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An Invitation to Feminist Ethics

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An Invitation
to Feminist Ethics
Second Edition
HILDE LINDEMANN
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lindemann, Hilde, author.
Title: An invitation to feminist ethics /Hilde Lindemann.
Description: 2nd Edition. | New York : Oxford University Press, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018058775 (print) | LCCN 2019006431 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190059347 (Online content) | ISBN 9780190059323 (updf) |
ISBN 9780190059330 (epub) | ISBN 9780190059316 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminist ethics. | Feminism—Moral and ethical aspects.
Classification: LCC BJ1395 (ebook) | LCC BJ1395 .L56 2019 (print) |
DDC 170.82—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058775
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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
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This book is for Ellen and Jack,
pieces of my heart
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
PA RT O N E OV E RV I EWS
1. What Is Feminist Ethics? 3

1.1 What Is Ethics? 4
1.2 What Is Feminism? 7
1.3 What Is Gender? 10
1.4 Power and Morality 15
1.5 Description and Prescription 16
1.6 Morality and Politics 19
For Further Reading 21
2. Discrimination and Oppression 23
2.1 Gender Neutrality 24
2.2 Androcentrism 26
2.3 Affirmative Action 29
2.4 The Dilemma of Difference 32
2.5 Oppression 33
2.6 Back to Gender Discrimination 37
3. Intersectionality 40
3.1 What Is Intersectionality? 41
3.2 Microaggressions 45
3.3 Why Is This So Hard? 48
4. The Importance of Who We Are 50
4.1 What Is a Personal Identity? 53
4.2 Damaged Identities 60
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4.3 Repairing the Damage 64

4.4 Countering Counterstories 67
5. Standard Moral Theories from a Feminist Perspective 75
5.1 Social Contract Theory 76
5.2 Utilitarianism 80
5.3 Kantian Ethics 83
5.4 What’s Wrong with This Picture? 88
5.5 The PowerPoint Problem 97
6. Feminist Ethics of Care and Responsibility 100
6.1 The Ethics of Care 103
6.2 Feminist Responsibility Ethics 113
PA RT T WO C L O SE -U P S
7. Bioethics 123
7.1 Bioethics in the Dominant Mode 126
7.2 Bioethics in a Feminist Mode 137
8. Violence 150
8.1 Rape and Sexual Harassment 151
8.2 Rape in War 164
8.3 Domestic Violence 167
9. Globalization and Cross-Cultural Judgments 173
9.1 The So-Called Southern Debt 174
9.2 Neoliberalism 176
9.3 The Global Version of Women’s Work 180
9.4 Cross-Cultural Judgments 190
Index 197
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Preface
Three themes came together in feminist work in the late 1970s and
early 1980s to give rise to the term “feminist ethics.” One theme was
that of feminist attention to contemporary ethical issues, such as
equality of opportunity, war, and rape. Another was that of uncovering
sexist biases in the traditional ethical theories. And the third was that
of the differences other than gender—such as race, class, sexual orien-
tation, ability, and ethnicity—that can bring different perspectives to
bear on ethics. Since then, a rapidly burgeoning literature in feminist
ethics has not only enlarged on these three themes but also added a
fourth: the development of feminist moral theories.
The majority of textbooks in philosophy don’t contain very much
of this work, although there are a few exceptions. To be sure, the
standard texts include a handful of articles by women philosophers,
but typically not philosophers—whether women or men—who cite
the feminist literature and use feminist methodologies. When the
work of feminists does find its way into these volumes, it’s likely only
to aim at issues of female plumbing (childbirth, egg donation, abor-
tion), or caregiving, as if feminist ethics were essentially about what
goes on in the women’s hut, away from the rest of the village.
It’s hard to say why this is so. In other areas of the humanities, femi-
nist analysis and criticism is reasonably well integrated into the schol-
arly conversation. Textbooks in literary criticism, for example, include
feminist work as a matter of course. The same is true in history, theatre
studies, religious studies, and the social sciences. For the most part,
though, philosophers have only just begun to pay attention to gender,
race, and other abusive power systems, as they begin to realize that
ignoring these matters distorts philosophical inquiry.
An Invitation to Feminist Ethics is an attempt to encourage fur-
ther conversation. It’s meant to support the efforts of philosophers
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who may not know much about feminist ethics but want to learn. Its
primary audience, though, is undergraduates, both those who have
had some exposure to philosophical ethics and those who haven’t. It’s
designed to be small enough to serve as a supplement to the usual
introductory textbook, but it can also function as a stand-alone text
in courses in feminist ethics, feminist philosophy, women’s studies,
bioethics, and the like.
The book is divided into two parts. The first part, “Overviews,”
begins by describing feminist ethics in broad strokes, saying some-
thing about what it isn’t, as well as explaining what it is. Since fem-
inist ethics is the attempt to understand, criticize, and correct our
moral beliefs and practices, using gender as a central category of anal-
ysis, Chapter 1 introduces the concept of gender, as well as drawing
contrasts between feminist and nonfeminist ways of doing ethics. In
Chapter 2 I offer a survey of the feminist ethicist’s toolkit—the set of
essential concepts that feminists use to do their work. Crucial among
these are the concepts of gender neutrality, androcentrism, difference,
and oppression, all of which I put to work on a discussion of affirm-
ative action. Chapter 3 adds another tool: intersectionality. I explain
what it is and how it works, and then take a stab at figuring out what
makes it so hard to deal with.
Chapter 4 looks at how personal identities operate—how they’re
conferred, how we “do” them, how they set up socially (and sometimes
morally) normative expectations for the way some sorts of people are
supposed to behave and how other sorts of people may treat them.
Identities are of special concern to feminist ethics, I argue, because
they interact with abusive power systems to establish who gets to do
what to whom.
Chapter 5 is an overview of the impartial, impersonal, univer-
salistic, hyperrational moral theories that have dominated ethics in
English-speaking countries for the last two centuries. The overview
is followed by feminist criticisms of the approach to morality that’s
presupposed by these theories. Chapter 6 is a survey of feminist moral
theories. Although there are many of these, I confine myself to two
sorts of theories: the ethics of care and what might loosely be called an
ethics of responsibility.
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Preface xi
The second part of the book, “Close-ups,” zooms in on three

topics of particular concern to feminist ethicists. Chapter 7 offers a
head shot of bioethics through a feminist lens, because bioethics is
the most popular ethical discourse—the one that seems to matter to
people in all walks of life—so it’s useful to see what feminists do with
it. Chapter 8 offers a close look at how feminist philosophers think
about violence, because violence, when it’s gendered, directly harms
women. That’s why the chapter focuses on rape, the #MeToo move-
ment, rape as a weapon of war, and domestic violence. And the final
chapter looks carefully at ethical issues arising from the globalized
economy, because here again gender plays a strong role. Not only
does globalization join forces with gender to intensify the oppression
of women in debtor nations, but “women’s work” has itself become
globalized, often with disastrous consequences. The chapter—and the
close-ups—closes with a discussion of how cross-cultural judgments
can be made in an unconfused, feminist, nonarrogant manner.
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Acknowledgments
Many people have helped me write this book. Particular thanks go

to Margaret Urban Walker for talking me into the project in the first
place and then offering insightful suggestions for improving many of
the chapters. My dear friend Sara Ruddick read most of the book in
draft and was, as she always was, unflagging and kind in her help.
Jamie Lindemann Nelson completes the troika: she gave generously
of her advice and affection, and offered many unfailingly supportive
comments. This extremely fortunate philosopher thanks them.
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An Invitation to Feminist Ethics

