GENDER ANARCHY AS SOCIAL JUSTICE: AN ANALYTIC RECONSTRUCTION OF THE IDEA OF EPISTEMIC EQUALITY IN JANE ROLAND MARTIN’S RECLAIMING A CONVERSATION Greg Seals College of Staten Island/City University, New York Jane Roland Martin’s later work, especially as represented in The Schoolhome: Rethinking Schools for Changing Families,1 has been attacked as vague, essentialistic, and a formula for the (re)feminization of education.2 No attempt will be made here to defend Martin against these criticisms because such a defense seems impossible for reasons to be given below. Rather, this essay’s intent is to present an interpretation of Martin’s early work, especially as represented in Reclaiming a Conversation: The Ideal of the Educated Woman,3 that provides an understanding of her theoretical point of view that preempts criticisms of vagueness, essentialism and (re)feminization. The new interpretation will seek to state a definition of Martin’s central but largely unexplicated concept of epistemic equality. Epistemic equality will be defined via analytic reconstruction as gender anarchy in terms of a set of conditions, individually necessary and collectively sufficient, describing an ideal set of rules, a constitution as it were, of gender politics. The analytic approach is taken for two reasons. First, Martin abandoned analytic techniques in the middle of her career in order to move beyond concerns with clarity of definition and take up consideration of “real problems” in education.4 However, if criticisms of Martin’s later work are taken to heart, it would seem that in surrendering concern for clarity she also gave up an ability to contend with the very real problem of creating an educational context in which girls, as well as boys, may claim the education they deserve rather than accept the education they are handed. Second, an analytic approach to the problem of epistemic equality is the right tool for the job at hand. When the job is avoidance of ambiguity, ambivalence, and opaqueness then conceptual analysis is the technique to apply.5 Because Martin’s attempt at describing the ideal of women’s education seems to suffer from lack of clarity, completeness, coherence, and compatibility with the wider world of educational practice, conceptual analysis is a balm to apply to her views. As the anarchistic philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend, notes in Against Method6 what any philosopher really wants is a well-stocked tool bench, one with a variety of methods able to deal with a variety of challenges. So it is with Martin. By removing an important tool from her workbench Martin hampered her ability to address the very problem she took as central to our understanding of education. In what follows the idea is not to deride Martin’s work or to dismiss it as unhelpful to production of positive change in educational practice—charges (cid:0) 2006 Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education Society 76 Seals – Gender Anarchy as Social Justice Martin has made against other of her commentators. Instead, the argument presented here is offered in a spirit of reconciliation and progress. Martin, it seems to me, took a misstep in moving from her early work to her later. That misstep involved a move from a gender neutral conception of education to a conception of education that favored one gender over another. In order to correct this philosophical faux pas the gender neutrality of Martin’s early work needs to be strengthened and clarified. Thus, the reappraisal of Martin offered here should be read as (re)constructive criticism, as an attempt to state the rules that govern gender fairness in the politics of educational practice. Revisiting Martin’s Early Work Reclaiming a Conversation formally addresses a neglected issue that, despite its neglect, remains central to clear articulation of a consistent and coherent feminism. That issue is the ideal of education for women. Neither philosophers nor feminists put women in a position to claim the kind of education they want and deserve (RC, 5). That education, at extreme odds to the education that women currently receive, is one that includes women’s experience and thoughts in form and in content (RC, 2). These ruminations on the general categories of women’s experience and thought may seem to commit Martin to essentialism even in her early work but Martin is sophisticated enough in her thinking to know that women’s education can arise only in a specific context. That context is the state, construed broadly as the idea of social justice, in which education occurs. Greater specificity of the notion of the state may be found in the work of two political theorists, Robert Alford and Roger Friedland. Alford and Friedland distinguish between the government and the state. A government is the specific regime in power at any one moment, while a state is the political culture of a given area. A political culture provides a logic of politics, a set of rules that constitute the political game and determine legitimate moves within that game. Although political actors may not be fully cognizant of the logic of their politics it is still the case that any logic of politics is “a set of practices—behaviors, institutional forms, ideologies—that have social functions and are defended by politically organized interests.”7 This constitutes the centrality to feminism of the issue of women’s education. Martin’s ideal of a properly feminist education cannot be realized independently of a political context. A change in the rules or logic of the gender politics in which education is carried out must take place for women to claim the education they want and deserve. Indeed much of Reclaiming a Conversation is an attempt to describe the context of justice in which the feminist educational ideal of equality between what Martin calls the productive processes of society (politics and economics) and the reproductive processes