53
FEMINIST STANDPOINT
EPISTEMOLOGY
Building Knowledge and Empowerment
Through Women’s Lived Experience
Abigail Brooks
I have . . . striven faithfully to give a true and just account of my
own life in Slavery . . . to come to you just as I am a poor Slave
Mother—not to tell you what I have heard but what I have seen—
and what I have suffered.1
—Jacobs (1861/1987, p. 242)
These are the words of Harriet Jacobs, who, after escaping and eventually
winning her freedom, took it upon herself to document her years spent
as a slave in the American South during the first half of the 19th century.
Speaking from a position of direct experience, Jacobs’s words filled the widespread
silence and ignorance about the condition of female slaves and challenged
many of the misconceptions about slave women that were predominant
at the time. Jacobs’s goal, to educate Northerners about the cruelty and injustice
of slavery and the particular suffering of female slaves within it, provided
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her with the courage, strength, and motivation to tell her story. She dared hope
that by sharing her own life story as a female slave, by drawing on what she
herself had witnessed and experienced, she would stand a chance of convincing
Northerners about the brutal truths of slavery. As Jacobs (1861/1987)
puts it,
I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to myself; on
the contrary, it would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent
about my own history. Neither do I care to excite sympathy for my own sufferings.
But I do earnestly desire to arouse women of the North to a realizing
sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in
bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add
my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States
what Slavery really is. Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and
dark, and foul is that pit of abominations. May the blessing of God rest on
this imperfect effort on behalf of my persecuted people! (pp. 1–2)
By revealing the acute exploitation, physical pain, and mental anguish she
was forced to endure as a slave, including years of sexual harassment perpetrated
by her owner, Dr. Flint, Jacobs succeeded in raising awareness among Northern
women. Ultimately, the heightened awareness engendered by Jacobs’s words
about the horrors of slavery, and about the psychic and physical violence
endured by female slaves in particular, inspired Northern white women to speak
out against slavery and contributed to the growth of the Northern antislavery
resistance movement.
Harriet Jacobs lived and wrote nearly 150 years ago, yet we look to her
for guidance as we begin our discussion of contemporary feminist approaches
to research and knowledge building. Why? Because Harriet Jacobs’s life
story—the strategies she applied and the goals she hoped to achieve in telling
it—resonates strongly with the ongoing project of feminist research. Through
sharing her own experiences as a slave girl, Harriet Jacobs opened people’s
eyes to what had been heretofore silenced and unknown—what life was like
for slave women. As a firsthand account of slavery from the female perspective,
Jacobs’s story offered new insight into the brutality of the institution of
slavery and helped to galvanize public critique and resistance against it.
Similarly, much of contemporary feminist scholarship and research strive to
give voice to women’s lives that have been silenced and ignored, uncover
hidden knowledge contained within women’s experiences, and bring about
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women-centered solidarity and social change. This chapter focuses on a
branch of feminist scholarship and research that was explicitly founded on
these goals and that maintains an ongoing commitment to achieving them—
namely, feminist standpoint epistemology.
Feminist standpoint epistemology is a unique philosophy of knowledge
building that challenges us to (1) see and understand the world through the
eyes and experiences of oppressed women and (2) apply the vision and knowledge
of oppressed women to social activism and social change. Feminist
standpoint epistemology requires the fusion of knowledge and practice. It is
both a theory of knowledge building and a method of doing research—an
approach to knowledge construction and a call to political action.
• But how do we actually go about integrating a feminist standpoint
framework into our research practices?
• What are some of the new insights and perspectives that women’s life
experiences reveal about the larger social world?
• How do we translate what we learn from women’s everyday lives, and
from the different oppressed positions women inhabit in society, into
political and social action?
These questions will prove useful guides as we trace the evolution of
feminist standpoint epistemology, from its origins to its ongoing development,
below.
BUILDING NEW KNOWLEDGE
FROM WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES
While many thousands of men’s lives have been recognized and recorded for
centuries and across cultures, women’s life stories have been documented far
less often, even forgotten. As Joyce McCarl Nielsen (1990) puts it, women’s
culture, history, and lives have remained “underground and invisible,” relegated
to the “underside” of men’s culture, history, and lives (p. 10). Beginning
in the late 1960s and 1970s, however, and as a result of feminist consciousnessraising
efforts both inside and outside of academia, women began to draw
attention to the omission and exclusion of their voices and experiences in
multiple arenas—politics; public policy; the professions of law, medicine, and
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business; and the disciplines of science, social science, and the humanities, to
name a few. In sociology classrooms, for example, female students began to
express frustration with the fact that the predominantly male-centered theories
and concepts they were learning about failed to take their own experiences as
women into account. In the words of feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith
(1987), the sociological theories and methods being taught did not apply
to “what was happening” as the female students “experienced it” (p. 86).
Women’s growing awareness of the contradiction between their own life experiences
and the research studies and theoretical frameworks they were learning
about—the failure of these studies and frameworks to accurately reflect
their lives—inspired them to construct new models of knowledge building.
These new models, or “alternative ways of thinking,” would be developed by
women for women, with the goal of granting authentic expression and representation
to women’s lives. One such alternative model of knowledge building
came to be known as feminist standpoint epistemology.
Feminist standpoint epistemology requires us to place women at the center
of the research process: Women’s concrete experiences provide the starting
point from which to build knowledge. Just as the reality about what life was
like for slave women could come to light only through Harriet Jacobs’s actual
lived experience of it, feminist standpoint scholars emphasize the need to
begin with women’s lives, as they themselves experience them, in order to
achieve an accurate and authentic understanding of what life is like for women
today. Building knowledge from women’s actual, or concrete, life experiences
is acutely important, feminist standpoint scholars argue, if we hope to repair
the historical trend of women’s misrepresentation and exclusion from the dominant
knowledge canons. And only by making women’s concrete, life experiences
the primary source of our investigations can we succeed in constructing
knowledge that accurately reflects and represents women. As feminist standpoint
scholar Patricia Hill Collins (1990) puts it, when making knowledge
claims about women, we must always remember that it is women’s “concrete
experience” that provides the ultimate “criterion for credibility” of these
knowledge claims (p. 209). But what exactly do we mean by women’s concrete
experience? How do feminist researchers go about uncovering women’s
concrete experiences? And what can we learn from these experiences? Let’s
turn now to some examples.
Women’s concrete experiences consist of what women do. They are the
wide and diverse range of activities that women engage in as part of their
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everyday lives. Just one aspect of women’s lives, previously understudied and
undervalued, that feminist researchers continue to shed light on is the myriad
nurturing tasks that many women perform on a daily basis. These nurturing
tasks, from cooking, cleaning, and taking care of their families (DeVault,
1991), to caring for the children of others (Collins, 1990), to caring for their
own children from afar (Hondagneu-Sotelo & Avila, 1997), are examples of
women’s concrete experiences. Further, from each of these concrete experiences,
women have cultivated particular knowledge and unique sets of skills.
