Since the days of Genesis, human beings have struggled to understand the ways in which women and men differ and the ways in which they may legitimately be viewed as similar. Until the rise of modern secular individualism in the seventeenth century, the significance of sexual difference seemed all but self-evident to most peoples, who normally drew upon that difference in their social and symbolic organization of their world. Christians, drawing upon readings of Scripture and tradition, took the difference seriously, even as they recognized the equality of souls in the eyes of God. Secular individualism, by introducing the idea of worldly equality, opened the way for feminist claims that women should be viewed as the equals of men in the here and now, not just in the hereafter. And, in our time, postmodern feminism has pressed beyond those claims to insist that any notion of natural difference between the sexes invidiously disadvantages women and must be repudiated. But the notion of difference has refused to lie down and die, especially since even those who most protest its oppressive character still seek to justify their belief that women as a gender have been and continue to be oppressed.

Ten years ago, Nancy Goldberger, Jill Tarule, Blythe Clinchy, and Mary Belenky published Women's Ways of Knowing, reissued now with a new introduction. To further mark the anniversary of that publication, they have edited a companion volume, Knowledge, Difference, and Power: Essays Inspired by Women's Ways of Knowing. Taken as a whole, the new volume, comprising 14 chapters, including one apiece by each of the original authors, implicitly marks an official canonization of their initial effort--one that is nonetheless self-congratulatory for the authors' admirable willingness to include a smattering of criticism. If anything, the criticism, including a measure of self-criticism, merely underscores their deep satisfaction at the reception their work (in this volume now familiarly referred to as WWK) has received and their quiet confidence that it now occupies a secure position in both feminism and epistemology.

The initial impetus for Women's Ways of Knowing derived from the authors' interest in extending the insights of Carol Gilligan's influential study of women's distinct patterns of moral reasoning, In a Different Voice (1982), to the ways in which women know and learn. At the time, they believed, as they still do, that "gender is a major social, historical, and political category that affects the life choices of all women in all communities and cultures." And this conviction led them to ask, "How were Western social constructions of gender and authority affecting women's sense of self, voice, and mind?"

Focusing upon the specific role of family and school in communicating the meaning of womanhood to girls, they did not analyze their findings with respect to what is now known as "positionality" or "social location"--class, race, nationality, and so on--but rather focused upon listening to women's own accounts of their experience as women. Their extensive interviews ultimately led them to identify five positions in relation to knowledge: (1) silence (not knowing and consequently feeling "voiceless, powerless, and mindless"); (2) received knowing (construing knowledge and authority as external to the self and expecting to learn from those who possess them); (3) subjective knowing (personal, private, and based on intuition or feeling rather than thought and evidence); (4) procedural knowing (developing and honoring "techniques and procedures for acquiring, validating, and evaluating knowledge claims"); and (5) constructed knowing ("the position at which truth is understood to be contextual; knowledge is recognized as tentative, not absolute; and it is understood that the knower is part of [constructs] the known").

Not surprisingly, the authors regarded constructed knowing as superior to other forms. Their preference in this regard signaled their immersion in and commitment to postmodernism, notably the postmodern revolt against the authority of one body of knowledge over others. At that time, however, as they now acknowledge, it also testified to their commitment to an implicitly developmental scheme in which they focused, as Goldberger puts it, "more on the descriptions of persons whom we sorted into types of knowers than on types or ways of knowing that persons used for different purposes at different points in their lives." The essays in Knowledge, Difference, and Power remain faithful to the centrality of constructed knowing, but many, including those by the original authors, attempt to refine the previous model and especially to substitute a systematic attention to positionality for their previous model's developmental implications.

Notwithstanding different foci or purposes, the 14 essays collected in this volume converge in their insistence upon the vision of knowledge as simultaneously a repository of power and a formidable perpetuator of its inequitable distribution. In the concluding chapter, Sandra Harding, a feminist philosopher and critic of science, credits the authors of wwk with having from the start focused not merely upon the importance of women's ways of knowing in relation to those of men but in relation to differences among women themselves and thereby having avoided the essentialist pitfall of regarding all women as fundamentally similar on account of their sex. Above all, the authors "kept in clear focus the links between power and knowledge and showed how less powerful positions nevertheless have distinctive epistemological resources." In this respect, they "charted the surprising epistemological 'powers of the weak.' " And they confirmed that, "in the case of gender relations, knowledge possibilities are shaped not only by the activities in which men and women characteristically engage, but by the positions they are assigned in power relations."