of society (including conception and birth, childrearing, tending the sick, caring for family needs and running a household). Martin alternatively describes PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION – 2006/Volume 37 77 male/female differences in terms of “traits” with rationality, objectivity, and autonomy used to describe male characteristics and feeling, nurturance, and connectedness female ones (RC, 6).8 Martin insists that any education so constituted as to favor one set of these traits over the other is overly narrow and equally debilitating to both sexes (RC, 7). However, description of the state able to sustain and support such an education is carried out in Reclaiming a Conversation in much the same spirit in which Scholastic philosophers approached description of the Almighty. That is, Martin proceeds primarily by contrast, describing in five cases the failure to attain a clear conception of an appropriately feminist political order. She does not describe that order directly. In defense of her largely negative and historical presentation of the main themes of Reclaiming a Conversation Martin distinguishes between a conversation and a debate (RC, 10). A conversation is circular in form, cooperative in manner, and constructive in intent. It involves interchange between human beings, not adversaries. The point of a conversation is to talk, listen, and learn. A debate, contrariwise, focuses on a single question with two clear-cut positions, one of which is a winner and the other a loser. Because Martin’s own position lurks between the lines of what she writes and haunts the theories she considers (but one and all rejects), the effect of the presentation falls somewhere between conversation and debate. “Discourse” may more accurately describe the true spirit of the book; where “discourse” is taken as “formal and lengthy presentation of a position on a given topic.” At any rate, the interpretation developed here is premised on the assumption that Martin has a point of view which she seems, for understandable rhetorical purposes, unwilling to articulate clearly but cannot help but articulate, even if obscurely, in her criticisms of other philosophers. This interpretive approach to Martin’s book does not interfere with her stated desire to create “acquaintanceship and conversation, not discipline and dogma” (RC, 175); but it does permit clarification of some of her main themes. In particular, Martin’s readers are invited by the style of presentation to get themselves straight on two central concepts: “epistemic equality” and “gender in its relation to sex.” What follows is an attempt to explicate the positive philosophical position on gender politics these two concepts express. The Touchstone of Epistemic Equality The ideal of epistemic equality between men and women is one of the key concepts Martin explores in the negative. Martin defines epistemic equality as the converse of epistemic inequality where epistemic inequality is taken to be “inequality in knowledge itself” (RC, 3). In her description of epistemic inequality Martin lists at least three counts on which “disciplines fall short of the ideal of epistemic equality for women: they exclude women from their subject matter, distort the female according to the male image of her, and deny value to characteristics the society considers feminine (RC, 3).” But defining by 78 Seals – Gender Anarchy as Social Justice converse leaves open to interpretation the inner workings of epistemic inequality. That is, it is hard from the description offered to tell whether the source of the epistemic inequality is substantive (exclusion from subject matters), normative (denial of value to the feminine), meta-epistemic (male distortion of the female) or all three equally (or in varying degrees) at the same time. Clearly, Martin does not believe the source of epistemic inequality is to be treated as meta-epistemic. If epistemic differences between men and women were treated as the result of fundamentally different approaches to knowledge or entailed fundamentally different ways of knowing, Martin’s effort would be inherently misbegotten. When men and women mean different things by knowledge, no political solution need apply. The epistemic gap between male knowledge and female knowledge becomes unbridgeable unless spanned by biological engineering. Similarly, Martin’s project receives no sustenance from any analysis that finds the primary source of epistemic inequality in substantive exclusion of women from knowledge of certain subject matters or the knowledge that comprises certain subject matters. This approach to epistemic inequality trivializes the issue in a way that makes philosophical analysis irrelevant to its resolution. Remedy would require only empirical determination of the areas from which women are excluded and remediation of the exclusion. If, however, epistemic inequality is taken to be a matter concerning normative epistemology then Martin’s approach is not only philosophically relevant to the problem but promising of its solution. The discussion becomes philosophically oriented in so far as it seeks the conditions for varying valuations of men’s and women’s knowings. This, in fact, is just what Martin is about. She ties the ideal of women’s education to a series of political ideals. The two ideals co-vary to the extent that educational ideals match changes in political ideals. From this it follows that to change women’s education in such a way that it matches more exactly a model of epistemic equality the state must, over time, be molded in feminist fashion. Martin’s argument as to what “feminist” ought to mean in this case turns in large part on the distinction between traits typically characterized as female and traits usually labeled male. As she sees it the problem is that female traits are ignored in education. Instead, education focuses almost exclusively on the so-called male