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“Knowledge, Difference, and Power: Essays Inspired by ‘Women's
Ways of Knowing’”
Edited by Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger and Jill Mattuck Tarule
Basic Books, 478 pp
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In 1986, four academic women — Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker
Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger and Jill Mattuck Tarule — published a book
called "Women's Ways of Knowing." A couple of years later, I went to work
at a small business that would eventually become a worker-owned, feminist
co-operative. When I finally left that company after seven years, I'd
learned to curse Belenky et. al., along with a whole passel of other
feminist theorists, whose ideas, I believe, helped to make my workplace the
most poisonous and depleting I've ever encountered.
"Women's Ways of Knowing," like the more popular writings of psychologist
Carol Gilligan ("In a Different Voice"), claimed, in the words of two
followers, that "women's thought patterns are more contextual and more
embedded in relational concerns than those of men." Women are supposed to
be co-operative rather than competitive, more inclined toward empathy and
less toward seeking dominance. In opposition to "the rationalism,
separation and false 'objectivity' of masculinist models of knowledge,"
women were touted as caring more about personal experience, feelings and
intuition, which are felt in the body ("gut" feelings) rather than the
head. Even people who've never heard of "Women's Ways of Knowing" or
Gilligan recognize such ideas — if only because they parrot traditional
notions of femininity, with the connotation neatly switched from negative
to positive.
Depending on your politics, a democratically-managed, feminist co-operative
might sound intriguing, heavenly or nightmarish. People who have worked in
other "alternative" organizations tend to offer a knowing, sympathetic
groan of agony when I talk about that part of my past. My former workplace
suffered from a litany of woes that plague such idealistic groups, most of
which just boil down to childish behavior. The difference was, in our
organization the perpetrators had a ready-made ideological justification
for every tantrum and dropped ball, every passive-aggressive stratagem and
rank prejudice, the wheel spinning and the finger-pointing. It was all,
somehow, a more feminist and womanly approach, an attempt to topple the
patriarchy by defying its cruel, oppressive, rational standards of
behavior. That ideology, picked up in college Women's Studies programs and
various feminist books and journals, came courtesy of theorists like
Goldberger, Tarule, Clinchy and Belenky.
Now, with "Knowledge, Difference, and Power: Essays Inspired by 'Women's
Ways of Knowing,'" the four authors have anthologized writings by people
whose lives were changed by their original book — although not,
unsurprisingly, malcontents like me. To be fair, reading it I learned that
many of the boosters of "Women's Ways of Knowing" have gravely
misinterpreted and simplified its authors' ideas. But I also learned that
this (deliberate or just plain stupid) misreading keeps cropping up again
and again. Students who read "Women's Ways of Knowing," as one contributor
to "Knowledge, Difference, and Power" reports, invariably "heard [the]
authors as praising 'connectedness,' a voice of one's own,
emotionality, 'embodied' knowledge and other characteristics," all
described as typical of women.
Our company ran a retail store and mail order business. Trying to
accomplish the necessary, nuts-and-bolts tasks of such an operation, while
appeasing those staff who demanded that the company emulate this
"connected" vision of feminism, felt like playing tennis underwater. The
authors of "Women's Ways of Knowing" don't seem to recognize that the
"female" style of behavior they champion is the direct result of women
having had very little power throughout most of history. It completely
fails us when we actually have some economic and social muscle. But many
feminists, like many leftists, have such a moral phobia about power that
they have no idea how to exercise it constructively.
Jan. 13, 1997
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Next: When tears trump arithmetic
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