Reviews Four Feminist Magazines

...Second, although the idea that language reflects social power does not necessarily entail that there can be no such thing as a better argument, some of the articles I read initiated more global attacks on human reason...

...Given all the ways that scholars might enlighten us about our world, it is regrettable that both postmodemists and economists have cloaked their investigations in jargon...

...Language, let us agree, can either blind us or open us to ways of seeing...

...is that the body, whether male or female, is as undecidable and shifting as any semiotic construction...

...One of the most striking facts Rose uncovers is that the "welfare to work" programs of the 1960s and 1970s treated men and women in an asymmetric manner...

...While Hypatia predominantly features articles by writers who are either sympathetic to the core ideas of reason and argument or who attempt to expand those ideas by appeal to other core concepts, the majority of the writers in differences are, I think, postmodernists...

...But if the goal of feminism is to realize the fundamental equality of all human beings, what is the value of replacing one genderspecific model with another...

...Rose thus demonstrates that "workfare" has not meant the same thing for the men and women involved...

...Old age insurance, for example, changes the relationship between children and their parents...

...Some theorists reject both empiricism and the standpoint approach to knowledge...

...Their argument goes roughly as follows...

...One track provided entitlements such as unemployment and old age insurance...

...They believe that experience ultimately provides the basis of all our knowledge about the world...

...There are, however, tensions between the methodologies of the various feminist critics of traditional research...

...In addition, as a philosopher concerned with issues of economic justice, I am disappointed that only a small number of articles address the "political economy" of sexism: questions of the distribution of work, income, and wealth...

...For example, sexist assumptions about women have led theorists to ignore the inequalities produced by the family, to exclude unpaid domestic labor from Gross National Product calculations, and to undervalue the role of emotion in judgment...

...And surely some of the characteristics attributed to women—that they are caring, nurturing, and relational—can reflect the oppression of women and their subordination within the family as much as a female essence...

...In "Gender Encoding in Fluid Mechanics: Masculine Channels and Feminist Flows," N. Katherine Hayles argues that gender stereotypes shaped scientists' understanding of hydraulics and fluid flow...

...What makes up the other part...

...how can its advocates now rule out the possibility of common standards on a priori grounds...

...Both tracks are forms of public provision, yet only the latter is seen as creating dependency and as giving recipients something for nothing...

...But there is also something absurd about this thesis, if it is taken to imply that all experience is literally linguistic...

...In the context of a worsening economy and eroding job opportunities, the authors' emphasis on the need for a cultural reevaluation of welfare is both timely and provocative...

...Not every article in differences fits this model...

...The best writing in these journals underscores both the intellectual power and the diversity of feminism today...

...Rose looks at the way that women were SUMMER • 1995 • 403 Magazines marginalized within the New Deal work programs: their participation was restricted to a maximum of one-sixth of the positions, when eligible they were considered only for "women's work," and they received lower payments on the work programs than men...

...For example, a recent issue of differences contains an essay by Neil Lazarus that criticizes postmodernism for its potential political nihilism...

...some articles inevitably spill over the boundaries of disciplinary domains...

...Not all women are feminists, let alone in similar social and economic positions...

...But they insist that this reflection occurs in a social context: for example, they try to show how gender relations among social and natural scientists can shape their theoretical inquiries...

...Yet, as the authors point out, the sharp distinction between welfare and entitlements cannot be maintained...

...by making it easier for children to abandon their parents in old age homes, it may actually render the aged more dependent...

...Each makes people dependent in some senses, and interdependent and independent in others...

...In order to understand some of the tensions in and among these journals, a little background is helpful...

...Consider the claims of one differences author, Charles Bernheimer: "My talk in this essay about behavior of the male sexual organ may appear to be essentializing and reductive because of its anatomical specificity...

...and Christine Sylvester gathers interviews from women involved in Zimbabwean cooperatives, and frames hypotheses about urban and rural women's participation...

...I was especially interested in examining which topics were centrally featured, the methods of analysis and argument that the authors employed, and the usefulness of those methods for our understanding of gender inequity...

...However, it does seem to me that they share a common core—a concern with the cultural, social, and historical dimensions of the inferior social status of women...

...programs became more mandatory and punitive when the recipients of benefits were women...

...Feminist empiricism has been subjected to criticism on many fronts...

...Even if we abandon the idea that all knowledge is neutral and absolute, we are still left with the important problem of distinguishing knowledge from opinion...

...In the complex analysis that Fraser and Gordon present, words are not the only determinants of experience...

...Some of the writing in differences is also imaginative and informative...

...While these empricists, therefore, do not deny that values influence the direction of scientific research or that scientific theories are underdetermined by evidence, they hold nevertheless that there are common standards of empirical adequacy against which competing theories can be judged...

...That said, there is surprisingly little about the economic aspects of gender inequality—the essays I have just described are notable exceptions...

