Philosophical feminism

Philosophical feminism, a loosely related set of approaches in various fields of philosophy that (1) emphasizes the role of gender in the formation of traditional philosophical problems and concepts, (2) analyzes the ways in which traditional philosophy reflects and perpetuates bias against women, and (3) defends philosophical concepts and theories that presume women’s equality.

Nature and scope of philosophical feminism

Philosophical feminism arose during the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s. During that period women in many academic disciplines, including philosophy, began to question why there were almost no works by women in the canons of their disciplines and why there were so few women in their professions. For feminist philosophers, part of the answer lay in the generally disparaging view of women that pervaded Western culture and was consequently reflected in the thinking of most male philosophers: compared with men, women were seen as irrational, emotional, unintelligent, and morally immature. Eventually women philosophers were led to ask more-pointed questions: how has philosophy been affected by the larger culture’s attitudes toward women? What has philosophy left out or misunderstood because of those attitudes? The most obvious results, as women philosophers noted, were omissions. Until the late 20th century, women’s philosophical contributions were generally dismissed (if they were noticed at all), and issues of concern to women were ignored. In the history of Western philosophy up to the 1970s, the topic of gender seldom arose, and when it did it was usually in the context of a rationalization of women’s lower social status and their exclusion from public life. The exceptions to this rule, such as Plato’s Republic and John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1861), were few and far between.

Feminist philosophers soon came to realize, however, that the problem they had identified could not be solved by filling in a few gaps—e.g., by hiring more women philosophers and by recognizing more philosophical works by women. Because of the historical sexism of Western culture and because the paradigmatic philosopher was conceived of as highly rational, dispassionate, and independent, the female philosopher was virtually a contradiction in terms. A woman could be a philosopher only if she “thought like a man.” Gender bias was thus built into the qualifications for membership in the profession.

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If bias against women was not incidental to philosophy but in fact one of its defining features, the potential ramifications of a feminist critique were boundless. Although some feminist philosophers adhered to mainstream philosophical traditions and pursued women’s issues within those frameworks, others were convinced that treating gender as a category of philosophical analysis would entail major modifications in the practice of philosophy. Different topics would be salient; different assumptions would make sense; different methods would be appropriate. For these philosophers, pursuing a gender-based critique of philosophy to its logical conclusion would transform the discipline and give rise to a distinctively feminist approach to philosophical problems.

There were some early attempts in the history of philosophy to address issues of concern to women, including Mill’s The Subjection of Women, which argued for woman suffrage, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), which showed how prevailing notions of femininity served male interests. Still, feminist philosophy from the 1970s was no less indebted to the practices and positions originally developed in women’s consciousness-raising groups (groups dedicated to raising awareness of women’s issues). The tenets that feminist philosophy extracted from those sources included the following.

1. Gender—the complex of psychological traits and dispositions that characterize a person as either “masculine” or “feminine”—as well as the relations between genders, are socially constructed (the product of socialization according to culturally variable norms), not biologically or genetically determined.

2. Independence and self-determination for women can be achieved only by “speaking in one’s own voice”—i.e., only by thinking and acting in ways that genuinely reflect one’s perspectives, experiences, feelings, and concerns as an individual.

3. The domination or subordination of women in any social setting or in any walk of life is a political issue, not a private one.

4. Because knowledge is produced by societies—i.e., knowledge is the result of collaboration among and validation by a community of inquirers—the standards used to evaluate knowledge claims and to identify legitimate topics of inquiry are socially determined, not absolute.

5. One’s upbringing and social situation affect how one frames questions and what one is likely to understand.

Those themes underlie contemporary feminist scholarship in all fields of philosophy.