To shed light on the lives and experiences of oppressed women, and to
uncover women’s knowledge and skills that are hidden and/or undervalued,
feminist scholars often make innovative use of research methods, develop alternative
research strategies, and even construct new methodological techniques
altogether.2
For example, in her research on women’s experiences of shopping,
planning, preparing, and cooking food for their families, Marjorie DeVault
(1990, 1991) found that simply asking questions and listening to her respondents’
answers was not working. Many women had not often had the opportunity
to talk about their daily activities with an interested party and struggled with
how to put their thoughts and feelings about their daily activities into words.
DeVault (1990, 1991) moved beyond the traditional interview format to adopt
what Kathryn Anderson and Dana Jack (1991) call the “interactive approach.”
She worked in collaboration with her respondents to “co-construct” new words
that accurately reflected their experiences, thoughts, and feelings.
Marjorie DeVault’s (1991) research documents the organizational and
coordinating skills that women have developed from their work in planning,
preparing, and cooking food for family members. The feminist standpoint
scholar Alison Jaggar (1997) argues that through their ongoing practice as
caretakers and nurturers, women have become especially skilled at expressing
and reading emotion. Women’s skill at expressing and reading emotion is
important, because emotion serves several instrumental functions: “Emotion is
necessary for human survival. Emotions prompt us to act appropriately, to
approach some people and situations and to avoid others, to caress or cuddle,
flight or flee. Without emotion, human life would be unthinkable” (Jaggar,
1997, pp. 190, 192).
Patricia Hill Collins’s (1990) research reveals African American women’s
skill in community building, a skill derived from their unique role of caring for
the children of extended family, friends, and neighbors. By performing a caretaking
role that Collins calls “other mothering”—helping to fill in the gaps left
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by unaffordable child care, economic hardship, and overworked parents by
caring for children other than their own—these “other mothers,” known and
trusted by many, may come to play an instrumental part in bringing different
members of the community together and leading the community forward. In
addition to other mothering, another innovative form of mothering called
“transnational mothering” reflects women’s cultivation of particular skills.
Through Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila’s (1997) research, we learn about Latin
American mothers who, separated from their children back home and often at
great risk to themselves, live and work in the United States to provide financial
support for their children. They send the bulk of their earnings home to
ensure their children’s well-being. Their earnings pay for their children’s food,
clothing, medical bills, and schooling. In this respect, these mothers have
developed nurturing skills that lie outside of the traditional mother role of
emotional support; although they do provide emotional support for their
children through phone calls and letters, their primary method of nurturance
becomes a financial one, a method traditionally reserved for fathers.
By making women’s concrete experiences the “point of entry” for
research and scholarship and exposing the rich array of new knowledge contained
within women’s experiences, feminist standpoint scholars begin to fill
in the gaps on the subject of women in many disciplines. However, granting
authentic expression to women’s experiences, and to the knowledge that
women have cultivated from these experiences, is not the only goal of feminist
standpoint epistemology. Feminist standpoint epistemology also challenges us
to critically examine society through women’s eyes.
• What do women’s experiences teach us about how society functions as
a whole?
• Do women’s experiences, and the knowledge gleaned from these experiences,
offer us unique perspectives and insights into the world around
us? If so, how?
UNDERSTANDING SOCIETY THROUGH
THE LENS OF WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES
Like Harriet Jacobs, who pushed her readers to evaluate the institution of
slavery through her eyes as a slave girl, feminist standpoint scholars encourage
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us to use women’s experiences as a lens through which to examine society
as a whole. Let’s return to Patricia Hill Collins’s (1990) research on African
American mothering to illustrate this point. Collins exposes us to an important,
and previously understudied, aspect of the everyday lives of African
American women called other mothering, a practice in which women care
for children of friends, neighbors, and family members whose biological
mothers are working outside of the home. Collins illuminates the practice of
other mothering as an indicator of the resourcefulness of African American
women; it is a unique and useful skill developed for and by women. At the
same time, however, and as Collins points out, African American women’s
daily experience of other mothering, and their reliance on it, throws light on
larger social and economic issues—namely, the lack of quality, affordable
child care in the United States and the difficulties faced by many poor
mothers as a result.
Alison Jaggar’s (1997) scholarship provides us with another example of
how women’s everyday experience, and the knowledge that accompanies that
experience, can serve as a helpful tool for understanding the larger social
world. When women engage in daily household activities, and comply with
socially dictated roles such as that of caretaker, they cultivate a unique set of
expertise that coincides with these activities and roles. Jaggar (1997) identifies
“emotional acumen”—a unique, intuitive ability to read and interpret pain and
hidden emotions and understand the genesis of those emotions—as one such
unique set of expertise (p. 192). But the utility of women’s emotional acumen
is not limited to the realm of home and family. Instead, Jaggar argues, if
extended outward and applied to the social world, emotional acumen can have
many vital functions. Women’s emotional acumen can help to “stimulate new
insights” in the disciplines of sociology and philosophy and generate a new set
of “psychotherapeutic tools” in the field of psychiatry (Jaggar, 1997, p. 192).
Probably the most profound potential application of emotional acumen, however,
is one of political analysis and accountability. Because emotional acumen
enables women to tune in more quickly to situations of “cruelty, injustice, or
danger,” it can become a powerful vehicle for exposing political and social
injustices. By providing the “first indication that something is wrong with the
way alleged facts have been constructed, with the accepted understanding of
how things are,” emotional acumen can empower women to make “subversive
observations that challenge dominant conceptions of the status quo” (Jaggar,
1997, p. 191).
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Alison Jaggar (1997) and Patricia Hill Collins’s (1990) research demonstrates
that women’s experiences, and the knowledge garnered from these
experiences, can be used as a means to draw attention to the inequalities and
injustices in society as a whole. In fact, as we come to understand society
through the lens of women’s experiences—let’s say, for example, through the
eyes of African American other mothers—we take the first step toward constructing
a feminist standpoint. A feminist standpoint is a way of understanding
the world, a point of view of social reality, that begins with, and is
developed directly from, women’s experiences. The next step is to draw on
what have learned from women’s experiences, to apply that feminist standpoint,
toward bettering the condition of women and creating social change.
Women’s experiences not only point to us flaws in larger economic and political
systems but also offer potential solutions to these flaws. As Alison Jaggar
(1997) explains, because women’s experiences, and the feminist standpoints
that evolve from them, offer us a deep understanding of the “mechanisms of
domination,” they also help us “envision freer ways to live” (p. 193).
WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES AS
A MAP FOR SOCIAL CHANGE
Harriet Jacobs’s (1861/1987) personal account of the sexual abuse and
exploitation she was forced to endure as a female slave energized antislavery
activism in the North. On learning about Jacobs’s experience, people came to
understand the institution of slavery as a whole through the eyes of slave
women—from slave women’s standpoint. The standpoint of slave women—
with the knowledge and understanding of slavery it revealed—served as a
powerful starting point, or position, from which to fight against the brutal
institution. Similarly, by granting honest expression to women’s contemporary
experiences of oppression, feminist standpoint scholars and researchers seek
to agitate resistance against these experiences of oppression and implement
solutions to overcome them. African American women’s experiences of other
mothering teach us that the capitalist system as a whole fails to provide
adequate support for poor working mothers. Further, as we come to view the
capitalist system from the standpoint of African American other mothers, we
are exposed not only to shortcomings in the system but also to the need for
change and new solutions—solutions such as universally affordable, quality
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child care. In fact, often the very process of enabling women to articulate their
own experiences of oppression raises awareness, among women and others,
about the particular difficulties diverse women face and inspires movement
toward change. Let’s turn now to some more examples.
In her book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan (1963) wrote about
what it was like to live as a middle-class (white) housewife in mid-century
America. Drawing directly from her own experience, and the experiences of
many other middle-class women, Friedan challenged the dominant conceptions
about American housewives at the time. Behind the cheerful media and
magazine images of housewives pushing vacuum cleaners, doing laundry, and
exclaiming over their new refrigerators with delight, Friedan uncovered widespread
feelings of discontent. Many women, Friedan found, suffered from
boredom and loneliness and encountered frustration with their everyday lives.
And when women sought help to try to overcome these unhappy feelings, they
would often blame themselves: “When a woman went to a psychiatrist for
help, as many women did, she would say ‘I’m so ashamed’ or ‘I must be hopelessly
neurotic’” (p. 389). Women had been taught to aspire to the role of
housewife: Compliance with the role of housewife was to bring them ultimate
contentment and fulfillment. Therefore, women who didn’t feel this way were
left to worry: “Is there something wrong with me?”
But eventually, even the male psychiatric industry began to doubt that
women’s unhappiness could be attributed to individual or psychological
factors alone. The problem was too widespread. “‘I don’t know what’s wrong
with women today,’ a suburban psychiatrist said uneasily. ‘I only know something
is wrong because most of my patients happen to be women’” (Friedan,
1963, p. 390). Betty Friedan granted a name to this “strange stirring, dissatisfaction
and yearning” felt by so many women. She called it, aptly, “the problem
that has no name” (p. 387). By articulating the unhappiness experienced
by many American housewives, Friedan helped women realize that they
didn’t have to struggle with these feelings alone. Moreover, by publicly naming
the problem, Friedan inspired women to take action to overcome it.
As women came together and shared their stories of unhappiness and dissatisfaction,
they stopped blaming themselves for failing to comply with the
happy housewife image. Instead, they began to critically examine society
through the lens of their own experiences and to challenge the social norms
and expectations of the woman-as-housewife model. From their shared knowledge
of what life was really like for American housewives, women developed
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a feminist standpoint—a critical perspective on reality and a position of political
consciousness—that seriously questioned the legitimacy of the dominant
worldview that women’s natural and biological destiny was limited to the role
of wife and mother. As Joyce McCarl Nielsen (1990) explains, “Without the
conscious effort to reinterpret reality from one’s own lived experience—that
is, without political consciousness—the disadvantaged [women] are likely to
accept their society’s dominant world view” (p. 11). By drawing on their feminist
standpoint, women were able to evaluate their experiences as housewives
and mothers from a fresh perspective. They came to understand their experiences
in the home not as an inescapable biological and natural destiny but
instead as a role constructed and imposed on them by patriarchal society. This
heightened awareness enabled women to resist dominant social perceptions
that linked them exclusively to the roles of wife and mother and empowered
them to pursue life and career paths outside of these roles.
Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony about the sexual harassment she suffered
from then judicial nominee Clarence Thomas, and the heightened awareness
and legal protections against sexual harassment in the workforce that followed,
provides another striking example of the vital relationship between granting
voice to women’s experiences of oppression and activating movement toward
social change. In 1991, Hill articulated her experience of sexual harassment
in a public hearing before the Senate judiciary committee. Humble and softspoken,
Hill was a reluctant public witness. Yet her descriptions of the harassment
she endured resonated with countless American women. On hearing
Hill’s story, thousands of American women came forward and told similar stories
of abuse they had endured in the workplace. Women who had previously
suffered in silence on the job filed a record number of sexual harassment complaints.
Sexual harassment laws were rewritten or tightened in business and in
government. The year following Hill’s testimony, 1992, was hailed “the year
of the woman,” as a record number of women were elected to Congress, attributed
largely to the “Anita Hill effect” (George-Graves, 2003, p. 16).
Anita Hill’s testimony provided women with the courage and strength to
build a critique of sexual harassment and to fight against it. As women came
together and shared their stories, they stopped suffering alone and blaming
themselves for the harassment they encountered. They stopped perceiving sexual
harassment as a personal problem that they had to endure in private and
questioning whether such harassment was a result of their own shortcomings.
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Instead, drawing from their own experiences of sexual harassment, women
developed a new point of view and position—a feminist standpoint—on the
culture of the workplace as a whole. As women examined the workplace
through the lens of their own experiences, they started to unpack connections
between the harassment they suffered and several aspects of workplace
structure—namely, widespread power imbalances based on gender and a blatant
lack of laws prohibiting the sexual harassment of women and providing
any serious recourse for women to fight against it. Thus, out of the process of
sharing and articulating their experiences of harassment, women acquired a
heightened level of consciousness about the issue and began to interpret their
own experiences from a new perspective. This new perspective—or feminist
standpoint—enabled women to locate the true root cause of sexual harassment
and empowered them to do something to change it.
WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES AND DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS
Feminist standpoint scholarship and research teach us that women’s experiences
of oppression provide a powerful lens through which to evaluate society
and a base from which to change it. In this section, we explore one aspect of the
lens created from women’s experiences of oppression in greater detail, an aspect
feminist standpoint scholars call “double vision” or “double consciousness.”
We now turn to the following questions:
• What is double consciousness?
• How does it develop out of women’s experiences of oppression?
• Does it offer women unique insights into society as a whole?
• What about its utility for social change?
Feminist standpoint scholars argue that women, as members of an
oppressed group, have cultivated a double consciousness—a heightened
awareness not only of their own lives but of the lives of the dominant group
(men) as well. Often, women’s daily lives and labor remain invisible to the
dominant group (men). Women, on the other hand, are tuned in to the “dominant
worldview of the society and their own minority perspective” (Nielsen,
1990, p. 10). Put differently, women have a “working, active consciousness”
of both perspectives (Smith, 1990, p. 19). In some cases, women’s capacity for
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double consciousness grows out of their compliance with socially dictated
roles, such as those of wife and mother. In other cases, women develop a
double consciousness to ensure their own, and their family’s, physical and
economic survival.
