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0:42 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life Philosophy podcast by some folks who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 42 how does human nature and specifically moral psychology vary by sexual and we read the first three chapters of Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice from 1982 and also Charlotte Perkins Gilman's novel Herland from 1915. My name is Mark Linsenmayer, running on Girl Power in Madison, Wisconsin.
1:10 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, parthenogenically replicating in Austin, Texas.
1:15 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, just sitting around in Middleton, Wisconsin.
1:19 Azura: And this is Azura Crispino, enjoying a beautiful sunset in Parker, Colorado.
1:25 Mark: Very nice. So, wow, this is a historic event. First of all, welcome back, Seth. You've been gone for so long.
1:33 Seth: Thank you so much. I can't tell you how thrilled I am to be doing this as opposed to what I have been doing for the last couple of months.
1:41 Mark: And do you wish to reveal any of that or should we just pass over that?
1:44 Seth: Let's pass over it in silence. I have smeared the blood of the lamb above my door, if you will, to let the angel pass over.
1:52 Mark: But just to clarify, your absence for the last four episodes does not mean that you're going to be intermittent, that you were just gone and I.
1:58 Seth: That is correct.
1:59 Mark: And you might be surprised to hear Dylan for the third episode in a row, people. But we'll say no more about that other than we really like having Dylan around. And Wes has not quit. He will be back, but he just didn't want to do this one. And our star this evening, Azura. Welcome back.
2:15 Azura: It's a pleasure.
2:16 Mark: Longtime listeners remember Azura from our second Kant episode, Kant on Knowledge, well over a year ago. And the reason that we had gotten in touch with you in the first place, right, was to find somebody who knew something about feminism. So this has been in the works for a long time.
2:30 Seth: Yes, it has.
2:31 Mark: And the readings that we did this time were eventually selected by Azura after I harassed her for months and months and then selected her land. And then I read that whole thing and said, that's not enough for a discussion. So. And you had said, but the Gilligan was extremely influential on your development, right?
2:47 Azura: Well, we had thrown out a lot of different ideas and there were various different constraints. So I'm not sure that I would say that I actually made the final decision. But I mean, I think we came together in a consensus kind of way to do that. But one of the reasons that's such
2:59 Seth: a gender specific way to characterize that it's very Herlantic. Mark was trying to give you absolute credit and you contextualized it.
3:09 Mark: So this is how it's going to be.
3:12 Azura: No, I think that's an interesting point, but part of the reason why I really like Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice is that one of the major questions that I think comes up a lot when people are trying to get into feminism is this idea of to what extent are these differences inherent and to what extent are these differences culturally constructed? And I fall more into the culturally constructed camp. And what I like about Gilligan's work is that she does a really good job of talking about, I think, how girls and women think about these ideas conceptually differently.
But she's really couching this in the perspective of, on one hand, that girls are raised differently in the sense that they have this closer female parent and then they develop differently. So anyway, I just thought that it would be a good foundation for us to discuss, especially because care ethics is such a big branch. And then her land I really like because the three of you are men. And I wanted to give you sort of a way to think about what it would be like to be a woman absent the thought of man. And that's what Gilligan is really exploring in part that I found particularly valuable.
4:17 Mark: You mean Gilman?
4:18 Azura: Did I just do that again?
4:20 Mark: We're going to have this trouble. The entire time we picked two authors that have nearly identified identical names. Should we just call them Carol and Charlotte?
4:28 Seth: No, that's no better.
4:31 Mark: So yes, there's many, many branches. We wanted to do something on feminism from the start of this. I know that the parts that I studied of that in grad school were more in the sort of neo Marxist continental camp of once you understand Marxism and understand moral relativism and some of the crazy existentialist stuff, feminism seems to branch right out of that. Kristeva Right. Being the main figure there. But this is not that this should be easier for our listeners to get a handle on and won't require the background of folks that we have not yet done episodes on. So maybe we'll get to that harder stuff later. Neither of these is officially a work of philosophy, right? I mean, they're both studied in philosophy classes. But one's a novel by Gilman and she was a sociologist.
5:15 Seth: I don't know which version of the book you guys read of her land. Her land? Yeah. But the one I have is actual hardback. And the introduction by this woman, Ann Lane, is actually quite extensive and goes into some detail about her life. She's very interesting.
5:29 Mark: That's a good place to start that. We'll talk about her and we'll talk about her land a bit. It's more dramatic than the Gilligan and it can get some of these themes out there.
5:37 Seth: So she was born in 1860. She's somehow related in a kind of extended way to the Beechers, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher. That family somehow related to her father. And they were very poor. She had a brother and they grew up in a very poor home and moved frequently when they were kids. She got married, sort of reluctantly, and after the marriage became deeply depressed and consulted a well known Philadelphia neurologist who specialized in women's nervous disorders. So at the time, the cure was a rest cure to basically put you into isolation, remove all reading, writing, that sort of thing.
