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Table of contents

The Intellectual Traditions

In the identification of the problem;. In the formulation of hypotheses and calculated guesses;. In the design of the research to test hypotheses; and. In the collection and interpretation of data. Nonetheless, theories based on this approach have been a major force in shaping perceptions of reality. An investigation of women's work conducted by researchers with a feminist perspective would, in all likelihood, rely on a variety of assumptions related to their own experiences, as well as to the experiences of women in other situations.

Such assumptions would differ according to factors such as race, class, ethnicity, and age. An investigation such as this would therefore be more likely to give the following results:.

Feminism, Aestheticism and the Limits of Law

Some women do unpaid work in the home;. Some women do both unpaid work in the home and waged and unpaid work in wider society;. Some women work only in wider society and employ other women to work in their homes;. Women are found in a variety of occupations;. Women work at all levels in the workplace; and. Women, both in their paid and in their unpaid work, contribute greatly to the national economy. Based on this wider view, the general principle would be that women's work is not restricted to the home. Female perspectives and experiences would help to challenge the hypothesis generated from the male perspective that women's work is in the home and show it to be invalid.

Theorizing is therefore an important, flexible, and dynamic process. We each have assumptions about people, events, issues, etc. We may explicitly state these assumptions or allow them to remain implicit in our opinions, attitudes, and behaviours.

We each interpret things differently as we bring our assumptions to bear on a situation. We test some of these assumptions formally and others informally.

An encyclopedia of philosophy articles written by professional philosophers.

Informal testing of our assumptions is, in fact, a process of hypothesis testing, and the results often cause us to change our assumptions. Sandra Harding's views, reprinted in Box 1 , are particularly interesting. Though feminist empiricism appears in these ways to be consistent with empiricist tendencies, further consideration reveals that the feminist component deeply undercuts the assumptions of traditional empiricism in three ways: feminist empiricism has a radical future. In the first place, feminist empiricism argues that the "context of discovery" is just as important as the "context of justification" for eliminating social biases that contribute to partial and distorted explanations and understandings.

Traditional empiricism insists that the social identity of the observer is irrelevant to the "goodness" of the results of research. It is not supposed to make a difference to the explanatory power, objectivity, and so on of the research's results if the researcher or the community of scientists are white or black, Chinese or British, rich or poor in social origin. But feminist empiricism argues that women or feminists, male and female as a group are more likely than men non-feminists as a group to produce claims unbiased by androcentrism , and in that sense objective results of inquiry.

It argues that the authors of the favored social theories are not anonymous at all: they are clearly men, and usually men of the dominant classes, races, and cultures. The people who identify and define scientific problems leave their social fingerprints on the problems and their favored solutions to them. Second, feminist empiricism makes the related claim that scientific method is not effective at eliminating social biases that are as widespread as androcentrism. This is especially the case when androcentrism arrives in the inquiry process through the identification and definition of research problems.

Traditional empiricism holds that scientific method will eliminate any social biases as a hypothesis generated by what men find problematic in the world around them. The problem here is not only that the hypotheses which would most deeply challenge androcentric beliefs are missing from those alternatives sexists consider when testing their favored hypotheses.

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It is also that traditional empiricism does not direct researchers to locate themselves in the same critical plane as their subject matter. Consequently, when non-feminist researchers gather evidence for or against hypotheses, "scientific method," bereft of such a directive, is impotent to locate and eradicate the androcentrism that shapes the research process. Finally feminist empiricists often exhort social scientists to follow the existing research norms more rigorously. On the other hand, they also can be understood to be arguing that it is precisely following these norms that contributes to androcentric research results.

The norms themselves have been constructed primarily to produce answers to the kinds of questions men ask about nature and social life and to prevent scrutiny of the way beliefs which are nearly or completely culture-wide in fact cannot be eliminated from the results of research by these norms. A reliable picture of women's worlds and of social relations between the sexes often required alternative approaches to inquiry that challenge traditional research habits and raise profound questions which are no longer marginalized as deviant.

