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Feminist Epistemology

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Feminist Political Ecology; Feminist Theory; Gender
and Feminist Studies in Economics; Gender and
Feminist Studies in Sociology
Bibliography
Agarwal B 1994 A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights
in South Asia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
Albelda R 1995 The impact of feminism in economics—beyond
the pale? A discussion and survey results. Journal of Economic
Education 26: 253–73
Barker D K 1999 Gender. In: Peterson J, Lewis M (eds.) The
Elgar Companion to Feminist Economics. Edward Elgar,
Cheltenham, UK, pp. 393
Blau F D, Ferber M A 1992 The Economics of Women, Men,
and Work. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
Blaug M (ed.) 1999 Who is Who in Economics. Edward Elgar,
Cheltenham, UK
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England P, Kilbourne B S 1990 Marriages, markets, and other
mates: The problem of power. In: Friedland R, Robertson A F
(eds.) Beyond the Market Place: Rethinking Economy and
Society. Walter de Gruyter, New York, pp. 163–8
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Wealth, Series 42, No. 3, September, pp. 335–351
Gustafsson S 1990 Half the power, half the incomes and half the
glory: The use of microeconomic theory in women’s eman-
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tion of the Chair of Labor Market Issues with Special
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Hewiston G J 1999 Feminist Economics. Interrogating the Mas-
culinity of Rational Economic Man. Edward Elgar, Chelten-
ham, UK
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Aldershot, UK
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over time. In: Persson I, Jonung C (eds.) Women’s Work and
Wages. Routledge, London, pp. 36–71
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Household. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
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Lewis M (eds.) The Elgar Companion to Feminist Economics.
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MacDonald M 1995 The empirical challenges of feminist
economics. In: Kuiper E, Sap J (eds.) Out of the Margin.
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Ott N 1995 Fertility and division of work in the family. In:
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Feminist Epistemology
Persson I, Jonung C (eds.) 1998 Women’s Work and Wages.
Routledge, London
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Economics. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK
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Thought. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK
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D. Meulders
Feminist Epistemology
Reflecting on feminist epistemology, namely the claim
that there are distinctively feminist perspectives on the
theory of knowledge, initially proposed at the end of
the 1970s, is a little like recalling the English Chartist
movement with its utopian program of radical political
reform. Within what historians would regard as rather
little time, what was seen as an absurd and impossible
political project, not least the demand for universal
suffrage, was to become an everyday reality. The
utopian dreamers turned out to be more practical than
the dismissive establishment. The equally utopian
proposal for a distinctively feminist epistemology was
placed firmly on the theoretical agenda of the second
wave of feminism by the end of the 1970s. Within just
two further decades, substantial aspects of the feminist
epistemology debate began to find acceptance, not just
among the diversity of feminists, but much more
widely within culture and society.
That hot debate among the scholars and activists of
the women’s movement, which gave birth to the claims
for feminist epistemology, took rather little notice of
disciplinary boundaries. The new field they were in the
process of creating, ‘Women’s Studies,’ was self-
consciously not only highly innovative but was also
transgressive. Having found that the academic gaze
was blind to the bodies and lives of women, to say
nothing of sex–gender relations, there seemed little
purpose in deferring to the canon of the old ex-
clusionary disciplines. Thus the new epistemology
drew in theorists whose disciplinary formation lay in
philosophy, psychoanalysis, biology, history, physics,
and sociology, but whose cultural products often
showed little trace of their formation. These feminist
epistemology debates, without quite ever settling down
and forging an unequivocal consensus, have entered
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Feminist Epistemology
and helped foster profound changes in many academic
disciplines, particularly where the mode of production
of knowledge requires rather modest capitalization.
The so-called ‘Little Sciences’ have proved much more
susceptible to change than the ‘Big Sciences.’ Thus the
most power charged techno-sciences of molecular
biology and informatics are proving to be remarkably
resistant to the kinds of internal changes that pri-
matology or sociology have experienced.
1. The Birth of Academic Feminism
Despite the power of late twentieth century feminism
to touch women worldwide, the development of
academic feminist theorizing required financial sup-
port. During this key early period support given to
Women’s Studies by both the Ford and Rockefeller
foundations enabled US academic feminism to de-
velop more strongly than its counterpart within
Europe, not least in the development of feminist
approaches to the theory of knowledge. By contrast,
although Scandinavian research policy was swift to
support Women’s Studies, it did so as part of policy-
oriented, rather than as basic research, while in
Western Europe, with the exception of The Nether-
lands, support from either the state or from found-
ations was slow to arrive. Thus, while there was a rich
outpouring of articles and books published by femin-
ists from many countries criticizing existing theories of
knowledge and proposing alternatives, the confident
assertion that there were distinctively feminist per-
spectives on epistemology had to wait until the
publication of Disco
ering Reality (Harding and
Hintikka 1983). The editors, the US philosophers of
science, Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka, de-
scribed their theoretical project.