It almost made her go insane. And she rejected it and then fled to California, abandoning essentially her husband and the child that they had had. She got much better in California. She tried to reconcile with her husband. It didn't work. So they got a divorce and she got the daughter and moved to California. Long story short is she stayed out there. She did some writing. So she wrote something called the Yellow Wallpaper, which was an autobiographical story of a woman who basically has a mental breakdown. And this brought her some notoriety. Ended up getting involved in women's associations and literary circles and so forth on the West Coast.
6:55 Mark: And I had read that in, I think, a horror anthology.
6:58 Seth: Yeah, yeah.
6:59 Mark: The wallpaper is really creepy. Maybe it's haunted.
7:02 Seth: The author of the introduction says it could be placed in the tradition of black comedy, although its comic quality has not been previously acknowledged. Very black, yes. Anyway, she became quite involved and outspoken in women's rights. At one point she was attacked because she had abandoned her child. After that she kind of left California and just traveled around the country, lecturing and being a part of activities and so forth. It was kind of out of that activity that she wrote another, apparently more famous book than her land called Women and Economics. And she got some international notoriety for that. For the rest of her life. She was quite prolific as a writer, writing both fiction and nonfiction. When she was about 40, she married one of her cousins and they lived together for some time until he died, and then she died shortly thereafter.
7:50 Mark: And she did not breed with her cousin?
7:52 Seth: No, no. I suspect it was probably one of those very upper class, east coast arranged marriage type situations.
8:00 Mark: It would have been very in keeping with her love of controlled breeding to keep those genes, those Gilman genes strong or the Perkins genes.
8:08 Seth: And apparently during her lifetime she was extremely well known, had a great amount of infamy as well as fame, and then a generation later was completely forgotten.
8:18 Mark: Well, in this book from 1915, right?
8:20 Unknown speaker: Correct.
8:20 Mark: Appeared in serial form in a magazine she published herself. Forerunner. There's actually a sequel to Herland that I did not look at. It kind of reads like an H.G. wells novel, like Journey to the Center of the Earth.
8:31 Seth: Azuras, thank you for sharing this with us because I enjoyed reading it so much. It does read exactly like one of those turn of the century science fiction adventure kind of stories. It was so much in that style. It was pure enjoyment.
8:43 Azura: I'm glad.
8:44 Mark: Of course, if you're reading it just for the philosophical content, you can skip the first third because that's the best part. It's just the. And then our plague. We're climbing mountains. And as Azura had said before, the point of this is that this is a lost society of just women. All the men were killed off by their own demise.
9:05 Azura: Right.
9:06 Mark: The important part, yeah, most of them weren't. They killed off by a volcano or something, but then just the ones that were slaves were left and they were just obnoxious and tried to take over. And so they were all killed off.
9:18 Azura: Right.
9:18 Mark: As opposed to just keeping a couple around for breeding. So that just shows you that those women just did not have foresight.
9:23 Seth: You need to set the stage a little bit better than that, Mark.
9:27 Dylan: Go for it, Seth.
9:28 Seth: So this is a utopian novel. Like all utopian novels, you have to have some kind of an origin story for how you come across this isolated civilization that somehow manages to keep itself distinct. These three guys are adventuring and the guide tells them of this mysterious land that nobody goes where there are only women. And they, of course, don't believe it's true. The whole concept is that this thing is sort of elevated up in this remote mountain range and it's sort of sealed off from the rest of the World by the mountain range. And the origin story is that at one point there was a pass that was open down to the lower lands.
But at one point there was a war going on between the lowlanders and the highlanders, and all of the men of this highland village were down fighting the lowlanders, and a volcano erupted and sealed off the pass so that only the women and the miscellaneous few slaves at the time were open. And this was 2,000 years ago. So they've had 2,000 years of living without men in this isolated utopia, but
10:26 Dylan: you have to explain the origin of them continuing on, right?
10:30 Seth: That is correct. I would be happy to, but I don't want to monopolize the conversation.
10:34 Mark: Oh, it's not a conversation yet. Go ahead.
10:37 Seth: Well, as you said, the men essentially die out or are killed, and the women who are there resign themselves to basically living out the remainder of their natural lives until every Everybody is dead. Then a miracle happens and you'll have to read the book to get the details, but essentially one woman miraculously gets pregnant and gives birth to a girl.
11:00 Dylan: I want to put a hiccup in that because I think that it's important, at least in terms of the context of the point of view about science, which I don't know that we should really talk in detail about in the book. But the woman who has the first child, Gilman, writes about it as a kind of evolution, a parthenogenic birth that had very Darwinian undertones of the kinds of things that happen to other sorts of animals if they're left in isolation. It was not divine in the sense of immaculate conception, that is an impregnation by a deity or something like that, that kind of thing. It's wholly within the physical being of this woman that this happens.
11:37 Seth: Yes, and I apologize if that's the way it came across. What I meant to say was it was taken as such by the community because the religion of the society is like an earth mother sort of basis. They revered this Ur mother as a divine. What? Closer to the divine, maybe is what I'm looking for. She doesn't characterize the society as viewing the woman as evolutionarily superior. That to me, is something that comes out later, over time.
