Notes on "Feminism and Postmodernism"

Notes on "Feminism and Postmodernism" by Sabina Lovibond

As always, I've done my best to quote any phrasing that isn't my own, but since this is combined from my handwritten notes and highlighting, I may not have gotten it perfect.

“Aversion to the idea of universality”

“refuses to conceive of humanity as a unitary subject”

The Ideal of Consensus

Justification and legitimation are practices – communities “recognize this and not that as a good reason for doing or believing something.”

Postmodernists “question the merit of consensus.”

Language Games

Non-teleological:

Postmodern objections to working towards consensus:

1. Marxism is outdated – people no longer buy into the idea of universal emancipation.

2. “the pursuit of ideal consensus is misguided”. (So how would this affect feminist goals of freedom and equality for all women? It’s definitely relevant to ideas of racism, classism, and ethnocentrism within feminism. Postmodernism is pro-innovation, but thinks that you can’t term something new as “better” or “progress” based on some absolute criteria. “since history has no direction” we can’t assume that our new ideas are any better than the old.

Rorty wants conversation to replace enquiry. MacIntyre concludes that “mythology… is ‘at the heart of things’.”.

Neither conversation nor mythology aims “at a single, stable representation of reality” or “truth”.

They seem to want to separate “intellectual activity” from the pursuit of “ideal consensus”. Rorty: a life NOT aiming for actual truth is “better”. Lyotard: a focus on “truth” suppresses difference.

Lyotard says that while it might suck to “place constraints on liberty in the name of social order,” you can’t try to bind all thought “into a single ‘moral organism’ or ‘significant whole’. (I’m not sure how these two ideas connect, especially given his previous one. He thinks that aiming for truth suppresses difference; does aiming for truth mean trying to come up with a singular truth? In that case, it makes sense. Or I guess trying to come up with a singular truth in any one situation).

Enlightenment thought that what exists should justify itself. Postmodernism opposes that, seeing “justification (or legitimation) [as] always local and context-relative”. This is anti Platonism. Plato thought that truth transcends our “criteria of truth”. Postmodernism thinks that idea is obsolete, and that it’s “no longer possible to believe in a transcendent truth”.

Dialectic = of, pertaining to, or of the nature of logical argumentation.

Postmodernism is also skeptical of Plato’s WAY of thinking. Plato’s dialectic method of enquiry was about questioning an idea until you came down to some essential truth that could not be corrected any further. According to his view, at this point the “thought would come to rest”.

The idea of postmodern conversation instead of that kind of dialectic is that “it aims, not at its own closure, but at its own continuation.” It wants agreement and disagreement.

According to Plato, the increasing coherence of the idea corresponds to “coherence in the mind of the enquirer”. Basically you’re supposed to get to a point where “no sudden access of emotion, no previously unconsidered aspect of things, is able to disturb the ordering of my beliefs and values.”

Positive Liberty

Negative liberty (Hume) = no external restraints, spontaneity.

Positive liberty = autonomy (didn’t we discuss autonomy vs. agency the other day?) In positive liberty, any “commands issued by the true subject… cannot be overturned by recalcitrant impulses or ‘passions’.” (To me, that sounds a lot like what Plato’s ideas were in the last section – is this supposed to be the postmodern view?). We’re supposed to be free from anything that we see as irrational.

You can only be free if you’ve fully realized your potential for reason (achieved perfect rationality). Right now we might feel subjectively free, but if we continue to develop intellectually we will later see, in hindsight, now not free we really are in our “current patterns of behavior.”

In the Enlightenment, the “centered subject” “was free because he was no longer at the mercy of unpredictable bouts of passion or appetite.” Now, the modern subject is free by being liberated from “the influence of social forces which s/he does not understand, and so cannot resist.” (So we’re liberated by gaining an understanding of these forces and then being able to resist them). In Marxism, it was learning about “the capitalist economic order;” in feminism, to look at ways we’ve internalized patriarchal views. Head for autonomy by “making ourselves less susceptible to external determination” = transcendence. (Is this related to De Beauvoir’s transcendence?).

Transcendence is connected to the idea of universal reason, and postmodernists don’t like this. Feminists also don’t like it. Western philosophy seems to see man as this “normal or complete” being, associated with the mind and civilization, and woman as body, associated with nature, hanging out in the background. In Plato’s writings, men “emerge from the womb-like Cave,” and Hegel’s men leave the home, therefore the private, where women had dominion. “the passage from nature to freedom, or from ‘heteronomy’ to autonomy, has been represented in terms of an escape by the male from the sheltered, feminine surroundings in which he begins his life.” This seems to signal a “convergence between feminism and postmodernism”.

Tradition and Modernity

Sexual equality as a political goal can be seen as a way that tradition is moving aside to modernity.

“Modern conditions” as “created by technological progress.” (the next few sentences seem to frame modernity as a negative thing). “Sooner or later, arbitrary authority will cease to exist” is a very Enlightenment thought.

Sex and gender-based aspects of the social system are the parts of tradition that seem to be the hardest to change.

Modernism repudiates “unearned privilege”.

Some people claim that we missed our chance to rebuild society “on rational, egalitarian lines”. She’s suspicious – how are we supposed to give up our dreams of emancipation when we’re not emancipated? (Not sure I’m interpreting that correctly). “universal reason”.

The Enlightenment ideas of “emancipation” or “autonomy” are “complicit in a fantasy of escape from the embodied condition” and reinforce harmful hierarchical binaries. Naturalist philosophy has looked at “institutions of knowledge-production… to expose the unequal part played by different social groups in determining standards of judgment.” In doing so, it’s been able to reveal how value systems we’d previously seen as objective aren’t.

She’s going to introduce three distinctly postmodern themes and question “whether postmodernism can be adopted by feminism as a theoretical ally”.

Dynamic pluralism, quiet pluralism, pluralism of inclination.

There’s nothing in the idea that standards of judgment are social constructions that would explain why postmodernists are hostile to the idea of consensus. You can understand that knowledge claims have perspective but also want to use enquiry to bring these perspectives together to create a body of thought that can be accessed from any starting point. (almost like using a bunch of 2-D drawings to create a 3D model).

Kant had talked about an imaginary point, “located beyond the limits of possible experience, upon which all lines of rational activity appear to converge”. The fact that it’s imaginary shows that it’s irrelevant to worry about we’ll ever “reach the goal of enquiry”. Theory itself would be impossible if we didn’t care about its maxims (general truths or principals; rules of conduct). However, theoretical effort is non-contractual – you do it even if you have no guarantee that others will help to achieve the goal. (not sure about that last part).

Dynamic Pluralism

Lyotard’s writing on the “eclipse of ‘grand narratives’” gives suggestions on “postmodern mental health.” Lyotard thinks that people don’t care about the idea of consensus. The desire for legitimation of knowledge is eclipsed by “quest for discursive novelty”.

“The authentically postmodern consciousness is experimental”.

Modernity wants to impose form on to chaos; postmodernity wants to jump into the chaos feet-first.

Nietzsche thought that idealism led to nihilism, which was a sickness.

He thought that godlessness was like innocence, and it’s harder to achieve that than you’d think because positivists “still have faith in truth” and therefore can’t achieve godlessness or freedom.

Nietzsche’s critique was aimed at those who think knowledge rests on the foundation of experience.

Socrates wanted to eliminate conflict by having everyone gradually converge to one point of view. Nietzsche thinks that this goal (of eliminating conflict) will appeal to the weak. You only use dialectics when you “have no other weapon left”.

Rationalism – wants to move conflict from physical to argument, so the underdog has more of a chance of winning (I have to imagine this is more metaphorical?). Nietzsche thinks that social conditions of rank are necessary. They want to get rid of class relationships.

“Truth as a regulative ideal is the creation of a socially inferior type of mind”. It comes from the hostility of the lower class trying to make the upper class feel guilty for being “naturally good” (What??)

Nietzsche doesn’t think that self-contradiction is a fault, but that it’s human beings who came upon “coherence as a criterion of value”.

Nietzsche and the Enlightenment

Nietzsche thought we had to recover from the Enlightenment. He sees feminism as part of the rationalist movement – as trying to “end the war between men and women” and move to communication.

Nietzsche doesn’t agree that being morally repulsed by war is a good thing. He finds rationalism and pacifism repulsive in the category of sexuality.

Nietzsche defines virility as loving war and refusing to compromise.

“In a world without truth…the interpretation of experience is itself a field for invention”.

“The cognitive activity of a …better… humanity will involve not the suppression of individuality… but rather their subordination to a commanding will.” (Not sure I get this).

The more perspectives we consider the more objective we can be (?).

Nietzsche describes himself as hostile to feminism. He sees feminism as part of idealism and wants Europe to be more virile. He saw feminism as the mental impotence in binding the mind “to regulative ideas such as truth.” Looking for the stability of truth emasculates the mind.

“We should be on the watch for signs of indulgence in a certain collective fantasy of masculine agency or identity”.

The attack on universality (theme two – quiet pluralism)

Dynamic pluralisms’ roots lie in distaste for move toward sexual equality.

We’ll be looking at the “postmodern ‘rediscovery’ of the local and customary”.

She thinks there’s a big difference between these two points:

Nietzsche renounced a truth-oriented way of life.

Postmodernists want to scrap ideas of absolute letigimation.

To read this second one as just an update of Nietzsche misses the point, because “postmodernism does not condemn the pursuit of truth or virtue within local, self-contained discursive communities.” “truth” as distinct from “Truth.”

Postmodern theory concedes the ability of groups “to reflect on themselves and to pass judgments of value”. So a scientist can ask “is this a valid contribution to scientific theory”?.

MacIntyre says that “a healthy [moral] tradition is sustained by its own internal arguments and conflicts.”

If groups are capable of self-criticism, how far are they going to take it? Can’t you always make some kind of criticism?

Rorty hopes that the post-enlightenment culture will be “better,” and that nobody will be thought more “rational” than another.

“admiration of exceptional men and women who were very good at doing the quite diverse kinds of things they did”.

“liberal individualist” and “Modern self” are only externally connected to the roles they take on. To be separated from any of these roles would not hurt their integrity – they would not become so wrapped up in them.

MacIntyre thinks we should stop trying to transcend and instead construct local communities to sustain intellectual and moral lives.

Postmodernism – “there is no such thing as a ‘pure reason’ dissociated from” culture or context.

