Feminisms: Equality and Difference

There are at least two distinct forms of philosophical feminism. Both, of course, seek to offer rational grounding for the empowerment of women against a background of persistent oppression and marginalization. That’s what makes them “feminist.” But each starts from a different understanding of feminine/masculine bifurcation and what empowerment means.

[There is a more completely annotated version of the writeup in pdf here (http://files.meetup.com/1686570/Feminisms.pdf).]

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Equality: “We are all just human beings”

The most prominent form feminism takes at this time especially in the Anglophone world is what may be called “equality feminism.” It attempts to minimize the difference between women and men in the interest of promoting gender equality in power relations between the sexes. It reacts to the historical and current use of difference to insure that women (and the feminine, generally, wherever it inheres) remain subordinate to men (and the masculine). Equality feminism seeks to diminish the significance of differences, perceived or real, between the sexes. It is the view that what differences there are that matter—that affect relative power imbalances—are the result of the contingent perpetuation of pernicious environments that have resulted in unjust social, economic, and political arrangements between women and men. The differences on which our social institutions and patterns of conduct are founded are for the most part arbitrary, the result of entrenched perceptions, and, apart from their injustice, counterproductive to salutary human development. Historically, differences have been exploited without just cause.

The equality feminist argues we are all first human beings before we are female or male (or any combination thereof). Behavior with moral implications that deviates from that assumption should be burdened with having to provide justification. That fact requires reflection on how liberal institutions, especially those which purport to prize equal justice, are interpreted. (The word “men,” for example, in the phrase “all men are created equal” may not always have been intended to refer to generic human beings but when used nowadays the presumption seems to be that it is.) Those institutions are premised on the notion that there is only one morally significant kind of human being. “Equality” between the sexes is taken to mean something close to “interchangeability” at least in contexts of power distribution.

The fallout of this assumption is that nothing about female or male identity predisposes how we should treat or be treated by one or the other. Nothing normatively attaches to being classed female or male—or ought to be. To think there is is to open the door to unhelpful discriminations. So the equality feminist argues.

The critical assumption

Of philosophical interest here is the critical assumption made by equality feminists that there is only one morally significant type of human being whose interests and from whose perspective we at bottom must philosophize for and from. To invite consideration of intrinsic differences between the sexes at the level of moral, social or political theory and practice is to validate outmoded, culture-bound, presumably valueless, ways of discriminatory thinking. If social and political institutions do not treat all members of this one type equally, we have a problem.

But is the assumption correct? Is there just one type of morally significant human being we theorize about?

If the answer is no, equality feminism may set the stage for new injustices, ones that stem from not making discriminations where discriminations should—likewise in the interest of justice—be made. Can’t the assumption that women and are equal as in “interchangeable” be used to further unjust causes just as much as calling attention to differences, real or imagined, essential or socially constructed?

Again, is the presupposition of equality correct? One may still be a feminist and not hold this assumption.

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Parity: “Differences make a difference”

Less familiar is the other philosophically contrasting form feminism takes which has been called “difference feminism” or “parity feminism.” It doesn’t share the assumption. Although from the start it has been an undercurrent of feminist movements everywhere, the tracks of this alternative account of feminism in recent times have become increasingly visible in the feminisms of Continental Europe and the developing world. Here the understanding of what it means to take seriously the wrong done to women (and the feminine) asks that we notice and make salient rather than understate or ignore sex differences. The claim is that those differences are significant to the framework of justice (indeed, to vastly more than mere justice---practically the whole of culture). What justice is will depend on making the sex distinction. They argue against a one-size-fits-all notion of perception and value. (Difference feminism, by the way, is not anti-feminism---at least of the garden variety. “Equality,” in some sense may still be a goal but only on very different terms. As we shall see, difference feminism may well entail a more radical revision of established institutions than is demanded by more familiar feminisms.)

One of the principal contentions of difference feminism is that a one-size-fits-all notion of perception and value shaping our notion of justice essentially inherits too much from a prior patriarchal picture of the world. What characterizes the notion of equality is that under the guise of making us think female and male are interchangeable in all significance ways related to power distribution, the possibility that one sex may authentically represent the other sex in a “representative democracy” (for instance) is taken for granted. Under current understandings of what it means to be “representative,” institutions and concepts developed by and originally for men are just being extended (with perhaps well-meaning though self-congratulatory generosity) to women: such notions as liberty, equality, even justice.

What is ignored is that the shapes of those institutions were never developed with women in mind. “All men are created equal” Jefferson put in the declaration of independence. There has been a tendency to read into that statement something that is not there and was never intended: that women, too, were equal to men. Nothing like that was in his or the minds of any of the men who created — out of philosophical whole cloth — the institutions that shape our society. Women were simply not on the radar screen except as helpmates to essentially male projects.

