On the Significance of a Pre-history to Feminism

While studying women is not new,studying them from the perspective of their own experiences so that women can understand themselves and the world can claim virtually no history at all. It is also novel to study gender. The idea of a systematic social construction of masculinity and femininity that is little, if at all, constrained by biology, is very recent.”—Sandra Harding (1987) “Introduction: Is there a Feminist Method?” Feminism and Methodology (Indiana) p. 8.

In her introduction (quoted above) to her influential reader, Harding makes some claims that may have seemed plausible in the 1980s, but we now know to be seriously overstated (not to say misleading). Scholars are increasingly recovering women's voices from many historical periods in which the role of women is studied from the perspective of their own experiences. In addition, it is pretty clear that (recall) by the eighteenth century the social construction of gender was well understood.

But here I want to note a cost of this effacement. First, there is a historical injustice that the very intellectual women who have become victims of history, and often extremely sexist history, are being victimized not just by their contemporaries and effaced by (sexist/misogynistic) successors, but also, more unintentionally, being harmed by those whose insights they had anticipated. For, while Harding does not suggest that earlier feminists are a conceptual or historical impossibility, she emphasizes in context that modern feminism is culturally situated in a distinctive way and a reader may be forgiven in thinking that earlier cultures would not have access to some such ideas.

Second, at the time, Harding explicitly understands her own enterprise, and the Feminist method(s) she and her intellectual allies advocate, as something novel rather than a recovery in a new (and undoubtedly substantially different) context.* One consequence of this, is that one can then understand oneself as being part of (historical/social/political etc.) triumphant progress; the ground zero from which this progress is understood is -- judging by the examples given by Harding -- the generation of scholars that came to age in the 1960s or so. Harding comes close to suggesting that a Kuhnian revolution has occurred or is in the process of occurring (Kuhn, is in fact, mentioned for other purposes just before), but she does not do so.

However, it is notable that, in context (see, especially p. 5), Harding is acutely aware of the dangers of the welcoming of new insights leading one to embrace a progressive, teleological understanding of the very existence of feminist thought being part of the forward march of history. She explicitly notes (p.5) that one can say with equal justice that statistics of abuse reveal a "barbaric" state of affairs. Of course, a new social scientific (reflexive) paradigm is compatible with such a paradigm revealing a bad state of affairs.

If one recognizes that modern feminism is, in some measure, a recovery and reviving of earlier insights (while allowing that it is also a great transformation), that is, in fact, one of the great permanent possibilities of human existence, would that change much of anything? I think so, because it encourages us to look at the mechanisms of silencing and displacement. It is worth understanding how the pre-history of feminist ideas was effaced during the long nineteenth century not just to do justice to our predecessors, but also to better understand the ways in which the professionalization of philosophy relied on emphasizing some philosophical virtues that came at the expense of proto-feminist insights and arguments.

 

Comments

[Margaret Atherton]

I think you are right about this, Eric. One worry I have sometimes expressed is that in overlooking previous struggles, we can become too complacent about the success of our own. What if we are well on the way to being just as forgotten?

[Jacqueline A Taylor]

There were remarkable women intellectuals in the 19th century too -- Harriet Martineau and Harriet Taylor Mill come most immediately to my mind. There were also many women working for social and political reform -- the abolition of slavery, poor law reform, the advent of professional nursing, as well as more rights for women. So I think Eric is right that it's a very serious and understudied (within philosophy) question of how or perhaps whether the earlier achievements of 17th and 18th C. women, and men advocating their rights, etc., were effaced. Were these men and women still being published, available in libraries, and read? What were the causes of the effacements?