But – feminism wants postmodernism to explain “how we can achieve a thorough-going revision of the range of social scripts, narrative archetypes, ways of life, ways of earning a living, etc. available to individual women and men.” How can we actually revise the scripts, archetypes, and options available to individuals?

If there’s no “systematic political approach” to issues of “wealth, power and labour,” how can we effectively challenge a society that distributes privilege and burdens unequally between the sexes?

How can we achieve sexual equality if we’re not allowed to “address the structural causes of existing sexual inequality”?

MacIntyre’s Moral Epistemology

Discusses mythology. When we picture our lives as “unified chains of events” we’re drawing on mythology. But, when discussing sexual politics, myths aren’t very reassuring. MacIntyre lists “the Bible, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the Greek and Latin classics”. The actual mythology that affects us is more TV or media-based.

Can we reclaim the available roles? According to MacIntyre, modern social roles all draw from the Enlightenment, so are fictions.

Feminism wants to construct a “life worthy of human beings”.

MacIntyre treats “the individual enterprise as a source of insight into the collective one”. You ask “what is good for me,” and the answer to “what is good for man” occurs where all of the previous answers converge.

But this blocks the way to theory and pushes you back to mythology.

Pluralism of Inclination

Feminists as embracing fashion.

Discussion of pleasure – especially (for women) the pleasure we get from making others happy “thereby justifying our own existence.”.

“conventional femininity” can “be pleasurable for women”.

If feminism is accused of racism, there’s a new political agenda, so the movement becomes less unified. This “calls attention to a certain respect in which feminism has fallen short of its own idealized self-image as an occupant of the ‘universal standpoint’.”

Reflection paper on Women in Education

This week’s reading took several different perspectives on women’s education, specifically their access to (and reasons that they should be allowed this access) reading, writing, the classics, and each other’s company.

McGrath and LeDoeuff, in their articles, seem to agree with the assumptions of Astell and Cavendish that in order to attain pleasure, education, or both, women must remove themselves from society in a very literal and physical way. This idea of seclusion echoes both Woolf’s “Room of One’s Own” and the utopias put forth by the writers in last class’ readings. However, each woman sees solitude as necessary for a slightly different purpose. For instance, the purpose of Astell’s solitude is to remove the woman from the temptations of society; her focus is not on quiet, except in the sense that quiet is a relief from “the noise and trouble, the folly and temptation of the world.” In Astell’s view, the world and its associated noises are all instruments of temptation.

Obviously the question of women’s places in society and the public world is one discussed by almost every reader who addresses women. Therefore, it is possible that Astell is responding to the view of women held by writers such as Vives, who claims that in order to preserve her reputation and not act as a temptation for men, “a woman should live in seclusion.” Vives’ claim happens in the context that a woman in public is doomed from the start, since any choice she makes will prove that she is not good, virtuous, and chaste. For example, he claims that “if you speak a little in public, you are thought to be uneducated; if you speak a lot, you are light headed.” While the framing of Vives’ statements seems to acknowledge the double standard contained within them, he does nothing to implicate the structure of his society in this frustrating contradiction, but places the responsibility squarely on the heads of the women being judged. It is possible that Astell, exasperated by his impossible demands, subverted his demand for women’s seclusion in order to further her own arguments. Vives’ demand seems almost self-contradicting in light of McGrath’s view of “women’s participation in pleasure and privacy as means to subjectivity.”

LeDoeuff, in her focus on women gaining access to male circles of thought, seems ambivalent about seclusion as promoting thought. In relation to the male philosophers she writes about earlier in the article, solitude is something that is “needed” and termed “precious.” On the other hand, as she discusses the theme of solitude in the writing of Gabrielle Suchon, she seems to see the isolation of “the poor woman” as a “tragic position if there ever was one.” I have to wonder if her own resentment at being excluded, as a woman, from the community of French philosophers colored her reading of Suchon’s position. Indeed, Suchon did not seem to feel this kind of pity for herself; LeDoeuff admits that she even “advocated solitary reflection as the proper starting point of intellectual development.” Suchon went even further to imagine societies of women that would nurture thinking and conversation, and to engage in “a conversation with both past and contemporary authors.” While it is lamentable that Suchon did not have the external intellectual community that she desired, she seemed to be able to own her solitude in a way that, in the context of all of our reading this term, can only be called feminine.

Gabrielle Suchon’s image of a world where women could talk, argue, debate, and learn from each other echoes the demand for women’s spaces and communities in the context of women’s learning that seemed to flourish in the seventeenth century. However, they did so with varying levels of practicality, from Astell’s practical ideas for funding her monastery to Cavendish’s obviously fantastical convent. In LeDoeuff’s framing, Suchon seemed to call upon women themselves to begin this process of learning and thinking and society-forming; LeDoeuff does not mention Suchon’s calling for a changing of any kind of structure that currently prevented women from doing so. Astell’s proposal addresses some of these issues. While Devereaux points out that Astell adheres to “conventional structures of masculine hierarchy,” in developing her “feminotopia” (and indeed, her occasional use of phrases like “stock the kingdom with pious and prudent ladies” is, from a feminist point of view, problematic), we should not be too quick to criticize this aspect of her work.

Astell was obviously aware that her piece would be read by people of many minds; she would be read by women who supported her cause, by those who were still steeped in the time period’s patriarchal and Christian views of women’s roles in the world, and by men who had the money and influence to make real changes in their societies. In order to appeal to all of these demographics at once, Astell mobilized an impressive arsenal of persuasive tools that makes this piece simply fun to read. Her use of rhetoric is clever and, at times, biting, but she manages to address her readers in ways that would persuade even the hardest of hearts.

First and foremost, Astell keeps her arguments strongly grounded in the Christian ideology that surrounds her. She appeals to the stereotypical desire of woman to make those around her happy and the world around her a better place; with this, and not personal fulfillment as the ultimate goal of education, she keeps her demands clearly within the lines of what is acceptable at the time. She also echoes the ideas that Speght so passionately put forth in Mortalities Memorandum in prioritizing the soul’s afterlife over the body’s earthly life. She bases her logical appeals on a Christian belief system, arguing that a woman “who is a Christian out of Choice, not in conformity to those about her” – who isn’t just good, but can “give a reason why she is so” - will not be easily tempted by sin. Another logical appeal she makes actually addresses one of the more practical aspects of this separate society: funding. As made clear in Devereaux, one of the points of educating women (according to Astell) was to help society and make the women into good wives. Astell proposed that fathers pay their daughter’s intended dowry as her tuition; since these funds would be used to educate the women, therefore making them more valuable as wives, it is seen as a gain, not a financial loss. While this idea could be seen as perpetuating the commodity exchange view of women, it is unarguably a solid, logical argument for the education of women. Astell also uses her logic to point out the irony present when women are denied advantages but then reproached because they lack the skills those advantages produce. Furthermore, she implies that if a woman is useless to a man or to mankind, it’s men’s own faults for denying her a proper education.

The more emotional parts of her appeals continue to address the idea of education as conducive to better Christianity. For instance, she appeals to the emotions of parents by implying that neglecting to educate children is “wicked,” then influences them by asking the rhetorical question “is Charity so dead in the world that none will contribute to saving their own and their neighbours’ souls?” (hoping, obviously, that the answer is “no”). Astell’s imagery is also closely tied to religion; the images of a soul so pure that it would be like an antidote to evil, able to “expel the poison in others” would have surely been appealing to a good Christian of her time. Furthermore, her allusions to the Garden of Eden that place men in the traditionally female role, implying that they will resent the idea that women are “invited to taste of that Tree of Knowledge [men] have so long unjustly monopolized.” By doing so, she subtly implicates men in the fall from Eden, perhaps to emphasize that they do not have an exclusive claim on knowledge and education. Additionally, Astell’s metaphors echo Biblical metaphors that use common, recognizable images of nature to make her points; for instance, she posits that a woman’s piety may be large and visible, but if it lacks roots a temptation can knock it down, or it may wither of its own accord. Her argument also likens women to rich soil that, if cultivated properly, would yield a bountiful harvest; readers would have immediately recognized this image, along with the previous one, as familiar from the book of Mark, which talks about seeds falling on rich soil providing a plentiful crop as a metaphor for Jesus’ parables: only those “in the know” would be able to understand the parables and learn from them. Astell’s use of this familiar imagery makes her readers feel like “insiders” who understand her message; this understanding, hopefully, would make them more likely to agree with her points.

Astell wraps up her textbook-thorough use of rhetorical devices by dropping a few snappy and quotable aphorisms into her writing, making claims like: “were the world better, there would be more Friendship, and were there more Friendship we should have a better world.” The confidence implied in this phrasing would ideally inspire confidence in her readers.

While it has been a recurring theme of the writers we’ve read this term that many are not aware of or do not address issues of class in their time, limiting their subjects and audiences to middle or upper class women, I was surprised to see the same kind of elision of class issues in one of the modern writings. Michele LeDoeuff, in her discussion of seventeenth-century women writers, does not acknowledge the challenges that women faced in accessing knowledge and information; she claims that in the “post-Gutenberg era,” when printed books were more affordable than they had previously been, even “a lower-middle-class woman could invite herself to discussions held in the filed without anyone’s permission.” McGrath obviously believes that it was not that easy; if an “eloquent, educated woman bore a worrying kinship to the curious Eve in pursuit of… knowledge,” it would take more than a few coins for her to have easy access to education. While I don’t want to diminish the difficulty that LeDoeuff and her peers may have faced gaining access to the inner sanctum of the philosophy community, it seems that her struggle and waiting for the male philosophers to break “the sacrosanct male contract” so that she and other women philosophers could sneak into the discussion was a much more manageable task than the consciousness-development that women of the seventeenth century would have to undergo in order to demand access to education. LeDoeuff believes that “every woman had always had a natural right to learning and philosophizing. But this right remained dormant until the concrete means (affordable books) came along.” However, even though the physical tool of learning, the book, may have come within reach, there was as yet no infrastructure in place to support women’s learning.

