Standpoint Theory and Epistemic Privilege
Maeve M. O’Donovan, Ph.D.
College of Notre Dame of Maryland
April 1, 2006
Standpoint Theory and Epistemic Privilege[1]
Maeve O'Donovan-Anderson
This paper is part of a larger project in which I argue that Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is a not only a work of Existential-Phenomenology, but also one of Feminist Epistemology. To make that point I need to first explain what Feminist Epistemology is (focusing on the branch most applicable to Beauvoir’s text) and then show why Beauvoir's work should be categorized as such (as an example of it.)
I. Feminist Epistemology
Women have described and lived the world differently than the way it is described in Western philosophy and Western history. Traditional philosophy and history describe a world where the most valuable human endeavor is the life of the mind, where the best run society is governed by men with highly developed intellects, and where women are the natural inferiors of men. Women's history projects have begun to tell a different story, where human community and childrearing are among the most precious of human experiences, where the best societies are those that provide equal opportunities to all--all genders, all races, and where women have hated and fought against being labeled inferior, only to find themselves made inferior by those in power.
Feminism, at present a primarily interdisciplinary or 'women's studies' subject, is beginning to be recognized by some for its contributions to classic philosophical questions. Recent anthologies of Feminist Philosophy have gone from listing essays under schools of feminism to listing them under sub-fields in Philosophy. (compare Women and Values to Women, Knowledge and Reality, both edited by Marilyn Pearsall) One such sub-field is (Feminist) Epistemology.
Feminist epistemology attempts to uncover the relationship between thought and lived experience – in particular the lived experience of gender. (Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, does the same.) Feminist epistemology admits as a starting point that there are differences in perception attributable to differences in the concrete lived realities (gender being one important difference) of those doing the perceiving--and in doing so it furthers the original philosophical project of knowing ourselves, and of understanding the nature of thought. (Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, does the same.) In studying the effects of situation on knowledge, feminist epistemologists have developed standpoint theory – a theory which in its multiple forms argues that the standpoint of the knower is an essential element of the account of the object known. This replaces phenomenology's inclusion, in consciousness, of the object known with the inclusion, in the object known, of consciousness.
There are at least three schools in the development of standpoint theory: 1) the original Marxist analysis which takes as its beginning the conditions in which women labor as a foundation for a superior epistemological framework through which women, as a marginalized group, are able to more easily (than men/privileged groups) identify the errors in dominant and patriarchal accounts of the world/human life; 2) a second approach criticizes the Marxist approach as primarily gender neutral, proposing as an alternative that the conditions and activity of women's labor, as a gendered, feminine labor (consisting in traditionally feminine activities such as nurturing, nourishing, caring for the body, and reproducing), be adopted as a standpoint through which patriarchy can be critiqued and new ways of thinking can be found; and, 3) a third approach proposes we adopt the notion of 'situated knowledges', arguing that the central insight of Marxist and gendered standpoint theories is an insight into the inescapably partial nature of knowing, thinking, and making. This approach is taken up both in feminist critiques of science and in postmodern feminism.
A. Marxist Standpoint Theory
Nancy Hartsock is frequently credited with introducing the idea of a 'feminist standpoint'. Arguing that the position of the proletariat is analogous to that of women in patriarchal society, Hartsock finds in Marx a means to identify and ground a feminist epistemology. Just as the proletariat is able to "go beneath bourgeois ideology,"[2] so too, she argues, can a reflective approach to women's labor yield insights into "both why patriarchal institutions and ideologies take such perverse and deadly forms and how both theory and practice can be redirected in more liberatory directions."[3] The basis for such an analogy lies in two things, an account of a gendered division of labor, and a meeting of the five criteria--generated by Hartsock--for establishing women's labor as capable of grounding a 'Feminist Historical Materialism'. Although Hartsock ultimately argues that Marx's conception of production fails to account satisfactorily for women's labor, she makes use of his account in establishing women's work in the home as a form of 'production of use values.'
After making clear that her account of women's labor will focus on commonalities in women's work, and admitting that this means the account does not of necessity apply to any particular woman who is working, Hartsock argues that there is not only a social division of labor into economic classes, there is also a gendered division of labor that "is central to the organization of social labor more generally."[4]
Using Marx's terminology and conceptual scheme, Hartsock points out two difference between women's and men's labor: 1) women’s labor is doubled compared to men's; and, 2) only women are 'institutionally defined' by their labor in the home. By analyzing both the institutionalization of women's labor (in the home) and the type of labor that this involves, Hartsock is able to justify her claim that there is a gendered division of labor, and, an important addition, to begin identifying the advantages such conditions produce for women in regards to their (unique/privileged) ability to see through patriarchy and ground a critique of, and alternative to it.