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1
PART ONE
OVERVIEWS
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What Is Feminist Ethics?
A few years ago, a dentist in Ohio was convicted of having sex with
his female patients while they were under anesthesia. I haven’t been
able to discover whether he had to pay a fine or go to jail, but I do
remember that the judge ordered him to take a course in ethics. And
I recall thinking how odd that order was. Let’s suppose, as the judge
apparently did, that the dentist really and truly didn’t know it was
wrong to have sex with his anesthetized patients (this’ll stretch your
imagination, but give it a shot). Can we expect—again, as the judge
apparently did—that on completing the ethics course, the dentist
would be a better, finer man?
Hardly. If studying ethics could make you good, then those of us
with PhDs in moral philosophy would be absolute saints. I can’t speak
for all of us, of course, but though my colleagues are decent enough,
they’re no more moral than anyone else. Ethics doesn’t improve your
character. Its subject is morality, but its relationship to morality is that
of a scholarly study to the thing being studied. In that respect, the
relationship is a little like the relationship between grammar and lan-
guage. Let’s explore that analogy. People who are linguistically compe-
tent in English don’t have to stop and think about the correctness of
the sentence “Bellatrix gave it to him.” But here’s a harder one. Should
you say, “Bellatrix gave it to him who must not be named” or “Bellatrix
gave it to he who must not be named”? To sort this out, it helps to
know a little grammar: the systematic, scholarly description of the
structure of the language and the rules for speaking and writing it.
According to those rules, the object of the preposition “to” is the entire
clause that comes after it, and the subject of that clause is “he.” So, even
if it sounds peculiar to you, the correct answer is, “Bellatrix gave it to
he who must not be named.”
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4 Overviews
In a roughly similar vein, morally competent adults don’t have

to stop to think about whether it’s wrong to have sex with one’s
anesthetized patients. But if you want to understand whether it’s
wrong to have large signs in bars telling pregnant women not to drink,
or to sort out the conditions under which an act is rape, it helps to
know a little ethics. The analogy between grammar and ethics isn’t
exact, of course. For one thing, there’s probably more agreement about
what’s linguistically correct than about what’s morally correct. For
another, grammarians are concerned only with the structure of lan-
guage, not with the meaning or usage of particular words. In both
cases, though, the same point can be made: You already have to know
quite a lot about how to behave, either linguistically or morally, before
there’s much point in studying either grammar or ethics.
1.1. What Is Ethics?
Ethics is the scholarly study of morality. It sets out to understand

and justify people’s moral beliefs and the forms of life in which those
beliefs are practiced. And it also criticizes and corrects those beliefs
and practices. As an academic discipline, it can be divided into three
branches. The first branch is metaethics, the study of what morality is.
To engage in metaethics is to ask questions like these: What do moral
terms mean? Where do moral values come from? Do moral judgments
consist of statements that must be either true or false, or are they more
like applause or an expression of disgust? If moral judgments are true
or false, are they true just for me? For my society? For everybody?
Or false because there’s no such thing as morality? Do we have to do
what the moral rules tell us to because they’re commanded by God?
Because we’ve all tacitly agreed to? Because, paradoxically, it’s only by
putting ourselves under the law that we can be free?
The second branch is normative ethics, the study of moral
theories and concepts. The task of normative ethics is to set out and
critically examine the norms, or standards, that we can use both to
guide and to evaluate our actions. Here we find moral theories such
as the ethics of care, social contract theory, utilitarianism, Kantian
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What Is Feminist Ethics? 5
ethics, and virtue ethics. We also find accounts of integrity, oppres-

sion, justice, evil, and so on. You’re doing normative ethics when you
try to determine what duties you have to your parents or children,
or whether you should forgive somebody who isn’t sorry for having
mistreated you. Figuring out the moral difference (if there is one)
between making something happen and simply letting it happen is
also an exercise in normative ethics.
The third branch of ethics is practical ethics, the study of ethical is-
sues that arise within specific social practices. You will often hear this
called applied ethics, because on one popular picture of morality (which
I don’t buy) ethics at this level is a matter of taking the principles that
you’ve logically deduced from your moral theory at the normative level
and applying them to a concrete case. For reasons I’ll explain later, this
picture of morality seems all wrong to me, so rather than talk about
applications, I’ll describe this branch as the most practical of the three.
Examples of practical ethics are legal ethics, medical ethics, the ethics of
journalism, and business ethics, all of which set out to regulate the be-
havior of the people working in those fields. Environmental ethics and
bioethics—the study of ethical issues arising from the rapid advances
in biomedicine—belong to this branch as well. Here’s where you’d work
out the moral implications of professors’ dating their students. And
it’s here where the debates over abortion, academic freedom, climate
change, and physician-assisted suicide take place.
For your convenience, I’ve made a sketch map of some of the terri-
tory that’s covered by ethics. It’s incomplete, of course, and you prob-
ably won’t be familiar with all the terms on the map, but don’t worry
about that for now. You’ll pick up the ones you need as we go along.
Ethics Sketch Map
METAETHICS
Metaphysical Theories (theories of the basic nature of morality)
Noncognitivism (e.g., emotivism): moral judgments aren’t true or false
Cognitivism: moral judgments are true or false
Subjectivism: it’s true for me
Relativism: it’s true for some specific group of us
Objectivism: it’s true because of something independent of us
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6 Overviews
Monism: all moral values are commensurable; there can be no gen-

uine moral dilemmas
Pluralism: moral values are plural and therefore can conflict in
actual cases
Error theory: all moral propositions are false
Moral Epistemologies (theories of moral knowledge)

Foundationalism: moral truths rest on some fundamental moral
claim (e.g., the good for humans, the permission principle)
Coherentism: moral beliefs are true or acceptable if they are con-
sistent with one another
Moral particularism: what counts as a moral reason in one context
may not count as a reason in another
Skepticism: doubts whether there is moral knowledge
Naturalized moral epistemology: assumes that moral knowledge
arises out of and is corrected by our experience of the world
NORMATIVE ETHICS
Theories
Ethics of care
Kantian ethics
Social contract theory
Utilitarianism
Virtue theory
Accounts of
Integrity
Oppression
Justice
Evil
Human good
PRACTICAL ETHICS
Professional ethics (law, medicine, architecture, journalism, etc.)
Business ethics
Environmental ethics
Bioethics
7
You’ll notice that the word feminist appears nowhere on this sketch
map. The reason is that feminist ethics isn’t a branch of ethics—it’s
a way of doing ethics. Feminist ethicists work in all three branches.
Annette Baier, for example, has written a book called Moral Prejudices
in which she develops the idea of trust as a moral emotion. That’s a
book in metaethics, because it argues for a naturalized moral epis-
temology. In Justice and the Politics of Difference, Iris Marion Young
explains why social justice requires explicitly acknowledging and
attending to the differences among social groups that bestow privilege
on some and keep others powerless. That’s a book in normative ethics,
because it gives an account of the concept of justice. In Disability
Bioethics, Jackie Leach Scully considers the complex ethical questions
surrounding impairment as a set of social practices, as experienced
embodiment, as an emancipatory movement, and as a biomedical
condition. That’s a book in practical ethics, because it concerns a spe-
cific moral problem. These authors are all ethicists, and they do what
ethicists do. But they do it in a feminist way.
1.2. What Is Feminism?
What, then, is feminism? As a social and political movement with a

