Beneath the Surface of the Abortion Dispute

Abstract

Feminist theory and politics have emerged from within two great traditions in Western moral, political, and social thought.¹ They have emerged from liberalism, which assumes that conflicts between the timeless and universal natural rights of rational individuals should be adjudicated within the free market of social contracts. And they have emerged from Marxism, which assumes that conflicts between the socially determined needs of “animals who labor” are created by divisions of labor in the social relations of production.

After receiving an undergraduate degree in literature from a women’s college in the mid-1950s, I worked for 10 years in the entertainment industry in New York City. After my second daughter was born, I returned to graduate school, first in sociology and then in philosophy; at this time, I commuted back to New York University in Manhattan from Albany, New York. Thus, during the period when many of my earlier and later friends were active in the civil rights movement and the radicalism of the 1960s, I was busy changing diapers, maintaining a style of living suitable for a faculty household, and going to graduate school. When the women’s movement arrived in Albany in the early 1970s, I was more than ready for it. In 1973, I began teaching at The Allen Center, an interdisciplinary college (which no longer exists) within the State University of New York at Albany. Since 1976, I have been in the philosophy department at the University of Delaware and have taught many women’s studies courses. Since 1981, I have been, by joint appointment, also in sociology. I have been a single parent since 1974, and my two daughters are now heading off on their own.

In philosophy, I began examining the problems created by positivist inheritances in current American epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of social science. During the last five years, my research and publications have focused on how the most abstract and formal aspects of Western thought reveal the distinctive “fingerprints” of the social groups that created this thought. Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Science, which I coedited with Merrill Hintikka, was published in March 1983 by Reidel; I am currently completing a monograph, (supported by the National Science Foundation and a Mina Shaughnessy Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education) that examines the problems for mainstream liberal and Marxist theories of knowledge created by the new research on women and gender in the social sciences and biology.

The opening paragraphs of the second section of my paper indicate some of the ways in which I suspect that my experiences have influenced my beliefs about the politics and the social values that lie beneath the surface of the abortion dispute.