Men do not necessarily recognize, nor are they always conscious of, the
daily labor many women perform in the home and their dependence on it. But
many women must attend to the everyday tasks of cooking, laundry, and child
care, and learn to navigate, or at least become functionally familiar with, the
(male-dominated) public sphere of the capitalist marketplace. In this respect,
women mediate between two worlds, the world of “localized activities oriented
toward particular others, keeping things clean, managing somehow the
house and household and the children” and the male world of the marketplace,
a world of abstraction and rationality (Smith, 1990, p. 20). Susan Ostrander’s
(1984) research shows, for example, that in addition to managing the household,
women are often expected to be conversant in, and acquire a working
knowledge of, their husbands’ work activities. Familiarity with the names of
coworkers and the daily goings on in their husbands’ workplaces enables
women to provide emotional support to their husbands, support that ultimately
maintains their husbands’ ongoing participation and success in the public
sphere (Ostrander, 1984; Smith, 1999).
While some women develop a double consciousness as they attempt to
conform to particular social roles and expectations, other women rely on their
capacity for double consciousness to protect themselves and to ensure survival.
As Joyce McCarl Nielsen (1990) explains, if a woman is in an oppressed
position, it is often to her advantage to be “attuned and attentive” to the male
perspective as well as to her own. To survive “socially and sometimes even
physically,” women must familiarize themselves with how “men view the
world” and to be able to “read, predict, and understand the interests, motivations,
expectations, and attitudes of men” (p. 10). Harriet Jacobs’s (1861/1987)
survival story serves as a striking case in point. To protect herself against the
sexual abuse of her master as best she could, Jacobs had to become an expert
knower of his mind and moods. As she explains, “He was a crafty man, and
resorted to many means to accomplish his purposes”—sometimes he had
“stormy, terrific ways, that made his victims tremble; sometimes he assumed
a gentleness that he thought must surely subdue” (p. 27). Upon familiarizing
herself with her master’s psychology, Jacobs determined that his “quiet
moods” were the most dangerous—“of the two, I preferred his stormy moods,
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although they left me trembling” (p. 27)—and found creative and skillful ways
to avoid such moods.
bell hooks’s (2004) account of growing up poor and black in Southern
Kentucky provides another example of how double consciousness can develop
as individuals fight to maintain survival, in particular material survival. Every
day, hooks and her neighbors would cross the tracks to the white section of
town where, working as maids, janitors, and prostitutes, they earned just
enough money to obtain food, clothing, and shelter for themselves and their
families. They were permitted to work in the white section of town, with its
“paved streets, stores we were not allowed to enter, restaurants we could not
eat in, and people we could not look directly in the face,” as long as it was in
the “service capacity” (p. 156). However, they were not allowed to live there.
At the end of each day of work, hooks and her neighbors would cross the
tracks to “shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town.” “There were
laws to ensure our return. Not to return was to risk being punished” (p. 156).
By crossing the tracks to work everyday, hooks and her neighbors developed
a “working consciousness” of the white world as well as their own. Whites
however, seldom crossed the tracks in the other direction.
hooks’s (2004) account focuses more on African Americans as an
oppressed group versus whites as a dominant group rather than women versus
men. However, hooks’s explanation of how double consciousness develops as
individuals fight for material survival can be applied specifically to women as
well. It is probable that some of the African American individuals that hooks
describes were women who worked for white men and who depended on white
men for their material survival. In fact, some feminist standpoint scholars draw
parallels between women’s capacity for double consciousness and the capacity
for double consciousness among other oppressed groups, such as African
Americans. Joyce McCarl Nielsen (1990) states:
Given that blacks in our culture are exposed to dominant white culture in
school and through mass media as well as in interaction with whites, we can
see how it is possible that blacks could know both white and black culture
while whites know only their own. The same might be said for women vis-àvis
men. (p. 10)3
It should be clear now that women’s capacity for double consciousness
grants them a unique perspective, or lens, through which to evaluate society as
a whole. Out of their experiences of oppression and exploitation, and their
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enactment of gender specific (subordinate) roles, women have developed, in
hooks’s (2004) language, a “mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors”
(p. 156). Women are tuned in to men’s activities, attitudes, and behaviors
and to their own. But men, as members of the dominant group, are not necessarily
tuned in to women’s activities and behaviors; instead men’s mode of
seeing reality is more likely to be rooted exclusively in their own experiences.
Women’s capacity for double consciousness enables them to see and understand
“certain features of reality . . . from which others [men] are obscured”
(Jaggar, 2004, p. 60). This unique “mode of seeing,” this ability to know and
understand the dominant group’s attitudes and behaviors as well as their own,
places women in an advantageous position from which to change society for
the better. To improve a given society, it is necessary to comprehend how that
society functions as a whole, become familiar with the everyday lives of the
dominant groups and the oppressed groups, and understand the interrelations
between them. Thus, the knowledge gleaned from women’s double consciousness
can be applied to diagnose social inequalities and injustices and to construct
and implement solutions. bell hooks (2004) sums it up best when she
says that double consciousness serves both as a powerful “space of resistance”
and a “site of radical possibility” (p. 156).
WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES AND STRONG OBJECTIVITY
Some feminist standpoint scholars argue that women’s subordinate status in
society, and their capacity for double consciousness that evolves from it,
places them in a privileged position from which to generate knowledge about
the world. This feminist standpoint concept, sometimes called “strong objec-
tivity,”4
teaches us that women are more capable of producing an accurate,
comprehensive, and objective interpretation of social reality than men are. As
Alison Jaggar (2004) explains, women’s “distinctive social position” makes
possible a “view of the world that is more reliable and less distorted” than that
available to the “ruling class” (or men; pp. 56, 57). Furthermore, some feminist
standpoint scholars argue that research that begins from women’s everyday
lives as members of an oppressed group will lead to knowledge claims that
are “less partial and distorted” than research that begins “from the lives of men
in the dominant groups” (Harding, 1991, p. 185). Why? We turn now to a more
detailed explanation, with examples.
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In many societies, feminist standpoint scholars argue, knowledge is
produced and controlled by the ruling class. Therefore, in a given society,
the prevailing interpretation of reality will reflect the interests and values
of the ruling class. Because of its commitment to maintaining power, the
ruling class seeks to conceal the ways in which it dominates and exploits
the rest of the population. The interpretation of reality the ruling class presents
will be distorted such that the “suffering of the subordinate classes
will be ignored, redescribed as enjoyment or justified as freely chosen,
deserved, or inevitable” (Jaggar, 2004, p. 56). The positions of power and
privilege that members of the ruling class inhabit allow them to separate
and insulate themselves from the suffering of the oppressed, and to be more
easily convinced by their own (distorted) ideology. Members of the ruling
class experience the “current organization of society as basically satisfactory
and so they accept the interpretation of reality that justifies that system
of organization. They encounter little in their daily lives that conflicts with
that interpretation” (p. 56).