long, intermittent history, feminism has repeatedly come into public
awareness, generated change, and then disappeared again. As an ec-
lectic body of theory, feminism entered colleges and universities in the
early 1970s as a part of the women’s studies movement, contributing
to scholarship in every academic discipline, though probably most
heavily in the arts, social sciences, literature, and the humanities in
general. Feminist ethics is a part of the body of theory that is being
developed primarily in colleges and universities.
Many people think of feminism as a movement that aims to make
women the social equals of men, and this impression has been rein-
forced over the decades by references to feminism and feminists in
the newspapers, on social media and television, and in the movies.
But bell hooks has pointed out in Feminist Theory from Margin to
Center (1984, 18–19) that this way of defining feminism raises some
8
8 Overviews
serious problems. Which men do women want to be equal to? Women

who are socially well off wouldn’t get much advantage from being the
equals of the men who are poor and lower class, particularly if they
are black or brown; here hooks makes an early nod to the concept
of intersectionality, about which more later. Her point is that there
are no women and men in the abstract. They’re poor, black, young,
Hispanic, old, transgender, able-bodied, upper class, gay, down on
their luck, Native American, straight, and all the rest of it. When a
woman doesn’t think about this, it’s probably because she doesn’t have
to. And that’s usually a sign that her own social position is privileged.
In fact (this is an example of Lindemann’s ad hoc Rule Number 39),
privilege often means that there’s something uncomfortable going on
that others have to pay attention to but you don’t. So, when hooks asks
which men women want to be equal to, she’s reminding us that there’s
an unconscious presumption of privilege built right in to this sort of
demand for equality.
There’s a second problem with the equality definition. Even if we
could figure out which men are the ones to whom women should be
equal, that way of putting it suggests that the point of feminism is
somehow to get women to measure up to what (at least some) men
already are. Men remain the point of reference, theirs are the lives
that women would naturally want to live. If the first problem with the
equality definition is “Equal to which men?” the second problem could
be put as “Why equal to men?” Reforming a system in which men are
the point of reference by allowing women to perform as their equals
encourages women to concentrate on men and their preoccupations
instead of women themselves. For that reason, many feminists believe
that feminism is first and foremost about women.
But characterizing feminism as about women has is problems too.
What, after all, is a woman? In her 1949 book The Second Sex, the
French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir famously observed,
“One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological,
or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents
in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, in-
termediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine”
([1949] 1974, 301). Her point is that while plenty of human beings
are born female, “woman” is not a natural fact about them, it’s a social
9
invention. According to this invention, which is widespread in “civili-

zation as a whole,” man represents the positive, typical human being,
while woman represents only the negative, the not-man. She’s the Other
against whom man defies himself: she’s all the things that he isn’t. And
she exists only in relation to him. In a later essay called “One Is Not
Born a Woman,” Monique Wittig (1981, 49) adds that because women
belong to men sexually as well as in every other way, women are neces-
sarily heterosexual. For that reason, she argues, lesbians aren’t women.
But, you’re probably thinking, everybody knows what a woman
is, and lesbians certainly are women. You’re absolutely right. These
French feminists aren’t denying that there’s a perfectly ordinary use of
the word woman by which it means exactly what you think it means.
But they’re explaining what this comes down to if you look at it from
a particular point of view. Their answer to the question, “What is a
woman?” is that women are different from men. But they don’t mean
this in a trivial sense. They’re saying that “woman” refers to nothing but
difference from men, so that apart from men, women are nothing and
everything. Think of “not iPhone” and you’ll see what I mean. “Man”
is the positive term, “woman” the negative one, but what matters is
that she’s not a man.
A later generation of feminists have agreed with Beauvoir and
Wittig that women are different from men, but rather than seeing the
difference as simply negative, they put it in positive terms, affirming
feminine qualities as a source of personal strength and pride. For ex-
ample, the philosopher Virginia Held thinks that women’s moral ex-
perience as mothers, attentively nurturing their children, may serve
as a better model for social relations than the contract model the free
market provides. The poet Adrienne Rich celebrated women’s pas-
sionate nature (as opposed, in stereotype, to the rational nature of
men), regarding emotions as morally valuable rather than as signs of
weakness.
Defining feminism as about the positive differences between men
and women, though, creates yet another set of problems. In her
1987 Feminism Unmodified, the feminist legal theorist Catharine
A. MacKinnon points out that this kind of difference, as such, is a sym-
metrical relationship: If I’m different from you, then you’re different
from me in exactly the same respects and to exactly the same degree.
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10 Overviews
“Men’s differences from women are equal to women’s differences from

men,” she writes. “There is an equality there. Yet the sexes are not so-
cially equal” (1987, 37). No amount of attention to the differences
between men and women explains why men, as a group, are more
socially powerful, valued, advantaged, or free than women. For that,
you have to see differences as counting in certain ways, and certain
differences being created precisely because they give men power over
women. (This theory, then, is sometimes called power feminism.)
My own view is that feminism isn’t—or at least not directly—about
equality, and it isn’t about women, and it isn’t about difference. It’s
about power. Specifically, it’s about the pattern, widespread across
cultures and history, that distributes power asymmetrically to favor
men over women, creating and maintaining social institutions and
practices that systematically put men’s interests and preoccupations
ahead of women’s. This asymmetry has been given many names, in-
cluding the subjugation of women, sexism, male dominance, patri-
archy, systemic misogyny, phallocracy, and the oppression of women.
A number of feminist theorists simply call it gender, and throughout
this book, I will too.
1.3. What Is Gender?
Most people think their gender is a natural fact about them, like their
hair and eye color: “Jack is five foot eleven, red-headed, and a man.”
But gender is a norm, not a fact. It’s a prescription for how people are
supposed to act (or not act), what they must or mustn’t wear, how
they’re supposed to sit, walk, or stand, what kind of person they’re
supposed to marry, what sorts of things they’re supposed to be inter-
ested in or good at, and what they’re entitled to. And because it’s an
effective norm, it actually creates the gender binary of differences be-
tween men and women in these areas.
Gender doesn’t just tell women to behave one way and men another,
though. It’s a power relation, so it tells men that they’re entitled to do
and have things that women aren’t entitled to, and it tells women that
they’re supposed to defer to men and serve them. It says, for example,
1
that men are supposed to occupy positions of religious authority and

women are supposed to run the church suppers. It says that women
are supposed to take care of their children and frail elderly family
members but fathers have more important things to do. And, in gen
eral, it says that the things associated with femininity are supposed to
take a back seat to the things coded masculine. Think of the many tax
dollars allocated to the military as compared with the few tax dollars
allocated to the arts. Think about how nurses are paid as compared to
how stockbrokers are paid. And think about how many presidents of
the United States have been women. Gender operates through social
institutions (like marriage and the law) and practices (like manufac-
ture and medicine) by disproportionately conferring entitlements and
the control of resources on men, while disproportionately assigning
women to subordinate positions in the service of men’s interests.
To make this power relation seem perfectly natural, like the fact
that plants grow up instead of down, or that female mammals nurse
their young, gender constructs its norms for behavior around what’s
supposed to be the natural biological distinction between the sexes.
According to this distinction, people who have penises and testicles,
XY chromosomes, and beards as adults belong to the male sex, while
people who have clitorises and ovaries, XX chromosomes, and breasts
as adults belong to the female sex, and those are the only sexes there
are. God wills it so. Gender, then, is the complicated set of cultural
meanings that sets up a binary. Your sex is either male or female, and
your gender, either masculine or feminine, corresponds socially to
your sex.
As a matter of fact, though, sex isn’t quite so straightforward.
Some people with XY chromosomes don’t have penises and never de-
velop beards, because they don’t have the receptors that allow them
to make use of the male hormones that their testicles produce: these
are people with androgen insensitivity syndrome, and they look like
any other women. Some people have ambiguous genitals or internal
reproductive structures that don’t correspond in the usual manner
to their external genitalia. How should we classify these intersex
people? People with Turner’s syndrome don’t have XX chromosomes
at all—theirs are XO. People with Klinefelter’s syndrome have three
sex chromosomes: XXY. Mother nature is a good bit looser in her
12
12 Overviews
categories that the simple male/ female distinction acknowledges.

