Feminist Perspectives on the Social Sciences

Philosophy 152Week 7

2011

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Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie

Outline

I. The need for feminist social scienceII. Wylie’s arguments on methodology

II.A. The collectivist model of inquiry II.B. The ‘self-study’ model of inquiry

III. Standpoint theory IV. Crasnow on feminist social science

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I. The need for feminist social science

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Historically, women have been marginalized and prevented from participating in academia as equals (and it’s not perfect, now):

•Rosalind Franklin did not receive sufficient credit for her contributions to the discovery of the double helix. •Jocelyn Bell, the discoverer of pulsars, was not included in the 1974 Nobel prize for physics. (Her PhD advisor, Antony Hewish, received it, along with Martin Ryle.)• Ruth Barcan Marcus, a PhD student in Philosophy at Yale in the 1940s, was prevented from attending the lectures for which she was a class teacher.

What are the intellectual worries, aside from equity concerns?

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• Much of social science (especially that of the interpretive tradition) concerns understanding and explaining the subjective experiences of persons. – Whose reports do we rely on when we attempt to

understand and explain the subjective experiences of a person?

– The exclusion of women ensures that no effective check exists against passing off stereotypical views about ‘women’s experience’ as facts.

• Consider the following examples. . .

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Erik Erikson (1902-1994) Influential professor of psychology who taught at Yale and Harvard.

Erikson:‘[M]uch of a young woman’s identity is already defined in her kind of attractiveness and in the selectivity of her search for the man (or men) by whom she wishes to be sought.’

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Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990) Influential professor of psychology who taught at University of Chicago, 1944-1973.

Bettleheim:‘We must start with the realization that, as much as women want to be good scientists or engineers, they want first and foremost to be womanly companions of men and to be mothers.’

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The ‘view from nowhere’ often represented clear social interests and concerns (of men).

Sandra Harding: The women’s movement needed knowledge that was for women.

Women had long been the object of others’ knowledge projects. Yet the research disciplines and public policy that depended upon them permitted no conceptual frameworks in which women became the subjects or authors of knowledge; the implied ‘speakers of scientific knowledge’ were never women. (1987)

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Three features of feminist social science

1. A recognition that the problematics of traditional social science generally reflected the concerns of men.

Reflection of 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 groups of them) who have this problem: a problem is always a problem for someone or other. (Harding 1987)

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Three features of feminist social science

2. An explicit attempt to design research programs that perform research for women.

[T]he goal of this inquiry is to provide for women explanations of social phenomena that they want and need, rather than providing for welfare departments, manufacturers, advertisers, the medical establishment, or the judicial system answers to questions they have. (Harding 1987)

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Three features of feminist social science

3. An explicit attempt to locate the social scientific researcher ‘in the same critical plane’ as the subject matter.

The best feminist analysis… insists that the inquirer her/himself be placed in the same critical plane as the overt subject matter, therby recovering the entire research process for scrutiny in the results of research. (Harding 1987)

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Sample questions for critical social science

• How did it come to be that violence against women in modern Western societies was often interpreted by legal systems as women ‘asking for it’ and/or ‘deviant men’ committing it?

• How did it occur that a double day of work, one unpaid, was regarded as normal and desirable for women but not for men?

• Why is it that societal attitudes regarding behavior (e.g., anti-social behavior, sexual promiscuity, etc.) are so asymmetric in their judgments of actions when committed by a man as compared to when committed by a woman?

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Some aims of feminist social science1. To provide descriptions of the experience of women that

would be recognized as accurate by women. (Recall the quotes from Erikson and Bettelheim.)

2. To inform women of, and liberate them from, their oppressed state.

3. To refuse to start off scientific thought and research using conceptual frameworks taken unreflectively from traditional disciplines.

A crucial question: what changes need to be made to the methodology of the social sciences to achieve these ends?

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II. Wylie’s arguments on methodology

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Women’s caucus PSA 2008

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Alison WylieNancy Tuana Lisa Lloyd, Sharon Crasnow, Mieke Boon

II. A. Wylie: the Collectivist method

• Focus: the experience of women as research subjects.– Researchers should ‘not impose [their] definitions of

reality on those researched.’ (Acker et al., 1983)

• Demands discrepancies between the theoretical constructs of researchers and the personal understandings of subjects be identified.

• Acknowledges that women have a ‘credible theoretical, explanatory grasp of what goes on in their lives.’

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• Research must not be exploitative, and research subjects must not be objectified.

