Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction
Summary Chapter 4, Part II (pp. 154-171)
Tong, Rosemarie Putnam. Feminist Thought: A More
Comprehensive Introduction. Boulder,
Colorado: Westview Press, 1998.
Chapter
4, continued – pp. 154-171
Gender
Feminism emphasizes boy’s and
girl’s psychomoral
development rather than their psychosexual development.
Gender
feminists believe that boys and girls become men and women with gender-specific
values and virtues that do two things:
(1)
reflect the importance of separateness in men’s lives and of
connectedness in women’s lives
(2) serve to empower men and disempower women in a
patriarchal society.
Questions
posed by gender feminism:
(1) Will women’s liberation “be best served by
women’s adopting male values and virtues, by men’s adopting female
values and virtues, or by everyone’s adopting a mix of both female and
male values and virtues”? (154).
(2) If “men and women should share a morality
encompassing an equal mix of female and male virtues and values, then who
should inculcate this morality in boys and girls?” (154).
(3) “Is dual parenting the best means to achieve the
end of gender equity in everything, including the practice of morality?”
(154).
(4) Or, is there another means to achieve this worthy
goal?” (154).
Carol
Gilligan: In a Different Voice
Her
theory is based on the notion that men’s and women’s different
emphases lead them to different styles of moral reasoning.
Emphasis Style
of Reasoning (and thinking)
Men Separation
and autonomy Stresses
justice, fairness, and rights
Women Connections
and relationships Stresses
wants, needs, and interests of
particular people.
Gilligan
claims that most moral development theorists have used male norms rather than human norms to measure all moral development. The result:
Women have routinely “failed.” As an example, she uses Lawrence
Kohlberg’s six-stage process of determining an individual’s ability
to function as a moral agent; girls and women rarely got past stage three of
the six-stage model when tested.
Gilligan’s
empirical study: 29 pregnant women
deciding whether or not to have abortions. She found three levels of moral
reasoning:
(1)
Moral agent
overemphasizes her own interests
(2)
Moral agent
overemphasizes others’ interests
(3)
Moral agent strikes a
balance between her own and others’ interests
Subsequently,
in Mapping the Moral Domain
Gilligan hinted that the ideal moral thinker might be more inclined to an
ethics of care than an ethics of justice and that girls growing into women who
put other people first (as opposed to boys who grow into men who put themselves
first) “is not a sign of women’s moral inferiority but of
women’s moral depth” (158).
Nel
Noddings: Caring and Women
and Evil
Like
Gilligan, Noddings claimed that women and men speak different moral languages
and that our culture favors the masculine ethics of justice over the feminine
ethics of care. Women’s moral reasoning is “emotional” while
men’s is “rational.”
Unlike
Gilligan, Noddings claimed that not only is an ethics of care different than an ethics of justice, it is better. She says human relationships are not about
“persons’ abstract rights but about particular individuals’
concrete needs” (159).
Ethical caring vs. Natural caring - Noddings disagreed with Immanuel
Kant’s view that ethical caring is better than natural caring because
doing things we ought to do is
better than doings things we want
to do. Noddings believes that our “oughts” build on our
“wants” – that ethical caring is dependent upon natural
caring.
Noddings and Evil - She believes that women are
more capable of withstanding evil than men are because women’s
understanding of evil is concrete (a harmful event, someone gets hurt), while
men’s is abstract (a rule or law is broken). For women, it’s an
experience. For men, it’s an idea.
Relational
ethics, women, and evil -
Noddings traces poverty and war to a morally distorted worldview –
“Us-versus-them” thinking – Noddings summoned women to bridge
the gap between the powerful and powerless – women have experience
mediating between their powerful husbands and their powerless children.
“Only when the unappreciated art of relational
ethics, of working together to maintain connection, comes into its own will
peace have a chance” (162). And, women strive for conflict resolution but
not with the notion of extinguishing their foes – they are more aware of
the perpetual occurrences of things needing to be done (cleaning and feeding
others).