One last point that I found interesting, but that I’m not sure is important or not, was the positive and negative connections made between clothing and education and each of their relationship to frivolity throughout the readings. For instance, McGrath makes a point that in the seventeenth century, women’s learning was often posited as analogous to dressing frivolously; this devaluation and trivializing of women’s learning perhaps acted as a rhetorical argument against it. However, Astell counters this point by arguing the very opposite; she says that learning will help women resist such frivolous talk, and people who want to gossip about fashion will have nobody to talk to if women choose to be educated. In light of these, I was a little conflicted about Cavendish’s work; her description of the Convent of Pleasure seemed rather decadent, as if the imaginings of an aristocratic lady in her spare time. However, if, at the time, the opinion was that “For a woman, the ‘desire for information’ always risked the appearance of frivolity, perhaps of self-indulgence,” could Astell’s virtuous monastery of learning be viewed as no more chaste than Cavendish’s luxurious pleasure convent?

Part Three of Woolf's "Three Guineas"

I finally finished!

Here are my notes on Part Three of "Three Guineas".

Back to the original letter! Reiterates that we can sign a pledge, join a society, or contribute to a society to help prevent war. We can also protect “culture and intellectual liberty.” Relates them to the photographs. But those are “rather abstract terms.” Again, I’m surprised to be asked for help since I am a woman.

Ok, back to “Arthur’s Education Fund.” “We have already contributed to… culture and intellectual liberty” by contributing money that could have gone to our educations. We’ve paid for their educations with ours. When we finally got “the right to some paid-for education,” there weren’t any women “who had received enough paid-for education” to teach us. And NOW I’m finding, through your letter, that all of that money and education “has been wasted or wrongly applied.” (I assume because we’re coming up to war). Weren’t the unis supposed “to protect culture and intellectual liberty?” “We must assume that the money so spent was wasted.” So what makes you think that your society is going to be able to help? Shouldn’t you investigate why the “universities have failed?”

But, that’s your worry. How can we (daughters of educated men) help “you in protecting culture and intellectual liberty”? We have no education. We’re not “thought capable of teaching”. Talks about Whitaker. Ok, so even if we have no training, we have to think about what we can do “to protect culture and intellectual liberty.” First – what do those words mean? Eh, let’s not waste time and just agree that we know what they mean.

Turn to the daily paper. A “conference of head masters” decided that women “were not fit” to teach “boys over the age of fourteen”. If we tried to “reform the education of our brothers” there would be chaos. “We can only help you to defend culture and intellectual liberty by defending our own culture and our own intellectual liberty.”

We can suggest our ideas to the women’s societies we support. But for women, culture is still obtained “outside the sacred gates”. So, women have to read and write as a way of protecting their own culture and intellectual liberty. Literature has never been shut to women, partly because of “the extreme cheapness of its professional requirements.” But since it’s open, there’s no “honorary treasurer” asking for donations to whom we can dictate the terms of a donation. So how do we pressure readers and writers? There’s no “head of the profession”. We can’t bar women from libraries or deny them the use of metaphors. Any woman can write under a man’s name.

So “we have very little power over those who earn their livings by reading and writing, we must go to them humbly.” Ask them to “practise the profession of reading and writing in the interests of culture and intellectual liberty.”

Ok, so now we do need to clarify the terms a little more. If we consult male authors, “their definition would apply to paid-for culture.” For our purposes, culture will be “the disinterested pursuit of reading and writing the English language.” Intellectual liberty will be “the right to say or write what you think in your own words, and in your own way.” So our letter might say: ok ladies, this guy says war is coming, and we’re asking you “who earn your livings by reading and writing…” but wait. There are facts. Here’s Mrs. Oliphant’s autobiography. She wrote, earned a living, and “educated her children.” Read her books – did they lead you “to respect disinterested culture and intellectual liberty”? Or do you “deplore the fact” that she sold her work and “prostituted her culture” to “earn her living and educate her children”? We know that poverty sucks and that if you have kids you have to take care of them, so we “applaud her choice and… admire her courage.” She may be on our side personally, but she has to make a living; a brewer might not drink, but his signature on a temperance manifesto would be worthless b/c he’s “inducing his customers to drink more beer.” You don’t need an opinion, you need actual help. So they will have to “pledge themselves not to write anything that denies culture, or… infringes intellectual liberty.” So we can only appeal to women who have enough money to live on. “How many of them are there?” They might ask us to define terms; what is “’disinterested’ culture,” and how are we to protect those things in actuality? Compares to selling your body “without love,” instead of giving it to your husband; so it’s wrong “to sell your mind without love, but right to give it to the art which you love.” So don’t write what someone tells you to just because it pays. “Adultery of the brain.” Anticipated response: so I should turn down everyone who wants me to write/say something I don’t believe, even if they’ll pay? Yup. Also, you should call them out just like you would someone who tried to solicit you to protect yourself and others. But money’s not the only adulterer (using the other definition) – Advertisement and publicity also corrupt. So don’t “appear on public platforms… lecture… allow your… face to be published”. Don’t accept “medals, honours, degrees.” They may reply that these terms are too hard. “Loss of money… of fame… censure and ridicule.”

Ok, let’s go to the photographs. Can we make a “connection between them and prostituted culture” so that these photos represent it, and women would rather reject money and fame when they see what it causes? Let’s try.

Imagine a girl reading newspapers because she is “interested in politics, and wish[es] to know the facts.” Ok, so why more than one newspaper? Aren’t facts facts? Girl points out that papers are owned by people, so you have to read “at least three different versions of the same fact, and come… to your own conclusion.” She feels the same way about book reviews, theater reviews, etc. So there’s no “pure fact, or pure opinion, but adulterated fact and adulterated opinion”. So we have to “strip each statement” of its various motives – money, power, publicity, vanity, and more. And if someone with no such motives gave you his opinion, would you believe him (allowing for human error, of course)? Girl says yes. Now, if there was a group of people with no motive; couldn’t we know “the truth about war”? Wouldn’t that strip it of its glory? And the truth about art? Wouldn’t that make art “so desirable” that war would be “a tedious game”? If newspapers told only the truth, we would not believe in war, but in art.

Lady might reply to this argument; well, duh. But how does she do this stuff in practice? In the real world, not an ideal one? Well, there is a private printing press that’s not TOO expensive. Typewriters, duplicators. You can be free from the “pressure of… editors.” But how do we reach “the public”? Think that the public is made up of individuals.

You could even give honest reviews to the artists, in private, without affecting their sales. (she seems to be assuming that the woman’s opinion is worth this). If you’re more of a reader, don’t buy “papers that encourage intellectual slavery”. Once writers can write what they want, won’t they refuse anything else? Once readers have read something a writer enjoyed writing, wouldn’t they prefer it to something that was “written for money”?

Refers to paid writers as “slaves” (NOT COOL Woolf). Culture (personified) would become free and adventurous. Don’t just sign, lady; do something.

Whether rich ladies will listen, I cannot say. But this seems to be the way to go. Women are the ones who have to do it – “to protect culture and intellectual liberty” will result in “ridicule and chastity, loss of publicity and poverty.” But women are used to that. Since the high-level jobs aren’t open to us, we can be more disinterested. “We will sign [your manifesto] if we can keep these terms.”

Ok, you want money. So define your aims and means. To prevent war “by protecting the rights of the individual; by opposing dictatorship; by ensuring the democratic ideals of equal opportunity for all.” Ok. Here’s your guinea, “given freely.”

BUT… what does “free” actually mean? Because I can make a living, I can give you a guinea “without asking for anything in return.” That’s a BFD. Let’s celebrate. Let’s kill the word “feminist”. It no longer has a meaning because we can earn a living. Let’s write it and burn it. “the air is cleared.” Yay, “men and women [are] working together for the same cause”. Women in the 1800s were fighting the same cause you are. We’re all working for the same thing! Let’s kill more words, like Tyrant and Dictator! Oh. They’re not obsolete yet. We’re seeing it overseas. You’re feeling, as a Jew, what your mothers felt, as women. (Wow. That kind of statement would not fly today, although I guess this was before people really knew how bad the holocaust was). Yay, we’re all working together.

Ok, now you want me to be a member of your society. Sounds easy. BUT. We’ve determined that the sexes are different, and that difference is what lets us help, so if I join your society do I “lose that difference”? So, a society is a group “joined together for certain aims,” but you are an individual. We respect you (the individual) as in private individual men and women respect each other. But can we do so in public, in a “society relationship”? So far it’s been the “society relationship” that’s been keeping us down. She fears that societies can bring out (or impose on) the worst of men, while excluding women. “It seems… wrong… and impossible… to… join your society”.

“We believe that we can help you most effectively by refusing to join your society.” We’d rather work for the same aims from the outside.

Anticipated response: so you won’t join ours but you’ll start your own? What kind of society will you start that can work with ours but outside it? We wouldn’t have an office or need funds. “It could be called the Outsiders Society.” They would swear “not to fight with arms” (which is easy since women aren’t allowed). They wouldn’t work in factories to produce munitions, or tend to wounded soldiers. Wouldn’t encourage or dissuade brothers to fight; would remain indifferent. She can’t understand the desire to fight (just as he can’t understand maternal instinct) so she can’t judge it. When he says he’s “fighting to protect our country” she has to ask what “our country” means to her as an outsider. How much of England actually belongs to her? How much does the law protect her? What kind of physical protection does she have? If he’s protecting against foreigners, she has to think that “for her there are no ‘foreigners’, since… she becomes a foreigner if she marries” one. So she’ll decide that she doesn’t really have “much to thank England for.” History tells us Englishmen are superior to others; let’s check with French or German historians and see what they say. Intellectual superiority? Compare the music and literature of countries. “She will find that she has no good reason to ask her brother to fight on her behalf to protect ‘our’ country”. If she still has some drop of patriotism, let it be used to help bring peace to England.

So. She can’t participate “in patriotic demonstrations,” praise her country, avoid military displays. “For psychology would seem to show that it is far harder for human beings to take action when other people are indifferent and allow them complete freedom of action, than when their actions are made the centre of excited emotion.” It’s kind of like ignoring a child’s bad behavior instead of giving him attention, however negative.

You have to agree that men couldn’t use those methods.

Women need to earn their own livings – push for a living wage. “create new professions”. Wage for non-working women (instead of allowance). Push for wage to be paid “to the mothers of educated men.” Wage for the professions of “marriage and motherhood.” This would increase the birth rate “in the very class where births are desirable – the educated class.” (Wow.). Points out that since it’s unpaid it’s devalued. And because she made money too, you wouldn’t have to slave at your job and could enjoy life. BUT… since we’re spending 300,000,000 on weapons, guess we don’t have the money to do that.