12:02 Mark: And I can see, I'm looking at the Wikipedia page for parthenogenesis here, and it says in many cases, parthenogenesis occurs when one gender, typically the male, is unavailable in the general vicinity. Once males are again available, the parthenogenesis created females would be capable of mating with the males and creating normal offspring. Apparently this does happen in some kinds of animals. It can sort of turn on and off.
12:24 Seth: That's pretty weird.
12:25 Dylan: It is weird, but it's true.
12:27 Mark: So this is what she was thinking of, at least in putting this forward.
12:31 Seth: Yes. So this original mother has a girl child, and then she proceeds to have four more girl children, and then those five girl children each proceed to have five girl children and so on and so forth. And kind of the original people that are there die off, and all you're left with is this one branch of parthenogenically replicating mothers who, strangely enough, are
12:56 Mark: not all identical twins, but whatever.
12:58 Seth: No, they are not.
12:59 Mark: She didn't know that much genetics.
13:01 Seth: And so when these guys climb this mountain, these three adventurers, and they get up into this society, they encounter this relatively homogenous utopian society that's 100% women who reproduce parthenogenically and have been doing so for thousands of years and have created this utopian society.
13:20 Mark: But since you're talking about breeding, that part of this is they don't just have five kids, they can control it. They sort of have some special feeling that they know that it's going to happen. And if they involve themselves in a lot of other activities or something like that, then they won't.
13:35 Seth: But that comes after the period of time where they run up against the limit of their resources. So they voluntarily control. They realize they can voluntarily control the number of children. So, in fact, not all of them have children, but most of them do, and. But you only have one.
13:49 Mark: Right?
13:50 Seth: And it's only a rare few that get to have two, etc. Etc.
13:53 Mark: Right. And that becomes the key mechanism of social control. Right. Not only have they developed customs and actually social aspects, but just if somebody just seems to be less than optimal in some way, then that person does not breed.
14:06 Seth: That is correct.
14:07 Mark: Well, Azura, where should we take this next?
14:09 Azura: Well, so one of the things that I thought was really interesting in the beginning of the book is when the three adventurers are trying to speculate as to what a society only made up of women will be like. The thought is that women, as that word is being used right now, understand each other relationally towards men. Right. That to be a woman means to try to be attractive to a man, and that this requires all sorts of actions and ways of being and ways of dressing and so on and so forth. And what I think Gilman does a really good job of doing is to set up the expectation from the two male adventurers of this is what these women are going to be like and then she completely shatters that impression as soon as they actually arrive at her land. Which I think is philosophically almost exactly along those lines.
14:52 Dylan: It's interesting that the whole point of view of the novel is written as a kind of travelogue from the point of view of one of the male adventurers. And in fact, it's never told from the point of view of any of the women in her land. It's always told from the point of view of these men. And you have, in particular the narrator, Van, and his two compatriots. And they each represent pretty clear, stereotypical styles of men. You know, a kind of manly man in Terry and a kind of, I don't know, more effeminate man and Jeff. And then Van seems to me like something like Gilman's idea of an educable man that would listen and still be a man in some respects, I guess, learn something. I guess that's the big thing. He is, of the three, he's the one that seems to be the one who actually genuinely changes his mind.
15:47 Mark: And we could make comparisons and say, which of the men correspond to which of us, but we won't do that.
15:54 Seth: No, but I mean, I think Azura's point was in the opening part of the book, they're speculating about what a society of women would be like. And they're thinking there can't be a society without men. Because women are incapable of rationally discoursing and coming to agreement that they're too catty or they're too passive. They kind of go through all these different modalities because they're thinking of the society women or the women of their class in the society they come from. And they're trying to imagine these women who live in some degree of luxury and are responsible for maintaining the home and having kids and them being catty with each other about others.
And women don't operate in the public sphere of politics and economics and commerce and academia and all those sorts of things. So they can't imagine a society that's run by women. Because they can't imagine women in those roles.
16:45 Mark: It's always fun reading a social commentary aimed at a different age. That you can have a little distance. That, you know, it might have been an accurate representation that women were so marginalized at the time that she was writing that. Yeah, she probably thought that most of the people in her social class who are women were very frivolous. You know, that's one of the ongoing themes in her work. That even when women are treated well, and supported. They're not given any responsibility and they're just. They're not built up into being impressive people to the detriment of everyone.
17:15 Azura: Right. Well, and I think part of what she's trying to say is that the reason why the women are so frivolous and so on and so forth is because they have been so marginalized that their only option is to be able to attract a man. And in order to attract a man, all of this frivolity is now necessary. Because when we get to her land, there's this comment about, well, why would I wear a hat with feathers in it? You know, that's ridiculous. You know, I need to be running around and climbing trees and being active and doing all of these things. I wanted to come back to the point about this being in a travelogue, because Gilligan talks about this too in her first chapter.