What assumptions do you think are held by various groups across cultures about the following issues? Identify and state assumptions that women could propose to challenge the assumptions you listed in answer 1. What are the essential differences between the assumptions in answers 1 and 2?

Feminist Ethics

The differences identified in this activity can reveal the ways the perspectives of men and women differ, and these differences also relate to the problems experienced by men and women. As Harding noted,. Many phenomena which appear problematic from the perspective of men's characteristic experiences do not appear problematic at all from the perspective of women's experiences — On the other hand, women experience many phenomena which they think do need explanation.

Why do men find child care and housework so distasteful? Why do women's life opportunities tend to be constricted exactly at the moments traditional history marks as the most progressive? Why is it hard to detect black women's ideals of womanhood in studies of black families? Why is men's sexuality so "driven," so defined in terms of power? Why is risking death said to represent the distinctively human act but giving birth regarded as merely natural? If we concede that men and women often view issues differently and have different experiences, it follows that we must consider a phenomenon in relation to the individuals who experience it.

Harding therefore further suggested that. Reflecting on how social phenomena get defined as problems in need of explanation in the first place quickly reveals that there is no such thing as a problem without a person or group of those who have this problem: a problem is always a problem for someone or other. Recognition of this fact and its implications for the structure of the scientific enterprise quickly brings feminist approaches to enquiring into conflict with traditional understandings in many ways.

Feminists have challenged the view of women that has developed from male theorizing. Hilary Rose explained the nature of the challenge:. Increasingly, the new scholarship drew on the concept of gender to illuminate a double process of a gendered science produced by a gendered knowledge production system. Was the seemingly taken for granted androcentricity, even misogyny, of science, a matter of "bias" which good unbiased science turned out by feminists and their allies would correct, or was the problem more profound, one that only an explicitly feminist science could displace, so as to become, in the language of the enlightenment, a "successor science"?

Once we undertake to use women's experience as a resource to generate scientific problems, hypotheses and evidence, to design research for women, and to place the researcher in the same critical plane as the research subject, traditional epistemological assumptions can no longer be made.

These agendas have led feminist social scientists to ask questions about who can be a knower only men?

Theoretical Perspectives on Gender and Development

The aim of feminist theorizing is to deconstruct and redefine concepts previously defined from a male perspective and generally accepted as factual. The deconstruction and redefinition of concepts, as well as the creation of new ones, have emphasized the following:.

Problems that, when solved, will benefit both researcher and subject;. Interaction between researcher and subject;. Establishment of nonhierarchical relationships;. Expression of feelings and concern for values; and. The result is the generation of theories from a view of the world through feminist lenses. The aim has been to change conditions adversely affecting women's lives by critically analyzing existing theories and developing new policies and social action.

Hilary Rose elaborated on this in her address entitled "Alternative Knowledge Systems in Science," an excerpt of which is set out in Box 2. The problem for feminist materialists is to admit biology — that is, a constrained essentialism — while giving priority to the social, without concluding at the same time that human beings are infinitely malleable Largely ignored by the oppressors and their systems of knowledge, feminists at this point necessarily theorised from practice and referenced theory to practice The first is feminist stand-point theory which looks to the possibility of a feminist knowledge to produce better and truer pictures of reality; the second is feminist post-modernism which refuses the possibility of any universalising discourse but which argues instead for localised reliable feminist knowledges.

The pervasiveness of gendered thinking that uncritically assumes a necessary bond between being a woman and occupying certain social roles;. The ways women negotiate the world; and. The wisdom inherent in such negotiation. The social roles and the ways women negotiate the world also differ among women in diverse contexts cultural, social, political, racial or ethnic, religious, etc.


  • Wet and Horny.
  • Children of the Streets.
  • Feminist Standpoint Theory?
  • Poetry In Motion.
  • The 4 Horses of Apocalypse =360°= Les 4 Cavaliers de lApocalypse?
  • COURAGE OF THEIR CONVICTION!
  • Feminist-Pragmatism.

Notice that it is "women's experiences" in the plural which provide the new resources for research.