” (Chodorow puts it this way: boys learn to relate to others in terms of power; girls don’t.) While men are concerned with “the primacy and universality of individual rights,” she maintains, women have more of a sense of being part of a community and of having responsibility to others. While women define identity “in a context of relationship” and judge it “by a standard of responsibility and care,” and view morality “as arising from the experience of connection,” for men “identity is different, clearer, more direct, more distinct and sharp-edged.” But whereas “we have listened for centuries to the voices of men and the theories of development that their experience informs,” women have lived mostly in silence and, when they do speak, have not been listened to.
Another influential book that makes related points is Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (1986) by Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule. The authors exalt what they call women’s “connected knowing,” which, they argue, is based on a “commonality of experience” and on shared emotions, and reject men’s “separate knowing,” which is rooted in a dispassionate “mastery of relevant knowledge and methodology” and involves rigorous critical thinking and logical proofs. Educators, they conclude,
can help women develop their own authentic voices if they emphasize connection over separation, understanding and acceptance over assessment, and collaboration over debate; if they accord respect to and allow time for the knowledge that emerges from firsthand experience; if instead of imposing their own expectations and arbitrary requirements, they encourage students to evolve their own patterns of work based on the problems they are pursuing. These are the lessons we have learned in listening to women’s voices.
And then there’s Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Wellesley Centers for Women and author of a famous 1988 essay, “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies.” McIntosh introduces race into the equation, identifying white men as “vertical thinkers,” out to master topics and achieve excellence, and describing white women and people of color as “lateral thinkers” who are “relational” and “inclusive.”
Although Haack complains wryly that “new-fangled feminist ideas of ‘women’s ways of knowing’” are nothing but the same old “sexist stereotypes that old-fashioned feminists used to deplore,” one of those old-fashioned feminists, Phyllis Chesler, accepts that there are deep-seated differences between men and women. Yet in Chesler’s reckoning, women don’t always come out on the positive side of the ledger: “While men kill openly and directly and know how to enforce party lines, they also know how to give other men (but not necessarily women) some serious personal and ideological breathing room. Men do not take their differences personally; women usually do.” In Chesler’s view, women fear conflict and prize conformity; many of them “self-censor as a way of belonging.” (Certainly the dynamics of Women’s Studies would seem to confirm this view.) What’s more, “women’s overwhelming need for intimacy . . . leads to passivity, conservatism, and a refusal to take responsibility for injustice.” Gilligan, to be sure, speaks of the “tyranny of niceness,” the need to be seen as polite and virtuous that can keep women from asserting themselves; but Chesler complains that Gilligan is “so invested in presenting girls and women . . . as . . . morally ‘different’ and superior to men” that she ignores the distinguishing moral failures of females—what Chesler calls “false niceness,” conformism, and a tendency “to censor unpopular or original thinking.”
One cannot discuss “women’s ways of knowing” without mentioning écriture féminine, a French school of language theory whose name was coined by Hélène Cixous. Dating back to the early 1970s, it counts among its other leading lights Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig, who argue that language is by nature masculinist, and that women, when they use it, are wielding an instrument that is foreign to them and that was invented as a means of suppressing them. Therefore it’s the task of women to place their own stamp on language, an act that the “French feminists,” as they’re commonly called, associate with the female body. (Cixous, for example, compares “the desire to write” to “the gestation drive.”) It’s fair to say that these women’s ideas don’t easily translate
into clear French, let alone clear English.
Even Peace Studies, of all things, is too “masculinist” for some Women’s Studies stalwarts. I learn this at an NWSA convention session in which four white women discuss “outsider feminisms.” (The session’s title is “Bodies in Question: Outsider Feminisms, Oppositional Knowledges, and Common Struggles.”) Anya Stanger of Syracuse University says that she started out as a student of Peace Studies, because she wanted to learn “how to contest violence in all forms.” But she found that Peace Theory could cause, rather than resolve, conflicts. It was Women’s Studies that taught her what the problem was: Peace Studies is too masculinist; it views identity as fixed, says that “violence is not natural,” maintains that the key to teaching soldiers is “dehumanization” and “distanciation [sic] between people,” and preaches that the converse of dehumanization is “humanization.” But all these claims, says Stanger, are wrong, for violence and so-called dehumanization are a natural part of male behavior. Therefore Peace Studies needs to be corrected by “transnational feminist theory,” which understands the importance of challenging “hegemonic Western masculine constructions of knowledge.” Stanger now views Peace Studies through a Women’s Studies lens, for she recognizes that “ignoring feminist insights” in peace work can result in “replicating violence.”