Hartsock points out that both men and women, in producing for/in the home, can engage in behaviors that are grounded in material reality, activities that bring about a transformation of nature. Using Marx she argues that it is through these activities that men and women contribute to "a unification of mind and body."[5] However, there are significant differences for men and women due to the sexual division of labor. "Women as a group work more than men, … a larger proportion of women's labor time is devoted to the production of use values than men's, … [and] women's production is structured by repetition in a different way from men's."[6] Unlike men, for whom the process of production entails a part but not the whole of life, women move ceaselessly from one job to another, from the factory to the home; their engagement in productive activity never ends. In addition, women's work in the home is a transformation of nature now outside of the conditions of political economy (to a degree, not entirely).[7] Given that her labor in the home is unrecognized and uncommodified by capitalist society (while at the same time essential to the functioning of that society); woman is able to see into the material reality of existence through her productive labor (in the home). She is in fact transforming nature not for exchange value but for the reproduction and care of the 'worker.' Seen in comparison to man's, woman's labor (in the home) now takes on the liberatory structure of the proletariat, while man's labor (outside of the home), as commodified and alienated from him, ceases to be productive labor and thus no longer makes available to him the revolutionary/critical vantage point. [8]
What makes women's position in society, as producers in the home of future producers--babies and well-raised adults, liberatory is that pregnancy and childrearing do not fit easily into this notion of capitalist production. There is no object produced. The man born to woman, no matter how alienated he may become, retains his ability to change the social relations in which he works (to un-alienate himself), whereas a car or bushel of apples does not. The repetitious and supposedly un-productive nature of woman's work in the home -- the baby once fed will need to be fed again and again, and the feeding of the baby produces something akin to, and yet not explainable by use value, and with no surplus value--conceals the fulfillment that the work of rearing children can provide. In motherhood, woman produces not an object but a species-being, an entity and a community of humans that political economy unsuccessfully attempts to commodify. In addition, the work of motherhood, though it involves repetitious behaviors (bathing and clothing infants, practicing the letters of the alphabet with toddlers, etc.) is not in fact repetitious but transformative of both mother and child.[9]
And so women labor under political economy in ways that are meaningful and productive, and in ways that can't be fully accounted for by its model of production. In doing so women and their labor make it possible to see and see through these enslaving and objectifying relations. But it took women to see this. While Marx provides a groundwork for this form of standpoint theory, it was not until women (who worked, at home and elsewhere) attempted to use his framework for feminist critique that these flaws and omissions were identified.
Unlike the more common argument, that women's labor in the home ought to be recognized in the same way that similar labor (say, janitorial work or day care) would be recognized outside of the home (would be paid), Hartsock finds that it is the lack of commodification of home labor (and the nature of that labor) that provides for those who do it (women) a privileged standpoint (into the inherent flaws of capitalism and patriarchy).
B. A Standpoint Theory of Care
A second version of standpoint theory emerges out of the first. In reading Hartsock's argument for a feminist standpoint, Sara Ruddick takes a closer look at Hartsock's account of women's labor. Instead of being primarily Marxist in nature, Ruddick argues, Hartsock provides an alternative to the Marxian conception of labor--replacing it with the idea of women's labor as caring, rather than strictly productive, labor.
In many ways Ruddick agrees with Hartsock; the material world is structured differently when seen from the perspective of caring labor--productivity, if it can still be called that, has as its aim not exchange value but the satisfaction of "people's needs and pleasures, and, by extension, of the needs and pleasures of any animal that is instrumental in human caring or is tended for its own sake."[10] This labor promotes interconnections and human community, rather than isolation and alienation. And much of what is problematic in patriarchal thinking is revealed through the activity of adopting a feminist standpoint, (not merely through the experience of being woman). "By looking and acting from a feminist standpoint, dominant ways of thinking--and I had in mind primarily militarist thinking--were revealed to be as abstract and destructive as I suspected."[11] However, there are some problems with this feminist adoption of Marxism that Ruddick identifies and addresses.
Ruddick argues that the story of masculinity and its acquisition in patriarchal society is a construction, an acceptable situation since Ruddick believes that "all knowledge is constructed."[12] What concerns Ruddick here is Hartsock's claim that the women's standpoint is privileged and not perverse, that the construction and acquisition of femininity is not addressed. While eEarly feminist standpoint theory argued for a more or less universal adoption of the feminist standpoint and the 'women's work' model of labor., Ruddick is hesitant about such universalizing claims: "Standpoint theorists are ready … to declare that dominant values are destructive and perverse and that the feminist standpoint represents the 'real' appropriately human order of life.”[13]
Ruddick's second criticism of traditional feminist standpoint theory is that these claims, when universalized, not only silence other voices and standpoints, they also unwittingly (unreflectively) adopt some of the oppressive patriarchal structures that formed them. She is suspicious of any dualism, including the one maintained by standpoint theorists who pit women's labor against men's labor, who claim two standpoints, one of which is perverse/false, the other 'normal'/true. For Ruddick this not only perpetuates the structure that has been oppressive to women, treating them and giving them meaning through their otherness, it also risks losing sight of the flaws in women's ways (as, says Ruddick, all ways are partial and so potentially perverse.) "Perhaps most worrisome, being on the side of good can foster a repressive self-righteousness that legitimates killing or, alternatively, condemns violence without attending to the despair and abuse from which it arises." [14] In other words, the feminist standpoint while valuable should not be used to ignore the pleas and needs of persons of other standpoints--this would be a failure to improve the very conditions feminist standpoint set out to transform.
What Ruddick most values in standpoint theory is the recognition that all knowing is partial, and that a different standpoint tells a different story of a shared event. These critiques of Marxist Standpoint Theory, and the solution Ruddick offers in “Maternal Thinking,” form the basis of what I am calling a standpoint theory of care.
At the core of this Standpoint Theory of Care are three interests: “preservation, growth, and acceptability.”[15] Maternal Thinking, when done with the best interests of the child in mind, begins with preservation of the child’s life, continues with a desire for growth of all kinds for the child – physical, emotional, intellectual growth, and at the same time is aware that such growth must be guided by a need to produce “a young child acceptable to her group.”[16] Carrying out all three functions is engaging in attentive love for the child.