characteristics. To achieve a non-dichotomous education it is necessary to bring female characteristics into the educational realm (RC, 193); and the surest way to do that, it may be presumed, is to allow them to find their way into public life. Finally, this normative approach to rewriting the rules of politics regarding sex-based traits holds the promise of solving the problem of epistemic inequality at a faster than case-by-case pace and, at the same time, PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION – 2006/Volume 37 79 avoids the absurd attempt to bridge an unbridgeable, biologically-based, intellectual gap between men and women. Finally, a normative conception of epistemic inequality exposes motives for the creation of meta-epistemic difference myths and exclusion of women from some subject-matter disciplines. The former serves to shore up and the latter to perpetuate judgments about the relative unimportance of women’s knowledge. Thus, to focus on normative epistemic issues is to focus simultaneously on all three epistemic problems associated with epistemic inequality. For these reasons, Martin’s notion of epistemic inequality should be read as picking out any epistemologically normative attitude toward men’s and women’s knowledge that finds knowledge typically categorized as feminine or typically associated with women unequal in importance to knowledge typically associated with men or typically categorized as masculine. Conversely, the ideal of epistemic equality picks out any epistemologically normative attitude that finds knowledge typically categorized as feminine or typically associated with women as equally important as knowledge typically categorized as masculine or typically associated with men. This solution to the puzzle of epistemic equality, though, contains a puzzle of its own which also requires analysis. Equality and Difference Epistemic equality contains an oddity. In order to determine if men’s and women’s knowledges are valued as equally important it must be possible to differentiate between men’s and women’s knowledges. However, if that distinction can be made, it becomes difficult to explain how equality can be achieved. It seems difficult at least to the extent that some supposedly noticeable difference is supposed to make no noticeable difference. How can this be? Martin blocks herself from any easy route to explanation by her tendency to use “sex” and “gender” interchangeably. In English, of course, there is considerable linguistic temptation to blur the difference. “Men” and “women,” “woman” and “man” serve as middling words that express the tendency of our culture to map the gender continuum of feminine-masculine onto an often presumptuously prearranged sex dichotomy of female/male. However, these two are different in denotation and can be used as one only at substantial theoretical cost. When man:woman knowledge is treated as male/female knowledge feminism becomes a fascist regime. That is, any male will have to learn man knowledge just as any female will have to learn woman knowledge whether he or she is interested in doing so or not. This is true, furthermore, whatever the value status of either epistemology. Whether valued as equally important or valued as unequally important, whether the scale tips toward female knowledge or male or neither one, individuals will learn a body of knowledge appropriate to their physical, rather than their intellectual 80 Seals – Gender Anarchy as Social Justice characteristics. This arrangement, to be sure, is able to meet criteria of epistemic equality in so far as it actually does differ between the epistemologies and in so far as it may possibly allow equal valuation of them. However, the sacrifice to individual choice hardly seems to fit the liberative nature of feminism generally or Martin’s project in particular. Fortunately, a less objectionable result may be obtained if Martin is allowed to take back detachment from gender and replace it with detachment from sex. When institutions and the like are detached from sex, the fact that they are gendered becomes largely irrelevant to feminist aims. This is for the simple reason that to call a thing or characteristic feminine or masculine is not to restrict it by definition to enjoyment by either females or males alone. Unlike the situation described above in which sex forcibly determined gender propriety, gender does not determine sex. Masculine and feminine knowledges may be equally available both to females and males without contradiction. In settings in which they are equally available, epistemic equality has been achieved. This, then, is the interpretation that seems to best fit Martin’s desideratum of epistemic equality. Feminine and masculine knowledges ought to be equally available to both females and males and that availability should articulate itself in terms of freedom of choice to learn either or both independently of sex characteristics of the learner. Any society that achieves this ideal will offer ideal support for the education of women. Martin’s discussion of various ideal societies and the views of education of females they support bears this interpretation out. Five Failures at Epistemic Equality Discussion to this point suggests, then, that there are four conditions separately necessary and together sufficient for the actualization of epistemic equality between men and women. Epistemic equality obtains if and only if: 1. It is possible to differentiate between gender traits (the Differentiation Condition); 2. These gender traits must be viewed as separate from sex characteristics (Separation Condition); 3. The gender traits must be valued equally as regards their importance to individual lives and society as a whole (Value Equality Condition); and 4. Exercise of gender traits must be freely available to members of both sexes on an individual and trait by trait basis (Gender Anarchy Condition). Violation of