Members of the ruling class are satisfied with the status quo and have no
cause to question the prevailing interpretation of reality. The daily suffering
faced by members of the oppressed groups, on the other hand, presents a series
of “particularly significant problems to be explained” (Harding, 1993, p. 54)
and demands further investigation. Sometimes the dominant (ruling-classauthored)
ideology succeeds in temporarily convincing oppressed groups to
accept their pain, to self-blame, or to deny it altogether. But ultimately, the pervasiveness,
intensity, and relentlessness of their suffering push oppressed
groups toward a
realization that something is wrong with the social order. Their pain provides
them with a motivation for finding out what is wrong, for criticizing accepted
interpretations of reality, and for developing new and less distorted ways of
understanding the world. (Jaggar, 2004, p. 56)5
Women, as members of an oppressed group, have no cause or motivation
to misconstrue reality. Unlike men, who, as ruling class members, have
constructed a distorted interpretation of reality to protect their interests and
maintain their power, women’s subordinate status means that they are likely
to develop a “clearer and more trustworthy understanding of the world”
(Jaggar, 2004, p. 62). Let’s start with the example of Harriet Jacobs. If we
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examine the institution of slavery from her standpoint, through her eyes and
her own lived experience of it, we obtain an interpretation of the institution
that differs greatly from the dominant interpretations at the time. Slave owners
constructed a paternalistic discourse about slavery: Slaves were helpless,
weak minded, even subhuman, and masters were kindly father figures who
took care of them and provided for them. Slave women were often portrayed
as animal-like, hypersexualized, and in need of being “tamed” by the
Victorian virtues and morals of their white mistresses. From Harriet Jacobs,
we learn the truth about the widespread cruel and brutal treatment of slaves
by their masters, and we learn about the humanity, suffering, and courage of
slave women in particular. By exposing the reality of the sexual violence and
exploitation that many slave women were forced to endure, Jacobs succeeded
in challenging the (distorted) ideologies about slave women that held
sway at the time.
Betty Friedan’s (1963) research on American housewives in the 1950s
and 1960s provides another example of how women’s subordinate status
in society places them in an advantageous position from which to build
knowledge—to construct a more accurate picture of social reality. As we
learned about in an earlier section, dominant ideologies and media images of
the 1950s portrayed women as happy housewives—women’s true and only
calling in life was that of wife and mother. But in reality, many women were
feeling unhappy, dissatisfied, and limited by that role. And these feelings of
emotional pain and frustration motivated women to come forward and challenge
the widespread happy housewife ideology. Women were able to successfully
question the validity of an accepted interpretation of reality—that
of the happy housewife—based on their own knowledge and lived experience
as housewives. Finally, by overturning that (distorted) happy housewife ideology,
women were free to step outside the boundaries and restrictions of the
housewife role, to pursue other goals, interests, and skills—in short, to construct
a new reality that more accurately reflected the full range of their potential
as human beings.
In sum, the feminist standpoint concept of strong objectivity teaches
us that the representation of reality from the standpoint of women is “more
objective and unbiased than the prevailing representations that reflect the
standpoint of men” (Jaggar, 2004, p. 62). Strong objectivity stems from
women’s oppressed position in society and from their capacity for double consciousness
that evolves from that position. Because women can know and
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understand the dominant groups’ behaviors and ideologies as well as their
own, starting research from women’s lives means that “certain areas or aspects
of the world are not excluded” (Jaggar, 2004, p. 62). As Sandra Harding
(2004b) puts it, “Starting off research from women’s lives will generate less
partial and distorted accounts not only of women’s lives but also of men’s lives
and of the whole social order” (p. 128).
NEW COMPLEXITIES AND MULTIPLE STANDPOINTS
As we have learned above, some feminist standpoint scholars argue that
women’s subordinate status in society, combined with their capacity for double
consciousness, grants them a kind of “epistemological privilege” (Jaggar,
1997; Narayan, 2004) from which new and critical research questions arise.
These new and critical questions, if explored, may produce a less “distorted”
and more “reliable” understanding of social reality (Harding, 1993; Jaggar,
1997, p. 192). Further, and perhaps most important, because research that
starts from women’s lives yields a more accurate picture of how a given
society functions, it also uncovers the necessary ingredients for social change.
Only by exposing the intraworkings of society as a whole do we learn about
which elements require modification and reconstruction such that a more just,
humane, and equitable society can be constructed. As Alison Jaggar (1997)
explains, because research that begins with women’s lives grants a more accurate
and “reliable appraisal” of society, it also grants us a “better chance” of
“ascertaining the possible beginnings” of a new society, a society in which all
members can equally thrive (p. 192).
More recently, however, some feminist standpoint scholars have begun to
challenge and rework the claim of women’s capacity for a more complete
understanding of social reality and the potentiality of producing more “objective”
results by beginning research from the lives of women. As Joyce McCarl
Nielsen (1990) puts it, feminist standpoint claims to accuracy and objectivity
are both “promising and problematic” (p. 25). One the one hand, feminist
standpoint scholars remain committed to the “liberating effect” of these claims
and the goals of social justice and social change that accompany them. After
all, the main purpose of attaining a more accurate, more complete understanding
of society is to be able to change it for the “betterment of all” (p. 25). On
the other hand, many object to the very notion, implicit within these feminist
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standpoint claims to accuracy and objectivity, that the experiences and
perspectives of one group (in this case women’s) are more “real (better or more
accurate) than another’s” (p. 25).
Beyond the difficulties of establishing that women as a group, unlike men
as a group, have a unique and exclusive capacity for accurately reading the
complexities of social reality, it is equally problematic to reduce all women to
a group sharing one experience and a single point of view, or standpoint, based
on that experience. This form of essentialism is a double-edged sword.
Notions of objectivity, and the “more accurate” or “more reliable” standpoint
of women, become increasingly difficult to negotiate as a diverse array of
women’s experiences are taken into account.
• How is the nature of feminist standpoint epistemology changing as
racial, cultural, and class-based differences between women are exposed?
• As feminist standpoint scholars recognize women’s multiple social
realities, do they lose the capacity to produce truthful and meaningful
research findings?
• Do the experiences and standpoints of some women offer a more objective
and accurate assessment of social reality than those of others?
• If so, what are the criteria for determining the experiences and standpoints
that are the most or the least reliable?
Let’s turn to these critical questions in greater detail.
Most feminist standpoint scholars now acknowledge that women “occupy
many different standpoints and inhabit many different realities” (Hekman,
2004, p. 227). In short, they take differences between women seriously.
