Abstract
During the last decade of feminist inquiry, a new “object” for scientific scrutiny has emerged into visibility: the sex/gender system.* Sex/gender is a system of male-dominance made possible by men’s control of women’s productive and reproductive labor, where “reproduction” is broadly construed to include sexuality, family life, and kinship formations, as well as the birthing which biologically reproduces the species. However, the “discovery” of the sex/gender system has implications beyond the need for revisions in our scientific understandings. While many feminists have argued that this discovery calls for new morals and new politics, I intend to show why its discovery at this particular moment in history also calls for a revolution in epistemology. The new epistemology must be one which is not fettered by the self-imposed limitations of empiricist, functionalist/relativist, or marxist epistemologies. We shall see, within the all too brief limits of so short a paper, what the main limitations of these existing epistemologies are, and distinguish the pre-conditions for an adequate theory of belief production from the epistemological goals of feminist inquirers which lean too heavily on these inadequate epistemological programs. The feminist discovery of the sex/ gender system certainly is more than the expression of socially unobstructed “natural talents and abilities,” of functionally adequate beliefs, and of changes in the division of labor by class. But an insufficiently critical stance toward the existing epistemologies has obscured for us just what this “more” is. We need to investigate more fully why it is that only now can we understand “patriarchy,” “misogyny,” “sex-roles,” “discrimination against women,” and “the first division of labor — by sex” as mere appearances of the underlying reality of the sex/gender system. Let us begin by first looking at the newly visible size and shape of the sex/gender system, and then examining the self-imposed limitations of empiricist, functionalist/relativist, and marxist epistemologies.
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Notes
The best source to use to begin to grasp the main focuses of the last decade’s feminist research is Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Chicago: University Press, 1975 et seq.), especially the review essays for each discipline regularly published there.
Cf., E. G. Ruby Rohrlich Leavitt, ‘Women in Other Cultures’, in V. Gornick and B. Moran (eds.), Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (New York: Basic Books, 1971).
Cf. e.g., Eleanor Leacock, ‘Women’s Status in Egalitarian Society: Implications for Social Evolution,’ Current Anthropology 19,2 (1978).
Cf., e.g., Joan Kelly-Gadol, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance,’ and Marilyn Arthur, ‘“Liberated” Women: The Classical Era,’ both in R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz (eds.), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).
Cf. Heresies 11 (1981), special issue on ‘Making Room: Women and Architecture.’
Cf. Jane Flax, ‘Political Philosophy and the Patriarchal Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Epistemology and Metaphysics’ in this volume; Nancy Hartsock,’ social Life and Social Science: The Signficance of the Naturalist/Intentionalist Dispute,’ and Sandra Harding, ‘The Norms of Social Inquiry and Masculine Experience,’ both in PSA 1980, Vol. II, P. D. Asquith and R. N. Giere (eds.) (East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association, 1980).
Cf. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (New York: Doubleday, 1978).
Cf. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1980); Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature (New York: Harper and Row, 1978); Sherry Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’, in M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds.), Woman, Culture and Society (Stanford: University Press, 1974).
Cf. e.g., Zillah Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (New York: Longmans, 1980); Isaac Balbus, Marxism and Domination (Princeton: University Press, 1982); June Nash and Ruby Rohrlich, ‘Patriarchal Puzzle: State Formation in Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica,’ Heresies 13 (1981).
However, it seems unwise methodologically as well as theoretically to go so far as to assume that anything like the sex/gender system we know is a universal trait of human social life. Such an assumption obscures and mystifies the culturally-differing features of men’s and women’s lives. It may well be that the appearance of the familiar dynamics of the sex/gender system in some societies distant from our own is a product only of male-dominated inquiry, as Eleanor Leacock argues in Myths of Male Dominance (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981). Refusing to adopt the universalist assumption leaves open important empirical questions such as to what extent changes in reproduction should be understood as part of, or partially a product of, changes in production; and how biology is shaped by culture. Nevertheless, stopping short of claims that the sex/gender system is universal, it is still now hypothesized that the vast majority of cultures to which we will ever have historical access have been ones in which the sex/ gender system organically structures social interactions to some degree or other.
M. Z. Rosaldo, ‘The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding,’ Signs 5 (1980), 394–395. The enumeration in the quotation is mine.
Ibid., p. 394 (my emphasis).
See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University Press, 1970).