This idea that when girls go on an adventure, that it's a very different sort of adventure. When you think about mythology and Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, you have them falling into this deep sleep and all of this passivity. And so I think the fact that she couches it in a male travelogue adventure type story is to sort of give the idea that these women are also themselves adventurous, but instead of their adventure being individual, it's context in the sense that the whole society is going through this adventure.
18:20 Dylan: You know, Another tack she could have taken, I suppose would have been to tell the origin story of her land from the point of view of like one of the observers of that initial parthenogenesis or something like that. Another way to do it would have been, again, starting from the origin and go through generations of women and tell a kind of mega novel story about it, but all from the perspective of the birth of her land. She clearly chose to do it this particular way. And it's effective in the sense that you can look back and tell the story of it having fully matured in the end, the last half of the book or so is really revealing the origin story of her land, but sort of looking backwards on it in this sort of fully mature state.
19:08 Mark: Yeah, I think maybe despite the fact that we've talked about the origin here for a little while in this discussion, my initial impression was that's a storytelling device that you have to give some kind of origin. But that's not the point. The point is, what would a society be like when men are not around? Well, okay, part of that is, then how could you have a society where men are not around? What would that mean? So the origin does matter in terms of we want to see what it's like, not the sudden absence of men, but really there's been a lot of development free of men.
And what would that be like? And there's some details, again, like the fact that there's this genetic engineering that, oh, that woman is a little too big for her britches. Let's not let her breed. The other women saying this, there's such a social consciousness that such a woman would be made to recognize that she, she's not optimal as far as the breeding pool goes. That seems to be how most of these things work.
19:57 Azura: Right.
19:57 Mark: They say some women are not optimal to be mothers, in other words, to be the full time caretakers of children. In fact, most women are not appropriate for that. So it becomes specialized and there's a recognition in the society that, yeah, that's the way it should be. I don't want my biological child being raised by me who is not optimally suited for doing so. I want to be able to interact with them, but I want the majority of that to go to somebody else.
20:21 Dylan: So, I mean, Terry, I mean, the men in the novel answer those questions, well, what do you do about crime? What do you do about people who don't agree? Gilman includes those things, but I think that they are sort of on the edges of a primary concern, which is the idea that you have this society in which individuals have their orientation towards the whole group and there's a kind of consensus. And of course, at the edges, we only hear a little bit about what happens at the edges of this consensus in general, the things that they bring to bear to build the society.
One of them is practical science, cultivation and efficiency. They cultivate the entire plane, including the trees. They breed the nuts together to figure out how to get the most efficient food production and all that kind of stuff. And they develop regimens of education and physical development so that they can with the point of view of all flourishing together at some level. So in that perspective, one of the hardest things for them to deal with, the men, is the disposition with respect to competition, the idea that society can only proceed and grow and flourish with the whip of competition.
That's the point of view of the men. And they're flabbergasted that this society doesn't have competition. And at first they think there must be competition that really pushes them along just in a way that they're not used to seeing. And in the end, Gilman seems to put forth the notion that there is no competition, not in Anything remotely like the sense in which we normally think of it, but that nonetheless the society flourishes and progresses and develops, but in the absence of anything like genuine competition, but born out of cooperative activity towards a greater good.
22:16 Mark: Right, so this is supposed to be saying ultimately something about that when philosophers have reflected on what is human nature like Hobbes, everybody is selfish, they just don't have women in mind.
22:25 Dylan: Yeah.
22:25 Mark: And that's chiefly what this is supposed to be about.
22:27 Dylan: Well, that would be her response that she would say it might be true for men what Hobbes says, but that isn't the way all society has to be. And here's an example that would be completely resonant with women's psychology or point of view. I don't know how he exactly would put it, but certainly it wouldn't be the only way you had to do it. And I suspect that Gilman would think that Hobbes was just wrong about men as well, because she has these three men and the one that would be most like a Hobbesian man would be Terry, the guy who ends up being the reason for them getting thrown out and who simply cannot control himself and also is completely befuddled by the existence of this society.
Whereas the other men don't seem to fit so well into Hobbes picture of the way in which society works. So she offers an alternative that isn't just focused on women but also holds seems to me forth the notion that well, there is a gradation of psychology among the women in her land as well as among the three men that she takes as token representatives of maledom.
23:28 Azura: Can I go back to the food production for a second? What we were talking about with the nuts and so on.
23:32 Dylan: Please do.
23:33 Azura: I think that's interesting when we think about it in terms of the question of competition. And also we were talking about earlier how a lot of the more theoretically context of philosophical work deals with Marxism and comes out of that tradition or is inspired by that tradition, if you want to say. And so I think it's kind of interesting that you know, here they're talking about doing small scale, high yielding in the sense that it's compact type of farming. And Gillig, dammit. And Gilman is talking about this really at a time before the kind of industrialized farms that we see today. But you also see in her writing a hint that women would just not make the kinds of decisions that would lead to the kind of industrial farming practices that we have today. Even though she's writing 105 years ago and I find that really sort of interesting.