What goes on in a Women’s Studies classroom? A group of blogs kept by the professor and students in an introductory Women’s Studies course at a state university that shall be nameless offers a rare look not only at what happens behind the closed classroom doors but also at what happens in the students’ minds. On her blog, the professor, whom I shall call Ms. Channing, explained that in the course, which was taught in the spring of 2009, gender would be understood
by examining ways in which power is deployed over and through bodies for use of the nation-state and elites. We will critique feminist histories, knowledges, and production in the face of imperialism, colonialism, environmental development-destruction & the negative consequences of violences deployed against poor, subordinated, and indigenous peoples. Tools and methods are provided to respond to expressions of anticolonial resistances to Western development logics.
Note that this was not listed as a course in imperialism or colonialism or international relations—it was a course designed to introduce students to Women’s Studies. Its emphasis on matters that the pioneers of second-wave feminism never would have considered particularly relevant to the women’s movement is typical. So is the teacher’s prose style. (Why settle for knowledge, violence, and resistance when you can have “knowledges,” “violences,” and “resistances”?) The course reading list was also unsurprising, including such books as Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey’s Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives (2009), Barbara H. Chasin’s Inequality and Violence in the United States: Casualties of Capitalism (2004), and Stephen Burman’s The State of the American Empire: How the USA Shapes the World (2007), plus various online materials about rape, race, patriarchy, white privilege, heterosexual privilege, the rights of indigenous people, the feminization of poverty, and the military-industrial complex.
Channing explained that on the midterm, students would be expected to “give form and definition to the theories, methods and practices which inform your current understanding of gender and power in historical and contemporary contexts,” to “move from untethered supposition and opinion to intentional, articulated, informed, engaged and specific footholds which speak to your understanding of the ways in which gender, and power relationships, are articulated as gender intersects race, class, hierarchy, patriarchy, religion, militarism, capitalism, global systems, work, labor, citizenship, and nation,” and to “engage deeply in a critical analysis practice regarding the literatures and methods examined in class thus far and to articulate more concretely an appreciation for and understanding of systemic, institutional, and structural components in social relationships.” Simply put, they would be expected to abandon their own views and start parroting Women’s Studies rhetoric about social constructionism, intersectionality, and so forth. Channing called on her students to “[p]rovide an analysis that is engaged and using critical tools which you have had access to thus far in this course. Here is an [sic] model which you can build upon, and/or develop your own model. However, your model must have this level of complexity in terms of you are [sic] doing intersectional analysis: the INTERSECTION of gender, power, race, class, history, labor, migration, immigration, etc.”
Channing introduced her students to the concept of patriarchy by having them read a portion of Allan G. Johnson’s book The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy that was excerpted in Women’s Lives. “I’ve never come across the word ‘patriarchy’ before,” wrote H. (a biochemistry major from Hawaii who listed her interests as “Music, Piano, Make-up, Arts & Crafts, Beach, Baking, anything and everything & just having fun”), “so I found this article in Women’s Lives quite interesting. . . . I never knew it before, but we live in a patriarchal culture that creates inequalities between men and women.” Her classmate A. commented on H.’s posting: “Like you, before this course I had not heard the term patriarchy in this context.” But now “I notice power dynamics within my relationships with both men and women.” And here’s R., a journalism major:
White, middle to upper class, males have surrounded me my whole life. My family is ran [sic] by them, my neighbor [sic] is full of them, my government is dominated by them, and they have mostly been the authority figures in my life. . . . I am sometimes in a bind between wanting to be extremely independent and also wanting to be taken care of.