Most human beings can certainly be classified as either male or fe-
male, but a considerable number of them fall somewhere in between.
The powerful norm of gender doesn’t acknowledge the existence of
the outliers, though. When, for example, have you ever filled out an
application for a job or a driver’s license or a passport that gave you a
choice other than M or F? By basing its distinction between masculine
and feminine of the existence of two and only two sexes, gender makes
the inequality of power between men and women appear natural and
therefore legitimate.
On 3 October 2002, at a party in Newark, California, seventeen-
year-old Gwen Araujo was forced to expose her genitals in the bath-
room of a private home. Her attacker yelled that “he was really a man,”
whereupon two young men who had had sex with her earlier that
evening beat her severely, in full view of at least some of the other
partygoers. They took the semiconscious girl out to the garage and
choked her with a rope until they believed she was dead. Eventually
they wrapped her body, put it in the back of their truck, and dumped
it in a remote wilderness area. Two weeks later one of the suspects told
the police what had happened and took them to the spot where the
body lay (Calef 2002).
At the trial, the three men charged with first-degree murder and
hate crimes used what has come to be known as the “trans panic de-
fense,” the panic in question being the “extreme shock, amazement,
and bewilderment” they experienced on learning of Araujo’s “sexual
deception.” Their lawyers argued that the victim’s “sexual fraud” and
“betrayal” had understandably provoked their clients’ violent response,
and insisted that the charge should be reduced to manslaughter. The
jury failed to reach a verdict, and on retrial, two of the men received
second-degree murder convictions, while the third pleaded nolo con-
tendere to voluntary manslaughter. None of them were convicted of a
hate crime (Bettcher 2007, 43–44).
A columnist for the Iowa State Daily, Zach Calef, claimed that the
murder would not have occurred if Araujo had “been honest” with
the men. Calef argued that their violence was understandable, as it
was “simply a reaction to a form of rape.” “Using lies and deception
to trick them into having sex,” he explained, is “as bad as rape.” He
13
acknowledged that, given the circumstances, murder was a bit much,

but after all, “the men did what they did because Araujo violated
them.” “These men were truly violated,” Calef repeated. “They were
raped” (Calef 2002).
Calef ’s op-ed is a fine example of thinking that has been informed
by the narrative of the Evil Deceiver. According to that narrative, if
you’re a man and you present yourself as a sexually tempting woman,
you are an Evil Deceiver, because not only are you taking on an unau-
thorized identity and therefore confusing the other actors, but you’re
also manipulating manly, heterosexual men into having sex with a
man and thereby stripping them of their masculinity.
Fundamental to this narrative is the distinction between appear-
ance and reality: The gendered appearance must faithfully reflect
the reality of the sex organs. “In this framework,” argues Talia Mae
Bettcher, “gender presentation (attire, in particular) constitutes a gen-
dered appearance, whereas the sexed body constitutes the hidden,
sexual reality. Expressions such as “a man who dresses like a woman,”
“a man who lives as a woman,” and even “a woman who is biologically
male” all effectively inscribe this distinction” (2007, 48).
The Evil Deceiver narrative, drawing on the myth of a gender bi-
nary, creates a vicious double bind. If one is a transperson, one must
either “disclose ‘who one is’ and come out as a pretender or masquer-
ader, or refuse to disclose (be a deceiver) and run the risk of forced
disclosure, the effect of which is exposure as a liar” (2007, 50). As
those are the only two options there are, concludes Bettcher, “it would
appear that this representational system actually prevents transpeople
from existing at all” (55).
When the stories circulating widely in your society allow you to be
understood only as a liar or a deceiver, others are apt to treat you as
if you have no right to exist. You’re likely to be denied a job because
your gender presentation doesn’t match the M or F on your driver’s
license; you’re subjected to beatings; you’re raped “to teach you a
lesson”; all too often, you’re killed. There’s no place for you anywhere,
because there’s no way for others to make sense of you. And what’s
worse, there’s also no way for you to make sense of yourself. You may
be firmly convinced that you’re neither a liar nor a deceiver, but then
you might also feel you aren’t a man, really, and not a woman, really,
14
14 Overviews
either. Those not-identities, though, don’t offer any positive depiction

of who you are. For that, you need moral understandings that resist
the Evil Deceiver narrative by offering concrete representations of the
range of sexed and gendered possibilities—including the possibility of
claiming for yourself one of the two genders with which most people
identify.
Transpeople with white skin privilege and middle-class status are
granted some protection from the Evil Deceiver narrative, to be sure,
as does the growing social visibility of transpeople who hold public of-
fice, teach in schools and universities, or write about their experiences
in blogs and newspaper columns. Still, counterstories to that narra-
tive have been agonizingly slow on the uptake. Transphobic cisgender
people continue to exercise their power over transpeople by refusing
them a place in society and effectively cutting them off from partici-
pation in public spaces.
For transpeople as for others, then, gender is about power. But it’s
not about the power of just one group over another. Gender always
interacts with other social markers—such as race, class, level of educa-
tion, sexual orientation, age, religion, physical and mental ability, and
ethnicity—to distribute power unevenly among women positioned
differently in the various social orders, and it does the same to men.
A man’s social status, for example, can have a great deal to do with the
extent to which he’s even perceived as a man. There’s a wonderful pas-
sage in the English travel writer Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners
of the Americans (1831) in which she describes the exaggerated deli-
cacy of middle-class young ladies she met in Kentucky and Ohio. They
wouldn’t dream of sitting in a chair that was still warm from contact
with a gentleman’s bottom, but thought nothing of getting laced into
their corsets in front of a male house slave. The slave, it’s clear, didn’t
count as a man—not in the relevant sense, anyway. Gender is the force
that makes it matter whether you are male or female, but it always
works hand in glove with all the other things about you that matter
at the same time. It’s one power relation intertwined with others in
a complex social system that distinguishes your betters from your
inferiors in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of purposes. We’ll re-
turn to this point in Chapter 3.
15
1.4. Power and Morality
If feminism is about gender, and gender is the name for a social system
that distributes power unequally among men, genderqueer people,
trans and intersex people, and women, then you’d expect feminist
ethicists to try to understand, criticize, and correct how gender operates
within our moral and social beliefs and practices. They do just that. In
the first place, they challenge, on moral grounds, the powers men have
over women, and they claim for women, again on moral grounds, the
powers that gender denies them. Since the moral reasons for opposing
gender are similar to the moral reasons for opposing power systems
based on social markers other than gender, feminist ethicists also offer
moral arguments against systems based on categories such as class,
race, physical or mental ability, sexuality, and age. And because all
these systems, including gender, are powerful enough to conceal many
of the forces that keep them in place, it’s often necessary to make the
forces visible by explicitly identifying—and condemning—the various
ugly ways they allow some people to treat others. This is a central task
for feminist ethics.
Feminist ethicists also produce theory about the moral meaning
of various kinds of legitimate relations of unequal power, including
relationships of dependency and vulnerability, relationships of trust,
and relationships based on something other than choice. Parent-child
relationships, for example, are necessarily unequal and for the most
part unchosen. Even for parents who choose to have children, most
don’t choose to have the particular children they do, nor do children
choose their parents. This raises questions of involuntary obligations,
and these too are topics for feminist ethics. Similarly, when you trust
someone, that person has power over you. Whom should you trust,
for what purposes, and when is trust not warranted? What’s involved
in being trustworthy, and what must be done to repair beaches of
trust? These too are questions for feminist ethics.
Third, feminist ethicists look at the various forms of power that are
required for morality to operate properly at all. How do we learn right
from wrong in the first place? We usually learn it from our parents,
whose power to permit and forbid, praise and punish, is essential to
16
16 Overviews
our moral training. For whom or what are we ethically responsible?

