Patrick Morris

Chapter 4: 154-172

Gender Feminism

In her section discussing Gender Feminism, Rosemarie Putnam Tong discusses two feminist approaches to understanding the differences in moral behavior between men and women. She says what distinguishes Gender Feminists from psychoanalytic feminists is this emphasis on the difference between boys and girls moral development. The first author Tong discusses is Carol Gilligan whose work is important because she establishes a new way of considering moral development in girls. A way that is not based on the types of developmental models constructed for males, but one that is based more on a morality of caring than on a morality of justice. Tong describes how Gilligan critiques her own mentor's established model of moral development by saying that women's morality is functionally and psychologically different than men's. Gilligan illustrates this through her study of pregnant women deciding whether or not to abort their fetuses. Using this case study, Gilligan creates a three level model for women's moral development, a model based on caring and nurturing, not on a sense of justice. Tong emphasizes that Gilligan does not see this kind of caring morality of women as better than the ethical morality of men, but as simply different, and that the perfect kind of morality is a balance between the two.

However, the second thinker Tong discusses, Nel Noddings, does consider the caring based morality of women as superior to the ethically based morality of men. Noddings contends that the kind of morality that is cultivated through a sense of justice is fundamentally lacking in the kind of interpersonal relationships, recognitions, and understandings that a caring based morality necessitates. Noddings sees the justice-based morality as opening the doors for acts of evil and great malice because it is an abstract kind of morality that distances individuals from each other and changes relationships from personal ones to symbolic ones. According to Noddings, women are in a unique position to resolve conflicts and change the course of societies because of their caring-based morality.

The critiques of Gilligan and Noddings, that Tong discusses, are both methodological and conceptual. Gilligan is criticized for not being intellectually or scientifically honest about her case study because she failed to address socio-economic, political, or ethnic differences among her subjects. Noddings is criticized for not fully addressing the limits, and drawbacks, of a caring-based morality. Her critics say she does not discuss the potential harm to the caregiver in the relationship, or the unequal power dynamics in these relationships.