During the 1990s, feminist thinkers provided
brilliant critiques of the political and social beliefs and
practices of patriarchal cultures. But less attention has
been given to the underlying theories of knowledge,
and to the metaphysics which mirror and support
patriarchal belief and practice. Are there—can there
be ‘distinctive feminist perspectives on epistemology,
metaphysic, methodology, and philosophy of science’
(p. 9)?
The US contributors, divided between deconstruc-
tionist accounts of the values embedded within or-
ganized knowledge or scientia, and those which try
to set out the conditions for rebuilding these as feminist
knowledges. A key target was the natural sciences,
which had, with immense success, claimed to be above
culture. In setting the natural sciences as their target,
the feminist critics of science shared more than a little
in common with the new, post-Mertonian, sociology
of science, although there was little visible connection
between the two. However, the very title of the book
indicates that these were daughters, albeit dissident
daughters, of the enlightenment. As feminist critics of
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science, they sought to replace what they saw as flawed
accounts of reality with more reliable accounts free
from ideologies and relations of domination. For this
generation of theorists, the fact that reality was both
real and knowable was not significantly at issue; the
nominalism which was to sweep the 1980s and 1990s,
was not, at that moment, a powerful current. Recog-
nizing the power of foundationalist thought, the
authors set out to analyze the patriarchal constructions
of those cultural giants who had deeply shaped Western
culture from antiquity, to the early theorists of
modernity to the late modern figures of Darwin, Marx,
and Freud. Within the natural sciences it was not by
chance that the focus was Darwin and the life sciences,
and not, say Einstein and physics, for biology was the
discourse which claimed cultural authority to define
women’s nature.
The definition of women’s nature was an old
battleground, with pioneer nineteenth century femi-
nists arguing that in Darwinian theory, only men
evolved. Unquestionably, scientific sexism along with
scientific racism demanded critical attention; clearing
away the culture of biology-as-destiny would help
create a political space in which new human subjects
could claim agency. Where in the past such detailed
critiques had been mounted predominantly by pro-
gressive men biologists, as women entered the labor-
atories, their consciousness raised by the second
women’s movement, they too had the skills to enter
the lists in their own right. The pioneers among these
feminist biologists include Ruth Hubbard, Marian
Lowe, Ethel Tobach, Betty Roscoff, Anne Fausto
Stirling, Ruth Bleier, and Lynda Birke. These insisted
that the androcentricity which produced and reflected
a patriarchal culture also produced poor biology, and
that a more faithful, more reliable account of women’s
nature could only be produced through feminist
science resisting the relations of domination. It was the
pioneering work of Carolyn Merchant (1980) as a
historian of science that linked the problem of gender
domination with the domination of nature. While this
link by the feminist historians opened a continuing
connection with the burgeoning environmentalist
movement, the feminist life scientists made a powerful
connection with the women’s health movement. Both
had, and have, epistemological and political impli-
cations.
Their deconstructionist critiques (without Derrida)
constituted an immense methodological challenge to
contemporary biomedical research. They charged
successfully that biomedicine had taken the body of the
male of European bio-geographic ancestry, or ‘race,’
and fetishized it as the universal human body. They
demonstrated forcefully the ways through which
women’s bodies, apart from their problematic re-
productive systems and their troublesome psyches,
along with the bodies and minds of other Others, were
subsumed within a demonstrably false universalism.
Under the impact of this epistemological questioning,
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together with the increasing presence of historically
excluded groups within the laboratories, the discourse
of biomedical research has gradually but dramatically
changed, above all in the study of the pre-eminent
lethal diseases of the West. Thus, heart research now
routinely explores difference without hierarchy, where
previously the study of the heart of the pale male was
equated with some universal human organ. Re-
searching cancer also underwent a sea change. It was
not simply the immense pressure to address breast
cancer seriously but, almost ironically, this attention to
sex–gender difference has led to greater attention being
paid to the specific problems of men, not least prostate
cancer. Even mental health began to address gender
and ‘race’ difference without automatic notions of
domination. This was feminist epistemology in action.
