This is an extraordinarily good book, and it is all wrong that it should have taken this long for me to discover it. It shows, by careful research of an open-ended kind, that women's intellectual development does not follow the same path as that of men, particularly as outlined in the influential research of William Perry.
Perry traced, in college students, a progression from basic dualism to passive learning, to an appreciation of multiplicity of views, to a subjectivism which says that my opinion is as good as any other, to a relativism subordinate, where the objectivity of an academic discipline is respected as a way of knowing, to a full appreciation of relativism, where it becomes the real way a person thinks, and not just something adopted within a discipline. Knowledge is therefore constructed, not given - that is the final stage of learning.
This all sounded plausible enough, but it made abstract objectivity the only way forward, and this seemed to be a repeat of much the same error as Carol Gilligan had found in the research on ethical outlooks of Lawrence Kohlberg. Gilligan, a former co-worker of Kohlberg, had shown that his scoring system did not do justice to the ethic of care, responsibility and connectedness which many women adhered to in their thinking. It focussed strictly on questions of abstract truth and justice, and again the emphasis was on objectivity.
What the authors found in their research on women was a somewhat different developmental model. The first and most basic position they found was silence. Many women had simply been silenced, firstly by their own families and then by their husbands and other men. They had no voice and did not acknowledge any right to think.
The second position was received knowledge, gained from listening to the voices of others. Women at this stage had no respect for their own opinions and regarded other people and books as the source of all knowledge. I say "stage", but the authors of this book are much less confident than Perry or Kohlberg that these positions are stages in an inevitable process of development.
The next position they outline is subjective knowledge: the inner voice. Here the woman has made a breakthrough into respecting her own opinions, her own way of seeing things. But it is limited by the fact that she then finds it hard or impossible to see things any other way. It is as if her hold on it were quite precarious. Such women often reject the masculine world as being alien and hard or impossible to relate to.
The position the authors discuss next is procedural knowledge, which they describe as the voice of reason. But in their major departure from the Perry sequence, they find in women two versions of this, which they describe as the separated and the connected.
The separated version is much like Perry's: it relies on objectivity. In a phrase, it is to play the doubting game. Everything that is put up as fact must be doubted, opposed in an adversarial manner. Only that which stands up to the most hostile scrutiny can be accepted.
The connected version is quite different. It is still procedural, it is still reasoned, but this time we are playing the believing game. We go into an author or a theory and systematically get inside it, or allow it to get inside us, so that we can really turn it round, examine it, cherish it, experience it until it yields up its secrets. Often this is done in discussion with others, but these are not the discussions of the separated version where each tries to shoot the other down, but more like the sharing of small truths to make a larger truth. More like gossip than debate and depending upon the participants knowing and respecting one another as people.
The final stage the book speaks of is constructed knowledge: integrating the voices. Here the woman sees that both subjectivity and objectivity are important, but that both have to be transcended if any really adequate knowing is to be had. This is a trained and disciplined subjectivity which can cope with anything which may come along.
So far, so good, and so interesting. But the authors go on to look at two other very important questions: first of all the families which these women came from and the startling way in which a woman's way of knowing comes very directly, in the first place at least, from the family atmosphere in which she was brought up.
The second question they deal with, and very fascinating it is too, is what the implications of all this are for those institutions which train and educate women. Here, without oversimplifying, they show that much of the traditional teaching in colleges and universities is quite unsuitable for women's learning. They supply a lot of hints for important changes which need to be made.
Excellently printed and produced too.
John Rowan
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