We’d have to earn our livings in a way that if we stopped, it would affect others. Would have to commit “to reveal any instance of tyranny or abuse in their professions”. And they couldn’t work for money but for “love of the work itself” once they’d earned enough money to live on. Also couldn’t work in any profession that benefited war. Wouldn’t take honour from any society that restricted liberty. Would “investigate the claims” of societies that benefit from their taxes (church, schools) as carefully as they would any private society they choose to donate to. Criticize education and religion. Their “freedom from unreal loyalties” and outsider status would help them be able to do that.

We want “freedom, equality, peace” like you, but we’ll go about it in our own way. Not critical but creative. We will “dispense with pageantry” of gowns, medals, etc.

“Extinguish the coarse glare of advertisement and publicity” it acts as a headlight to rabbits (deer). Doesn’t this “limelight” paralyze “free action of the human faculties” and inhibit people’s ability “to change and create new wholes”?

Back to facts. How can we do this? Was this a waste of my time? But there is a model already. A female mayor recently said she wouldn’t even mend a sock to help a war. Sure, it was tactless. But brave, especially if other female mayors follow suit.

Second example from the newspaper: women’s teams don’t get medals or awards - people will play sports for the love of them, even if they don’t get awards. Article about girl’s soccer gaining popularity while men’s is losing it. Plus, women could get hurt.

See, it’s harder for men “to experiment freely in altering current values.”

“Experiment in passivity” – vicar talked about how the church was to “make civilization moral.” Needed everyone’s help, not just men. Historically, 3x more women had gone to church than men. But young women are moving away from the church. It’s an experiment you can do “with very little difficulty or danger”. We should keep an eye on this experiment and see if it has any effect. Well, the church is getting worried. Point out that women’s colleges don’t usually have a chaplain b/c women can’t afford to volunteer. One bishop warned that “men do not value ministrations which are gratuitous”. Women can make at most £150 as a deacon, but that’s not enough. So this experiment “is highly encouraging”. It shows “that to be passive is to be active.” “By making their absence felt their presence becomes desirable.” And there may be more experiments of this sort that haven’t been documented. But this movement has to fly under the radar. Jobs are short, and we can’t piss off the bosses. “those who are economically dependent have strong reasons for fear.” There are still subjects that men and women don’t talk about. (War?).

Let’s look at the Archbishop’s commission on women. The church ranks higher than other professions. In 1935 women wanted to join the church; priests looked at the New Testament, and found that Jesus (whose disciples were from the working class) said men and women are equals. There were female prophets. Women could preach. Then priests went to the Church, namely St. Paul, who saw women as forbidden from teaching in the Church or from holding any position where she’d have authority over a man. In the church men can be promoted but women can’t. Religion seemed to go from a voluntary, unpaid calling to a profession, and at that point women women were excluded.

“The Church… has to give spiritual and not merely historical reasons for its actions.” Has turned to psychology, and revealed “the origin of the fear” that’s keeping women from acting out freely against war. Psychology reveals that men are dominant but not superior, so there’s no precedent for barring them from Holy Orders (I think – the original phrasing is convoluted).

People are hostile about women joining the Church. Because of an “infantile fixation”. Blames the “general acceptance of male dominance, and… feminine inferiority” on it.

It’s a “non-rational sex-taboo.” A professor has found evidence of this. “There is no theoretical reason” why women shouldn’t be priests – just “emotional and practical” ones. “To pay women more would be to pay men less”. Implies that a married priest can do his job well because his wife takes care of the housework and family.

So if a woman brings up the topic of her admission to the Church or Stock Exchange in a private conversation with a man, she’ll feel his “strong emotion” from the subconscious. This raises her fear, and her instincts to change the subject or to shut up.

“What possible satisfaction can dominance give to the dominator?”

We have to analyze “our fear and your anger.” They prevent freedom in the public and private worlds. They may even cause war. Let’s look at this “infantile fixation” through biographies and newspapers!

Mr. Barrett. Wouldn’t let his kids marry. Daughter Elizabeth eloped, dad never forgave her. His emotions were extreme and obviously subconscious. Charlotte Bronte’s love was too scared to ask her dad for her hand in marriage. Rev. Bronte disapproved of marriages, and couldn’t stand Mr. Nicholls. She turned him down and stayed in Haworth with dad. Jex-Blake. Sophia’s wish to earn a living tutoring aroused a strong, subconscious emotion in dad. She wanted the money and the pride of earning.

Finally we can figure out that he didn’t like her to take money from or be dependent on anyone but him. Also, it gives him right to approve who she marries. In his argument, Mr. Jex-Blake appealed to her emotions, to her womanhood, not to her reason. Sophia replied by mentioning other “ladies” who earned money. Sophia had to “kill the lady; but when the lady was killed the woman still remained.” Bronte and Barrett had to kill the woman. (I get that this is theoretical but I’m having a hard time understanding it).

SO, this infantile fixation could stand against human love. Could make people “quail before it; to cheat the father, to deceive the father, and then to fly from the father.”

“Nature, law, and property were all ready to excuse and conceal [infantile fixation]”. If the dads wanted to keep their daughters at home, “society agreed that they were right.” If she fought, “nature came to their help”. If she left, law made sure she “had no means of supporting herself.” We see this story time and time again. Mr. Smith loved his children, “objected to schools,” kept them home. He brought in teachers, took them on field trips. Educated his sons and daughters the same. Gave daughter an allowance of £300 a year. She founded a school for all sexes, classes, religions. Started an art class (drawing nudes). She worked on laws, and married women were allowed to own their own property. All that because one father “was immune from infantile fixation.” (She uses the language of disease). So we see why most dads wouldn’t.

Infantile fixation was a strong, concealed force. But they were met with a force – called feminism or emancipation of women. We don’t like those names though. None of the names accurately convey the emotions, the bitter tears. Girls wanted to learn, to love, to travel, to play music, to paint naked bodies. We are “suspicious of labels; they kill and constrict”. Not “freedom” – we don’t want to break laws.

So, whatever, no word for it, but it fought fathers with “tremendous power”. Women got out of the house, onto the sports field, into jobs and more comfortable clothing.

But that’s not the end of the story. It’s the beginning. In private, dads may have yielded, but in public, they became even more susceptible to this disease. Desire to support a family is connected to manhood. If you can’t support your family, you’re a failure as a man. If a scholar protests the admission of women to his school by refusing to go, or a hospital declines an endowment made by women for women, aren’t these actions “inspired by that sense of shame” of the “non-rational sex taboo?” Nature made women’s brains too small! But finally we passed exams. Ok, but our brains aren’t creative enough to earn higher salaries! All we can do professionally is write.

Also, our bodies. Men enjoy, we endure. Until recently, medical literature on childbirth was sadistic. Finally girls stepped in, saying “wouldn’t some training help develop our minds and bodies?” Reply: no because childbirth. Rebuttal: dude that’s like a fraction of our time. Didn’t we work during the war? Dudes: war is over.

The radio is talking about the home being women’s place. Give jobs to men. Two worlds. Women have failed. Let’s go back to Creon and Antigone.

Creon: “you have to obey the law. Disobedience is evil. Women go home”. Antigone: the gods haven’t set these laws, men have”. Creon: “let’s bury her alive.” Then he “brought ruin on his house” and caused lots of deaths. Let’s look at the pictures of Spanish children. Things are the same today.

As we’ve thought about this, another figure as appeared in the picture; Man. Virile. In uniform. Medals. He is a dictator. We want to suggest a connection between the public and private worlds. “the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.” We have to fight to change that figure. And we have to see that the ruined houses could be ours if the “public abstractions” and “private emotions” forget each other.

But you, sir, recognize the connection between the public and private. We can’t just dream of peace and freedom; we hear the guns. We’ll leave dreams to the poets and focus on the facts: the photograph. The picture is of evil. We have to work to destroy it, “you by your methods, we by ours.” We have to create new words and new methods. We have to remain “outside your society but in cooperation with its aim.” We won’t join yours. But here is your guinea: the third of three given to different societies but the same cause.

Sorry for how long the letter was, how small the contribution, and for writing at all. But you asked for it.

"Three Guineas" - Part Two

Here are my notes on Part Two of "Three Guineas".

Ok – so what else can we do to help prevent war? “We must turn to the professions”. It will be more effective to convince them than to convince teachers or to hang out in universities.

At first she says that simply showing these professional men his letter will convince them, but then she says that while they will agree that war is horrible, there will be hesitations. So she will put another letter next to it. It also asks for money – this time, to support an organization that helps “daughters of educated men” get jobs in the professions. Woolf says we can’t send her money “until we have considered the questions which [her letter] raises.”

“Why is she asking for money?” “Why is she so poor… that she must beg for cast-off clothing for a bazaar?” If she really is that poor, we can negotiate terms by which we will donate. Here’s the letter Woolf will write:

You’re asking for rent money, but how are you so poor? Women have been able to work for almost 20 years now. So how are you pleading for money? Either something is really wrong, or you’re lying about how poor you are. You’re opening yourself to criticisms “from educated men”. These men deny that you’re poor, and “accuse you of apathy and indifference”. A “Mr. Joad” says young women are “politically apathetic” and “socially indifferent”. He thinks that women in England, like women in America, should start an anti-war society. He says that women must have the money to start this society, since so much money was donated to help women win the vote. He says that women today should be prepared to sacrifice as much today for peace as their foremothers did for the vote. (Woolf points out that the criticism and insults that Joad asks women to weather are the same as the criticism and insults they already suffer “from their brothers and then for their brothers”). He says that if women can’t effectively work to stop war, they should go back into the home. Woolf points out that Joad himself said that war was “incurable,” so how are women, “even with a vote,” supposed to cure it? She then ironically says that according to Joad, women are rich and idle, so how are they asking for money?

They’re so lethargic they won’t even fight to protect the vote, according to HG Wells, who criticizes women for not resisting “the practical obliteration of their freedom by Fascists or Nazis.”

(So it seems that men of the time placed a lot of responsibility for peace on women’s shoulders?)

So (Woolf continues), how can you ask for money in the face of those failures?

