WE SHOULD SEEK MUTUAL RESPECT, NOT LEVELLING
STEPHEN CHILTON
Women's History Month lecture
Thursday, March 9, 2000, 12 - 1 p.m.
UMD, Kirby 355-357
-
Along with other liberation movements, but even more
so, feminism raises a basic challenge for political philosophy (particularly
classical liberal philosophy) of how to deal with difference (a.k.a. diversity).
Notice that I say "difference", not "inequality", since the latter has
a strong connotation of a hierarchy, which I will problematize later.
-
I'm going to give what I call a "philosophical history"
of the feminist movement around this issue. By that I mean not a
history of events or even a history of ideas but rather a sense of the
logical connection of positions: how the logic flows from one position
to another. All the ideas have been, are, and will be swirling around
in one form or another.
-
Feminism raises this challenge for two reasons:
-
First, it raises the question of inherent, biological
difference. Men and women start out differing in one half of their
32 genes (or about 1.5%), and the difference between apes and humans is
not much more. Men and women differ structurally to such an extent
that if an alien biologist were unaware of sex differences, they would
be classified as different species. If there were ever a case for
biological differences, it's this.
-
Second, the social differences are extreme.
In all societies, as far as I'm aware, men and women have their own, widely
different, private cultures; and the role differentiation is large.
-
So these raise the question of how to deal with such
wide and possibly innate differences.
-
The usual way of dealing with the differences is
to deny them, to pretend they don't exist, or (a more nuanced reply) to
say that the biological differences don't make a difference and
that the cultural differences are socially constructed, meaning that when
they are a product of our culture, they can be remedied or even eliminated.
I call this classical liberalism's "levelling" approach. This approach
is represented by various phrases:
-
"We're all the same under the skin."
-
"We're all equal before the law."
-
"We're all equal in the eyes of God."
-
"All men are created equal."
-
"Justice is blind."
-
... and so on.
-
But given these beliefs, classical liberalism has
to address & justify inequalities of outcome. If we're all the
same, how do we justify women making less then men, even when skill level
and education are held constant? If we're all equal before the law,
how do we justify the exclusion of women from various legal rights and
duties? How do we justify women being underrepresented in political
life and corporate leadership?
-
Various answers are possible. The classical
liberal's answer is that different outcomes are o.k. as long as they come
from equal competition, so the key is to "level the playing field."
(Remember that phrase. It will be important later.)
-
These problems and solutions have played out in feminism
in two stages:
-
Up to WWII (and remember, I'm not making a real history
here with precise breakpoints), the major focus of feminism was obtaining
legal
equality: the right to vote, to hold office, to own property, to
inherit, to divorce, and so on. The Equal Rights Amendment tried
to complete that process but was defeated, so in that sense the struggle
continues.
-
After WWII through the 1970s, the major focus of
feminism was obtaining economic equality by making women better
able to compete: open jobs to women, eliminate height/weight/strength
tests, use anti-discrimination and affirmative action programs, fight glass
ceilings and sexual harassment, receive equal pay for equal work ("comparable
worth"), allow for maternity leave, and so on. All together, these
were meant to bracket out both acknowledged biological differences and
socially constructed differences.
-
However, a reaction set in against this emphasis,
from two directions, one on the political left, the other on the political
right.
-
The reaction on the right is best represented by
Phyllis Schlafley and her Eagle Forum, who argued that feminists were fundamentally
misguided in believing that women wanted to be the same as men.
According to this critique, even though women liked their roles
as homemakers, wives, and mothers, feminists weren't speaking to that.
Legal equality, o.k. But women had no desire to compete with men,
and the feminists' emphasis on that was ignoring and even undermining what
all but a handful of confused, angry, upper-middle-class women wanted.
-
The reaction on the left was a contention that women
were inherently different from men, or if not necessarily inherently different,
then at least different in important ways that they didn't have to apologize
for. I will mention the names I'm most familiar with: Carol
Gilligan and Seyla Benhabib.
-
Gilligan wrote in reaction to Larry Kohlberg's work
on moral reasoning development, where surveys seemed to show that women
reasoned at a lower cognitive level than men, on average. Gilligan
argued that women (on average) differ in their moral reasoning from men
(on average) in the way they looked at moral issues: from a perspective
of "care and responsibility" instead of the masculine "rights and justice".
Kohlberg's theory, emphasizing rights & justice, mis-scored women.
-
Similarly, Benhabib argued that universalistic moral
theories (including those of Kant and Rawls) wiped out the important differences
between people: in her terms, they dealt with the "generalized other"
instead of the "concrete other". The latter is, of course, the domain
of care and responsibility.
-
So: two critiques, still being fought over
today. My argument is that these both point to a key truth, a truth
modern feminism has to take into account.
-
The key truth: both critiques problematize
the issue of the "playing field". They ask, in effect, "Wait a second!
