A Feminist Forum

...But since a fetus is unable to participate in deciding its own fate, Ms...

...In addition, Ms...

...Reviewed by Patricia Lynden Contributor, "Atlantic," New York "Times Magazine," "Ms...

...They therefore wonder if anyone has the right to take an unborn life...

...One of the collection's better pieces, Hilde Hein's "On Reaction and the Women's Movement," deals with the prospect...

...Athanaeus, the third-century Greek gossip writer, once asked rhetorically, "Who ever heard of a woman cook...

...Sex biology became a respectable field only after they abandoned the project when it was discovered that men and women contain the same hormones, albeit in different amounts...

...Unfortunately, except for the essays by Hein and Wolff, the writing in Women and Philosophy suffers severely from "academese...

...Lately, though, there have been second thoughts...

...From the book's typographical errors and punctuation omissions—which render some paragraphs virtually unintelligible—it would seem that the publisher was merely interested in adding a woman's title to its list with as little cost and effort as possible...

...And the writers they have selected—mostly women scholars, all but two of them philosophers—are neither opportunists nor intellectual lightweights...

...In an interesting piece, "Biology, Sex Hormones, and Sexism in the 1920s," Diana Long Hall shows researchers trying to use the discovery of hormones to put women in their place...

...Jaggar believes mothers should be able to sever connections to their children, and in the case of an unborn child this can only be done through abortion...

...Again, one wishes the publisher had taken the trouble to remedy the situation...

...Aristotle believed menstrual blood is unrefined semen that women, because they have less vital heat than men, are unable to cook, as it were, into the higher concoction...

...Finally, she contends that since women in our society are usually given sole responsibility for the care of children, they should have the sole "contingent right" to decide whether to abort...

...She accepts the position that an unborn child is a living being and maintains that citing the "right to one's own body" is an "unclear and dubious" justification for abortion...

...At least five of the essays are devoted to defending preferential hiring...

...Other more recent changes are reflected in these pages, too...

...A majority of the authors agree that women came to their present roles because of their reproductive systems and capitalism's "rational imperatives,' as Robert Paul Wolff of the University of Massachusetts puts it in the book's most provocative essay, "There's Nobody Here But Us Persons...

...Some now question the view, so popular five years ago, that a fetus is merely parasitic tissue within a woman's body until an arbitrary cutoff date...

...Nevertheless, this provocative book is worth the effort it takes to read it...

...Jaggar goes on to argue, it should not be endowed with rights...

...Rather, those who would have the responsibility for providing an unborn child with a full life (which excludes institutions) ought to be the ones to have a say in the matter...

...Yet this is a worthwhile volume, more insightful than much of the fashionable feminist literature of recent times...

...Editors Carol C. Gould of Swarthmore College and Marx W. Wartofsky of Boston University have tried, as they explain in the Introduction, to lay the groundwork for a theory of liberation...

...Through the centuries sexist notions persisted in the works of Kant, Fichte, Locke, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and, of course, Freud...

...Moreover, having witnessed the backlash against black students in the nation's colleges and universities, women professors apparently see themselves as next in line...

...Utilitarian" arguments—e.g., unwanted children fare badly in life—are similarly dismissed on the grounds that they tend to change with the times...

...No doubt this is attributable to the fact that women have felt the pain of discrimination sharply in academia, where credentials are readily accessible and objectively measurable...

...Many of the contributions document how philosophers and scientists have traditionally defined humanity in terms of their own maleness...

...Alison Jaggar, in an essay entitled, "Abortion and a Woman's Right to Decide," addresses the dilemma with an original, if tortured discussion...

...Because women recognized that the ability to bear children has been a primary source of their oppression, the feminist movement initially was united in its call for abortion on demand...

...The 21 essays presented here originally appeared as a special issue of the Philosophical Forum, an academic quarterly...