Indeed, the authors represented in Knowledge, Difference, and Power rival one another--in good collaborative, sisterly fashion--in delineating the myriad ways in which women's exclusion from power shapes the ways in which they learn and know. Thus, Elizabeth Debold, Deborah Tolman, and Lyn Mikel Brown (all collaborators in Carol Gilligan's continuing project on adolescent girls) discuss the case of Lily, a sexually active teenager, to illustrate the ways in which the narratives of the powerful undermine the self-confidence and self-knowledge of the less powerful.1 Lily, they argue, "'knows' and understands her experience, shaped within cultural power relations, through the story told in her family's culture and in dominant American culture that a woman's happiness is dependent upon marriage, motherhood, and sex after marriage. The lessons Lily learns map perfectly with cultural practices, rooted in constructed norms of femininity, that deny young women sexual subjectivity." Christians may note with interest the cavalier assumption that marriage, motherhood, and premarital chastity figure among the oppressive norms imposed upon the young, and that they invariably deny young women's sexual subjectivity; but we will return to such considerations later.

Many of the essays emphasize the imperative of rescuing women's subjectivity from the grasp of inherited narratives that exclude women from the company of those who construct valid knowledge. In general, however, most of the authors claim to have moved beyond a primary concern with subjectivity. Frances Maher and Mary Kay Tetreault argue that an excessive preoccupation with subjectivity has compromised cultural feminism, from which they and others in this volume seek to distance themselves. They credit the authors of wwk with having pointed out that "where 'truth' is based on personal experience, each person's truth rests on an essentialized uniqueness and is unknowable to the other."

Subjective knowing, Maher and Tetreault insist, "is also the quintessential epistemological stage of individualism, one of the most pervasive and mystifying ideologies in our culture because it suggests that we stand or fall, progress or not, only as individuals and not as occupants of societal positions of power and domination." An emphasis on positionality, they hold, rescues theorists from this trap by suggesting that individuals are not composed of any "fixed 'essence' or individual identity" but rather "develop amid networks of relationships that themselves can be explored, analyzed, and changed, as long as people understand that they are not simply individuals, but differentially placed members of an unequal social order."

Maher and Tetreault capture the sensibility and commitments of many of the authors through a discussion of the experience of "double consciousness" that affects women and nonwhite students who try to move from the identity politics of group consciousness to "outside knowledge" from cultural and historical experience. The prevailing disciplines offer them little help in this quest, since "the 'political language' of the mainstream culture offers a validation of oppression, but no means of communication for them within its terms." Their double consciousness derives precisely from the chasm that separates "objective" knowledge and prevailing forms of "rationality" from their sense of self. This alienation leads them to attempt to formulate a new language that does not oppress them in the manner of the dominant discourse: "Ultimately, they want to construct their own theory--to 'change the way things are,' by transforming the meaning-making apparatus itself."

The ambition to transform the world by transforming the "meaning-making apparatus" is one for which Maher and Tetreault, like the other authors, feel the utmost sympathy. Indeed, many, like Ann Stanton, see teaching as a "political activity" and their own work as teachers as the fulfillment of a moral responsibility. For Ann Stanton, WWK helps to sustain her vision of teaching's moral imperative by helping her to "see beyond the technological rationalism that undergirds most of modern life." The focus on epistemology it provides introduces a "strong subtext of an ethic of care. As the midwife/teacher image dramatically conveys, education is relational--a relationship that involves knowledge, attentiveness, and care; care directed not only at disciplinary material but to who students are and what they can become."

Like most of the other chapters, Maher and Tetreault's is primarily grounded in specific conversations or interviews with women of different ages and backgrounds. Throughout Knowledge, Difference, and Power, the liberal sprinkling of quotations from those with whom various authors have spoken reinforces the basic claim of WWK that women frequently do feel uneasy with much of the prevailing scholarly discourse and do often evaluate people, experience, and ideas by other criteria than scientific or academic "rationality." More often than not, the voices of those who find the learned discourses alien and alienating ring true.

This pervasive uneasiness with purportedly "objective" knowledge helps to explain why so many found it plausible to read wwk as a defense of subjective knowledge against the claims of objectivity. In that volume, Goldberger, Tarule, Clinchy, and Belenky seemed to invite readers to see women as naturally inclined to reason out from their personal experience and the relations in which their lives are enmeshed.

Strongly endorsing the importance of personal experience, Michael Mahoney, a psychologist and the only male contributor to Knowledge, Difference, and Power, directly attacks the illusion of impersonal detachment fostered by the goal of arriving at objective knowledge: "This has perhaps been the most basic illusion of Western white male epistemology: that reality is a rational order revealed by reason and public sensibility." In Mahoney's view, that assumption still "lies at the heart of objectivism, a tradition that still dominates contemporary worldviews. Such a view essentially denies plurality, perspective, diversity, change, and the private realm--rendering meaningless any discussion of multiple personal or dynamic realities." Mahoney's facile assumption that rationality and "objectivism" reflect the biases and implicitly the interests of white Western males pervades the entire volume, although some of the contributors attempt to guard against associating themselves with the most simplistic aspects of that view. Time and again, however, they have difficulty avoiding the impression that women remain more closely tied to subjectivity than men.

(First of two parts; click here to read Part 2)

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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