She comes back to the present, addressing the gentleman once again. She lists two facts; the W.S.P.U. had £42,000 and that “to earn £250 a year is quite an achievement even for a highly qualified woman with years of experience.” Wow - £42,000 is a lot less than any of the mainstream political parties, so it’s awesome that “one of the greatest political changes of our times” had such a small budget. Ok, so the lady’s telling the truth that she’s poor. “How much peace will £42,000 a year buy at the present moment when we are spending £300,000,000 annually upon arms?”

The second fact is even more depressing. Let’s look at Whitaker’s almanac, where he’s published the salaries of government workers. Woolf lists some professions that women can now work in, and points out that public money that provides the salaries is provided by men and women, and that income tax is 5 shillings a pound. She lists employees under Education and their salaries, most at 4 figures. So she determines that the statement about £250 being an achievement must be a lie.

Wait – all of those high-earning people were men. Three reasons: 1. The entrance exam for the higher positions is geared towards Oxbridge graduates. 2. Many more daughters stay home to take care of elderly parents than do sons. 3. Since women have less of a history taking exams, they probably aren’t as good at it yet.

Ok, fine, but why aren’t there any women making four figures? Well, maybe all of the women are deficient, untrustworthy, lacking in ability. Maybe it’s better to keep them in the lower positions so they can’t get in the way. Well, the Prime Minister says that no secret government info has ever been leaked by a woman (even though it has been by a man). Oh. So they aren’t “loose-lipped and fond of gossip”? He also said that the women working in Civil Service had been completely satisfactory to anyone who worked with them. Pays tribute to “the industry, capacity, ability and loyalty” of women. So it’s the word of the prime minister (Baldwin) against Whitaker. Let’s put them on trial. You, gentleman, are a lawyer. I have seen that world, though not experienced it. Let’s pool our knowledge and try their case.

In the professions, smart men don’t necessarily get to the top, and stupid men don’t always stay at the bottom. The process is not rational. Hints at nepotism. You can’t predict success by one’s abilities. This process “queers” the professions. Ok, fine. Maybe women are a distraction in the workplace. She was not educated at Oxford, and “is not a son or nephew.” Ok, let’s look at newspapers for more information.

1. Woman has too much liberty, which probably came with the war. They did a good job but “were praised and petted out of all proportion”.

2. There are too many women doing work that men could do, and too many men unemployed. “There is a large demand for woman labour in the domestic arts.”

3. If women gave jobs back to men, the men could buy nice houses for the women. The government has to give jobs back to men, “thus enabling them to marry the women they cannot now approach.”

So women are great in the home but not in Whitehall. Because of this, she’s stuck in “the lower spheres where the salaries are small.” And let’s not even talk about married women in the workplace. Implies that there aren’t any.

Ok, so both were telling the truth; women deserve to be paid as much as men, but are not.

Blames “atmosphere”. It’s a powerful and impalpable enemy of women. She compares one of the above quotes to something by Hitler, then expands this comparison to imply that England is moving in a fascist direction. So shouldn’t we help women fight this at home before we try to fight it abroad? How can we “trumpet our ideals of freedom and justice to other countries when we can shake out from our most respectable newspapers any day of the week eggs like these?”

She anticipates that the gentleman will say we need to understand those opinions before we can condemn them. These men want to be husbands and fathers and support their families. So the world is divided into the public and the private. In the public, the “sons of educated men” have jobs and are paid. In the private, women have jobs but are not paid. Is her work worthless? Without it, the State would collapse, but she is not paid.

She anticipates that a wife’s income is half her husband’s salary. That’s why men are paid more – because they support their wives. So… a bachelor is paid the same as a single woman? Hm, no. And there’s no law saying a man must split his salary with his wife. So this £250 is totally out of the question since a woman has a “spiritual right, to half her husband’s salary.” Wait, then how did the W.S.P.U only have £42,000? Why does the women’s college have to ask for money? The association for rent money or things to sell at a bazaar? Don’t women “have as much money to spend upon such causes” as men do? If this is true, we have to assume that women don’t care about education and voting. That’s a horrible charge to bring against women.

Let’s pause before we charge her. What does she spend her money on? Hm… it looks like she spends it on hunting, cricket, football, clubs. But she doesn’t share in these. “wine which she does not drink … cigars which she does not smoke”. Wow, she is really altruistic. Or… she just gets pocket money.

So we see that men make tons of donations, but women’s institutions or poor. There must be something that “deflects the wife’s spiritual share of the common income… towards those causes which her husband approves”.

So: 1. Women are paid little “from the public funds for their public services.”

2. “They are paid nothing at all from the public funds for their private services.”

3. Their share of their husband’s salary is nominal, not actual.

“It seems that the person to whom the salary is actually paid is the person who has the actual right to decide how that salary shall be spent.”

Hm. We had decided to appeal to women who earned their living to help prevent the war, but this doesn’t look good. If marriage is their profession they don’t get paid. The £250 thing is sadly probably true. So “daughters of educated men” don’t really have much influence “from their money-earning power.” But they alone can help us so we have to appeal to them.

Ok, so we have a motivation to help the organization that helps women find jobs, because that will help them get the “weapon of independent opinion.” But we still want to lay down terms under which we will donate.

So are we “wise to encourage people to enter the professions if we wish to prevent war”? If we encourage women to work, aren’t we encouraging the war-mongering qualities? Won’t it just perpetuate this war thing? So we have to make this woman promise that the professions will only be practiced in a way that they will prevent war. So here’s another letter to her:

Ok. You’re telling the truth. We will only send you money if you “can assure us that [women] will practice those professions in such a way as to prevent war.” I know that’s vague; let me clarify.

Let’s look at the men. A solemn procession. Bishop, judge, admiral, doctor. But now women are part of the procession (at the end of it). It makes a difference that we’re now part of it, and one day maybe we’ll have the authority of judges and generals. So do we want to join this procession or not. If so, under what terms? And “where is it leading us”? These are important questions that must be answered. I know we’re all busy, but we HAVE to think about it; when we’re stirring the pot, on a bus, at a funeral. Let’s look to books for answers. Biographies. But most of the recent biographies are about war.

This battle where youth has to “spend its strength… soliciting favours… inflicts wounds upon the human spirit”. The combatants are men vs. their sisters and daughters.

Sophia Jex-Blake. Her dad was a doctor. They were wealthy. She got £40 a year allowance. She decided to earn money and got a tutoring job. He says it’s beneath her. She said, you work, why shouldn’t I? My brother works. He said, but your brother has to support his family, and he has a high position “which can only be filled by a first-class man of character”. You have everything you need. She wrote in her diary that she gave up.

Next. Women applied to the Royal College of Surgeons. “Gate was closed in their… faces”. The authorities invoked God, Nature, Law, Property to deny women access. “waste of strength… temper… time, and… money”. Same daughters ask for the same privileges, are met with the same refusals.

Concludes that “the professions have a certain undeniable effect upon the professors.” People become possessive, combative, and jealous. If we enter the professions won’t we end up the same way? And aren’t those the qualities that lead to war? So if you want this guinea, you have to promise that any woman who enters a profession “shall in no way hinder any other human being, whether man or woman, white or black, provided that he or she is qualified to enter that profession, from entering it; but shall do all in her power to help them.”

More conditions. Once we’re part of this procession, we’ll have the potential to earn as much as the clergy. Suppose there were as many rich women now as there are rich men. There could be a women’s political party, daily newspaper, “pensions for spinsters,” equal pay, painkillers for childbirth, “bring down the maternal death-rate”.

But how desirable is money? Rich man, kingdom of heaven. But it’s a different world and you’d rather be rich than poor in England today. The poor don’t contribute to the country’s intellectual or spiritual wealth. But extreme wealth is also undesirable.

So where’s the happy medium. I’m asking you, madam, to consider these things.

Ok, so if you want to get these jobs, you’re going to have to “accept the same conditions that [men] accept.” 40-hour work week so you won’t know your kids. “little time for friendship, travel or art.”. Your duties might be arduous. “you will have to… profess the same loyalties that professional men” do.

Ok, fine. Why wouldn’t we?

Let’s go back to the books. Lawyers take work home with them. Politicians don’t get to enjoy nature. Clergy have crushing work. Implies that these jobs have crushed their souls. Doctor is away from his family on Sundays and Christmas. Professional writer. Another politician.

So what does this prove? Well, nothing. They’re all opinions that let us “question the value of professional life”. People who have successful jobs lose an interest in art, music, conversation, humanity.

Quotes:

We’ve made scientific discoveries but not enjoyed the fruits of them.

“Men are gathering knowledge and power” but not increasing in virtue or wisdom. The nature of man is the same as it was thousands of years ago. Under horrible stress he will do terrible things.

Quotes:

Men and women’s values are different. By imitating men, women are wasting their “opportunity to build a new and better world.”

So, men have not really improved the world; the call upon women to build a new one shows that even men are dissatisfied with the way things are. It also “imposes a great responsibility and implies a great compliment”. They must think her divine. Goethe: talks about symbols and women fulfilling things.

So we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. “Behind us lies the patriarchal system; the private house, with its nullity, its immorality, its hypocrisy, its servility. Before us lies the public world, the professional system, with its possessiveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity, its greed.” Shouldn’t we give up and kill ourselves?

Annnnnd BACK to the biographies!

Ok. We have to earn money. But the professions are undesirable. “How can we enter the professions and yet remain civilized human beings” who want to prevent war?

Let’s look at the lives of professional women in the 1800s. But there are none. The only way a single girl could work was as a governess, but “she was often unfit by nature and education.”

So there are no biographies as such. But there are some journals. One governess wants to learn Latin, physics, astronomy, botany, math, etc. but is stuck in her world. Anne Clough – principal of a college. She trained by doing housework to pay debts, reading loaned books, and declaring that if she were a man, she “would work for my country.”

So women in the 1800s did have ambition. Josephine Butler, let campaign against Contagious Diseases Act, child trafficking. Refused to be biographied; “purity of motives.” Gertrude Bell. Had a position in the East that was almost a diplomat. Chaste of body and mind.

Mary Kingsley’s statement about her “paid-for education” implies that there was an “unpaid-for education”. So what is the nature of this “unpaid-for education”? Their teachers “were poverty, chastity, derision… freedom from unreal loyalties”.

So, this education prepared them “for the unpaid-for professions”. But this education must have had some virtues, because there were many civilized, if uneducated, women.