If today we read “equality between the sexes” into the pronouncement, it is from wishing that Jefferson and his contemporaries had been so enlightened that the institutions worked out by them might merely be extended to include women and all would be well... but there were no women signers of that declaration. No women qualified to sign it, none intellectually and sufficiently privileged to critique it, not freighted with a history and culture of seeing things through the eyes of the men in their lives.

The most women could hope for in the then still distant future was a seat at the table. The idea that a say in the design of the very furniture of power in proportion to their numbers (as the notion of “democracy” suggests) was not even a dream for any but the most rabid and obscure feminist.

Representation in proportion to their numbers is what the parity or difference feminist asks for, not equality based on a non-existent interchangeability. “We offer you the same equality enlightened men have with each other,” said the early enlightened male feminist J. S. Mill. The parity feminist responds, “Thanks, but no thanks, we want to the power to decide what ‘equality’ is going to mean.”

Natural Kinds and Essentialism

In philosophical parlance, equality feminism implies that there is only one “natural kind” of human being. The technical term “natural kind” implies a type of entity that is irreducibly what it is. It is what it is essentially. Essentiality is usually explained in terms of properties things would have whether or not we existed (with the prejudices that go with having a perspective) to notice them. The existence of such properties is not some arbitrary, contingent creation on our part. Natural kinds are sorted based on these properties. The sorting sometimes leads to ranking. Ranking is normative, the result of the imposition of value. The doctrine of essence asserts that the differences between one natural kind and another are not arbitrary. The difference between flora and fauna, for example, would be a gross natural kind. The difference between things which are mobile and things that are not would not be. It is too easy, we must think, for one to become the other. Natural kinds cannot change their stripes without major conceptual upheaval.

A natural kind is taken to be a fundamental block of reality. There is no avoiding natural kinds. We classify entities in the world as natural kinds in order to address or interact with them. To make an otherwise normatively aseptic or “bare and blank” kind into a “natural” one is to make engagement with and conversation about them about possible. But it is also to infiltrate reality with our interests.

Not everything can be just a “kind,” a sort—a flat sorting based on similarity, a potentially fluid observation. (Actually, sortings, even in this imagined disinterested sense, are hard to conceive: after all, why one set of similarities versus another?) Some kinds of things are held still in our observations, they are seen as necessary while others are judged accidental, optional, arbitrary, or contingent. These non-natural kind attributions may serve a purpose but not one that has meaning or normativity beyond an application. I pick the olives out of my salad because I don’t like them, not because olives have some property that makes them and me incompatible in all conceivable worlds I might inhabit. If a heterosexual or homosexual discriminates in their choice of intimate partners, the property on the basis of which the discrimination happens is not one that can be easily imagined away without opening up questions of his or her identity. If the discrimination is made on the basis of skin-color, hair length, etc., by contrast, no such radical identity questions arise.

The suggestion is that sex divides human beings into two natural kinds that are neither reducible to each other nor inconsequential to other fundamental valuations. It contrasts with gender, a social construction, a potentially malleable discrimination.

Why isn’t the bare fact of biological sex like race, skin-color, religion, culture or any of the other myriad ways in which people sort themselves? Because all these, with the exception of sex differences, are notoriously malleable, mutable or dilutable. Interbreeding obfuscates them all in a few generations. But not sex. Heterosexual couples do not typically dilute the sex of their offspring in having them. As human differences go, there is none more predictable or enduring.

Parity feminisms take seriously the notion that the feminine and the masculine are natural kinds of human beings—not merely discriminations of social or historical fashion that can be brushed over or ignored at the behest of an ideology of equality. In the end, it is about justice not equality. And just what justice is to consist in must be homegrown to the party concerned. J. S Mill was wrong to assume that just because maximum liberty to do what you want unhindered was so valuable to men that liberty in that same sense ought to be of equal value to women. The liberty of significance to women, as understood by women, is not the same and may even be in radical opposition to the kind held so dear by male theorists. (See my discussion of the “Flavors of freedom,” part of the writeup for the “Why there are so few women in philosophy?” (https://www.meetup.com/Seattle-Analytic-Philosophy-CLUB/events/156682772/) topic.)

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Image: "raised by wolves" Abby

Forget “equal treatment,” how about parity of power?