24:25 Dylan: When you say industrial farming, Azura, you mean the idea that you would farm for profit.
24:31 Azura: Maybe I'm reading something into Gilman that isn't there, but I did want to bring up this point, that part of what feminism talks about is this idea that the relationship that you have to your environment can be either exploitative or non exploitative. And that part of what happens in competition and in capitalism is that you start to look at your environment in terms of how do I capitalize this asset? In other words, how do I squeeze as much out of it as possible? Not how do I do this in a way that is going to be cohesive and long going. So here she has a discussion of here's a society who's been here for 2000 years and they are having evolutions, but the kind of evolution that they're having is to have food that is going to be highly nutritious and that it all evolves together and that it's this really abundant ecosystem they're not thinking about, oh, I want to start the next Coca Cola.
And I think that Gilman does an excellent job of expressing the values that Gilligan is later going to say, are these feminine values and saying, if we take them to their natural conclusion, what kind of picture would that say for our society both in terms of how do we produce goods, how do we distribute goods, how do we deal with household labor? Because even this idea of, okay, I give up my child for somebody else to raise, that may seem really heartless, but I think a lot of women think to themselves, well, you know, but I also want to have a career and I want to do these other things and I want to be really involved and how can I possibly do everything?
And in her land, it's very easy. I can give it to somebody who's more suited to that task. And I can go back to, you know, genetically engineering tree nuts so that we can have this really bountiful harvest. And because it's all being done communally, I don't have to achieve that competitive status of I have to do everything right.
26:20 Mark: And if you give it up, it's not even completely giving it up, because really there's so much communality about it anyway that you could still see the kid as much as the average working dad in this society would.
26:30 Dylan: So the question to me would be, does Gilman's Herland admit of the kinds of criticisms that one would make of Plato's Republic? One of which would be because of the specialization and the Notion that each person has a metal soul of a particular kind that predisposes them to certain role in society, then you sort of have a neat bow around the building of society, because every person that is a piece of society has a very defined role. And then it becomes kind of a question of arranging the parts properly. That's different than saying that each person is their own activity that might realize that activity in many different ways, and in fact, following Aristotle, might realize their activity in unoptimal ways.
And so does Herland admit of the criticism of Plato's Republic that, well, there's just essentially no individuality here, that any kind of individual motion, individual determination, is just utterly absent, and you're either having a situation where people are effectively coerced into being into the role in society that they're in, or you have an unreasonable expectation that people will just fall into their role in a natural way and not only accept it, but actually thrive in it. That's a sort of a standard criticism of Plato, right?
27:50 Seth: To me, it's the former. And the interesting question is whether or not we believe that a society that was 100% created and run by women would be able to effectively accomplish this in a way that we don't believe it's possible in Plato from the perspective of having men involved.
28:08 Dylan: Oh. So that the third thought would be that because it's a society of women, a utopia of women, we avoid the difficulties that we would lay at the feet of Plato's Republic. That would have to be because the human nature of women is different than the human nature of men, or that Plato was wrong.
28:25 Seth: It could be both, or potentially both. Yeah, that was my reading of it, anyway.
28:29 Dylan: How about you, Azura?
28:31 Azura: I don't know which way I necessarily want to jump on that question. Whether Gilman is saying, well, this would just not be an issue because it's a society of women? I tend to think that that's not the answer that she would give. I tend to think that the answer that she would give is that this is a society where the priorities of the society are very clear and everybody has been indoctrinated into those priorities and accepts them to a certain point and sees the wisdom of them. But not only that, also has seen the futility of having other priorities be standard.
Right. Because there's this idea that they're all aware of how they came to be in this catastrophe and that these ideals of competition and these ideals of war were the reasons why they were in this catastrophe in the first place. So then we end up having a question of to what extent does individuation necessarily have to interlay with competition and necessarily have to interlay with war? But I see those questions as being really sort of tangential to what you were asking.
29:34 Unknown speaker: Thanks for listening to this Partially Examined Life episode preview. If you're enjoying it so far, you can purchase the full episode in the music section of the itunes store or at partiallyexaminedlife.com store for unlimited access to our back catalog. You can become a pel citizen@partiallyexaminedlife.com membership. Membership also includes access to discussion groups with other listeners, as well as ad free versions of current episodes and a host of other bonus content, all available from a single convenient feed that you can use with a variety of podcast apps.
I read that an article stated women can be Navy Seals. That’s funny.
The last extract seemed to imply that men and women had complementary attributes. I agree.
I have one gripe that the female on the show did not mention a single positive attribute of men and it seems the only exploited people are females. Maids and Housewives. Exploited is an overused word which is so inclusive as to be meaningless except to reveal the feelings of the user to certain situations. e.g you could say the high powered female lawyer was exploited by advertising to work so hard or far more likely in my view, the labourer in Herland with some assigned task for the greater good (not one mention of the shades of communism guys?)