Often this depends on the kind of power we have over the person
or thing in question. If, for instance, someone is particularly vul-
nerable to harm because of something I’ve done, I might well have
special duties toward that person. Powerful social institutions such
as the market, government, medicine, and religion typically dictate
what’s morally required of us and to whom we are morally answerable.
Relations of power set the terms for who must answer to whom, who
has authority over whom, and who gets excused from certain kinds of
accountability to whom. But because so many of these power relations
are illegitimate in that they’re instances of gender, racism, or other
kinds of bigotry, figuring out which ones are morally justified is a task
for feminist ethics.
1.5. Description and Prescription
So far it sounds as if feminist ethics devotes considerable attention

to description, as if feminist ethicists were like poets or painters who
want to show you something about reality that you might otherwise
have missed. Indeed, many feminist ethicists emphasize the impor-
tance of understanding how social power actually works, rather than
concentrating solely on how it ought to work—the debunking proj
ect, as it’s been called. But why, you might ask, should ethicists worry
about how power operates within societies? Isn’t it up to sociologists
and political scientists to describe how things are, while ethicists con-
centrate on how things ought to be?
As the philosopher Margaret Urban Walker has pointed out in
Moral Contexts, there’s a tradition in Western philosophy going all
the way back to Plato, to the effect that morality is something ideal
and that ethics, being the study of morality, properly examines only
that ideal. According to this tradition, notions of right and wrong as
they’re found in the world are unreliable and shadowy manifestations
of something lying outside of human experiences, something to which
we ought to aspire but can’t hope to reach. Plato’s Idea of the Good,
17
in fact, is precisely not of this earth, and only the gods could truly
know it. Christian ethics incorporates Platonism into its insistence
that earthly existence is fraught with sin and error and that heaven is
our real home. Kant too insists that moral judgments transcend the
histories and circumstances of people’s actual lives, and most moral
philosophers of the twentieth century have likewise shown little in-
terest in how people really live and what it’s like for them to live that
way. “They think,” remarks Walker, “that there is little to be learned
from what is about what ought to be” (2001, 3).
In Chapter 5 we’ll take a closer look at what goes wrong when
ethics is done that way, but let me just point out here that if you don’t
know how things are, your prescriptions for how things ought to be
won’t have much practical effect. Imagine a doctor trying to treat a
patient without having a good diagnosis. She might have a very fine
idea about the outcome she hopes for, but if she doesn’t know what’s
wrong, at best she’ll perform an irrelevant procedure and at worst
she’ll kill the patient. If, as many feminists have noted, a crucial fact
about human selves is that they’re always embedded in a vast web of
relationships, then the forces at play within those relationships must
be understood. It’s knowing how people are situated with respect to
these forces, what they’re going through as they’re subjected to them,
and what life is like in the face of them, that lets you decide which of
the forces are morally justified. Careful description of how things are
is a crucial part of feminist methodology, because the power that puts
certain groups of people at risk of harm and denies them full access to
the good things their society has to offer, or treats them as if they were
useful only for other people’s purposes, is often hidden and hard to
see. If this power isn’t seen, it’s likely to remain in place, doing untold
amounts of damage to great numbers of people.
All the same, feminist ethics is normative as well as descriptive.
It’s fundamentally about how things ought to be, while description
plays the crucial but secondary role of helping us to figure that out.
Normative language is the language of “ought” instead of “is,” the lan-
guage of “worth” and “value,” “right” and “wrong,” “good” and “bad.”
Feminists ethicists differ on a number of normative issues, but as
the philosopher Alison Jaggar has famously put it, they all share two
18
18 Overviews
moral assumptions: “That the subordination of women is morally

wrong and that the moral experience of women is worthy of respect”
(1991, 95). The first assumption—that women’s interests ought not
to be set systematically in the service of men’s—can be understood
as a moral challenge to power under the guise of gender. The second
assumption—that women’s experience must be taken seriously—can
be understood as a call to challenge how that power operates. These
twin assumptions are the two normative legs on which any feminist
ethics stands.
Feminist ethics, then, is both descriptive and prescriptive. The
belief that good normative theory requires a solid grasp of actual
social practices isn’t shared by all feminist ethicists, but it’s reflected
in enough feminist work to cause what seems to me to be a con-
fusion. Flip back to the ethics sketch map and look again at the
distinction between normative and practical ethics. In nonfeminist
ethics, the division between these two branches of ethics can often
be pretty sharp. Normative ethics tends to consist of ideal moral
theory, with scant or no attention paid to specific social practices,
whereas practical ethics uses principles extracted from that ideal
theory and applies them to something concrete, like business. But
when you try to apply the distinction between normative ethics and
practical ethics to feminist ethics, you’ll find it doesn’t work very
well, because feminist moral theory tends not to be ideal but in-
stead is grounded in description. And that’s what causes the confu-
sion: Many people assume that because feminist ethics is practical,
it’s opposed to theory, and furthermore, that all feminist ethics is
“applied” ethics.
A better way of looking at it, I think, is to see feminist normative
ethics as moral theory that arises out of actual social practices of all
kinds and that in turn relies on those practices to help determine
whether it’s on the right track. By contrast, feminist practical ethics
(for example, feminist bioethics) offers ethical analyses of specific so-
cial practices (like biomedicine). If you think of it that way, you can
see that feminists aren’t so much opposed to theory as dubious about
certain kinds of theory-building and that, even at its most practical,
feminist ethics retains its normative bite.
19
1.6. Morality and Politics
If moral theorizing dates back over two thousand years in Western

