(Second of two parts; click here to read Part 1)

Debold, Tolman, and Brown speculate that many women have difficulty in moving from subjective to constructed knowledge because of "the justifiable difficulty women have in explicating reason outside authorized rational discourse." In their view, WWK did "not go far enough to negate the cultural equation of mind, authority, and masculinity." Sara Ruddick, in her chapter entitled "Reason's Femininity," deplores the "impersonal procedural knowing, which continuously separates knower from known and the mind's knowing from its emotional, bodily, and social life." Arguing that both gender and knowing develop from and within relationships, she insists that "a person is the relationships that constitute and are constituted by her." Similarly, the knowing that arises from practices--for example, farming, engineering, mothering, or psychotherapy--is gendered, for "to the extent that women and men engage more extensively and intensively in certain practices than others the thinking that arises from these practices will have a masculine or feminine aspect."

In this respect, styles of thinking do not merely express attributes of gender but reinforce them. Thus, for example, the "epistemic" communities of defense analysts create a specific definition of masculinity that intensifies the devaluation of femininity. Within this community, masculinity "is expressed in--and requires--an 'objective,' abstract style of thinking so deeply rooted as to appear 'natural.' " Ruddick applauds WWK and other initiatives for serving as "disruptive interventions in epistemic communities marked by insistently separate, impersonal procedural knowing that is labeled and legitimated as 'masculine.' "

Ruddick, who has written elsewhere of her deep hostility to militarism, believes that women's experience endows them with special proclivities for attentive listening to and caring for others, notably children.2 Here, she explicitly states what the other authors imply, namely that "connected knowing will be judged by ethical as well as epistemological ideals." And she insists that connected female knowers will be more likely than impersonal, objective male knowers to evaluate knowledge and ways of knowing in relation to "the good to which they lead and which they yield." This connection "between epistemological ideal and moral result seems to me central to the feminist epistemological enterprise and to WWK."

As the original authors of WWK and their current collaborators attempt to move beyond "essentialist" assumptions about natural differences between women and men, they run into escalating theoretical difficulties. For if men and women do not differ in their embodied natures, it becomes imperative to identify sufficiently binding ways in which they do differ to account for their proclivity for different ways of knowing. Similarly, as many of the authors attempt to move beyond the value of subjective knowing to an ideal of connected and constructed knowing, they must provide a necessary and sufficient explanation for why women are more prone than men to engage in the latter.

This dual quest leads them, as we have seen, to embrace all or aspects of the postmodernist emphasis upon positionality and standpoint theory. Human minds, hearts, and ways of knowing are shaped by a person's location within the complex network of power that constitutes our world. In this perspective, knowledge itself ranks among the primary spoils of victory in the continuing struggle among differently empowered and enabled social groups. And the individuals who "know" the knowledge are reduced to little more than specific sites of knowing.

If the language in which these ideas find their expression seems opaque and forbidding, it may be because the ideas themselves remain fraught with confusions and complexities that deny clear, direct expression. Try as the reader may to appreciate the theoretical discussions of positionality, he or she will be hard pressed not to fall instinctively back into the intuitive assumption that, in some way, women and men do naturally differ. The authors, however, have been well schooled in the truth that any concession to such essentialism compromises both postmodern theory and the utopian political goal of drawing men into women's ways of knowing. Difference must be affirmed, for without it the entire enterprise crumbles; essentialism must be denied, for the admission that, in however small measure it exists, would implicitly accede to the claims of authority, whether natural or divine.

As the attentive reader will by now have noticed, much of what the feminist epistemologists value in women's ways of knowing bears a strong resemblance to Christianity. Jesus Christ did die for all of our sins--for each of us in particular--not for the sins of humanity in the abstract. He did enjoin us to love our neighbor as ourselves and, especially, he did insist that what we did for the least among us we did for him. The Gospels abound with his concern for connected knowing, and much of Christian theology has followed the path they charted. At the same time, the Gospels preach the reality of God's power and the universal claims of his commandments. Again, much Christian theology has followed suit, combining particularism with rationalism. Even secular ethics has generally combined attention to binding, universal laws or rules with attention to the specificity of particular cases, including the situation of individuals. Against this background, it appears increasingly difficult to claim many of the virtues celebrated in WWK and Knowledge, Difference, and Power uniquely for women.

Christianity merits no entry in the index to Knowledge, Difference, and Power, religion only one, and that one is explicitly paired with "received knowing." The section in which the mention of religion occurs is labeled "External Authority and Received Knowledge," which accurately conveys the authors' hostility to received knowledge.

In an exploration of cultural imperatives and diversity in ways of knowing, Nancy Rule Goldberger, the author of the chapter in which the reference to religion appears, interviewed African American women to understand the ways in which their perceptions of knowing and learning differ from those of white women. A number of those she interviewed referred to the centrality of God or the church in their lives, which might suggest that they also recognized the binding character of God's authority. But by probing beneath this surface, Goldberger (one strongly suspects to her great relief) was able to understand that although African American women speak about their faith and their trust in the ultimate authority of God, there is a sense of God as someone who listens as well as directs and dictates, who frees as well as expects obedience. Furthermore, God is experienced as "in me" (not external); thus, the person's voice can be God's voice. The orientation to God as authority coexists with a strong sense of self, experienced as a distinct and particular person who can and should be known by God and by other people on her own terms.

How much Goldberger understood remains open to question. What she demonstrably does not grasp is Christianity, which her interlocutors clearly understand much better than she. Otherwise, how could she suggest that the idea that God listens and frees as well as directs, dictates, and demands obedience in some way qualifies or undercuts the totality of God's authority? Indeed, until the claim that the person's voice could be God's voice--in all fairness, a confusion that too many have made--the African American women's beliefs, as Goldberger describes them, may be read as entirely orthodox. But whether sadly or comically, Goldberger is incapable of recognizing them as such. For she, like the other authors in this volume, seems incapable of acknowledging the possibility that some authority may be legitimate and some traditions may be sustaining.

It remains beyond dispute that the West is indeed suffering an epistemological crisis of the first order, one that has been gaining momentum since Nietzsche, if not since Hegel. The postmodernist assault upon authority in all forms and the concomitant emphasis upon the situational or positional character of all claims to truth merely represent the culmination of a long development. Recognition of the historical antecedents of postmodernism may not make its doctrines any less dangerous, but it does help to recognize the feminist variant as an especially radical permutation of them rather than as something new under the sun.

Indeed, the cumulative logic of the articles in Knowledge, Difference, and Power ultimately points toward the eradication of the female subject qua distinct subject. For once we have toppled God and nature as authoritative sources of the difference between the sexes, we are indeed left with gender understood as a conventional or "relational" organization of the darkling plain of fluctuating relations among individuals, each of whom is jockeying for maximum power.

In this zero-sum game, it is hard not to accord a grudging admiration to feminist theorists who have the wit to saddle hapless men with the rationality that the larger epistemological crisis has already discredited. Unfortunately, their clever tactic leaves the women they seek to champion with no firm ground upon which to base their own claims. Worse, it leaves the rest of us with the formidable task of attempting to understand the ways in which women and men do genuinely differ, the ways in which they do not, and the bearing of both upon a renovated understanding of legitimate authority, on earth as in heaven.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese teaches history, literature, and women's studies at Emory University. Her most recent book is "Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life": How Today's Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women (Doubleday/Nan Talese).

1. For a critique of the spirit that informs the project, which has already yielded several books and many articles, see Christopher Lasch, Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn (Norton, 1997), ch. 6, "Gilligan's Island."

2. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking (Beacon Press, 1995).

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 17

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