musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Is thought gendered?


There was a time when I thought I actually understood the world, but I wonder if I was just casting my eyes about me from a plinth. I was a gynaecologist in another life, and although I tried to understand the other side, perhaps I was merely looking through a glass darkly. It takes more years than I practiced to understand the nuances of behaviour with which I was dealing, the significance of the messages to which I was privy.

We are all affected by context, all exposed to biases that no doubt influence the way we interact with others -no one of us is an island entire of itself; every one is a piece of the continent, a part of the main, to paraphrase Donne. I don’t believe that women think differently than men, but rather that society may situate them in positions that lead them to have different interests, and suggest that they should contribute differently.

Now that I am retired from my specialty, however, I have found more time to wonder about the disparate influences, the cultural conditions, that have led to misunderstandings… often, in fact, to discrimination.

Of course the subject is such a large one, it is probably better to narrow the focus for this short essay: is there any reason to believe that women would have a different approach to philosophy than men? The traditional idea has always been that philosophy is neutral, a disinterested enquiry essentially untouched by history or culture. But the thinker is not a disembodied mind; the context in which one is situated affects one’s thoughts in ways that might not be appreciated by someone living in another. In fact, feminist theories argue that contextualizing the enquiry might be the only way to bring to light important truths and expand their understanding of the world by exposing biases that are so firmly rooted in patriarchal societies that they have become imperceptible… [i]

Each of us -whether man, or woman- is different, and has been exposed to different realities, different expectations, and so one might expect different reactions. How we have been treated, and the opportunities afforded us colour how we understand the world, and what we know about it. But perhaps more importantly, regulate how our views are received. And although there have been philosophical contributions from women throughout the ages, most philosophers have been male; there has been little philosophical treatment of how women view and experience the world.

‘One such phenomenon is taking care of others. Care ethics focuses on the wellbeing of caregivers and their dependents, giving a voice to people in such relationships and to the injustice and oppression they’re often subject to… Instead of placing the notion of justice at the centre of ethical thinking and focusing on building moral relations and societies around that, they replace it with the notion of care.’[ii]

Interestingly, traditional ethical theories of the 18th and 19th centuries defined what is important in terms of dispassionate reason and autonomy. But, let’s face it, emotion plays a large role in our relations -we connect with others, and we depend on the relationships.

Unlike the abstract formal relationships described by some ethical theories, many of the social relations that we find ourselves in are often unequal, emotional, and sometimes involuntary -the family is an example. Historically, since women have been assigned a role as the linchpin in caring for the domestic needs of the family, one might expect a female philosopher to have less objective views, pursue less of a disinterested, impartial enquiry. But, does that invalidate the ability to examine them? Deny the worth of any conclusions derived from them?

Another elephant in the room, of course, is pregnancy, the experience of which men cannot hope to share except by proxy, as it were. So, if a woman’s experience of being pregnant both physically and emotionally, clashes with ‘objective’ accounts of pregnancy, whose voice should be the authority? Should not the voice of experience, also be accepted as the voice of enlightened self-examination?

It has been suggested that, historically, at least, most ‘philosophy has been done by privileged men without families who had the luxury of doing philosophy in isolation – like Descartes in his room contemplating the truth about knowledge, isolated from the mundane exigencies of everyday life. The problem with such isolated thinking is that it skews the way we think about the world and ignores viewpoints that might be revealing of another dimension of reality.’[iii] Which, of course, is largely what philosophy is all about.

Should personal involvement in the subjects which may be more engaging for women disqualify them as being too subjective? Too involved to properly analyse what men with their enforced distance think they can see more clearly? Surely philosophy is about all of reality; there are no out-of-bounds limits, are there? Philosophy requires persistent examination of our assumptions and presuppositions, with dogged self-examination. Yet, ideologies still creep in, and biases continue to hide in unexpected crevasses if we are not careful. Philosophy does not -or at least should not- privilege particular points of view, nor should it exclude inquiries into its influence on the way people think and its meaning for their lives.

There was a time when women’s voices were disregarded, or at least, not taken as seriously as they deserved. As Eileen O’Neill, a historian of philosophy put it, women seemed to ‘write in ‘disappearing ink’… because their contribution was considered dangerous as it challenged the status quo and thus was systematically silenced, or because questions that concerned women weren’t considered serious enough, or because the mere fact that something was written by women was sufficient to indicate that it was somehow lightweight.’[iv] I can’t help but think of something which the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai once observed: ‘We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.’

This silence seems to be disappearing, thank goodness. It seems to me that women’s voices are finally being recognized for bringing philosophy into the lived-world, and perhaps making it relevant to the lives of those who would otherwise have little interest in academic philosophy. But they are also bringing an ageing gynaecologist to a fuller understanding of a world whose doors were seldom left ajar for him.

[i] https://aeon.co/essays/is-there-something-special-about-the-way-women-do-philosophy

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid

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