Critiques
of Gilligan’s and Nodding’s Ethics of Care
Debates
on Gilligan’s work –
(1) Her methodology – critics claim she didn’t
raise enough of the right issues. The women in Gilligan’s abortion study
came from various ethnic, marital, and educational backgrounds and social
classes, and ranged in age from fifteen to thirty-three. None of these
differences were addressed (does an African American woman’s moral
reasoning closer resemble an African American man’s or a white
woman’s?). And, she
didn’t raise questions about men’s moral attitudes toward abortion.
(2) The negative consequences of
associating women with an ethics of care – promotes the
notion
that women care by nature and that they should always care regardless of the
cost to
themselves.
Sandra
Lee Bartky (Femininity and
Domination) – Questioned
whether women’s care-taking disempowers or empowers women.
Women
who are paid to care-take and to be “relentlessly cheerful” (e.g.
flight attendants) eventually forget “how it feels to be genuinely or
authentically happy” (166).
Women
who do emotional work/care-taking (e.g. wives for their husbands) may feel
empowered (regards herself as a pillar without whom her husband would crumble).
But, Bartky cautions about the dangers of this: if the care given is
unreciprocated, and the more she gives, the more she will see things as he sees
them. Men’s and women’s interests are not identical in a
patriarchal society.
Bartky
quotes Jill Tweedie’s In the Name of Love: “’Behind every great man is a woman, we
say, but behind every monster there is a woman too, behind each of those
countless men who stood astride their narrow worlds and crushed other human
beings, causing them hideous suffering and pain. There she is in the shadows, a
vague female silhouette, tenderly wiping blood from their hands’”
(167). To this, Tong says:
“…women need to analyze ‘the pitfalls and temptations of
caregiving itself’ before they embrace an ethics of care
wholeheartedly” (167).
Bill
Puka claimed care can be interpreted
in two ways:
(1) Gilligan’s way – ‘” as a
general orientation toward moral problems (interpersonal problems) and a track
of moral development’” (167).
(2) Puka’s way – “’as a sexist
service orientation, prominent in the patriarchal socialization, social
conventions, and roles of many cultures’” (167).
Puka
reinterprets Gilligan’s supposed levels of moral development (pg. 167-8)
and views them as coping mechanisms and defensive strategies.
Tonga
says: “As long as society remains patriarchal, women will not be able to
strike an appropriate and abiding balance between rights and responsibilities
in their moral lives” (168).
Sarah
Lucia Hoagland claims that Noddings
advances “a fundamentally unequal relationship”
(168) in using the mother-child relationship. Hoagland says that this
kind of relationship (as well
as teacher-student and therapist-client) are meant to be transcended and
should not be used as the
paradigm moral model.
Hoaglund
also challenges Noddings notions about control by the caregiver being permissible or
required. “As long as this sort of ‘role-playing’
occurs, said Hoaglund, we can be sure the
relationship being described is
less than morally good” (168).
Hoaglund
questioned Noddings’ view that “inequalities in ability make a relationship unequal.
She instead claimed that inequalities in power make a relationship unequal” (168).
Lastly, Hoaglund faults Noddings “for implying
that the best caregivers never
stop caring, no
matter the cost to themselves” (170). “If
this is true, said Hoagland, ‘then I get my ethical
identity from always being other-directed,’ and
‘being moral’ becomes another term for ‘being
exploited’” (170).
Claudia Card challenged Noddings claim that reciprocity alone is necessary for the
solidification
of a relationship. Card distinguishes between
receptivity (a child’s smile for its mother) and
reciprocity (something equal in value).
Tong
writes: “Ethics is about knowing when not to care as well as when to
care” (170).
Conclusion
It
is not enough to consider only psychoanalytic explanations when examining
women’s oppression; legal, political, and economic institutions and
structures must also be considered. Gender identity explanations are
problematic.
We
must recognize the differences between ‘distortions of caring’ and
‘undistorted caring’ – Sheila Mullett – p. 171. Mullett says that a woman cannot
truly care for someone if she is forced to so economically, socially, or
psychologically. “Thus, genuine or fully authentic caring cannot occur
under patriarchal conditions characterized by male domination and females
subordination” (171) and “neither men nor women will be able to
care authentically” (172).