2. The New Feminist Epistemology
This successful critique of biomedical science as
skewed and inadequate, bad for women and bad for
science, fostered an initial comfortable solidarity
between the pioneer feminist science critics, embracing
both the feminist biologists and those, typically from
the social sciences and humanities, engaged in setting
out the theoretical project of a distinctively feminist
epistemology. One of the most influential theorists of
the new feminist epistemology was political scientist
Nancy Hartsock (1983), who formulated and named
feminist standpoint theory. Her socialist feminist
project revisioned Marx’s theory of knowledge.
Taking the project of a proletarian science, she
runs it through the sieve of feminist analyses of the
specificities of women’s reproductive labor. She argues
that it is a feminist consciousness that gives rise to the
distinctively feminist standpoint. This approach was
shared by Harding in the same volume, and by
sociologist Hilary Rose in her Signs article (1978). In
the important earlier natural science issue of Signs, the
historian Donna Haraway (1978) had already spelled
out the need to rebuild the life sciences outside the
relations of dominance. In this project of a successor
science these feminists reflected the strong Hegelian
and Marxist influences in their work. The heretical
claim that nature and not just society could be more
reliably ‘seen from below’ challenged the hegemony of
the claims of the natural sciences to be a culture of no
culture.
Feminist standpoint theory, particularly when it
was directed to the study of nature, represented a
theoretical development from the ‘two sciences thesis,’
articulated initially as the struggle between proletarian
and bourgeois science by the social relations of the
science movement of the 1930s and 1940s, lost in the
Stalinist period, but subsequently re-articulated as a
rainbow politics of ‘science for the people’ by the
radical science movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Other influential feminist science theorists came at the
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Feminist Epistemology
epistemology question from very different theoretical
and political trajectories. Thus, philosopher Helen
Longino, while concerned to define a feminist science,
did so by specifically repudiating the Hegelian master\
slave argument; for her the view from below carried
no epistemic privilege. Evelyn Fox Keller, by contrast,
took a psycho-historical approach, focusing on the
gendered origin stories of science. She saw masculinity
as embedded in that mechanical philosophy which had
triumphed in those founding years of both modern
science and capitalism.
Not only did early feminist epistemology theorizing
show little deference to the existing canon, initially it
paid little formal attention to the paradigm-breakers
emerging from the crisis of French social thought in
the wake of the defeat of 1968. Few of these early
feminist epistemological texts paid attention to the
theorists of post-structuralism and post-modernism.
As noted above, self-proclaimed feminist decon-
structionists paid little attention to Derrida or to the
discourse analysis of Foucault, or to Lyotard’s post-
modernistic project, even though debates were raging
around these in the mainstream disciplinary dis-
courses. Despite the parallels which have led to some
over facile assertions such as ‘feminism is part of post-
modernism,’ these new currents were relatively slowly
taken into feminist theoretical production. They first
entered the humanities and then, with continuing
resistance, the social sciences.
3. Disciplining Feminism?
Feminism’s successful arrival within the academy by
the end of the 1980s brought with it substantial
epistemological implications, not least the restoration
of disciplinarity within feminist discourse. Feminists
began to address the specific canon and current
debates of their own disciplines; the ethical and
political commitment to address the feminist move-
ment both in and out of the academy increasingly
weakened. The language of feminist theorizing soon
changed. The early commitment to transparency
and accessibility ceded to a new complexity, even
obscurantism. There was a sudden interest in post-
modern theorists, whom an early, more politicized,
generation of feminists had set aside for their anti-
feminism; earlier theorists such as Nietzsche became
widely discussed despite an evident anti-semitism and
misogyny. While disciplinary boundaries appeared,
the claims of theorists became grandiose. Feminists in
the humanities often spoke of ‘feminist theory,’ by
which they meant more precisely feminist humanities
theory, but tacitly let the term carry with it the
aggrandizing claim that this had universal power over
the diversity of fields. Even feminist sociology, some-
thing of a bastion of critical realism, entered a period
of self-questioning. When the differences between
women, whether of class, ethnicity, and bio-
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Feminist Epistemology
geographic ancestry were so very visible, how did it
make sense to speak of a single feminist standpoint?
Theoretical developments responding to these chal-
lenges by feminist sociologists such as Canadian
Dorothy Smith, German Frigga Haug, and African
American Patricia Hill Collins gave standpoint theory
a new and enriched life.