any one of these conditions constitutes violation of epistemic equality and dooms the education of women to unequal status PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION – 2006/Volume 37 81 relative to the education of men. Not surprisingly, each of the philosophers Martin submits to scrutiny in Reclaiming a Conversation violates at least one condition of epistemic equality. Mary Wollstonecraft violates the Differentiation Condition. Her basic strategy in A Vindication of the Rights of Women9is to prove that women are as rational as men. A key step in this proof is to redefine the home as a place of equality and rational affection (RC, 79). In doing so she forces feeling into absolute subordination to reason (RC, 90) thereby presenting us, as Martin says, “with an ideal of female education that gives pride of place to traits traditionally associated with males at the expense of others traditionally associated with females” (RC, 100). Thus, Wollstonecraft ends by denying any difference as regards gender. Jean-Jacques Rousseau violates the Separation Condition. For Rousseau, in Emile,10 sex is the primary determinant of nature. Sex is what distinguishes men from women both biologically and psychologically (RC, 43). Females, he thinks, are by nature suited only to the triple role of wife-mother-homemaker (RC, 40). Their education must train for these activities and these alone (RC, 41). Thus, Rousseau denies that gender traits can be separated from sex characteristics. Plato and Charlotte Perkins Gilman run afoul of the Value Equality Condition, each in his or her own way. Among the ruling or guardian class of his Republic, Plato guarantees “equal role opportunity” for females but does not guarantee their “equal role occupancy” (RC, 19). He does not because he tends to disparage feminine traits (RC, 24) and articulate guardian-preferred traits in terms of traditionally masculine characteristics (RC, 32). In Plato’s judgment, then, masculine traits are valued above feminine ones and gendered epistemic equality finds no expression in the Republic.11 Gilman violates the Value Equality Condition, too; but from the other side. According to Martin, part of Gilman’s project in her utopian novel, Herland,12 is to prove that the world would be a better place if women were to run it (RC, 140). So long, that is, as they run it in a certain way. The cultural ideal of Herland is motherhood, conceived socially as a particular relationship between adults and children in which the adults exhibit an overriding concern for the welfare and development of the children (RC, 140–142). The good citizen in Herland is, Martin claims, by definition the good mother (RC, 151). Note this is distinctively not a story about the assimilation of women into male roles in a male world. Rather, it is a putative extension to men of the traits stereotypically associated with women (RC, 163–164). The result, however, is an elitism of the reproductive processes of society (RC, 169) and, simultaneously, a failure to observe the equal value condition of epistemic equality. 82 Seals – Gender Anarchy as Social Justice Worth noting at this point, too, is the fact that Martin’s later work violates the Value Equality Condition of gender anarchy in exactly the same way Martin says Gilman does. For example, Martin’s dismissal of martial values, appearing on pages 17–19 of The Schoolhome, as inherently dangerous and corruptive of domestic tranquility clearly asserts an attitude of disvalue toward traditionally masculine traits. Her replacement of those traits with the three C’s of care, concern, and connectedness demonstrate just as clearly a desire to play a zero-sum politics of gender traits. It is for this reason that Martin’s later work is easily criticized for being essentialist and offering (re)feminization as the ideal solution for the woes facing contemporary schooling. In brief, Martin’s later work overturns the gender anarchy expressed in her early work. Finally, Catherine E. Beecher falls out of favor on the Gender Anarchy Condition. A Treatise on Domestic Economy13 recommends the subordination of women to men in civic matters and the subordination of wives to husbands in private ones (RC, 106). At the same time, Beecher takes pains to prove that women are neither less rational nor less autonomous than the men to whom they are to be and remain subordinate (RC, 104). There’s the difficulty. There simply is no explanation in Beecher as to why it is that women, the equal of men in character, must remain subordinate to men in society (RC, 123). The limitation of men and women to certain realms in society remains as an indefensible surd in Beecher’s system, perhaps tied only to her belief that Christianity and Democracy are linked together. In any case, Beecher’s position violates the free availability of all gender traits to men and women alike that is required by epistemic equality. The Ideal Society and the Education of All Martin’s positive recommendations for a state and an education supportive of gender anarchy emerge from her largely nugatory critique of epistemic inequality. Education, Martin suggests, needs to be gender sensitive (RC, 195): “The existence of genderized traits makes sensitivity to gender a prerequisite to sound educational policy and so does the persistence into or own time of the value hierarchy [associated with feminine and masculine gender traits]” (RC, 196). The right kind of sensitivity to gender is encapsulated in a gender anarchic education, an education that provides boys and girls with equal access to and opportunity for practice of both feminine and masculine knowledges (RC, 196). That educational opportunity will require reconceptualization of current anti-feminine curricula in both the hidden curriculum and the overt curriculum. Martin’s hope is that these changes will raise consciousness in society generally and help minimize the current, culturally