• The myth of the separation between researcher and the ‘objects of study’ should be discarded.

• Differential power relations between researcher and subject should be eliminated to the extent possible.

Researchers must be acknowledged to enter the research relationship as concretely situated (social) individuals whose subjective experience and social engagement with the subjects inevitably affect what they come to understand. (Wylie)

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Transformed role for research subjects• In ordinary models of social research, subjects are

effectively passive participants in the research process.

• In the Collectivist model, research subjects participate in the research process through– determining the direction of research– collaborating in the description and interpretation of

their experience – formulating and assessing explanatory and theoretical

constructs.

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Problems in realizing the collectivist model

From reflection and experience: •Difficulties regarding egalitarian participation. – Successful involvement of subjects in the research

process – as active participants – requires that they be ‘very much like’ the researcher. This excludes many people from participation.

– Functioning as active participants requires that they be ‘very much like’ the researcher. This excludes many people from participation.

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• Difficulties with co-participation in analysis. – ‘If we were to fulfill the emancipatory aim for the

people we were studying [indeed, as demanded by them], we had to go beyond the faithful representation of their experiences, beyond ‘letting them talk for themselves’ and put those experiences into [a] theoretical framework. . . ‘ (Acker et al., 1983)

– In addition, sometimes one needed to represent the experiences of subjects in terms that countered the self-understanding of the research subjects themselves.

II. B. The ‘Self-study’ model of inquiry

• An alternative model that seeks scrupulously to ground feminist practice (and, hence, feminist science) in ‘atoms’ of particular experience, taken to be explanatorily primitive and strictly veracious.

• In articulating this model for social research, Stanley and Wise (1983) reject: – treating personal experience as a ‘point of departure’ for

theory construction– theories which posit structures, processes– ‘realities’ beyond women’s experience.

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Reality as a ‘negotiated construct’Where the commitment to privilege women’s experience comes into conflict with a demand for broader theoretical understanding, Stanley and Wise are prepared to repudiate any mode of theorizing that might involve reassessment or displacement of the theories and perceptions of subjects…Realities are, they argue, negotiated constructs and any theorizing that suggests otherwise just constructs a myth, usually an oppressive myth. [Wylie]

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Reasons in favor of the Self-study model

• Pragmatic: Any social or structural conditions relevant for understanding women’s experience and oppression can, it is claimed, be revealed with (or through direct analysis of) experience.

• Moral: Feminists have an obligation to resist any imposition of one person’s reality or standpoint over another. – Contradictory reports of experience are handled by

recognizing that, because all realities are constructed, reality for one subject may not agree with reality for another.

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A critical failing of Self-study model

• The relativism it endorses compromises the potential of feminist research to enlighten and liberate women from conditions of oppression.

• Why? Because ‘[w]hen all accounts are equally valid, the search for “how it actually works” becomes meaningless.’ (Acker et al., 1983)

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III. Standpoint theory

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What is standpoint theory?

A method of social research built upon the following basic ideas:

•A ‘standpoint’ is an attitude or an outlook on issues (used here in an all-inclusive sense) which arises from one’s circumstances and beliefs.

•A person’s standpoint affects how he or she socially constructs the world. (For more on social constructionism, see Hacking (1999).)

•People’s standpoints are, in turn, influenced by their membership in social groups.

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• The theoretical claims of standpoint theory require moving beyond mere reporting of what women (or members of an oppressed group) say or believe.

• Why? Two reasons: • Oppressed groups may believe misrepresentations of social

relations generated by the dominant group.

• Members of oppressed groups may report unreliably about their own experiences (e.g., they may report how they want to think of their experiences).

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Standpoint theory thus differs from the Collective model and the Self-Study model in several key ways:

•Although it attends to the experience of members of oppressed groups, research subjects need not be active participants in the research process. This violates the recommendations of the Collectivist model.

•It explicitly attempts to go beyond personal experience by mapping the practices of power. This violates the recommendations of the Self-Study model.

•It retains a privileged position for the researcher with respect to the subject. This violates both models.

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Crasnow on feminist social science: to speak for herself

Some additional readings

• Joan Acker, Kate Berry, and Joke Esseveld. Objectivity and truth: Problems in doing feminist research. Women’s Studies International Forum, 6(4):423Ð35, 1983.

• Ian Hacking. The looping effect of human kinds. In Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack, editors, Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate. Oxford University Press, 1996.

• Ian Hacking. The Social Construction of What? Harvard University Press, 1999.

• Sandra Harding. Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues. Indiana University Press, 1987.

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