Women, philosophy, and education

Feminism is not exclusive: anyone can be a feminist. Anyone, apparently can be a woman, but not all women are feminists. Men can be feminists. The object of feminism is the welfare of women and girls. The object of ‘women in philosophy’ is women who are interested in philosophy. They are not the same thing (Thayer-Bacon, Stone, & Sprecher, 2013). This special issue is a result of the activities of a group of women PESA members in Aotearoa New Zealand, beginning with a two-day meeting held at Raglan in mid-2015, followed by a symposium at the PESA 2015 annual conference in Melbourne that December. Within PESA, women have been significant in inviting and encouraging more women to join and to take up leadership roles. What does the philosophy of women offer PESA and the wider university project today? (Furlong, 2013; Roberts, 2015). New social times present pressing new issues for women to tackle, while the old problems of patriarchy remain largely intact. Today, women are well represented within the membership and leadership of PESA, but the need for feminist thought in philosophy and in education is as urgent as ever.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, the situation with regard to women in philosophy of education over the last three decades has been much more positive compared with the experiences of women in philosophy more generally (Thayer-Bacon, 2013). Marshall (1987), a seminal scholar in local philosophy of education, was also significant in opening up philosophy of education to people who would not traditionally have been welcome in philosophy. Women never felt disadvantaged in his company, and his intellectual legacy thrives today amidst the large circle of productive academics who were touched by his influence. This example shows how individuals in pivotal positions can make an enormous difference to the experiences, confidence and futures of women philosophers. Women and men who have that power need to exercise it with a view to the future.

A woman in philosophy could be anti-feminist, anti-men or anti-women; or not interested in the gender binaries and complexities at all (Martin, 1981). Clearly the processes of socialisation are different for men and women: as Simone de Beauvoir says, ‘one learns to be a woman’ (de Beauvoir, 1993). An ethical difference from the world of men is not guaranteed, as shown, for example, by the debate over whether or not Margaret Thatcher was a role model for feminism (Lott, 2002). Women philosophers are nonetheless recognised as ‘different’: for example, UNESCO (2018) sponsors a network of specifically women philosophers.

The messiness, the physicality of women’s lives—bleeding, pain, pregnancy, childbirth, feeding—all experiences generally known only to women—are seldom theorised by anyone, but when they are, it is usually by women (Lewis & Mills, 2003; Spivak, 1990). We might also be thinking about other physical phenomena relevant to women in education: the longer lives of women, lesser incomes, employment issues and so on, as part of a wider brief. No brief could be wider than the brute fact of physical danger at the hands of men, a universal fact of life with which women must contend. Dickson (1996) explored the very different ways in which men and women perceive their personal safety, noting how women learn early on that we must be constantly aware of being physically vulnerable, simply because of our gender. The media constantly reminds us of the danger, in our homes and in the streets, even just taking the rubbish bag to the kerb.

We may be afraid of strangers, but it is the most intimate of strangers—a husband, a lover, a friend—who is most likely to hurt us. According to a U.S. Justice Department study, two-thirds of violent attacks against women are committed by someone the woman knows. Can we ever be too wary?

A woman’s worst nightmare? That’s pretty easy. Novelist Margaret Atwood writes that when she asked a male friend why men feel threatened by women, he answered, ‘They are afraid women will laugh at them.’ When she asked a group of women why they feel threatened by men, they said, ‘We’re afraid of being killed.’ (Dickson, 1996)

This is not to argue that women in philosophy and philosophy of education are at risk of being killed physically, but the suppression of voice can be seen as a similar infringement on women’s right to be. It is clearly evident that women in philosophy still struggle for the right to be. That it is a very different story in philosophy of education, particularly in New Zealand, can be attributed to the more enlightened attitudes of the men who formed the initial impulse to the formal study of philosophy of education in the local academy, particularly James Marshall. However, the suppression of voice remains a constant anxiety, even more so when the voices are complicated by other factors, of complex gendering or ethnicity or class. Not least should the anxiety concern the internalised critic in women’s own heads: the consequences, as Virginia Woolf points out, of generations, of hundreds of years, literally, of being told to ‘keep off the grass’(Woolf, 1929).