constructed division between feminine and masculine traits (RC, 197). Penultimately this will lead to a gender plural liberal democracy in which individual preference will guide PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION – 2006/Volume 37 83 gender choice. Ultimately society-wide changes will transform gender categories themselves, transcending commonly and casually accepted notions of gender and role (RC, 198). Well, perhaps not; it may be overly optimistic to hope that the state will wither away. However, even if the state is here to stay, the system of rules by which it operates, the logic of its politics, remains subject to change. The system of education and gender politics Martin envisions in her early work meets all the conditions required for gender anarchy. Her proposed state and the education it implements take gender differences seriously, detach them from sex, and in theory provide equal access to and evaluation of femininity and masculinity by members of both sexes. Such a system maximizes the opportunity of each individual to choose his or her gender roles free from societal and institutional constraint. To the degree Martin clearly outlines the general features of this system; she successfully reclaims the conversation about women’s education by redirecting the discussion to talk about the education of all. Legitimate concern that instituting a politics of gender anarchy will diminish the ability of individuals to form relationships with other, like- gendered persons may be assuaged to some extent by recalling Marilyn Friedman’s argument that a culture that values autonomy, even for a few, creates the possibility for social transformation. The overall societal quality of relationality is not compromised by any ruptures exercise of autonomy may promote in any particular social relationships. Instead, Friedman concludes, “in most cases in which autonomous reflection does lead people to reject the commitments that bound them to particular others, they are at the same time taking up new commitments that link them through newly shared conviction to different particular others. This is one important reason for thinking of autonomy as social in character.”14 The sociality of gender anarchy, then, rests on the fact that it does not lay out a specific set of gender characteristics as acceptable for any given set of individuals. Instead, gender anarchy creates cultural rules governing individual choice of gender traits and, as a politics of gender, suggests that individual choice in this regard be free of institutional and societal constraint. In this way gender anarchy brings Martin’s concept of epistemic equality down to Earth. Gender anarchy connects feminist thought to specific cultural contexts and focuses attention on choice among gender traits available in context. This frees discussion of gender traits from the more universalistic treatment provided by Martin when she considers gender characteristics as knowledges or processes. Gender anarchy also avoids charges of vagueness, essentialism, and feminization leveled against Martin’s later work. It reduces vagueness by offering a set of rules that lay out an acceptable, anti-bias logic of gender politics by describing political norms for gender choices. It deflects charges of 84 Seals – Gender Anarchy as Social Justice essentialism and feminization by hooking the concept of epistemic equality to a decidedly non-feminine feminism. In these latter regards, gender anarchy codifies a gender politics expressed in the work of feminists such as Rebecca West, Judith Butler, and Joan Scott. West perhaps initiated the line of feminist thought that endorses free choice as the hallmark of feminist activity with her famous quote, “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I know only that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”15 This sums up the importance to feminism of freedom in the face of gender constraint. More recently, Butler has done feminism the service of freeing feminist thinking from essentialistic ideas of “woman-ness.” Such ideas, she argues, close off possibilities for critique and politicization of gender norms.16 Joan Scott goes the further step by insisting that difference is the key component to any fully functional feminism. As she says: Placing equality and difference in antithetical relationship has, then, a double effect. It denies the way in which difference has long figured in political notions of equality and it suggests that sameness is the only ground on which equality can be claimed. It thus puts feminists in an impossible position, for as long as we argue within the terms of discourse set up by this opposition we grant the current conservative premise that since women cannot be identical to men in all respects, they cannot expect to be equal to them. The only alternative, it seems to me, is to refuse to oppose equality to difference and insist continually on differences—differences as the condition of individual and collective identities, differences as the constant challenge to the fixing of those identities, history as the repeated illustration of the play of differences, differences as the very meaning of equality itself.17 Gender anarchy as applied to education suggests that schools support by their policies and practices just this kind of identity formation via individual difference, letting collective identities form out of individual identities, not vice versa.18 Notes 1. Jane Roland Martin, The Schoolhome: Rethinking Schools for Changing Families (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 2. For details of the debate see Audrey Thompson, “Surrogate Family Values: The Refeminization of Teaching,” Educational Theory 47, no. 3 (1997): 315–339; Jane Roland Martin, “What Should We Do with a Feminist Educational Theory When We have One? A Response to Audrey Thompson,” Curriculum Inquiry 33, no. 1 (2003): 67–77; and Audrey Thompson,