Who said we had to compete? And even if we do, who said we have to
play on that playing field?" Classical liberals justify their
playing field on the basis of political and economic liberty and on the
basis of the creation and enjoyment of wealth. That answer is not
self-evidently correct, even though classical liberals say it is so --
in fact, say not only that it is correct but that it is so self-evidently
correct that they are entitled to impose it on you, regardless of whether
you want that way of life.
-
Before elaborating on that, let me clarify the two
positions in that light:
-
Schlafley: She is rightly concerned that women
are being forced onto a playing field they may not want. And I think
that's a legitimate hit, at least to the extent that feminism ignored existing
roles in its push to create new ones. And it should be noted that
the women's movement has in fact shifted (or at least broadened) its focus,
taking up additional issues important to homemakers, wives, and mothers:
issues like child support, spousal abuse, and, I'm sure, many others that
I've love to hear you tell me about. But to return to Schlafley,
her direction was clouded by her seeming desire to push women back into
the old roles. So hers was not a further liberation from a feminism
gone astray but rather an attempt to roll back what liberation had already
occurred.
-
Gilligan and Benhabib: They are rightly concerned
that grand social theories pay too little attention is being paid to women's
perspectives. But they fall prey to the same objection that can be
made to most postmodern critiques: what do you propose to do instead?
It's one thing to point out the absence of attention to "women's" issues
of care and responsibility, of concrete relationships, but it's another
to say that these have to rule, when we live in a society too large for
people to work things out face-to-face.
-
We're getting to my major thesis. I argue that
the problems arise from a general "politics of disrespect", and that whatever
else they do, feminists need to concentrate on the issues related to that.
-
What do I mean by a "politics of disrespect"?
-
A politics in which classical liberal theorists tell
us what we have to want, regardless of whether we actually want it or would
choose it if we were free to choose.
-
A politics in which there is little real discourse:
where we have freedom of speech, but no obligation to listen, to engage
in dialogue, or even to say what one believes in the first place.
-
A politics in which victory proves one is Right,
a politics in which defeat proves one is Wrong, a politics in which the
victory of one way of life is allowed to push out other ways of life.
-
A politics in which no punishment or (foreseeable)
outcome is too severe: the death penalty, homelessness, and so on.
-
A politics in which victory allows one the mutually
reinforcing rights of beating up on one's opponents and consolidating one's
victory so that the issues cannot be raised again. A politics in
which defeat allows one the right to try to sabotage whatever policy experiment
has resulted.
-
A politics, in short, in which people are divided
from each other rather than bound together in this giant exploration we
call life.
-
I want to end by bringing this home to the direction
feminists should be taking. Some feminists reply to Schlafley with
the argument that "her political power arises only because women (her supporters,
anyway) are suffering from 'false consciousness, from 'internalized oppression'
induced by 'institutionalized oppression', a misperception of their situation
arising from their long subjugation and brainwashing by men. Only
feminists can see through the ideological smokescreen our classical liberal
society throws up." That's a fine argument to make, and it might
even be correct. But in the end, if people aren't persuaded, it is
disrespectful to dismiss what they say they want. "We know better
than you" is not a healthy stance for creating a liberated world -- not
least because that's exactly the argument men can use (have used) against
women. Only God knows what's really Right; in the final analysis,
all we're left with in our settling conflicts is how we've dealt with each
other in the process. Winning some tactical victory doesn't guarantee
we're Right; losing some tactical victory doesn't mean we're Wrong.
In the long run, it is the means we use and not the end we seek that governs
what we create.
-
In conclusion: If one wants to pursue material goods, or the social
approval and respect that go with them, then one can choose that, and we
need to continue the critique of our present system for the ways in which
it oppresses women making that choice. However, in my view, liberation
is most deeply not about inequality but rather is most deeply about
accepting diversity even as one presents and lives one's own sense of the
good. Feminists should support policies that help all women
lead the lives they choose: guaranteed annual income, food, and health
care; support for homemakers; the diversity allowed by magnet
schools; etc. Moreover, even more deeply, even beyond such
policy proposals, feminists need to work on advancing
the general conditions of discourse in our society. [SPC: For
example, I think here of programs in the criminal justice system like "restorative
justice", "diversionary programs" {for juveniles}, and "mediation".]
In the long run, this will result in the only ultimately reliable goal:
the liberation of all people.?
Page URL: http://www.d.umn.edu/~schilton/Articles/Intelligencetalk.html
Page Author: Stephen Chilton
Link to Home Page:
www.d.umn.edu/~schilton/index.html
Last Modified: January 24, 2001
Mail suggestions and comments, especially re.
typos and other errors, to: schilton@d.umn.edu
Honor Roll of Proofreaders and Colleagues: www.d.umn.edu/~schilton/Honor.html
This way to the
UMD homepage
This way to the
Political Science Department home page
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity
educator and employer.
Copyright © 2000 Regents of the University
of Minnesota. All rights reserved.