One of the main achievements of Western feminism since the 1970s has been the liberalisation of former prohibitions over women’s sexuality. Whereas in previous generations, women were disallowed by social norms from being sexually active outside of traditional marriage, the pendulum has now swung far in the opposite direction: younger generations of women in Western nations experience intense pressure to have sex, and an eroded agency to ‘just say no’ (Hall, 2018). The rampant influence of pornography in popular culture has further eroded women’s rights to set personal boundaries. The strength and rapid growth of protest movements such as MeToo and TimesUp oppose, while also demonstrating the dominance of, what is described as ‘rape culture’ in the US (Sommers, 2018), personified by its current leadership (Chaplin, 2018).

While women are no less vulnerable today than they were before feminism, the very category of ‘woman’ is now under erasure. Hadley Freeman (2018) reports from the UK on feminist protest against proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act that would enable anyone to ‘self-identify’ as a man or woman ‘regardless of whether they have made any actual changes to their lifestyle or body’. The proposal removes the current requirement that a person ‘needs to have lived in their chosen gender for two years and been diagnosed with gender dysphoria’. Women protested this proposed change to the legal status of ‘women’ because it would give predatory men unchallenged access to female-only spaces. Freeman applauds the women who attended a men’s swimming session, telling the confused patrons in the male changing room that they now self-identify as men. She takes exception to those ‘liberal men’ who delight in making women wrong for what these men describe as ‘reductive and exclusionary’ references to biology and lived experience, both of which, apparently, are now ‘passe’.

Gender is a feeling and biology is a physical fact, and the reason women-only spaces exist is not to protect some special inner feminine essence, but because there are significant physical differences between male-born bodies and female-born ones, and the latter have long been at a disadvantage. This is something women and trans women will have to work out between themselves, because this is a woman’s rights issue. (Freeman, 2018)

The status of trans women as women was a subject of lively discussion when our PESA women’s group met together in Raglan. This and other feminist issues are theoretical, complex and embedded in our practice in universities and other social institutions: connections explored in the following six articles that make up this issue. To start with, Elizabeth Grierson applies Foucault’s methods of genealogy to excavate some of the hidden contributions women have made in art, politics, education and philosophy, and to consider contemporary feminist challenges.

The next three articles deal with specific examples of topics related to women in philosophy and education. Liz Jackson explores and theorises problematic experiences women often face in academic encounters, related to emotional labour and everyday sexual harassment. Andrea Delaune describes the gendered divide between theory and practice in the history of early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand, drawing on the philosophy of Iris Murdoch to reconceptualise the early childhood curriculum. Georgina Stewart uses Māori feminist theory to re-examine the historical controversy over the banned school journal, Washday at the Pā, by Ans Westra.

The final two articles return to more generic lines of investigation. Marco Oschner and Georgina Murray explore the emergence of ‘postfeminism’ linked to the capitalist project of subjectivity, that is, ‘embodied neoliberalism’, and ask what this means for the future of feminism, emancipatory pedagogy, and the education of women. Finally, Simore Galea draws on Luce Irigaray to show how the feminist project of diversifiying knowledge contributes to the struggle for epistemic diversity in philosophy of education, in parallel and in conjunction with non-white, not straight and non-Western methods of inquiry.

These six papers reflect in various ways the roles played by women in philosophy, education, and philosophy of education, involving women as authors and theorists, and women’s experiences as sources of data and topics of study. Regardless of how diverse a learned society such as PESA becomes, it will remain important to focus on the welfare of women and girls, and the viewpoints of women on all matters as related to our lives.

Nesta Devine
[email protected]
Georgina Stewart