thought, a newer tradition only a couple of centuries old has split
off morality from politics. According to this tradition, which can be
traced to Kant and some other Enlightenment philosophers, morality
concerns the relations between persons, whereas politics concerns
the relations among nation-states, or between a state and its citizens.
So, as Iris Marion Young explains, ethicists have tended to focus on
intentional actions by individual persons, conceiving of moral life as
“conscious, deliberate, a rational weighing of alternatives,” whereas
political philosophers have focused on impersonal governmental sys-
tems, studying “laws, policies, the large-scale distribution of social
goods, countable quantities like votes and taxes” (1990, 149).
For feminists, on the other hand, the line between ethics and polit-
ical theory isn’t quite so bright as this tradition makes out. It’s not al-
ways easy to tell where feminist ethics leaves off and feminist political
theory begins. There are two reasons for this. In the first place, while
ethics certainly concerns personal behavior, there is a long-standing
insistence on the part of feminists that the personal is political. In a
1970 essay called “The Personal Is Political,” the political activist Carol
Hanisch observed that “personal problems are political problems.
There are no personal solutions at this time” (204–5). What Hanisch
meant is that even the most private areas of everyday life, including
such intensely personal areas as sex, can function to maintain abusive
power systems like gender. If a heterosexual woman believes, for ex-
ample, that contraception is primarily her responsibility because she’ll
have to take care of the baby if she gets pregnant, she’s propping up
a system that lets men evade responsibility not only for pregnancy,
but for their own offspring as well. Conversely, while unjust social
arrangements such as gender and race invade every aspect of people’s
personal lives, “there are no personal solutions,” either when Hanisch
wrote those words or now, because to shift dominant understandings
of how certain groups may be treated, and what other groups are
entitled to expect of them, requires concerted political action, not just
personal efforts.
20
20 Overviews
The second reason why it’s hard to separate feminist ethics from
feminist politics is that feminists typically subject the ethical theory
they produce to critical political scrutiny, not only to keep untoward
political biases out, but also to make sure that the work accurately
reflects their feminist politics. Many nonfeminist ethicists, on the
other hand, don’t acknowledge that their work reflects their politics,
because they don’t think it should. Their aim, by and large, has been
to develop ideal moral theory that applies to all people, regardless of
their social position or experience of life, and to do that objectively,
without favoritism, requires them to leave their own personal politics
behind. The trouble, though, is that they aren’t really leaving their own
personal politics behind. They’re merely refusing to notice that their
politics is inevitably built right in to their theories. (This is an instance
of Lindemann’s ad hoc Rule Number 22: Just because you think you’re
doing something doesn’t mean you’re doing it.) Feminists, by contrast,
are generally skeptical of the idealized moral theory nonfeminists
favor, and they’re equally doubtful that objectivity can be achieved
by stripping away what’s distinctive about people’s experiences or
commitments. Believing that it’s no wiser to shed one’s political
allegiances in the service of ethics than it would be to shed one’s moral
allegiances, feminists prefer to be transparent about their politics as a
way of keeping their ethics intellectually honest.
In the following chapters, then, you’ll find that power and morality,
description and prescription, theory and practice, and ethics and pol-
itics all jog along merrily together. I’m not going to try to show you the
one way that’s most representative of how feminists do ethics, because
as you probably realize by now, there’s no such thing. Feminists dis-
agree, both with nonfeminists and with one another. But I can show
you samplings of feminist moral thought on a number of subjects, so
that by the time you reach the end of this book you’ll have pretty de-
cent idea of what feminist ethics is.
In the next chapter I’ll give you an overview of the feminist ethicist’s
toolkit—the set of essential concepts that feminists use to do their
work. We’ve already examined some of these concepts, such as gender,
power, and “the personal is political,” but you’ll need to familiarize
yourself with several others before you can start doing feminist ethics
for yourself. Crucial among these tools are the concepts of gender
21
neutrality, androcentrism, difference, and oppression, all of which I’ll

put to work on an argument in favor of affirmative action.
In Chapter 3 I’ll add another tool: intersectionality. I’ll explain what
it is and how it works, and then take a stab at figuring out what make it
so hard to deal with. In Chapter 4 I’ll give you an overview of how per-
sonal identities set up socially normative expectations for how some
sorts of people are supposed to behave and how other sorts of people
may treat them. Gender interacts with other power systems to estab-
lish who gets to do what to whom, so feminist ethicists have to pay
special attention to how identities function within morality.
Chapter 5 is an overview of the impartial, impersonal universal-
istic, hyperrational moral theories that have dominated ethics in
English-speaking countries for the past 150 years or so. The overview
is followed by feminist criticisms of the approach to morality that’s
presupposed by those theories.
Chapter 6 is an overview of feminist moral theories. There are many
of these, and as you might guess, it’s hard to separate them out from
feminist social and political theories. So I’ve confined myself to two
sorts of theories: the ethics of care and what might loosely be called an
ethics of responsibility.
Once you have equipped yourself with some of the key concepts
from Chapter 2, the problem of intersectionality in Chapter 3, the ac-
count of personal identities from Chapter 4, the pitfalls of nonfeminist
moral theories in Chapter 5, the gender-sensitive theories of Chapter 6,
you’ll be ready to start doing the close-up works of feminist ethics.
Accordingly, Chapter 7 offers a close-up of feminist bioethics, Chapter 8
provides a feminist ethical analysis of violence, and Chapter 9 furnishes
a close-up of ethical issues arising from the globalized economy, as well
as a discussion of cross-cultural ethical judgments.
For Further Reading
Baier, Annette. 1994. Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press.
Beauvoir, Simone de. [1949] 1974. The Second Sex. Trans. and ed. H. M.
Parshley. New York: Modern Library.
2
22 Overviews
Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2007. “Evil Deceivers and Make- Believers: On

Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion.” Hypatia 22, no.
3: 43–65.
Calef, Zach. 2002. “Double Standard in Rape?” Iowa State Daily, 24
October. Downloaded October 2, 2012, from Strangetalk http://
strangetalk.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=26505&start=0
Hanisch, Carol. 1970. “The Personal Is Political.” In Notes from the Second
Year: Women’s Liberation. New York: Radical Feminism, 76–77.
hooks, bell. 1984. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. Boston: South
End Press.
Jaggar, Alison. 1991. “Feminist Ethics: Projects, Problems, Prospects.”
In Feminist Ethics, ed. Claudia Card. Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 78 –105.
MacKinnon, Catharine A. 1987. Feminism Unmodified. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Scully, Jackie Leach. 2008. Disability Bioethics: Moral Bodies, Moral
Difference. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Walker, Margaret Urban. 2001. “Seeing Power in Morality: A Proposal
for Feminist Naturalism in Ethics.” In Feminists Doing Ethics, ed.
Peggy DesAutels and Joanne Waugh. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 3–15.
Walker, Margaret Urban. 2003. Moral Contexts. Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield.
Wittig, Monique. 1981. “One Is Not Born a Woman.” Feminist Issues 1,
no. 2: 103–9.
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
23
2
Discrimination and Oppression
On 19 June 2001 a class-action sex-discrimination lawsuit was filed

