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.?

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