We can’t judge education just by its ability to get us jobs, honor, or money. It would be silly to throw away unpaid-for education or the knowledge we got from it.

If you combine “poverty, chastity, derision and freedom from unreal loyalties… with some wealth, some knowledge, and some service to real loyalties… you can enter the professions” without becoming a war-monger.

So those are the conditions. You have to “help all properly qualified people, of whatever sex, class or colour, to enter your profession” and stick with those four teachers. Define the terms? Ok, poverty = enough to live on and be independent and healthy, but no more. Chastity = “refuse to sell your brain for the sake of money.” Derision = don’t advertise your merits; you’d rather ridicule than fame. Freedom from unreal loyalties = get rid of pride of religion, nationality, college, school, family, sex, etc.

Use your gut to figure out how much money or knowledge is enough. If you don’t trust it – it’s “too personal and fallible” – go to public galleries and libraries, turn on the radio and listen to music.

Look at the character of Creon in Antigone to see “the effect of power and wealth upon the soul”. He shows tyranny. To tell the difference between real and unreal loyalties, look at Antigone.

She points out that society as it is will pretty much guarantee women poverty, chastity and derision – also, since the Church and colleges restrict us, freedom from unreal loyalties as well.

Anyway, we’re used to working with little or no pay and for little or no honor.

So, these conditions will be easy to fulfil. So here is your guinea. In the future, daughters in poor houses will be happy in peace, and their mothers in their graves will be happy.

So, gentleman, that was the letter. Those are the conditions. I had to answer her letter and the letter from the women’s college and send them money before I could answer your letter, “because unless they are helped… those daughters cannot possess an independent and disinterested influence with which to help you to prevent war.”

Notes on "Three Guineas," Part One

I've spent a full twenty-four hours with Virginia Woolf, and probably have another twelve left. Sadly, the more I read of her, the more she irritates me. While I'm sure her ideas were revolutionary at the time, today her simple acceptance of her privilege and failure to question it (or others' lack of privilege) is grating on me. Especially her repeated use of the phrase "daughters of educated men."

Here are my notes on Part One of "Three Guineas".

Structure and overview (summarized from Wikipedia):

The essay is structured as a letter in response to a man who had written to Woolf asking her to join his anti-war efforts. Woolf was a pacifist. Woolf thinks it’s “remarkable” that a man is asking a woman her opinion on war, but she has so far not written back because, given her difference in education, experience, and access to public life, she thinks that he, as an educated man, will have a very hard time understanding her.

The work shows Woolf’s ambivalence between leaving the home to help the anti-war efforts and her reluctance to become a part of the public world of men and all that it entails.

As she writes her reply, she also addresses two other letters that she’s received; one is a request for a donation for a women’s college, and one asks for a donation for an organization that helps women “enter the professions.” Woolf uses these letters to criticize the institutions of education and the professions in England at the time, comparing the attitudes entrenched in them to those of Fascism.

She wants to make sure that girls attending school don’t end up corrupted, and talks about a new system of education that values emotional intelligence and skills for living well.

She concludes that war is bad, but that women and men will approach their efforts to prevent it in very different ways.

One

According to Woolf, the letter asking her opinion on preventing war has been laying unanswered for three years. She’d hoped that, in that time, someone would figure out how to prevent war, but alas.

She has thought of answers, but they’d all involve lengthy explanations that would be susceptible to misunderstandings. Even when she’d explained, there would still be things that he couldn’t understand and that she couldn’t explain. But because it’s so unusual that a man asks a woman her opinion on something like this, she’s going to do her best to reply.

She creates a description of the gentleman who wrote the letter (addresses it to him directly, using “you”); thinning, graying hair, lawyer, prosperous. He’s a good person, not apathetic. Well-educated.

She points out that they are both from “the educated class,” having the same accents, manners, experience, conversational skills. They both have jobs. (She likes to point out her use of ellipses). BUT (going to start pointing out differences). Talks of “the daughters of educated men”. (What about mothers?). She talks of “Arthur’s Education Fund,” apparently an account that educated families would put money into.

Points out that formal education wasn’t the only way boys were educated; they played games, talked with friends, traveled, received an allowance that let them study.

Sisters contributed to the fund with their own education and luxuries (“travel, society, solitude, a lodging apart from the family house”). This difference changes the way that men and women see things, through the filter of the experiences and opportunities that were afforded to boys. (To me personally, Woolf’s apparent ignorance of her classism is starting to get a little awkward).

She points out that her own lack of formal education will change the way she’s able to relate to the question of how to prevent war. She doesn’t know about politics, or “international relations of economics,” and therefore doesn’t “understand the causes which lead to war.”

She believes that if you look at war as “the result of impersonal forces,” it will be impossible for her uneducated mind to understand, but if you look at it “as the result of human nature,” that explains why he asked her, a woman, for advice. She seems to believe that “understanding … human beings and their motives” is a kind of education that women have. She calls it “psychology” but admits that the actual word is more scientific than she’s using it. She believes that the “profession” or “art of choosing the human being” one will spend the rest of one’s life with has given women an experience in psychology.

Claims that men are more likely to fight than women. Points out that women haven’t killed people, don’t hunt. So how can she understand his problem or answer his question?

“The answer based upon our experience and our psychology – why fight? – is not an answer of any value.”

(Interesting – the idea that a woman doesn’t really get the motivation to fight, and therefore her best answer to how to prevent fighting won’t really be useful).

She can turn to books or newspapers to try to understand – they let her move beyond “the minute span of actual experience” that is still really limited for women. So first she’ll look at a biography of a soldier. He claims to be happy in his life, “for he had found his true calling.”

Another biography, this one of an airman: he held the opinion that if there was no war, “there would be no outlet for the manly qualities which fighting developed,” and humanity would deteriorate physically and mentally.

So, men fight because it’s a job, it’s a “source of happiness and excitement,” and it’s “an outlet.”

But, she doesn’t want to generalize these opinions to all men, so she turns to another biography, of Wilfred Owen, “a poet who was killed in the European war”. He believed that Jesus promoted passivity over violence, disgrace over violence, death over killing. Talks about war as unnatural, inhumane, unsupportable, beastly, foolish.

So, men have different opinions among themselves about war. But, according to the newspaper today, a majority of men “are today in favour of war.” Agree that spending a lot of money on weaponry is necessary. “it is better to kill than to be killed.” She uses the idea of patriotism as a prevailing idea that causes the apparent unanimity today.

Ok, so what is patriotism? According to another book: Being proud of your country, loving your country. Using England as a standard by which to judge other countries. Liberty.

Ok, that’s fine when talking about men, but what does patriotism mean to women? Does she feel the same way? “her position in the home of freedom has been different from her brother’s”. This difference has taken a mental and physical toll. So, it might be hard for a woman “to understand his definition of patriotism and the duties it imposes.” So, if Woolf’s response to the gentleman’s letter requires her to understand the motivations of going to war, it will be useless. She wants to find an objective perspective of morality (right and wrong), so she will turn to the clergy. However, within the clergy, some believe that dishonor was worse than war, but some believed that war was at odds with the teachings of Jesus. So there’s really no certainty to be found, and the more people we ask for their opinions, the more confused she becomes and the harder it is to come up with a solution.

Ok, so let’s look at photographs. Pictures of dead bodies so mutilated you can’t tell if they’re male or female, human or animal. Dead children in a bombed house. The photos “are not an argument; they are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye.” So even with different educations, we react in “horror and disgust.” These pictures lead to the gut reaction that “war must be stopped,” no matter who you are.

Let’s change the subject and address the actions you (the gentleman) suggested. Write to the newspaper, join a society, and/or donate to a society. Sounds easy – writing your name, listening to someone preach to the choir, writing a check – “cheap way of quieting what may conveniently be called one’s conscience.” However, you’d still feel the same emotion you felt upon looking at the photographs of dead children. You have to do something more active. But what can we do? Join an army to defend peace, join the Stock Exchange to exert economic pressure – neither of those is open to women. We can’t join the Church to preach peace. Sure we could write letters to the “Press,” but the “Press” is run by men. Even in public areas where we are now allowed, our “position is… precarious and our authority of the slightest.” If male lawyers went on strike in order to make demands, it would have an effect on England. If women lawyers did, not so much. In fact, if working-class women in munitions plants went on strike, it would affect the war. But if we “daughters of educated men” did, it wouldn’t affect anything. We have the least influence. “We have no weapon with which to enforce our will.”

BUT – we can influence educated men. Ok – how have we influenced politics in the past? We’ve got biographies of men, but how would we tell what was the result of influence by women? She lists women who were politically influential through the dinners they had and the people who met at their houses. BUT, you never see mention of the daughters of the houses. You see their brothers and husbands.

Daughters of educated men helped “the franchise”. But, Woolf concludes “that influence has to be combined with wealth in order to be effective as a political weapon” and that these women’s influence is weak, slow, and painful. This “one great political achievement” of women was expensive.

Now, Woolf concludes, that “the influential are the daughters of noblemen, not the daughters of educated men.”

Cites a guy who claimed that women’s influence should always be indirect, and that “the wise woman always let him think he was running the show when he was not.” He claims that women actually had more power before they could vote, because they could influence the men in their lives (implies that she could influence more than one).

If that’s the real influence of women, we’re screwed – “many of us are plain, poor and old” (implying that you have to be young and hot to influence men), or some are too proud, considering using this kind of influence as worse than prostitution.

Ok, so if that’s all true, then we just have to sign letters, join societies, and write checks. “Inevitable, though depressing, conclusion of our inquiry into the nature of influence.”

Mentions the right to vote and “the right to earn one’s living” as equally important.

Describes the way that earning your own money and being able to spend it as you please can open up the world to a girl’s imagination. Work is less objectionable slavery than dependence on a father. Earning money freed them from having to use the above kind of influence (implied to be sexual). The influence she has as an earner and spender “is an influence from which the charm element has been removed”. “She need no longer use her charm to procure money from her father or brother.” So now, since her family can no longer “punish her financially she can express her own opinions.” “She can criticize.”

Ok, so “how can she use this new weapon to help you to prevent war?”

Continues to point out differences between men and women in education, property ownership. “Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.” But maybe the value of the help offered by women lies in its difference. So let’s look at how a man’s world appears to a woman.