Competition and capitalism were mentioned as self evidently (male?) bad things which seems ironic for a podcast distributed over a web, using energy and countless clever inventions, including an iPad which are largely the result of both.
Old post I know but the fact that you refer to Azzurra Crispino as “the female” says a lot about you.
Also, saying the internet was invented by men and capitalism misses the point. Maybe, if women actually had substantive rights or equal treatment, a women might have invented the internet or something like the ipad. The fact that men invent pretty much everything reflects the pressures of our society.
And in any case you clearly don’t know the facts because the internet, along with computers generally, as well as rocketry, lasers, jet engines, and pretty much all of the amazing technology that provides the ground for modern technology were almost entirely subsidized by the state. Pentagon R&D is the source of virtually all major technological changes in the last 70 years. Big science is just too expensive for individual firms, even massive ones like Microsoft or Boeing to engage in. You need the Pentagon, DARPA, NASA, or CERN to make the major innovations, then firms make modifications and new products based off of them.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahjewell/inventions-by-women-that-changed-the-world#.yn57660GV
Look, the point is that there is a whole community of writers immersed in this women’s studies project which seems weird to outsiders. We took a brief dip into it to try to get some of what the movement is about, and didn’t really have/take time to discuss much the substance of it.
Unless you want to just dismiss it altogether (which it sounds like you do), then you’ve got to put on some armor and wade in and not get all offended as a male. I think our take on the Gilligan was ultimately comparable to the non-Christian take on Kierkegaard we exhibited back in that episode: is there anything cool to be gotten out of the reading even if you’re not signed up for the feminist project as a whole, e.g. even if you think that the differences she found are not a matter of fundamentally different sex natures that have to be accounted for? Without giving any kind of judgment on that overall project, I think there is.
This episode was brilliant!
I only just got around to listening to it. Enjoyed every minute, thanks!
Feminism is more a psychological study than anything else, if anything else. The division of thought based on a personal identity derived or related to sex organs/reproduction is purely arbitrary. Like all the associations of self. There are many ‘studies’ which apparently support the division. They fundamentally assume the distinction, design the study and/or interpret the data in a way that supports the preconceived notion of sex differentiated thought.
Feminism (like many, if not all political ideology), contrives absolute class based distinctions, using philosophy, sociology and ‘advocacy science’ to support, what is probably a flawed premise (sex differentiated thought).
The class based distinction or classification is critical to political power. The division is the basis of political authority.
Feminism is essentially a tertiary label of the marxism brand. It has utopian foundations, which indicates both a discord with existing conditions and possibly a deep disconnect from reality. l would go so far as to say, that no matter what the prevailing conditions are at any instant, things are exactly as they are. Inherently perfect. Of course, the psyche or ego or self or person or whatever that program is called, must have its way. It wants what it wants. From there arises what should be, which is a projection of wanting. Wanting comes from not accepting.
To this extent, l would say that these types of thought are psychological. Or self imposed. How one begins to rationally, objectively and consistently measure, model and interpret such personal scripts is anyone’s guess. Its likely impossible to do as there is no method to the ego madness. Its a problem of You-Am-I-Am-You.
Psyche is seperation.
Are we done with the gender/identity philosophy stuff now? Please?
If you guys take suggestions it would be good to get back to Metaphysics, Logic or that potential Whitehead episode that was suggested.
“We took a brief dip into it to try to get some of what the movement is about, and didn’t really have/take time to discuss much the substance of it.”
I haven’t listened yet but this is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been looking for. I’m on an email list that advertised a feminist reading group, but “cis men” – a term I had to look up – were not welcome. At first I was peeved and indignant but as you say “you’ve got to put on some armor and wade in and not get all offended as a male.” It makes sense that they want the group to be a safe place for any woman not to feel inhibited by men’s presence. But I did find it unfortunate that there was no suggestion of an alternative for men who were even interested in maybe not being oppressive phallocentrists.
Also re: “even if you think that the differences she found are not a matter of fundamentally different sex natures that have to be accounted for” – I’m speaking out of turn not having listened yet but I’m curious if this implies she is pointing to a biological basis for the sociological differences we see in male/female roles/skills/etc., because I just read a book called “Living Dolls,” which was very concerned with biology and/or evolutionary psychology being used to prematurely justify existing stereotypes and thus a sort of fatalism. Oh, well, guess I’ll have to listen to find out 😛
Since you guys asked in the episode, I want to state that this episode was quite excellent (It did not at all seem unfairly weighed against men either in my opinion) and that I’d really enjoy another episode on feminist philosophy – particularly as a “follower” of Schopenhauer, I find the mixture of parallels and dissonances between his philosophy and feminism to be quite fascinating (in both ethics and metaphysics).
By the way, I’m a Bachelor student of philosophy in Germany, and this podcast has been tremendously useful in getting a first look into topics that I was unfamiliar with and could then research on my own more effectively – so thanks for your work in doing these!
Just some memories this triggers..