4. Feminist Science Wars?
Among feminist science studies scholars it was the
historian Donna Haraway who embraced post-
structuralism decisively, simultaneously throwing into
question the possibility of universal reliable know-
ledge. In a key paper (which echoed silently philo-
sopher David Bloor’s methodological stance of
refusing to privilege the truth claims of the natural
sciences), Haraway, despite her respect for Hubbard
as a pioneering feminist biologist, pointed to her
uneven treatment of truth claims. She argues that for
Hubbard, good science remained privileged; only bad
science was to be deconstructed. This epistemological
difference between the feminist scientist and the
feminist historian foreshadowed, with some strained
courtesy, the divisions among the feminist approaches
to science theory which were to develop.
However, the tensions between feminists science
theorists were never characterized by the savagery of
those within mainstream epistemological fights, above
all those of the Science Wars. Science theory feminists,
despite their theoretical differences, frequently shared
a desire to build solidarity between those in science
studies and those in science. Thus it was matter of
common recognition that natural scientists, particu-
larly biologists, had to be realists. It was equally clear
that, for science theorists, more relativistic positions
were entirely possible, whether they were historicized
as by materialism or full-blown as by nominalism.
Feminist science theorists routinely drew back from
stark ‘either\or’ choices, not least those dichotomously
opposing relativism to realism. Thus, where the early
Harding had shared Rose’s concern at the hyper-
reflexivity of the strong program of science, and the
reduction of science just to social relations proposed
by Robert Young and the Radical Science Journal, her
subsequent publication suggested a new theoretical
ambiguity. Certainly reviewers who were outside
science theory of The Science Question in Feminism
(Harding 1986) diversely claimed the book both for
standpoint theory and as support for the more
relativistic approach of post-structuralism. The ambi-
guity was not accidental but typical of the feminist
science theorists as they fought to avoid an unwelcome
dichotomy.
Later, Haraway made a sophisticated attempt to
spring the ‘either\or’ trap: unwilling to lose all claim to
objectivity she proposes a feminist objectivity built
from ‘partial critical knowledge located in multiple
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embodied sites sharing a web of connections called
solidarity in politics.’ Harding too made an attempt to
go beyond the ‘either\or’ dichotomy in her advocacy of
‘strong objectivity,’ an argument which has much in
common with the earlier externalist analysis of
Marxism.
5. Global Technoscience and Global Feminisms
In a quite extraordinary way, the feminist epistem-
ology debates have paralleled and offered an entirely
different face to the widespread demands for equal
opportunities within the labor market, including that
of science. This, whether claimed for reasons of justice
or for economic efficiency, has become subtly linked to
arguments about changing the character of cultural
production, typically side-stepping whether the claim
entails an appeal to social, cultural, or essentialist
difference. Today, innovative corporations concerned
for their global markets sound remarkably like dedi-
cated multiculturalists in their arguments that pro-
ducts aimed at a socially diverse market are better if
designed and produced by a matching diversity of
producers. That the former tend to equate better with
‘sells more’ and the latter equate better with ‘is more
democratic’ and ‘will produce a more sustainable
science and technology’ is almost incidental. Both are
responding to the feminist epistemological challenge
that who gets to produce knowledge, and who is
excluded, matters.
But it has been the advent of what social theorists
have termed the risk society, that is, where the
development of science and technology have become
associated intrinsically with major environmental
risks, which has also fostered an immense turn
towards democratic control to protect the entire
socio-ecosystem. This immense cultural and political
move has paralleled the struggle within the sciences.
Working from outside science, a mixture of NGOs
and mass popular movements from both the North
and the South have confronted the technosciences and
the corporations. As we have seen with the fate
of the Kyoto agreement, individual governments and
global corporations continue to mobilize the old
constructions of science as outside culture and capable
of producing certainty, in order defend themselves
against the need to take socio-ecological risk seriously.
Nonetheless, although it would be a mistake to
announce the environmentalist cause won, it has
become less and less easy for the corporations and
supportive governments to pursue their commercial
and technological objectives without any sense of
global responsibility and concern for either human or
green nature. Where they display such indifference
they find themselves confronted by new alliances
capable of mobilizing immense popular criticism. The
more sophisticated recognize the need for sustainable
development and are more open to new more socially
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inclusive forms of governance. How far these are
serious or tokenistic is too soon to judge.