For those not as familiar with parity feminism here is one illustrative political consequence of its rigorous implementation. The contemporary French philosopher, Sylviane Agacinski has argued in her book, translated as Parity of the Sexes, that, because women and men are intrinsically different in their respective perceptions of social reality, the values that each places on aspects of it forces structural requirements on the way power is distributed in society. So much so that representative democracy, as an attempt to give just voice to constituencies, fails to the extent it does not take sex into account.

Here’s a picture of what this might mean:

Current forms of democratic representation in the U.S., for instance, take into account geography. We expect representatives to have some physical connection to the localities they represent. Why is that? Because historically distances have mattered a great deal. Communities separated by geographical space often have different interests and values. An intimacy with their constituencies by representatives is usually mandated for proper representation. (There is a good reason to wonder whether, because of modern communication and transportation technologies, geographical intimacy—a necessity in another time—is still meaningful. But we leave that controversy aside for now.) Thus representatives are supposed to have geographical connection to their constituencies.

If geographical location is a contingent, as opposed to essential, feature of a person (and if it’s not contingent I don’t know what is!... perhaps the clothes we wear?) which deserves consideration in the layout of our political infrastructures, how much more so the essential features of the bodies we inhabit? The bodies we inhabit are contingent perhaps in the natural scheme of things but, once born, we are necessarily to a very consequential extent ruled by their features. No other class of features used to sort people is more salient, consequential, or durable than that of biological sex: not skin color, not race, not ethnicity, not nationality, not language, not religion, not culture, etc. All these and other features can and are diluted (for better or worse) with passing generations. But not sex.

So… shouldn’t there be sex quotas on those invested with power over institutions? Shouldn’t fifty of the one hundred seats in the upper house be reserved for women? Shouldn’t every seat in the lower house be held at least half the time by a woman? And shouldn’t every other presidential election have only women candidates running on all sides? (Something like this is suggested by Agacinski’s ideas translated to the American political landscape.)

Difference feminists start from this assumption about human nature: that it comes divided in two in such a deep way that authentic translation between the two is essentially problematic. Yes, women and men both bleed, experience pain and pleasure, are mortal, have notions of what would make them happy, and so on. They may use the same words even to describe what apparently are the same interests. Both may speak of higher order ideas such as freedom or opportunity or security or the things that make a life fulfilling or help us to flourish. But do women and men mean the same things by these expressions? More importantly can the experiences that correlate with the expressions be identical?

Difference feminists take it as obvious that experience is sexed. The experience of women and men are not identical, and certainly not interchangeable. And, at the very least, the burden of proof should fall on the side that argues for the possibility of univocal meaning, and a singular cross-gender experience to correspond to it.

Men cannot—even with the most generous intentions—authentically represent women in any matter of significance and vice versa. The point here is not that you cannot adopt someone else’s cause but that, to the extent the cause stems from the kind of being you are, you cannot do this authentically, that is, from the place you inhabit, the uniform that contains you. And why should authenticity matter?

Well, if it doesn't matter, why bother with the representational fiction at all? Given that all representation is fictive how much more so when it is between such blatantly differentiated persons as women and men. Otherwise we have arbitrary proxy. Can a government operate by arbitrary proxy, i.e., one in which just anyone is eligible to convince you they may represent you? Maybe. But how different is such a government from one based on divine right or inherited landedness or wealth or lottery? Wouldn’t that gut the concept of “political representation” entirely? Isn’t there supposed to be a connection between representative and representee? And not just any connection but one of the highest significance?

The point here is if “representative” democracy is to mean anything it must account for—at the very least—differences of the highest salience, those that sort people in highly consequential ways. And nothing sorts people like sex.

……

I merely introduce these two basic forms of feminism. There is much more we can say about each, all their variations, and how each interacts and has fared in contention with the dominant culture each seeks to reform.

Resources

Rae Langton, “Feminism in Philosophy” (http://web.mit.edu/langton/www/pubs/FeminismInPhilosophy.pdf) The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy, eds. Frank Jackson and Michael Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 231-57.

Georgia Warnke, “Intersections Between Analytic and Continental Feminism” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/femapproach-analy-cont/) in the SEP.

A podcast interview with Janet Radcliffe Richards on Men and Women's Natures (http://philosophybites.com/2008/04/janet-radcliffe.html) at Philosophybites.com. Richards offers insightful commentary on Mill, sex difference, Darwin and feminism.

An overview of feminist philosophical scholarship with further links: “Approaches to Feminism” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-approaches/) also in the SEP.

Sylviane Agacinski, Parity of the Sexes (translation of Politique des sexes by Lisa Walsh), Columbia University Press, 2001.

[There is a more completely annotated version of the writeup in pdf here (http://files.meetup.com/1686570/Feminisms.pdf).]