Years ago I used to casually read a blog called “Bitch Ph.D.” (along with “I Blame the Patriarchy” which is still around and recommended,btw) and articles, liberal websites with feminist articles and so on.
Looking at this long, complex history with its 3 whole “waves” and the various thinkers and wildly contradictory strands of thought that are all called feminist I eventually said, “Damn, feminism just amounts to bitching about how it sucks to be a woman”.
Hah yes I know, pretty vacuous and unfair.
And reading one day the played-out slogan some woman dropped in a discussion forum, “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people” I replied that feminism is boring.
Anyway one day the brilliant woman that started “Bitch Ph.D.” said the blog was coming to an end because she is at a much happier place in her life and she was over the personal emotional/psychological issues in her life that motivated her to blog. Fine, but the blog was largely a political blog and was used to champion feminist perspectives. Never mind all that then. No more need to bitch.
“I Blame the Patriarchy” comes from a lesbian woman in Austin, TX that enjoys good food, taking nature pictures and delivering the most cleverly snarky screeds on our woman hating society you can lay your jaundiced eyes upon. She says she isn’t a hater. And neither are Christians that “don’t hate the lesbian sinner, only the sin”, if you buy that.
One consistent thing with feminism is the desire for increased political, social and cultural power of women and overcoming traditional roles for women. Obvious. But they are confused as hell about what that means to themselves and each other. When they say feminism is about the empowerment of men too (since patriarchy hurts us so much too..) and we’re supposed to feel it is as much about our liberation I wonder why they call themselves feminists and not humanists.
I’ll look that up but doubt I’ll be on board with ideologues that consistently put men down and have it so much easier. Ex. Women are discouraged to succeed and be #1 said your guest?
I graduated high school in the mid ’90s and our valedictorian was a “woman of color” with parents from India and she was looked upon with great admiration by the students and was a star to the school administration. But that’ one personal example. We want studies and statistics right? Aren’t girls kicking boy’s asses in about every subject now? Or at least making huge progress like in science and math, where there used to be a gap?
I’m a working class dude and sometimes I wish I could stay at home with the kids while a woman works her ass off. But I don’t think most women are for that kind of change.
Anyway, I think an evolutionary psychology episode would be good to do and how it compares and contrasts with the social sciences, ‘pomo’ gurus like Foucault and gender feminists, etc. I’m actually not an advocate of evolutionary psychology or nature being more important than nurture, I’m just confused as you can see.
Sorry, i know this is an old post now, but i only just listened to this one today, so….
Excellent podcast. Can not recommend it enough. Several points that were made here have been added to my list of points to bring up in the couple of lectures I will be giving on feminism and ethics. Absolutely stellar intro to the topic and i look forward to more!
Thank you thank you thank you.
Thanks, Shane! (And no, this is not old news yet, and continued dialog on older episodes is always welcome and typically actually noticed by us…)
Thanks Shane! If you want to see comments on an old post, check out the guy scolding us about Heidegger…:)
Hi,
I only came across PEL a couple of months ago, and only just listened to the Feminism episode. I had not heard of Gilligan and I’m now thinking of buying her book.
I thought it was a great general introduction to the subject. Introduction is the key word here though – let’s have some more. As Seth said, the avenues that open up as to what Feminism is etc become increasingly more complex.
By the way, Herland was mentioned as a Utopia. Do you know the Faber Book of Utopias edited by John Carey? It features a section from Herland.
Many thanks,
Nick.
Thanks Nick, glad you are on board! The Gilligan book is great, probably worth a check out from your library rather than a buy as you aren’t like to keep going back to it. Make sure to find the newer version with the updated foreword.
I am unaware of the Faber book, but with The Republic and Herland in close proximity, my interest in the subject of Utopias was definitely aroused. It be worth a survey to see if any Utopias actually acknowledge the value of emotion and don’t advocate eugenics…:)
–seth
I really enjoyed this podcast. I realize we’re just dipping our toes, but you guys all did a great job and the two books were a particularly good selection. I realize you did it a couple of months ago (I’m only just now catching up) but I’ve been recommending it to everyone. I hope you do another podcast to continue where you left off in your exploration!
Thanks. We do plan on some Simone de Beauvoir, which will connect this with existentialism, and perhaps our upcoming one on race will have some overlap.
If you’ve got any recommendations in this area, I’d be happy to hear them.
One of the best discussions I’ve read so far.
It’s difficult for males to talk about feminism without falling into either political correctness or on the other hand, macho locker room cynicism, but you people manage the subject maturely and intelligently.
What also makes it difficult to talk about feminism seriously is that there are fewer guidelines than there are for talking about, say, epistemology or Plato: with feminism, you’re on your own.
I would certainly appreciate another discussion on the subject of feminism. Simone de Beauvoir, whom you mention above, seems like a great starting point.
It’s been less than a year since the initial podcast, but perhaps we are ready for a follow-up. (I am, but I may be alone in this.)
“Herland” and “In a Different Voice” were bold choices. “Herland” in particular is classified into the sci-fi, feminist genres and yes, literary fiction at large.