However, while the claim that women can be categorized into one group with
uniform characteristics and a single standpoint has been discarded, feminist
standpoint scholars continue to debate how best to incorporate women’s differences
into the research process. A range of strategies has been suggested.
Sandra Harding (1991, 1993, 2004a) has proposed several, two of which are
highlighted here. The first requires the consideration of women’s different
standpoints but at the same time maintains that some standpoints may generate
more truthful, objective knowledge claims than others. Specifically, this
tactic suggests that the higher the level of oppression, the more objective the
account: The standpoint of the most oppressed group of women will generate
the most truthful research findings. As Harding (1991) explains,
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It should be clear that if it is beneficial to start research, scholarship and
theory in white women’s situations, then we should be able to learn even
more about the social and natural orders if we start from the situations of
women in de-valued and oppressed races, classes and cultures. (pp. 179–180)
In this approach, Harding urges researchers and scholars to engage in a
process of “critical evaluation” to determine which social situations “tend to
generate the most objective knowledge claims” (Harding, 1991, p. 142).
In a second approach, Harding (1993, 2004a) calls for heightened attention
to be paid to the differences and even the conflicts between women’s
standpoints:
Feminist knowledge has started off from women’s lives, but it has started off
from many different women’s lives; there is no typical or essential woman’s
life from which feminisms start their thought. Moreover, these different
women’s lives are in important respects opposed to each other. (Harding,
1993, p. 65)
In this approach, Harding (2004a) emphasizes that it is precisely in the differences,
diversity, and even conflict between women’s experiences that we can
learn the most about society at large. As she explains,
Each oppressed group will have its own critical insights about nature and the
larger social order in order to contribute to the collection of human knowledge.
Because different groups are oppressed in different ways, each has the
possibility (not the certainty) of developing distinctive insights about systems
of social relations in general in which their oppression is a feature. (p. 9)
And yet, despite Harding’s call to recognize difference—the “subjects/
agents of feminist standpoint theory” are “multiple, heterogeneous, and
contradictory”—she continues to emphasize the fact that the experiences of the
oppressed, no matter how diverse, produce more accurate accounts of the
social order than the accounts of the dominant groups. She states,
“Nevertheless, thought that starts off from each of these different kinds of lives
can generate less partial and distorted accounts of nature and social life”
(Harding, 1993, p. 65).
In contrast to Harding’s concept of a “maximally objective” standpoint,
but in resonance with Harding’s recent emphasis on difference, other feminist
scholars also focus on the diverse array of knowledge found within a
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multiplicity of standpoints. Instead of attempting to find tactics that reduce all
standpoints to the “least distorted one,” or to generate universal knowledge
claims from an additive model of multiple standpoints, these feminist scholars
question whether it is possible, or even desirable, to “produce a single, unified
and complete description of the world” (Longino, 1999, p. 339). Each
woman’s standpoint presents a unique lived experience and perspective and
should be valued as such. According to these feminist standpoint scholars,
paying attention to the distinctive characteristics of each woman’s standpoint,
and the diversity among and between women’s experiences, does not interfere
with our capacity to build knowledge. In fact, it is precisely within the distinctive
characteristics of a particular standpoint, or the uniqueness of a particular
woman’s experience, that we can hope to find new knowledge.
Donna Haraway (1991) and Helen Longino (1999) argue that knowledge
grows out of women’s unique lived experiences, and the specific interpretations
of social reality (or standpoints) that accompany those experiences.
Instead of attempting to glide over differences between women, Haraway
(1991) points to the invaluable insights gleaned from the differences
between women’s standpoints and the “elaborate specificity” of each (p. 190).
Similarly, Longino (1999) asserts that women’s knowledge is located in “particular
places, in particular times” (p. 333). Women have different standpoints,
and embody different knowledges, depending on how they are oriented
toward, and interact with, their environments. In this way, each woman’s
unique experience and standpoint directs our attention to details and features
that we might otherwise overlook (p. 335).
By applying the knowledge-building strategies proposed by Sandra
Harding, Donna Haraway, and Helen Longino to some of the women’s lives
that we have become familiar with throughout this chapter, we gain a clearer
understanding of how each of their strategies actually work in practice.
According to Sandra Harding’s first tactic, for example, the lives and experiences
of poor African American women (highlighted by Patricia Hill
Collins’s, 1990, research) potentially offer a more accurate and complete
picture of social reality than the lives and experiences of white middle- and
upper-middle-class housewives (highlighted by Betty Friedan’s, 1963,
research). The implication is not to deny any oppression or suffering experienced
by white women. However, because the oppression and suffering
experienced by African American women as a group tends to be greater than
that of white women, it is by starting from the lives and experiences of
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African American women that we achieve a more objective standpoint on
society as a whole.
According to Donna Haraway (1991) and Helen Longino (1999), we
can learn more by paying close attention to the unique perspective, or standpoint,
on social reality that the experiences of African American women and
white women offer us. Each of these women’s experiences teaches us something
different and valuable about society. By starting with the everyday
lives of poor African American women, we learn about society from the
perspective of women who have to work outside the home to make ends
meet. We learn about low wages; the lack of quality, affordable child care;
and the creative alternative child care strategies that African American
women have developed. By starting with the everyday lives of white
middle- and upper-middle-class housewives on the other hand, we learn
about society from the perspective of women who do not have to work outside
the home to make ends meet. We learn about the dissatisfaction and
isolation these women experience as they perform their daily housekeeping
and nurturing tasks in the home—and about the falseness of the happy
housewife imagery and ideology. We also learn about women’s desires to
expand their lives beyond the roles of wife and mother—to enter the outside
world of work.
OVERCOMING RELATIVISM
If, as Donna Haraway (1991), Helen Longino (1999), Sandra Harding (1991,
1993, 2004a, 2004b), and others encourage, we value the unique perspective
on reality—or standpoint—produced by each woman’s lived experience and
respect the diversity of knowledge generated by women’s many different experiences,
do we also give up the opportunity for political activism?
• Is it possible to value a diverse range of women’s perspectives and
lived experiences and come together and create an organized force for
social change?