It is only possible in a brief article to do little other
than hint at the links between the feminist epistem-
ology debates and these huge cultural and political
developments. Sometimes, as with the mass people’s
science movement in India and the work of the feminist
science theorist and activist Vandana Shiva, the links
are more evident. But it will be historians looking back
at this extraordinary shift in the cultural status of
science and technology at the cusp of the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries, who will have the pleasure
of disentangling the cultural and political contribution
of the feminist epistemology debate to these sea
changes.
See also: Feminist Ethics; Feminist Political Theory
and Political Science; Feminist Theory; Feminist
Theory: Liberal; Feminist Theory: Marxist and
Socialist; Feminist Theory: Postmodern; Gender
and Feminist Studies; Gender and Feminist Studies
in Psychology; Gender and Feminist Studies in
Sociology; Rationality and Feminist Thought;
Situated Knowledge: Feminist and Science and Tech-
nology Studies Perspectives
Bibliography
Bleier R 1986 Feminist Approaches to Science. Pergamon,
Oxford, UK
Haraway D 1990 Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the
World of Modern Science. Routledge, New York
Harding S, Hintikka M (eds.) 1983 Disco
ering Reality: Feminist
Perspecti
es on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and
Philosophy of Science. Reidel, Dordrecht, The Netherlands
Harding S 1986 The Science Question in Feminism. Open
University Press, Milton Keynes, UK
Keller E F 1985 Reflections on Gender and Science. Yale
University Press, New Haven, CT
Longino H 1990 Science as Social Knowledge, Values, and
Objecti
ity in Scientific Enquiry. Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ
Rose H 1978 Signs: Special issue on women, science and
society. Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4(1)
Rose H 1989 Staying Ali
e: Women, Ecology and De
elopment.
Zed Press, London
Rose H 1994 Lo
e, Power and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist
Transformation of the Sciences. Indiana University Press,
Bloomington, IN
H. Rose
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Feminist Ethics
Feminist ethics has its roots in the more general
feminist theory and politics, going back to Mary
Wollstonecraft’s Declaration of the Rights of
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
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Feminist Ethics
Women, and on through the work of Jane Addams
and Charlotte Perkins Gilman early in the twentieth
century, work that took women’s moral visions
seriously. As an intellectual discipline in Anglophone
nations, it was born in the ‘second wave’ of the
Women’s movement in the mid- to late-1960s, taking a
few clues from de Beauvoir (1948). The early feminist
theories in this ‘wave’ were written by activists in the
movement as position papers to provide conceptual
and theoretical bases for charting strategy. The basic
concerns and projects of feminist ethics today have
grown from the political roots.
As time passed, the feminist activists entered pro-
fessions across the disciplines. They established
journals and courses and eventually the discipline of
women’s studies itself was legitimized and institu-
tionalized, with its own subspecialties that include
feminist ethics. Although feminist intellectual work
has always been multidisciplinary, its institutional-
ization has taken place in the traditional context of
departments, course assignments, disciplinary spec-
ialties, etc. One outcome has been that feminist ethics,
like traditional ethics, has tended to fall within the
territory of the humanities, despite the fact that the
social sciences also have essential contributions to
make.
Intellectually, feminist ethics was shaped by critic-
isms of the traditional moral theories that were
developed to suit life in secular, Western capitalist
democracies. Moral subjects and agents were defined
as autonomous individuals who were equal under
morality and the law—a stereotypically male subject.
The traditional theories incorporate, for the most
part, a variety of dualisms in which one side is valued
over the other, underwriting an ethics that supports
dominance and subordination of many sorts.
The dualisms fundamentally value reason over emo-
tion, with men identified with reason and mind and
women (and the racially subordinated) identified with
emotion, body, and nature. Out of this soil a variety of
feminist moral theories have grown, ranging from
modified, liberal theories of equal opportunity and
rights; to theories of mothering, care, and relationship;
to lesbian ethics; liberatory ethics; standpoint ap-
proaches; third world and minority approaches; and
the feminist ecological ethics that is now being
developed.
From the beginning, feminists worked in ‘applied
ethics,’ for example, on moral issues of abortion,
violence, prostitution, AIDS, clitoral cutting, the
environment, peace, immigration, and many others.
All of these theorists insist on taking women’s experi-
ence seriously. In addition, some feminists focus on
issues of power and dominance, insisting that feminist
ethics must be ‘liberatory’ and provide guides for
action. The liberatory focus can be seen as asking,
‘What would an ethics be like that takes patriarchy, or
racism, or anthropocentrism seriously as a social and
political structure?’
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ISBN: 0-08-043076-7