At first, “the world of professional, of public life, seen from this angle… is enormously impressive.” Marvels at “the splendour of your public attire”. But it seems weird to women that men dress the same in summer and winter, and that every part of their garment “seems to have some symbolic meaning.” Stripes, buttons, rosettes, and their colors, positions, and number seem to all have meaning. She also marvels at the ceremony and ritual of men’s public life.

For a woman, clothing only “creates beauty for the eye, and … attracts the admiration of your sex.” Dress (at least up until women could work) was enormously important to a woman. But for men, it “serves to advertise the social, professional, or intellectual standing of the wearer.” These kind of advertisements are seen as “unbecoming and immodest” for women. She seems to allude to academic dress, but also says that “A woman who advertised her motherhood by a tuft of horsehair on the left shoulder” would be looked down upon.

Ok, so how do our differences help the issue? What is “the connection between dress and war”? She mentions soldiers’ uniforms. Implies that the splendor of their uniforms when they’re not fighting is to, “through their vanity… induce young men to become soldiers.”

Ok, so women can’t wear those clothes, but we “can express the opinion that the wearer is not to us a pleasing or an impressive spectacle.” He is, instead, “barbarous.” Suggests that the fact that men use their clothing to “emphasize their superiority” in class or education, they “rouse competition and jealousy,” which both encourage “a disposition towards war.”

She seems to imply that if women refuse to wear clothing that advertises their class or education, that will contribute to war prevention.

She brings up the idea that a woman’s influence is very much on the surface of things. She wants to look “in the direction of education itself.”

She mentions a letter “asking for money with which to rebuild a women’s college.” As a donor, we have the right to dictate how our donation is spent. She talks about using the money to teach about war prevention. But what does that mean? How does education factor into that?

What IS a “university education”? It has “supreme value” (the biographies confirm that). English rulers have all had a university education. People spend enormous sums of money on it. And, reading biographies of the poor “proves that they will make any effort, any sacrifice to procure an education at one of the great universities.”

It’s SO valuable, that the sisters of the educated men wanted to be educated.

Apparently the church used to think that a woman’s desire to be educated “was against the will of God.” Also, since a woman couldn’t get a job, she must have desired education for its own good.

Talks about Mary Astell, who wanted to found a college for women. Princess Anne was ready to fund it, but the Church intervened. Believed that educating women would support the Roman Catholic church, not the English church (not sure I understand that logic).

These “facts” prove that education is good for men, bad for women; good if it makes you believe in the Church of England, bad if it’s Catholicism. (I think she’s being facetious here).

Ok, so we’ve looked at biography, let’s look at history. Since about 1870 there have been women’s college at Oxford and Cambridge. She implies that, because of certain facts, we have to give up on our idea of influencing the young against war through education. Here’s where she starts talking about these “facts”.

A house opened in Cambridge to house female students. Not a nice house. Small. But more and more girls wanted education. In order to build a new house they needed money. (In this next part, she seems to get very facetious). They borrowed the money. But wait, you say – surely someone gave them the money! The other colleges were rich and had made lots of money from women who donated. This is a great opportunity for them to repay the debt! The colleges “must have given it gladly in memory of their noble benefactresses”.

Some men volunteered to lecture but others refused. Eventually a girl passed an exam, and the school went to the college to ask if these girls “might advertise the fact as those gentlemen themselves did by putting letters after their names.” It was voted down.

Ok, so it looks like influencing against war through education isn’t going to work.

She says that it “does not teach people to hate force, but to use it.” It makes men possessive of the “grandeur and power.”

Eventually women could put B.A. after their names. But at Cambridge in 1937, women’s colleges can’t be “members of the university.” Scholarships for women pale in comparison with scholarships for men.

So how do we answer the woman asking for money to rebuild her women’s college? There’s no reason to think that a university education will educate you against war. If we send a girl to college, aren’t we teaching her “how she can fight” to get the same opportunities as men? And if she’s not a member of the university, how can she affect the education of the men? Woolf won’t bother even asking the treasurer how she’s going to use the money to prevent war, because she’s probably very busy and overburdened.

Woolf will attempt to write a letter outlining the terms under which she’ll donate the money to rebuild the women’s school:

How can you be so foolish as to ask for this money? Do you know what we’re spending on the army and navy with this threat of war? What has your college done to inspire “great manufacturers to endow it?” Have you invented anything that will help the war? Are your students capitalists? Are you a University member? So how can you ask for money?

Woolf says that the college must ask “what is the aim of education… what kind of human being [should it] seek to produce”?

Ok – so, since history and biography show that the old system doesn’t help people become anti-war, “you must rebuild your college differently.” Found it “on poverty and youth,” make it “experimental… adventurous.” Build it cheaply. Don’t make it a museum to the old, but let each generation redecorate cheaply. Don’t teach how to dominate – that requires too much overhead – “teach only the arts that can be taught cheaply and practiced by poor people; … medicine, mathematics, music, painting, and literature”. (It seems weird to put medicine with the rest of them – math too). Teach how to understand people. The aim “should be not to segregate… but to combine”. Look at how the mind and body can cooperate. Teachers should be “good livers as well as… good thinkers.” “People who love learning for itself would gladly come there. Musicians, painters, writers, would teach there, because they would learn”. They’d learn b/c they’d be working with people who weren’t thinking of degrees or profits, but of art itself.

End of letter.

Imagines that the woman who wrote the letter thinks it’s useless to think about a different college when the point of college seems to be to get a job. (Ooh, we totally talked about this in seminar yesterday). So her college has to be built on the lines as the others.

Woolf decides that no money should be used to build a college in the old way, so it should be burned down with “old hypocrisies”. Let women be done with “education” (in quotation marks).

But, if we can’t train women to earn their livings, and we’ve decided that it’s through their earnings and spending that they can have the most influence, well, then, this doesn’t work. So let’s just send her the guinea with no conditions.

So yeah. Guess we can’t ask women’s colleges to “use their influence through education to prevent war”. Our influence will have to be less direct. If we teach, “we can examine… the aim of such teaching.” We can scorn the trappings of institutionalized education. We can refuse honors. But, in order to prevent war we have to donate to women’s colleges. They have to be educated so they can earn their livings and exert their influence.

Back to biography. This one is of a woman dependent on her father.

She would go out, but had to be accompanied. Would meet educated men. Then marriage. Because marriage was the occupation, she could learn piano but not join an orchestra; sketch but not “study from the nude”; read one book but not another. “Solitude was denied her… that she might preserve her body intact for her husband”.

Ok, but why did that education make her in favor of war? Well, she had to support the system that supplied her the clothes and parties that allowed her to get married.

Interesting – Woolf suggests that women supported WWI because it let her get out of the house as a factory worker, driver, medic, etc.

So, we have to support the women’s college because it “is the only alternative to the education of the private house.”

Notes on Miranda Fricker's "Hermeneutical Injustice"

Wow - it's hard trying to keep up with doing fun travel, slice-of-life posts when I'm ALWAYS READING.

So, here are my notes on "Hermeneutical Injustice" By Miranda Fricker.

As always, I've tried to put any wording that I took directly from the article into quotation marks, but since I was taking the notes for myself, I may have missed some.

Hermeneutical Injustice by Miranda Fricker

This was a particularly difficult article as I was unfamiliar with many of the terms, so I spent some time on dictionary.com before reading.

Epistemic means related to knowledge or knowing.

Hermeneutical injustice is when “someone has a significant area of their social experience obscured from understanding owing to prejudicial flaws in shared resources for social interpretation.”

So, a person’s lived experience cannot be understood (by themselves or by others?) because there are “flaws in shared resources for social interpretation.”

Systemic = of or pertaining to a system. Incidental = happening or likely to happen in an unplanned or subordinate conjunction with something else.

Hermeneutics = the science of interpretation.

Situated hermeneutical inequality: the flaws in the interpretive resources “prevent the subject from making sense of an experience which it is strongly in her interests to render intelligible.”

So, someone has an experience. It would be really useful and productive for her to be able to make sense of it, but the shared modes of interpretation (maybe things like common narratives?) prevent her from doing so.

Hermeneutical justice = the listener’s ability to lessen “the effects of hermeneutical injustice on the speaker.” This is “a hybrid ethical-intellectual virtue.” (Does this mean that the listener helps to interpret the events for the speaker?)

7.1 The Central Case of Hermeneutical Injustice

Power relations can inhibit a woman’s ability to understand her own experience. If you’re part of the dominated group, the world is not structured for your purpose, and in fact is “inimical” to it.

“Structured” here has three meanings.

If it’s read materially: “social institutions and practices favour the powerful”

If it’s read ontologically (regarding the branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence): “the powerful … constitute the social world”

If it’s read from an epistemological perspective: “the powerful have an unfair advantage in structuring collective social understandings.”

We’ll be focused on the third one, but not ignoring the others, since it’s material advantages that create the epistemological advantage. “If you have material power, then you will tend to have an influence in those practices by which social meanings are generated.” AND, “if understandings are structured a certain way, then so are the social facts.”

We’re focusing on our knowledge and knowing practices and their ethics.

“Social power has an unfair impact on collective forms of social understanding”. One way of looking at that idea is to

1. Think of the ways in which our understandings reflect “the perspectives of different social groups.”

2. Look at how unequal power can skew interpretive resources; “the powerful tend to have appropriate understandings of their experiences ready to draw on” while the less powerful will have “at best ill-fitting meanings to draw on in the effort to render them intelligible.”

Consciousness raising sessions – where women shared experiences – let women share experiences that they didn’t really understand, awakening “resources for social meaning that brought clarity, cognitive confidence, and increased communicative facility”. In these groups, women were “able to overcome” their habitual methods of social interpretation and come up with new interpretations. As a group they were coming up with new resources for understanding their experiences. This kind of thing is a BFD.

Example: one woman’s remembrance of a consciousness-raising workshop where hearing other women talk about their experiences with postpartum depression let her realize that she wasn’t deficient, but that “it was a combination of physiological things and a real societal thing, isolation.”

Her depression (as “female depression”) was “ill-understood by the subject herself, because collectively ill-understood.” There are reasons for this lack of understanding; lack of honesty about the prevalence of depression, for example. But if we’re looking for some social power disparity or unfairness, her breakthrough was “a moment in which some kind of epistemic injustice is overcome.”