in federal court in San Francisco against Walmart, the largest re-
tailer in the world. The suit alleged that even though three-fourths
of the hourly sales employees at Walmart were women, two-thirds
of the supervisory and managerial positions were occupied by men,
as were nine out of ten of the top store-manager positions. Only one
of Walmart’s top twenty officers was a woman. Moreover, women
working for Walmart were paid an average of thirty-five cents less an
hour than men for entry-level jobs, and because they were promoted
much more slowly than men, the wage gap increased over time. By
2001, for example, women who were hired in 1996 were averaging
$1.16 less per hour than men who were hired in the same year. The
first promotion for men occurred, on average, 2.86 years after the in-
itial hiring, whereas for women it happened after 4.38 years, despite
the fact that women’s performance rating for hourly jobs were higher
than men’s and their turnover rates were lower. Women were denied
the training they needed to advance further, and they were almost
never told of opportunities for promotion.
Things haven’t changed much since then. According to the
American Association of University Women’s 2018 report, Asian
women’s salaries show the smallest gender pay gap, at 85 percent of
white men’s earnings. The gap was largest for Hispanic women, who
were paid only 54 percent of what white men were paid in 2015. Part
of what accounts for this is that women have to provide care for their
young children and frail elderly relatives. Taking time away from the
workforce or cutting back hours, both more common scenarios for
mothers than fathers, hurts earnings. Many employers and industries
enforce long, continuous, traditional work hours rather than flexible
schedules, a practice that tends to put women who are caregivers at a
24
24 Overviews
disadvantage. AAUW’s Behind the Pay Gap report found that ten years
after college graduation, 23 percent of mothers were out of the work-
force, and 17 percent worked part time. Among fathers, only 1 percent
were out of the workforce, and only 2 percent worked part time.
The 20 percent wage gap means that women are working for free
ten weeks of the year. If the disparity continues, an average woman
who’s twenty- five years old in 2018 will lose about $455,000 to
unequal pay during her working life. And the disparity is even greater
for women of color. Compared to white men, Latinas are paid a paltry
fifty-five cents on the dollar, while African American women, on
average, receive only fifty cents .
Moreover, because women are paid less than men, they have
smaller pensions. Median income for women ages sixty-five and
older ($17,400) is 44 percent less than the median income for men
in the same age group ($31,200). Women depend heavily on Social
Security, because they’re less likely than men to have pension income
and personal savings. In fact, for nearly one in five older women,
Social Security benefits are their only source of income. And for
many, Social Security benefits are their only source of income that’s
both guaranteed for life and whose value is protected against inflation.
Women seventy-five years and older are almost twice as likely as men
to live in poverty.
2.1. Gender Neutrality
One common-sense solution to the problem of gender discrimina-

tion is to simply stop discriminating and treat everybody the same
way. Although, as we saw in Chapter 1, the appeal to equality isn’t
without its problems, the ideal of gender neutrality was widespread
among feminists in the 1960s and 70s, and it was the moving force be-
hind the efforts, in the 1970s, to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment
to the US Constitution: Equality of rights under the law shall not be
denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of
sex. (Lindemann did her bit silk-screening t shirts. Which shows her
age.) Ratification fell short by three states, but if the amendment had
25
Discrimination and Oppression 25
passed, it would have been unconstitutional for Congress or the state

legislatures to use gender as a basis for denying people their rights
under the law.
Gender neutrality has been conceived of in two ways: androgyny
or assimilation. Androgyny has its roots in the Greek words for
“man” and “woman,” and on this conception, gender neutrality
amounts to treating people as if they were neither men nor women,
but something in between. The thought is that men and women are
the same in more ways than they’re different, or at least they could be
under the right circumstances, so corporations, judges, legislators,
and other policymakers should ignore the physical differences and
concentrate on the mental and moral similarities between men
and women.
Assimilation, on the other hand, is based on the idea that women
really are just like men, or could be if given the chance. On this con-
ception, gender neutrality dictates that corporations, judges, and
lawmakers should treat women in the same way as they already treat
men, holding them to the same standards but then also granting them
the same privileges. The advantage of assimilation is that it doesn’t
require radically restructuring society. Existing policies for things like
hiring and promotion can be left in place, on the understanding that
from now on, women will get the same consideration as men.
There are two major drawbacks to gender-neutral policies, though.
One is that they don’t respect the relevant ways in which women are
physically different from men—they just ignore them. There’s some-
thing slightly ludicrous, for example, about the gender-neutral city or-
dinance, passed in Texas in the 1970s, that prohibited all firefighters,
whether men or women, from breast-feeding their babies between
calls. Equally peculiar was the minimum height requirement for air-
line pilots, which was based on the gender-neutral concern that the
pilot needed to be able to reach the control panel, but which failed
to recognize that women, who are on average shorter than men,
would be able to use the controls if the cockpit were redesigned. At
about the same time as these regulations went into effect, advocates of
gender neutrality argued that it would be unfair for corporate benefits
packages to include maternity leave policies, because they can’t be ap-
plied “equally” to men.
26
26 Overviews
The second problem with gender neutrality is that it doesn’t re-

spect the relevant ways in which women are socially different from
men: It denies that women lag behind men in the race for the goods
that society has to offer. Because gender systematically favors men and
disadvantages women, men by and large keep winning that race, while
a few women prevail despite carrying a handicap. All that gender-
neutral policies do is stop employers from setting extra barriers for
women or putting further shackles on their legs so that they run even
more slowly. This helps keep the gap between men and women from
widening, but it certainly doesn’t narrow it. So men go on winning.
Built in to gender neutrality is the presumption the playing field is
equal, that there’s no systemwide bias in favor of men. But in the light
of current lawsuits, government reports, and the report of the AAUW,
along with plenty of other evidence, that’s either wishful thinking or
willful ignorance.
2.2. Androcentrism
Another way to put this second criticism of gender-neutral policies is

to say that they don’t take androcentrism into account. Androcentrism
is the (usually unstated) view that man is the point of reference for
what is normal for human beings. The work, which literally means
“man in the middle,” gives us a different spatial metaphor from the
one of a race with the men out front and the women behind. Here the
metaphor is that of a circle, with the men at the center and the women
around the circumference. You can think of the circle as the category
“human being,” where those who stand squarely in the middle are the
most fully representative or paradigmatic things of their kind, while
the outliers are, well, outliers.
According to androcentrism, the difference from men that pushes
women to the margins calls for an explanation, whereas nothing has
to be explained about men because they’re just normal human beings.
Often, the explanation presents women not only as different from men,
but as defective men. Aristotle, for example, explained that woman is a
“mutilated male.” The Victorian anthropologist James Allan explained
27
Discrimination and Oppression 27
that she is an “undeveloped man.” And because regarding man’s body

as the normal human body tends to produce a view of woman that
exaggerates her biological differences from man, it shouldn’t surprise
us that the nineteenth-century German physician Rudolph Virchow
explained woman as “a pair of ovaries with a human being attached,
whereas man is a human being furnished with a pair of testicles.”
Androcentrism accounts for the lingering use of masculine ter-
minology to stand for generic persons: “The voter exercises his con-
stitutional rights.” “All men are created equal.” Androcentrism also
accounts for the fact that the supposedly gender-neutral strategy of
assimilation requires women to measure up to the male norm rather
than requiring men to measure up to women. The equality theory of
feminism is in this way androcentric.
Many categories exhibit androcentrism’s center-and-margins fea-
ture, but they don’t all devalue the members of the category that oc-
cupy the margin the way androcentrism does. Think of the category
“bird,” for instance. If you were asked to draw a picture of a bird you’d
probably produce a sketch of something that looks like a robin or a
sparrow, but I’d bet you anything you wouldn’t draw a flamingo. That’s
because robins and sparrows are paradigmatic birds while flamingoes
are outliers. The fact that they’re outliers, though, doesn’t mean that
flamingoes are mutilated robins, or a pair of legs with a robin attached.
The trouble with the category “human being” isn’t that it has paradig-
matic types and outlier types. It’s that gender has infected the category
to make it androcentric. As androcentrism sees it, women, not being
men, must have something wrong with them. And that being the case,
why in the world would Walmart want to promote them?
In the twentieth century, androcentrism was particularly apparent
in medical research: Many clinical studies were conducted on male
subjects only, on the assumption that men are fully representative
human beings. My personal favorite is a pilot study to determine
the impact of obesity on breast and ovarian cancer, conducted at
Rockefeller University in 1989 on—wait for it—men alone. That study
raised man-centered medicine to ridiculous new heights, but it was
hardly the only one. Women were typically excluded from experiments
to test the safety and efficacy of new drugs, on the grounds that if the
women were pregnant the drug could put their fetuses at risk, and
28
28 Overviews
anyway, women’s hormonal cycles might complicate the picture. But

