Reading Summary - Johnnie Mazzocco
Rel 508 - Buddhism and Women
Winter, 2003
Tong, Rosemarie Putnam. Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive
Introduction. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1998.
Chapter 4, continued - pgs. 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 - pg. 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).