At least one appears unintelligible. In the following three sections I focus only on the assumption which most broadly challenges each epistemology from a feminist perspective. Individual authors often adopt positions which make more than one of these assumptions unintelligible.
David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977).
Ibid., p. 8. Bloor notes where this argument can be found in the writings of Gilbert Ryle, D. W. Hamlyn, R. S. Peters, I. Lakatos, and even Karl Mannhein on pp. 5-10.
_Ibid., p. 10. Bloor notes that this argument has been made by empiricists from Bacon through the present day. Bloor specifies this argument alone as the “argument from empiricism,” however I am suggesting what I cannot here argue: that all four of these arguments have roots in empiricism.
_Ibid.., p. 13. This argument is made by Mannheim’s critic Grunwald, by A. Lovejoy, and by T. Bottomore.
_Ibid.., p. 15. Bloor points out where Karl Popper, for one, makes this argument.
Radical Feminists sometimes make this claim.
Feminists writing within a Liberal discourse often imply this. Cf., e.g., Marcia Millman and Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s otherwise illuminating ‘Introduction’ to Another Voice: Feminist Perspectives on Social Life and Social Science (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975).
Hilary Rose op. cit., discusses this problem in ‘Hyper-Reflexivity — A New Danger for the Counter-Movements,’ in H. Nowotny and H. Rose (eds.), Counter-Movements in the Sciences, Sociology of the Sciences Volume III (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979).
Bloor, op. cit.; Barry Barnes, Interests and the Growth of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) 1977. Extensions and criticisms of the’ strong Programme’ have created a new industry. Among the key recent writings are Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979); Mary Hesse, Chapter Two of Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Larry Laudan, The Pseudo-Science of Science?’ and Bloor’s response, The Strengths of the Strong Programme,’ in Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11 (1981); Hugo Meynell, On the Limits of the Sociology of Knowledge,’ Social Studies of Science 7 (1977); Erik Millstone, ‘A Framework for the Sociology of Knowledge,’ Social Studies of Science 8 (1978). Hilary Rose also briefly discusses Bloor’s work in an illuminating way, op. cit.
Bloor, op. cit., p. 4.
op. cit. Ibid., p. 141.
op. cit. Ibid., p. 4.
op. cit. Ibid., p. 141ff.
Kuhn’s type of analysis (op. cit.) makes this clear.
Francine Blau, ‘On the Role of Values in Feminist Scholarship,’ Signs 6 (1981), 538–540.
F. Engels, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,’ in R. Tucker (ed.), The Marx and Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 606.
Ibid., p. 624.
Ibid., p. 624 Ibid.
Cf. Jane Flax, R. N. Giere (eds.) (East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association, 1980) op. cit.; Nancy Hartsock, The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,’ in this volume; and Dorothy Smith, ‘Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology,’ Sociological Inquiry 44 (1974).
These criticisms can be found in Hilda Scott, Does Socialism Liberate Women? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974); Batya Weinbaum, The Curious Courtship of Women’s Liberation and Socialism (Boston: South End Press, 1978); Jane Flax, ‘Do Feminists Need Marxism,’ Quest 3, 1 (1976); Gayle Rubin, The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex,’ in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975); Heidi Hartmann, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,’ and many of the other papers in the volume in which it appears: Women and Revolution, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End Press, 1981); many of Nancy Hartsock’s and Jane Flax’s papers, including those in this volume.
Hartsock in her paper in this volume has developed the concept of a “feminist standpoint”; the point can also be found in Dorothy Smith, op. cit., and in Jane Flax’s paper in this volume.
Carol Brown, ‘Mothers, Fathers, and Children: From Private to Public Patriarchy,’ in Women and Revolution, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Isaac Balbus, op. cit.; Zillah Eisenstein, ‘Antifeminism in the Politics and Election of 1980’ and Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, ‘Antiabortion, Antifeminism, and the Rise of the New Right,’ both in Feminist Studies 7, 2 (1981); E. Currie, R. Dunn, and D. Fogarty, The New Immiseration: Staglation, Inequality, and the Working Class,’ Socialist Review 10, 6 (1980), and the response to this paper by the Washington Area Marxist-Feminist Theory Study Group, ‘None Dare Call It Patriarchy: A Critique of “The New Immiseration”’, Socialist Review 12:1 (1982).
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Harding, S. (2003). Why has the Sex/Gender System become Visible Only Now?. In: Harding, S., Hintikka, M.B. (eds) Discovering Reality. Synthese Library, vol 161. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0101-4_16
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