I must embarrassingly admit that often my roommate and I will lie in bed at night and talk about how we want to fall in love. . . . why do I sometimes so strongly desire this? Is it because our society has embedded into my brain the ideals and wants a women [sic] should look for in a man? . . . As a society we promote behaviors of male dominance, and breed a misogynic [sic] culture. . . . This male dominance is everywhere.
Note that the students seem not to have been taught, in any objective way, about the radical-feminist concept of patriarchy, and were certainly not presented with a range of views about it; no, they were plainly inculcated with the concept and were put to work “dissecting patriarchy in our society.” They were so wet behind the ears that they didn’t even realize that they weren’t being educated but indoctrinated; they were so malleable, so easily manipulated intellectually, that it didn’t even occur to them that if they hadn’t ever heard of or thought about patriarchy and its role in their lives, perhaps it was because the concept didn’t have any great relevance to the way they lived in America in the twenty-first century.
Another student, B., wrote that Johnson’s “strongest message to me was that by doing nothing we contribute to this evil that allows for men to be on top and have superiority.” She mentioned “the game monoply [sic],” which “not only teaches us to put ourselves on top, by giving us rules it allows us to have an excuse to act in a way that puts others below you.” B. professed to share Johnson’s concern that “when a man is accused of rapping [raping] a child, we very quickly blame him . . . rather then [sic] examining the society that allows violence towards women in video games and movies. Its [sic] about looking at the roots.” One suspects that B. is entirely unaware of the disastrous consequences of Great Society programs founded on a let’s-blame-society-and-get-to-the-roots philosophy; her comment here provided a fine example of what happens when you push ideology on young people who are almost completely innocent of history.
Women’s Lives contains a substantial section on violence against women, including readings about rape. Here’s what C. learned:
[W]omen everywhere live under the threat of rape, the greatest risk often in their own homes! Rape is a highly unreported crime because people think that rape is only having sex. However, this is not true and rape constitutes any violence inhibited [she means committed] to assert
male power and control. The article stated that estimates suggest that the actual incidence of rape may be up to 50 times the numbers reported. Where did things go wrong in American society to make living in America so dangerous? . . . It is apparent that rape, as well as many other types of sexual violence, has become a HUGE problem when a woman isn’t even safe in her own home. . . . Now that women have gained more rights in all sorts of aspects in society, I feel that men are lashing out by inhibiting acts of violence because it is the only means they can think of to get back at them. . . .
In addition to regurgitating the exaggerations about rape served up in Women’s Lives (and throughout Women’s Studies), C. recorded her response to a film about male violence that was screened for the class: “Being that men are more likely to inhibit [again, she means commit] murder and assault, as a women [sic] I need to be aware of not only this, but also of the cultural influences and emphasism/pressure [sic] for men to be this way. I need to become more aware of the environment/people around me, as well as an understanding of the pressures media places over men.” A classmate, J., commented on C.’s remarks: “I wonder if men also commit acts of violence because they are given no other examples of how to deal with complex emotions. The entertainment industry (movies, music, etc) links violence with toughness and masculinity, and the news media ignores the fact that men are commiting [sic] the vast majority of crimes. . . .”
In one exercise, Channing asked her students to comment on a series of print advertisements plainly chosen because they lent themselves to feminist interpretations. One ad, for Dolce & Gabbana, showed four beautiful, bare-chested young men, one of them holding a beautiful young woman in a sexy clinch on the floor. Erotic stuff, but C. wasn’t turned on: “This image . . . displays a gender powered [sic] and is focused on white, wealthy males as their audience. It looks like the man is about to beat the woman with the other men intently watching. . . . This is representative to American society and the abuse that men inhibit on women [curiously, while Channing often commented on student blogs, she seems never to have explained to C. the meaning of the word inhibit]. . . . I feel that men inhibiting violence upon women has become such a common topic that people are immune to the effects it has.” K. agreed: “When I look at this ad, I see this group of men as trying to establish their dominance over this woman. The fact that her back is extended and her legs are strained implies that she is struggling to get out of the grasp of the muscular man hovering over her.” (What about the fact that her facial expression clearly conveys not fear but arousal?)