...Postmodern theory has successfully challenged so many of the a priori assumptions of traditional scholarship...

...This is feminist theorizing at its best: a cross-disciplinary and original investigation with practical import for the lives of poor women...

...Could it be that postmodernists are trying to imitate the language of these "scientists" and possibly share in their prestige...

...In each of these journals, feminist scholars discuss the way that gender bias functions to shape academic disciplines...

...But the idea that knowledge is gendered has led some feminists to attack reason and language as male prerogatives and even to claim (for example) that the Aristotelian syllogism is a form of sexist thinking Many feminist theorists, such as Carol Gilligan, claim that women think differently than men do...

...Words are not the only things that matter, and matter is not made up of words: you cannot achieve gender equality by declaring it is here...

...You cannot feed the hungry by declaring that they are fed, or even by pointing out that "hunger" and "poverty" have cultural and social dimensions...

...Those work programs that were voluntary and that relied on economic incentives disproportionately served men...

...I will discuss below some articles in which linguistic analysis sheds new light on social problems and alters the field of theoretical investigations...

...How can feminists argue that gender causally influences science and understanding except with appeals to empirical example and our common norms for what constitutes a good argument...

...differences typically presents authors trained in literary and psychoanalytic theory...

...the challenge for egalitarians is to understand how and when differences are to be taken into account...

...In recent years, many welfare rights organizations have directly challenged this claim...

...Economists, too, almost always bury their substantive assumptions beneath a technical apparatus (in their case, mathematics) that only a specialist can understand...

...First, the idea that language structures or constitutes our experience can be interpreted and applied in different ways...

...In particular, they point to a shift in meaning from dependency as an economic, legal, or political relation of inequality, to dependency as a sign of individual weakness...

...And you cannot erase biological difference between male and female bodies by arguing that they are both semiotic constructions...

...Penile Reference in Phallic Theory," differences, Spring 1992) This analogy between the body and language is significant, because one of the central tenets of postmodernism involves 402 • DISSENT Magazines the denial of the radical separation of materiality and language, of representation and that which is represented...

...Still, some of this research seems to carry troubling practical and theoretical implications...

...Fraser and Gordon, like Rose, trace the two tracks of public provision initiated during the New Deal to earlier hidden usages of dependency...

...Words have the power of "worldmaking": they help to determine what we experience...

...Philosophers such as Sandra Harding seek to establish a feminine "standpoint" where women are privileged as knowers and researchers...

...In showing us just how the concept of "dependency" is constructed out of particularly sexist assumptions, the authors 404 • DISSENT Magazines are giving us reasons now to reject it or rethink it...

...As is always the case, some individual pieces are more fruitful and imaginative than others...

...While some of the authors in Hypatia embrace it, others make claims about a feminine way of knowing, not available to men...

...The shift is associated with the narrowing of the term's application, from a preindustrial usage where it covered both men and women, to an industrial usage applied to women alone, to a postindustrial usage where it attaches chiefly to women of color...

...These programs explicitly excluded agricultural laborers, domestic service workers, and government employees...

...Two recent articles—one in Feminist Studies and one in Signs—are exemplary in this regard...

...How, they ask, "did the receipt of public assistance become associated with dependency and why are the connotations of that word in this context so negative...

...When people claim that welfare mothers ought to work in order to be independent, they are assuming that childrearing is not work...

...Such restrictive relief requirements did not generally affect those programs in which white men were the predominant beneficiaries...

...These four feminist journals vary in method and subject matter...

...While the term is somewhat misleading, these theorists might be called "postmodernists...

...Nor can welfare be declared a handout while Social Security is seen as just compensation for a life of hard work...

...In contrast, programs that more directly served poor women required that they continually demonstrate their eligibility as well as their moral worth...

...The term has multiple and contradictory meanings that, when brought into the open, will lead us to reject the language of dependency as the appropriate language for viewing welfare and welfare reform...

...More important, we need analyses that focus both empirically and theoretically on the relationship between income inequality and other aspects of gender inequality, for example, inequalities in health, mortality rates, division of labor within the household, and education...

...But I found many of the articles in differences less successful and illuminating for three reasons...

...These four journals share a concern with the nature of women's "difference" from men and its meaning...

...This mathematical modeling generally requires a level of abstraction that removes the discussion from any serious connection with the phenomena being studied...

...There is something paradoxical about these attacks...

...Postmodern insights can sometimes generate important results...

...The core idea of standpoint theory has had many expressions, ranging from the claim that women see things differently than men because they are more nurturing and intuitive than men, to more limited proposals that women have some gender-specific knowledge—for example, unlike men, they can know what it is like to be pregnant...

...It is an entirely open question which of our shared concepts and categories reflect objectionable structures of power and which can be rationally justified...

...Third, many of the articles are insular and unreadable: I spent considerable time thumbing the Oxford English Dictionary...