Joyce McCarl Nielsen (1990) characterizes this dilemma as follows: “Once
one rejects objectivism, the alternative seems to be a kind of relativism that is
not very satisfying” (p. 28). It is difficult to combine women’s many experiences
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into one universal standpoint without risking the repression of differences
between women or the reduction of all women to a single group with uniform
characteristics. On the other hand, by valuing the diversity of women’s experiences
and perspectives equally, feminist standpoint scholars must be careful to
avoid a kind of paralysis that hinders women from moving forward together and
taking a stand on social issues. If all groups produce “specialized thought and
each group’s thought is equally valid” and no group can claim to have a “better
interpretation of ‘the truth’ than another” (Collins, 1993, p. 625), do we risk a
state of apolitical relativism, a state of “being nowhere while claiming to be
everywhere equally” (Haraway, 1991, p. 191)? It seems clear that if women are
going to work to influence, change, and create new social policies, it is imperative
that they develop some common ground or shared perspectives to meet with
success. As Joyce McCarl Nielsen (1990) explains,
One could argue that there is no need to determine one view as more correct,
that plurality of views could prevail. But at some point—such as when important
decisions have to be made—some view of social reality must be
endorsed. To develop a policy about abortion, for example, one would have
to take a stance in an area where there are conflicting, seemingly irreconcilable
views. (p. 27)
But how can we facilitate the coming together of women with different lived
experiences and unique perspectives and encourage the bridging of standpoints
needed to wage a successful battle for social change without also suppressing
the diversity and uniqueness of each?
Many feminist standpoint scholars emphasize the need for open dialogue
between women and across different perspectives as a first step toward building
the kinds of allied networks or solid bases needed to fight from. Helen
Longino (1999) encourages the development of sites of “critical discourse”
both within and between communities. In these sites, community members
freely express their own perspectives and engage in dialogue with other communities
whose “shared background is different” (p. 343). Similarly, bell
hooks (1990) declares the need for “meaningful contestation and constructive
confrontation” between different perspectives and urges the creation of safe
spaces “where critical dialogues can take place between individuals who have
not traditionally been compelled . . . to speak with one another” (p. 133).
The kind of dialogue that feminist standpoint scholars encourage is one
in which every woman’s unique lived experience and the perspective, or
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standpoint, based on her experience gains a hearing. Indeed, some feminist
standpoint scholars argue that through the very process of constructing a space
that is open to dialogue across women’s different experiences and standpoints,
a space where a multiplicity of women’s voices are granted equal air time, we
actually build community. Patricia Hill Collins (1990) urges us to hearken back
to the African call and response tradition, whereby everyone must learn to
speak and to listen to ensure membership in the community: “Everyone has a
voice, but everyone must listen and respond to other voices in order to be
allowed to remain in the community” (p. 625–626). In the context of such a
community, a community that serves as a gathering site on which multiple
standpoints converge, and where respectful listening and dialogic interchange
is encouraged, we can begin to imagine the potential for increased understanding
among and between women from different backgrounds and cultures
and from different life experiences.
Patricia Hill Collins (1993) describes the potential for community-driven
growth of empathetic understanding between groups who hold different standpoints
as follows:
Each group speaks from its own standpoint and shares its own partial, situated
knowledge. But because each group perceives its own truth as partial, its
knowledge is unfinished. Each group becomes better able to consider other
groups’ standpoints without relinquishing the uniqueness of its own standpoint
or suppressing other groups’ partial perspectives. (p. 626)
In this way, through communal dialogue, a multiplicity of views are
shared and listened to. It is precisely because each community member is able
to trust that her own unique perspective will be heard and respected that she is
able to fully hear and respect the views of others. Such communal dialogue
may enable us to reach a point at which, as Elsa Barkley Brown puts it, “all
people can learn to center in another’s experience, validate it, and judge it by
its own standards without need of comparison or need to adopt that framework
as their own” (cited in Collins, 1993, p. 625). But beyond facilitating empathetic
understanding across women’s standpoints and respecting the diversity
and uniqueness of each, can such communal dialogue enable active alliances
between standpoints?
In fact, as feminist standpoint scholars point out, communal dialogue that
fosters interaction between women while also maintaining respect for the
diversity of women’s perspectives sets the stage for intragroup connections
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and enables the growth of alliances that are needed to wield power and forge
social change. As women’s diverse standpoints are shared, respectfully listened
to, and validated, connections may be made “where none existed before”
(Walker, cited in Collins, 1993, p. 625). As a woman shares her story of being
sexually harassed in the workforce or being denied access to a safe and legal
abortion, for example, other women who have not experienced these same
events but have encountered gender-based exploitation and feelings of powerlessness
in other contexts will probably connect to her experience.
These connections do not have to be made at the expense of diversity, nor
do they risk the denial of women’s different and unique lived experiences.
Instead, women can connect with one another through identifying a “common
thread,” or a “unifying theme through immense diversity” (Walker, cited in
Collins, 1993, p. 625). Let’s say, for example, that working women from a
range of socioeconomic, racial, and cultural backgrounds came together to
share and listen to each other’s experiences and perspectives on work and
family issues. Without denying or disrespecting each other’s differences, they
could probably unite around some common problems and join together to fight
for some common goals, such as equal pay to men, better maternity leave programs,
more affordable and quality child care, and better protections against
sexual harassment in the workforce. Joyce McCarl Nielsen (1990) describes
this process as a “fusion of horizons”: “With communication across and
among a diversity of women’s standpoints, each standpoint may be enlarged,
enriched, or broadened such that a fusion, or synthesis, between standpoints
may occur” (p. 29).6
By coming together and sharing their unique experiences and perspectives,
women can build alliances, develop a common position, and take a stand
on a particular issue without compromising their differences. Achieving a
shared position, or standpoint, on a particular issue promotes the most promising
course of action for social change—a solid base from which to fight. At the
same time, we must also remember that women’s experiences, perspectives,
and the issues they face are constantly evolving and changing across space and
time. Therefore, it is important that dialogue between and among women does
not end with the achievement of a particular alliance, or shared standpoint.
Instead, as many feminist standpoint scholars point out, dialogue must be
ongoing. We must work to find ways to incorporate continuous listening and
interchange into our communities of women—or, more simply, to construct
community in Patricia Hill Collins’s sense of the word. Such ongoing dialogue
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and debate, if successfully integrated into our communities, also drives, and
even guarantees, a built-in process of healthy evaluation, a process Helen
Longino (1999) calls “socializing justification.” Maintaining a safe space for
ongoing dialogue and debate—and for the creation and re-creation of new
alliances and standpoints among and between women—remains acutely
important as new issues arise and as women’s struggles for justice take on new
shape and form.
In many respects, committing to ongoing dialogic interchange and evaluative
processes between and among women’s standpoints is one and the same
with committing to the ongoing struggle for women’s empowerment. After all,
women’s struggles are not uniform or stagnant but ongoing and subject to
change. For example, take the issue of women and work. In the 1960s and
1970s, women fought just to gain entry into the workforce.7
Then, there were
the struggles for equal pay. Now women are fighting for better maternity leave
policies and more affordable quality child care.8
The fact that women’s experience,
and their standpoint on reality that evolves from that experience, may
change and evolve across space and time does not make it any less real or legitimate.