The time before this understanding is being referred to here as “hermeneutical darkness”. This darkness was “a wrong done to her in her capacity as a knower”. Therefore it was a kind of epistemic injustice (an injustice related to knowledge and knowing) being referred to here as “a hermeneutical injustice.”

Another example (having to do with sexual harassment): a woman was harassed by a superior – not blatantly at first – he’d touch himself when near her or “brush against” her. One night he kissed her. After that she worked hard to avoid him but be cordial to his wife, but the stress took a physical toll. She ended up quitting, but was denied unemployment because she was too embarrassed to explain why she really quit. Eventually she told a female professor, whose students had been talking about encountering this kind of stuff, and there was an “aha moment” where they realized how common this was, and how none of them had ever told anyone. They found feminist lawyers to challenge the unemployment claim. Then they held a “speak-out in order to break the silence” about sexual harassment in the workplace (even though at the time there wasn’t even a name for it, so they had to come up with one).

The women who were dealing with this had “an acute cognitive disadvantage from a gap in the collective hermeneutical resource”. Technically he had the same disadvantage since he wasn’t able to understand what he was doing to her. But it’s only an injustice to her because it’s harmful and wrongful – obviously, his “cognitive disablement is not a significant disadvantage to him.” In fact, it’s almost an advantage because he can do it unchallenged. (She implies that it COULD be seen as a bit of “epistemic and moral bad luck” if he was actually a fairly decent person to the point where understanding the harm he was doing would have led him to stop it).

It’s really in her best interest to understand her situation; “without that understanding she is left deeply troubled, confused, and isolated, not to mention vulnerable to continued harassment.”

If you can’t understand it, you can’t speak up against it, much less implement a system that would stop it.

If someone had a disorder that caused socially inappropriate behavior, but the disorder wasn’t yet understood or commonly diagnosed, you would “suffer a hermeneutical disadvantage.” However, it’s not hermeneutical injustice. Just sucky.

In order to figure out “the deeper source,” we need to look at the social conditions in the situation. Women’s social powerlessness, participation in things like “journalism, politics, academia, and law.” Because women were relatively powerless, they could not participate in the areas that created hermeneutical understanding in general. (I think).

7.2 Hermeneutical Marginalization

Because “we try hardest to understand those things it serves us to understand,” “a group’s unequal hermeneutical participation will tend to show up in a localized manner in hermeneutical hotspots.”

So, places “where the powerful have no interest in achieving a proper interpretation” or where they actually want to perpetuate the misinterpretation, like with the sexual harasser guy. The “unequal hermeneutical participation” is disguised by his interpretation of it (“flirting”) so it’s hard to see that there’s another interpretation.

So, with cases like the woman being harassed above, “the whole engine of collective social meaning was effectively geared to keeping these obscured experiences out of sight.”

“When there is unequal hermeneutical participation… members of the disadvantaged group are hermeneutically marginalized.”

The idea of marginalization indicates “subordination and exclusion from some practice that would have value for the participant.” It can happen in a big-picture sense or in smaller, more short-term cases. You can be marginalized in some contexts but not others, depending on which aspect of your identity is highlighted at that point (woman, upper-class, white). So you can be excluded from the understanding-forming process in some social areas, but included in others.

Sometimes your marginalization is because of “material power” – based on stuff like socio-economic background. Sometimes “identity power” – based on prejudicial stereotypes. Most likely it’s a combination.

“We can now define hermeneutical injustice of the sort suffered by women like Carmita Wood. It is: the injustice of having some significant area of one's social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to persistent and wide‐ranging hermeneutical marginalization.”

So, it’s the idea that part of your experience is obscured from the collective understanding.

So why is hermeneutical marginalization bad? “it renders the collective hermeneutical resource structurally prejudiced”. Interpretations of things that affect the less-powered will be biased toward the more-powered: marital rape, workplace harassment, etc. It causes “structural identity prejudice.”

So now, “Hermeneutical injustice is: the injustice of having some significant area of one's social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource.”

“Now what exactly does ‘systematic’ mean in the hermeneutical context?”

Hermeneutic marginalization involves socio-economic marginalization, since it involves non-participation in areas like “journalism, politics, law, and so on” that are able to participate. Marginalization “tracks the subject” through different areas of his/her life – not just the hermeneutical.

Systemic cases are more “persistent, wide-ranging,” while incidental cases are fleeting or “highly localized.” Incidental hermeneutical injustices arise from “one-off moment of powerlessness.”

Example from a book where a guy is stalked but not threatened, and the police say they can’t do anything about it – “a collective hermeneutical lacuna is preventing him from rendering his experience communicatively intelligible.” The two misinterpretations – that HE’S being too obsessed, and that he’s overreacting – trivialize his experience. BUT, this particular hermeneutical injustice isn’t coming from “general social powerlessness”.

“The generic definition now called for captures hermeneutical injustice per se as the injustice of having some significant area of one's social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization.”

An incidental hermeneutical injustice isn’t any less “ethically serious” than a systematic one.

If you’re disadvantaged b/c your experience isn’t understood because of “a lacuna in the collective hermeneutical resource,” then you can “claim… hermeneutical injustice” even if it’s an isolated incident. However, if the lacuna is “caused… by a wide-ranging and persistent hermeneutical marginalization” it’s systematic. It’s “part of a more general susceptibility” to other kinds of marginalization and injustice. However, in hermeneutical injustice there’s no bad guy or agent of injustice.

“Hermeneutical injustice might often be compounded by testimonial injustice.” Which we didn’t read about. “In such a case, the speaker is doubly wronged: once by the structural prejudice in the shared hermeneutical resource, and once by the hearer in making an identify‐prejudiced credibility judgement.”

If you’re of some other devalued class and try to explain a situation that has lots of lacunas, you may end up with “the perfect conditions conducive to a runaway credibility deflation”

Lacuna might affect not only content but also form. “Thus the characteristic expressive style of a given social group may be rendered just as much of an unfair hindrance to their communicative efforts as an interpretive absence can be.”

“their powerlessness bars them from full participation in those practices whereby social meanings are generated, for these are also the practices whereby certain expressive styles come (p. 161 ) to be recognized as rational and contextually appropriate.”

“ If one lives in a society or a subculture in which the mere fact of an intuitive or an emotional expressive style means that one cannot be heard as fully rational, then one is …subject to a hermeneutical injustice.”

7.3 The Wrong of Hermeneutical Injustice

“Hermeneutical lacunas are like holes in the ozone—it's the people who live under them that get burned.”

There might be formal equality but situated inequality. Everyone has health care but not dental = formally equal. Some people can afford their own dental = situated inequality. “some group(s) [are] asymmetrically disadvantaged by a blanket collective lack”

The primary harm: “The first prejudicial exclusion is made in relation to the speaker, the second in relation to what they are trying to say and/or how they are saying it.” Secondary harm: for instance, the sexually harassed woman had stress, had to quit her job, and couldn’t collect unemployment. Secondary epistemic disadvantages: “subject’s loss of epistemic confidence.” Can cause you to lose knowledge, prevent you from learning new knowledge, and make you less like to gain “certain important epistemic virtues, such as intellectual courage.”

When you feel like what you feel and what you’re being told are sharply at odds, “it tends to knock your faith in your own ability to make sense of the world.”

So let’s look at how situated hermeneutical inequality can “influence the construction of the individual subject.” Hermeneutical injustice can be “so damaging that it cramps the very development of self”.

Growing up gay. “collective understandings… construct not only the subject’s experience (his desires become shameful…) but also his very self.”

“At some level his personal sexual experience was of a simple love of men; yet this aspect of his experience being inarticulable, the only psychological rebellion he could hope to pull off against what this meant about his identity was denial. Denial is the first stage of the double‐think (the sleight of hand, the act of bad faith) that is required in order to rebel against internalized yet falsifying hermeneutical constructions of one's social identity.”

“But something else that allows for resistance is that other aspects of one's identity (being educated and middle‐class, perhaps) might equip one with resources for rebellion, as will certain personal characteristics (our narrator was surely fiercely intelligent, psychologically tough, and socially resourceful).”

“As individuals, some authoritative voices have special power over us, while others, for whatever reason, do not.”

An individual may start to feel dissonance if he realizes that one of the “common constructions” of his sexuality is false, he might start to think about other parts of that discourse and whether or not they might be false too. Dissonance is a starting point for critical thinking and “moral-intellectual courage that rebellion requires.”

“In certain social contexts, hermeneutical injustice can mean that someone is socially constituted as, and perhaps even caused to be, something they are not, and which it is against their interests to be seen to be.” This could prevent them “from becoming who they are”.

Questions of culpability still arise – we have to think about how to listen when you know there may be speakers “whose attempts to make communicative sense of their experiences are unjustly hindered.”

7.4 The Virtue of Hermeneutical Justice

It will be corrective. Nobody’s just immune to the unintelligibility caused by lacunas. You have to be sensitive to the fact that someone might be having trouble communicating not because it’s “nonsense” or the speaker is “a fool, but rather to some sort of gap in collective hermeneutical resources. The point is to realize that the speaker is struggling with an objective difficulty and not a subjective failing.”

“The virtuous hearer, then, must be reflexively aware of how the relation between his social identity and that of the speaker is impacting on the intelligibility to him of what she is saying and how she is saying it.” This will help the speaker appear more credible.

“ in hermeneutical contexts the orientation to truth needs to allow for the possibility that there is more than one interpretation with equal title to truth”.

(I’m having a hard time with the repeated use of the word “virtuous”).

A virtuous hearer will try to make a “credibility judgment” based on if the speaker’s interpretation “would make good sense if the attempt to articulate it were being made in a more inclusive hermeneutical climate – one without structural identity prejudice”.

Louise Antony suggests that a man should think that “when a woman, or any member of a stereotyped group, says something anomalous, they should assume that it's they who don't understand, not that it is the woman who is nuts”.

“ the virtuous hearer may effectively be able to help generate a more inclusive hermeneutical micro‐climate through the appropriate kind of dialogue with the speaker.”

“Virtuous hearers' performance is constrained by their own social identity vis‐à‐vis that of the speaker.”

“the virtuous hearer may seek out extra corroborating evidence; for instance, by consulting other relevantly placed people”

“ the virtue of hermeneutical justice may simply be a matter of reserving judgement, so that the hearer keeps an open mind as to credibility.”

You’d have to be SUPER virtuous to spontaneously be this hermeneutically just.