...To my mind, too many of the articles in differences dissolve the material world into the "materiality" of language...

...Is a world in which economic and social inequality is held constant, but women are now at the top, a fundamentally better world...

...This differential is only partly accounted for by income disparities...

...Some of the writers seem self-consciously aware of the pitfalls of the postmodern methodology...

...They reject the idea that reality can be grasped independently of its linguistic representation, pointing instead to the complex ways that power is intertwined with language...

...Theorists in these journals differ in their answers to centrally important questions: in criticizing scientific inquiries, are we to accept the fundamental commitments of empirical science itself...

...They are divided, however, both by the methodological approaches they take to this issue and by their areas of specialization...

...An article in the Summer 1993 issue of Feminist Studies by Nancy Rose examines the role of gender and race in the development of work programs from the 1930s to the present...

...In fact, it is not difficult to show that the historical exclusion of women from the social and natural sciences has affected both the content and direction of research...

...She argues that programs designed primarily for white men—such as Social Security and unemployment compensation—were usually not means tested and provided payments that were replacements of a portion of wages...

...There is another strange irony here: jargon and irrelevant formalism are endemic to the discipline most often viewed as the diametrical opposite of postmodern theory: modem economics...

...More important, the a priori rejection of "male" reason may displace more subtle accounts of the ways in which sexist assumptions, the exclusion of women as researchers, and the differential treatment of men and women as objects of study distort our knowledge...

...Nor did I find the terminology necessary for the ideas the authors were trying to convey (when I understood them...

...This should not be taken to imply that the goal of equality is opposed to difference...

...The other track created programs such as Aid to Dependent Children, funded by general tax revenues, means tested and often morals tested as well...

...Broadly speaking, Signs ranges over the widest domain, featuring work from history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and literature, while the authors contributing to Hypatia take an explicitly "philosophical" approach to their topics...

...Welfare "dependency" stigmatizes poor women by making their poverty appear to be the result of their moral and psychological problems...

...q SUMMER • 1995 • 405...

...They show how feminist theory can usefully employ linguistic analysis, and they should be read by anyone interested in current policy debates about welfare...

...Standpoint theorists, while embracing women's "difference," are not necessarily hostile to empiricism...

...But my point...

...in Feminist Studies, historical and literary studies predominate...

...in a special issue devoted to postmodernism and feminist political theory, Lisa Bower usefully explores the implications of judicial decisions about pregnancy for achieving gender equality...

...Or must we radically break from our core conceptions of reason, impersonal evidence, and argument...

...But it seems to me that no inquiry into the condition of women in modern society can be satisfactory if it fails to confront the discriminatory employment structure and the ways that work is categorized and rewarded...

...Claims about "women" or "gender" can ignore important divisions among women (such as those based on class and race) or the ways in which these very concepts are shaped by inequality...

...But what is the evidence for such a global claim...

...In the period following 1945, recipients of Aid to Dependent Children (later Aid to Families with Dependent Children) were removed from the rolls if there was a "man in the house...

...In an article with similar relevance to present policy issues, Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon in the Winter 1994 issue of Signs trace the meanings of "dependency," a concept that occupies a central place in contemporary criticisms of welfare...

...Although these were universal programs, the exclusion of domestic service workers, the understanding of men's labor in terms of a family wage, and simple racism combined to keep women and minorities off the rolls...

...Arguing along similar lines, an article in Signs by Jane Martin warns of replacing a "false unity" with a "false difference" in which feminists affirm the existence of nothing but difference...

...This article looks not only at the way that words can shape experience, but also at the way words can be resisted, how they can function as a "site" of social conflict...

...To get a sense of the shape of contemporary feminist research, I looked at the last three years of Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Feminist Studies, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and differences...

...There is something right about this thesis...

...Economics, of course, has not been a discipline hospitable to feminist concerns...

...they argue that assumptions and evidence that are applicable to one sex only should not be generalized to everyone...

...Another problem with this approach is that it simply inverts the sexist paradigm, by making a "standpoint" available only to women into a norm for the entire species...

...This division of intellectual labor is, of course, not absolute...

...These writers implicitly practice a "linguistic turn": believing that language both structures and constitutes our experience, their research centers around the analysis of concepts and categories...

...In a world populated with Margaret Thatchers as well as Margaret Sangers, would we really want to be, as Katha Pollitt put it in a 1992 Nation essay evoking the downside of feminist essentialism, "marooned on Gilligan's island...

...So I will close this review with a single stunning fact that I hope will inspire reflection, research—and activism: black women in the United States between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-four have a mortality rate almost three times as high as that for white men and women...

...FemiSUMMER • 1995 • 401 Magazines nist models of science, they claim, are often more compatible with evidence and reason than are the standard theories...

...There are feminist philosophers, such as Helen Longino, who embrace a modest empiricism...

...They also endorse the possibility of reasoned reflection on our understandings and values...