As Linda Alcoff (1989) argues, women can achieve a positionality, or
standpoint, that is simultaneously “determinate” and “mutable” (p. 325). In
other words, we can treat women’s standpoints on a particular issue or set of
issues as legitimate, as serious, as grounded in social reality while also
acknowledging these standpoints’ location within a “moving historical context”
(p. 325). Indeed, by highlighting “historical movement and the subject’s
ability to alter her context” (p. 325), we take women’s standpoints seriously
without reducing all women to a universal group with the same experiences,
needs, and characteristics.
CONCLUSION
Feminist standpoint epistemology is an innovative approach to knowledge building
that breaks down boundaries between academia and activism, between theory
and practice. Feminist standpoint scholars seek to give voice to members of
oppressed groups—namely, women—and to uncover the hidden knowledge that
women have cultivated from living life “on the margins.” Feminist standpoint
epistemology asks not just that we take women seriously as knowers but that we
translate women’s knowledge into practice, that we apply what we learn from
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women’s experiences toward social change and toward the elimination of the
oppression not only of women but of all marginalized groups.
Feminist standpoint epistemology has become more complex and multifaceted
and continues to evolve over time. Feminist standpoint scholars no
longer talk about the experience of women or conflate all women into one
oppressed group. They recognize instead that women hail from a diverse range
of class, cultural, and racial backgrounds, inhabit many different social realities,
and endure oppression and exploitation in many different shapes and
forms. As a result, the theoretical development of feminist standpoint epistemology
is multidimensional and ongoing, and scholars working within the
feminist standpoint framework continue to apply new and innovative research
methods to capture the diversity of women’s lives and experiences. Some of
these methods will be explored in other chapters in this volume. Finally, while
feminist standpoint scholars understand and recognize differences between
and among women—different experiences of oppression and different standpoints,
or perspectives, based on those experiences—they also continue to
emphasize the importance of dialogue between and among women, the need
for empathetic understanding, and the potential for achieving alliances. After
all, alliances between and among women are possible—without risking the
repression of difference—and necessary, if we hope to fight for more just
societies and to improve women’s condition within them.
NOTES
1. This is excerpted from a letter written by Harriet Jacobs to her publisher in
1857. In it, Jacobs describes her motivation for writing her autobiography, titled
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself.
2. It is important to note that although feminist research methods are not the
explicit focus of this chapter, feminist research methods were employed in many of the
studies on women’s lives and experiences that are cited throughout. The discussions of
women’s lives and experiences in this chapter are concerned more with content than
with method. However, because many of the women’s lives and experiences highlighted
here would not be known about except for the application of new and innovative
feminist methods, the importance of such methods is implicit. After all, the
framework of feminist standpoint epistemology demands that women’s lives and experiences,
“hitherto denied, repressed, and subordinated” (Smith, 1990, p. 12), break
out and gain a hearing. To gain access to and uncover women’s lives and experiences,
new and innovative feminist methods are often required. Feminist interviewing,
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autobiography, oral history techniques, and institutional ethnography are examples of
the feminist methods used to acquire the information about women’s lives and experiences
cited in this chapter. These feminist methods, among others, will be discussed in
greater detail and serve as the primary focus of later chapters in this volume.
3. The philosopher G.W. F. Hegel’s (1967) concept of the “master-slave dialectic”
easily applies here but transferred to the case of women and men. Hegel explains
that the master is only able to have an illusion of independence, the illusion of an independent
consciousness, precisely because of his dependence upon his slave. Without
his slave’s emotional and material labor, he would not be free to engage in “independent
pursuits.” While the slave, to ensure his own survival, must remain aware not only
of his own world but the world of his master as well, the master, due to his privileged
position, is able to remain unaware of the world of his slave. Indeed, just as many men
remain unaware of their dependence upon women’s labor (labor which sustains their
dominance) so too is the master unaware of his dependence upon the slave.
4. The concept “strong objectivity” was developed and named by feminist standpoint
scholar and philosopher Sandra Harding. For more from Harding on strong objectivity,
see the first Behind-the-Scenes piece in Chapter 1 of this volume. See also
Harding’s book Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Harding, 1991) and her chapter
“Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is ‘Strong Objectivity?’” in Feminist
Epistemologies (Harding, 1993) and, in updated form, in The Feminist Standpoint
Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies (Harding, 2004a), edited by
Sandra Harding. Please also note that “strong reflexivity,” an important aspect of
Harding’s “strong objectivity” that bears relevance to the method and practice of
research, is not the focus of our discussion here. Strong reflexivity demands that
researchers actively acknowledge, and reflect on, how their social locations, biographical
histories, and worldviews interact with, influence, and are influenced by the
research process. For more from Harding on strong reflexivity, see the second Behindthe-Scenes
piece in Chapter 1 of this volume. Finally, some manifestations of strong
reflexivity—namely, practicing reflexivity about one’s own social location, biographical
history, and worldview throughout the research process—are discussed in Chapter 5 of
this volume.
5. In some instances however, while women’s suffering plays a large role, it is not
their pain alone that motivates them to begin to critique and challenge the status quo.
As we have learned about in the case of American housewives of the 1950s or from the
women who suffered from sexual harassment in the early 1990s, sometimes a process
of consciousness-raising also needs to occur. As women come together and share their
stories and begin to understand that they are not suffering alone, they stop blaming
themselves for their own suffering and are empowered to look outward, toward society,
and challenge the societal norms and dominant ideologies that are oppressing them. In
this way, women’s critical point of view—their position of political consciousness—
their feminist standpoint—has to be achieved (Hartsock, 2004) through a process of
consciousness-raising, as opposed to stemming directly and unproblematically from
their pain and suffering.
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6. Another hypothetical example of Walker’s (cited in Collins, 1993) concept of
a “unifying theme through immense diversity” and Nielsen’s (1990) “fusion of
horizons” is as follows: If a group of women get together to discuss abortion rights,
each woman’s standpoint may be deepened or broadened as she learns about other
women’s experiences, concerns, and perspectives. A woman who is socioeconomically
privileged may focus solely on the legal right to choose to have an abortion. A woman
who is from a rural area may also be worried about a literal lack of access to doctors’
offices or clinics in her area that perform abortions. Finally, a poor woman may express
concern about whether she can afford to pay for a safe and legal abortion. Through
sharing and listening to each other’s different concerns, these women might formulate
a more complex, more developed standpoint on abortion rights—moving from a
straightforward pro-choice position to a pro-choice position that demands a certain
number of available clinics per region and governmental assistance to help ensure that
poor women can obtain safe and legal abortions.
7. That is not to deny the many thousands of women who had been tilling the land
and working in service, industry, education, and medicine prior to the 1960s and 1970s.
After all, for hundreds of years many women across the globe have had to work to
maintain their own, and their families’, survival.
8. It is also important to note that each of these struggles are ongoing: Women
still do not equal men’s numbers in the higher-ranking professions, for example, and
continue to make less money than men make in equivalent positions.
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