Helen Beebee asks ‘where did all the women go’ in philosophy and says that it’s a hard question to which we don’t yet have all the answers (right); and that this lack of answers is not surprising given that ‘until very recently the marked absence of women philosophers wasn’t even a topic of casual discussion amongst philosophers, let alone one deemed worthy of further investigation’ (wrong). (See http://theconversation.com/i-think-therefore-i-am-a-man-philosophys-woman-problem-17863)
Beebee has a paper just out, ‘Women and deviance in philosophy’, in a book co-edited by Katrina Hutchinson and Fiona Jenkins, Women and Philosophy: What Needs to Change? I haven’t seen Fiona for many a long year (Hi, Fiona), but she was an undergraduate at Bristol University, and took my course in Feminist Theory in 1986. So Fiona at least first considered these questions right at the start of her career. Didn’t she mention that to Helen Beebee?
And my arrival at the then all-male philosophy department of Bristol in 1982 was greeted with enthusiasm precisely because I was the first woman there, and the incumbents wanted that to change. For many years the department had been headed by Stephan Körner, who allegedly would not countenance a woman on the staff, so as soon as he went off to do whatever it is that retired philosophy professors do, like a bunch of naughty schoolboys itching to misbehave, they went and employed me. Because, way back then, over 30 years ago, they were acutely aware of the relative lack of women in philosophy. Various members of the department had tried to appoint women to posts, but had been overruled by what (not to speak ill of the dead), appears to have been a heavy dose of old fashioned sexism on the part of Professor Körner when he was head of department.
And way back then the students were clamouring to study feminism, which is why the department asked me to teach it. From 1983 to 1992 I taught classes covering various topics but including the question of how women and philosophy might or might not relate. That’s really not what I’d call very recent. The files I have are all dusty, the paper’s gone brown, the class notes are all handwritten, or badly typed – yes, typed! – and photocopied very amateurishly. And I have piles and piles of overhead projector transparencies. I won’t even stop to explain to the younger readers what these are – because you can just Google it. But I think you’ll find that this suggests that none of this was ‘very recent’. We didn’t even have email. Just think about it!
And throughout the 1980s I would from time to time traipse off to London to meetings of the Society for Women in Philosophy – organised by notices sent through the postal service – bless! – where, inter alia, we discussed the relationship of women to philosophy, and the relative lack of numbers of women, and the difficulty of progressing one’s career. We discussed, for example, whether philosophy seminars used overly aggressive questioning. We discussed if women tended to be more interested in certain questions, or if they tended to address these questions in typical ways different from the mainstream. We discussed sexism, and we discussed gender stereotyping.
I wouldn’t at all say I’ve been obsessed by this question of the place of women in philosophy and their attrition up the career ladder, but I’ve thought about it on and off for a while now, and lots and lots of people have worked on it. One idea that attracts me is that philosophy lends itself especially to the need to carve out and occupy an argumentative space; and that this is easier for certain individuals, and certain social groups that others; and that in general and for various reasons, women don’t do so well at this (although I think there are some means of inclusion and exclusion which can apply to various different people, affecting not only women, and not equally affecting all women).
What do I mean by ‘carving out an argumentative space’, and why does it matter? I think this is especially vital in philosophy, the discipline of debate and argument par excellence, and a discipline where the assessment of the standard of any work is especially problematic. To succeed, you need to get enough of the right people to listen to you and agree that what you’re saying is good. Carving out and successfully occupying this argumentative space encompasses various things – it’s the need to be listened and responded to, verbally and in print; and in practice this involves things like being able to swan across the Atlantic or wherever it is to go to the best conferences, being able to go to the pub after seminars, being heard as the originator of an idea, not as just endorsing or elaborating someone else’s, actually having your work cited, not being so swamped with all the pastoral care that your research time is eaten into, having your research and teaching topics treated as serious, etc etc etc. One thing that helps enormously is the simple trick of being able to sound authoritative; it’s a knack to which some are born, but which to a certain extent can be acquired or enhanced.
And there are various tricks to add to one’s toolkit. Claiming that what you are doing is new is one great way to mark a bit of philosophical territory with your own scent. I had a bit of a break from philosophy – in fact, I’m only doing it now by the skin of my teeth. On my return, mugging up on the latest developments in various fields, I was initially sunk into gloom at the vast amount of new work there seemed to be. Until I actually read it. And found out that hardly any of it was actually new at all; slightly different, perhaps, some new nuance, some rediscovered wheel. Its authors just said it was new; often giving it some new label, or coining some phrase to describe something (that’s a good one to remember, because then people have to cite you! Everyone will be discussing the ‘Finknottle – Glossop debate’. But of course, you have to get people to cite you, and not someone else.)
In a discipline where it’s not entirely implausible to say that everything is merely a ‘footnote to Plato’, the strategy of claiming that your work is new rather surprisingly often works, if carried off with a certain degree of aplomb. It’s a jolly good wheeze because it also often has the effect of turning attention away from those who have worked in the same topic before you, thus clearing the way for you to colonise the argumentative space. All part of the effective toolkit of making your way in the world of academic philosophy. But not terribly helpful in advancing debate, if it also acts to cut off contact with all those who have contributed to the debate before you did. And it would be a pity if an attempt to consider why women’s presence in philosophy is relatively muted, itself mutes those very voices.