Genres, themselves, provide an interesting provisional lesson in how we relate to knowledge. I have to credit Junot Díaz with this thought experiment: if you are a genre-practitioner of comic books, do you see yourself winning a Pulitzer?
Thanks for including some biographical information on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I think it’s safe to say that she was well versed in loneliness, isolation, marginalized living.
In the face of these facts, she sought liberation from unnecessary constraints to her freedom and her full development. This resulted in work in different literary genres (sci-fi, Gothic, black humor) and across academic disciplines (creative writing, sociology).
At the time of the podcast’s initial publishing, much had been discussed on other blog sites and message boards – in very vague terms – about the absence of gender parity in the field academic philosophy. I know very little. But I submit to you that philosophers are concerned about constraints to freedom and to effective communication. It follows that the intellectual viewpoints of women are relevant for further discourse in this field.
If there is a follow up, perhaps you could touch on gender fluidity. And Habermas.
Thank you for this blog.
At around 0:30, the question of “wanting what someone else has” arises. I think that there is a general theme in this novel, and in much of feminist theory. that wholism is to be preferred over reductionism. In the spirit of this, I would say that feelings of jealousy, envy and so forth arise from the fact that certain aptitudes and attributes of personhood are more highly prized by the culture than others. A reductionist culture such as our own, one that wants to answer questions like “what’s the bottom line” or “How can we achieve X” will focus on those questions to the exclusion of others. Once some determination is made about the answer to such questions, the society will be most supportive of aptitudes and attributes that seem to make one more likely to achieve the bottom line.
The wildcrafting of forest trees in Herland is a good example of a wholistic paradigm. The people wanted to maximize food production but in such a way that the ecosystem is left intact. The assumption is that the background from which the food arises is as important as the end product. Contrast that with the modern industrial food system and we see that a bigger, cheaper, chicken, for example, is the preferred outcome and no background considerations are brought into account. This leads directly to exploitation of the chicken, the genetic integrity of the feed supply, the environment, the labor and the public health.
One way to look at the difference I am trying to highlight is that, in general, “patriarchy” emphasizes the achievement of specific, usually abstract goals. I mean abstract here in the sense that the desired result is “abstracted” from the welter of irrelevant “noise” (in this sense the whole “scientific method” could be seen, and often IS seen as a product of patriarchy).
Notice that the goals in reductionism are “individuated”-we are looking for a specific “good” rather than GOOD in general (a whole other discussion but important to the topic). Wholism looks for the thriving of the entire system which ties into Gilman’s emphasis on concern for “the future”.
So, if we believe that society has an equal need fof good mothers, good tree climbers and good geneticists than one will not, at least in theory, be more prestigious than another. If, on the other hand, society is ONLY interested in good geneticists, it will grand prestige to those who show an aptitude in that direction. With prestige comes all sorts of social perks (more money, more praise, etc). It is, I submit, not the aptitudes and attributes of others that fuel jealousy and envy, but rather, the perks granted to those who possess such aptitudes and attributes. It comes to approval, acceptance and love.
As gregarious primates, we have a deep genetic mandate for acceptance and status as these assure security. I think Gilman implies that A more wholistic (hyper contextualized) view of the world (such as what Giligan seems to find in her female subjects) would reduce the occurrence of jealousy and envy by democratizing status through the recognition that it takes a lot of different kinds to make a society function.
Mark,
Thank you for pointing out that what is considered “normal” can be extremely messed up and oppressive.
I listen to these podcasts far after they have been posted and I’m not going to look at every comment so I don’t make a duplicate comment. So don’t reply saying “someone has already said that” because I don’t care. My two cents is this. Men and women are inherently different physically, but contrary to the book I don’t think they are psychologically. In a society evolved by only females the EXACT same problems of competition and selfishness would occur. I don’t know how you could argue otherwise.
I loved this episode! I am most interested in the idea that Seth talked about which is that discussing feminism as such a broad topic was hard and tough to tease out what was feminist philosophy and what wasn’t. I do hope you will do as he mentions and find some other entry point such as feminist epistemology or something along those lines. This is years later that I am listening so maybe by now the listeners have enough background to read something that has some prerequisite understanding of other philosophers? There is this group (cult-like) led by a guy named Keith Reneire who has a sort of philosophy for women called Jness and it seems similar to herland – what would life be like with a concept of women behaving without being compared to men. He has a similar program for men called something else – I forget the name. To make a long story short, the rest of this guy’s theory of ethics or philosophy seems so much like Ayn Rand that I would like to hear some criticism of actual feminist philosophy. Or even understand it properly. Anyway – without my crazy cult reference I still think more accounts of feminist philosophy would be awesome.
Thanks, Jennifer. We did bell hooks this year as a second step. Next would be more Simone de Beauvoir (Second Sex) or we’ve gotten some other recommendations over the year that I’d have to review… We’ll definitely keep this in mind.
http://cscs.res.in/courses_folder/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2012-02-24.1205832218/file