if the drug is tested only on men, how do you know it works the same
way in women? And if women’s hormonal cycles do in fact compli-
cate the picture, wouldn’t you want to know what those complications
are? Actually, men have hormonal cycles too, though these have never
been characterized as complications. And that makes the point about
androcentrism rather nicely. Men’s bodies are the normal ones. It’s
women’s bodies that are complicated. And if women are defective men,
that complication isn’t worth studying.
Racism and discrimination against gays and lesbians employ the
same sort of logic: the white race and heterosexuality are the norms
for human beings, so anything other than the norm must be defec-
tive, not just statistically but morally queer. Efforts to draw attention
away from the group that dominates the center (or, to use yet another
spatial metaphor, to dismantle that hierarchy that puts the dominant
group on top) will appear, from the perspective of those at the center,
as a hostile threat to the group—a threat to “the Southern way of life”
or to “the family as we know it.” This reaction keeps the focus on the
dominant group so that it, rather than the plight of the subgroup, re-
mains the center of attention.
This sort of thinking also operates in global contexts, where it is
called ethnocentrism (which is androcentrism applied to cultures). For
example, the philosopher Uma Narayan argues in Dislocated Cultures
(1997, 136–42) that in the global North, people often treat Southern
countries as mirrors of the North, seeing India, Africa, South America,
and so on essentially as places where Northern imperialism and co-
lonialism have played themselves out. This, she says, is a strategy that
permits Northerners to take an interest in the global South without
having to come to know that world on its own terms, because the
critical perspective is confined to Northern interference, Northern
exploitation, how bad Northern people feel about having oppressed
those people over there. The attention is deflected from others to
Us: what’s important is Us wringing our hands, not what life is like for
people in the global South. (This is an instance of Lindemann’s ad hoc
Rule Number 63: The most important question, at all times, is “What
do you think about me?”)
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
“Lament” the other day among some old papers, and as it is quite a
curiosity, I will let you see it:—
“Full twenty suns have risen and set

And eke as many moons,
Since I found thee dead, without a head,
In the bloody pantaloons!
“As thy foe did rob thee of a leg

In his hunger and despite,
An L. E. G. I give to thee,
In song, dear Sam, to-night.
“Thy tail was full of feathers gay;

Thy comb was red and fine;
I hear no crow, where’er I go,
One half so loud as thine.
“O, I mourn thee still, as on the morn

When cold and stiff I found thee,
And laid thee dead, without a head,
The cabbage-leaf around thee!”
TOBY, the HAWK.
TOBY, THE HAWK.
About the queerest pet that I ever had was a young hawk. My
brother Rufus, who was a great sportsman, brought him home to me
one night in spring. He had shot the mother-hawk, and found this
young half-fledged one in the nest. I received the poor orphan with
joy, for he was too small for me to feel any horror of him, though his
family had long borne rather a bad name. I resolved that I would
bring him up in the way he should go, so that when he was old he
should not destroy chickens. At first, I kept him in a bird-cage, but
after a while he grew too large for his quarters, and had to have a
house built for him expressly. I let him learn to roost, but I tried to
bring him up on vegetable diet. I found, however, that this would not
do. He eat the bread and grain to be sure, but he did not thrive; he
looked very lean, and smaller than hawks of his age should look. At
last I was obliged to give up my fine idea of making an innocent
dove, or a Grahamite, out of the poor fellow, and one morning
treated him to a slice of raw mutton. I remember how he flapped his
wings and cawed with delight, and what a hearty meal he made of it.
He grew very fat and glossy after this important change in his diet,
and I became as proud of him as of any pet I ever had. But my
mother, after a while, found fault with the great quantity of meat
which he devoured. She said that he eat more beef-steak than any
other member of the family. Once, when I was thinking about this,
and feeling a good deal troubled lest some day, when I was gone to
school, they at home might take a fancy to cut off the head of my pet
to save his board-bill, a bright thought came into my mind. There
was running through our farm, at a short distance from our house, a
large mill-stream, along the banks of which lived and croaked a vast
multitude of frogs. These animals are thought by hawks, as well as
Frenchmen, very excellent eating. So, every morning, noon, and
night, I took Toby on my shoulder, ran down to the mill-stream, and
let him satisfy his appetite on all such frogs as were so silly as to
stay out of the water and be caught. He was very quick and active,—
would pounce upon a great, green croaker, and have him halved and
quartered and hid away in a twinkling. I generally looked in another
direction while he was at his meals,—it is not polite to keep your eye
on people when they are eating, and then I couldn’t help pitying the
poor frogs. But I knew that hawks must live, and say what they
might, my Toby never prowled about hen-coops to devour young
chickens. I taught him better morals than that, and kept him so well
fed that he was never tempted to such wickedness. I have since
thought that, if we want people to do right, we must treat them as I
treated my hawk; for when we think a man steals because his heart
is full of sin, it may be only because his stomach is empty of food.
When Toby had finished his meal, he would wipe his beak with his
wing, mount on my shoulder, and ride home again; sometimes, when
it was a very warm day and he had dined more heartily than usual,
he would fall asleep during the ride, still holding on to his place with
his long, sharp claws. Sometimes I would come home with my
pinafore torn and bloody on the shoulder, and then my mother would
scold me a little and laugh at me a great deal. I would blush and
hang my head and cry, but still cling to my strange pet; and when he
got full-grown and had wide, strong wings, and a great, crooked
beak that every body else was afraid of, I was still his warm friend
and his humble servant, still carried him to his meals three times a
day, shut him into his house every night, and let him out every
morning. Such a life as that bird led me!
Toby was perfectly tame, and never attempted to fly beyond the
yard. I thought this was because he loved me too well to leave me;
but my brothers, to whom he was rather cross, said it was because
he was a stupid fowl. Of course they only wanted to tease me. I said
that Toby was rough, but honest; that it was true he did not make a
display of his talents like some folks, but that I had faith to believe
that, some time before he died, he would prove himself to them all to
be a bird of good feelings and great intelligence.
Finally the time came for Toby to be respected as he deserved. One
autumn night I had him with me in the sitting-room, where I played
with him and let him perch on my arm till it was quite late. Some of
the neighbours were in, and the whole circle told ghost-stories, and
talked about dreams, and warnings, and awful murders, till I was half
frightened out of my wits; so that, when I went to put my sleepy hawk
into his little house, I really dared not go into the dark, but stopped in
the entry, and left him to roost for one night on the hat-rack, saying
nothing to any one. Now it happened that my brother William, who
was then about fourteen years of age, was a somnambulist,—that is,
a person who walks in sleep. He would often rise in the middle of the
night, and ramble off for miles, always returning unwaked.
Sometimes he would take the horse from the stable, saddle and
bridle him, and have a wild gallop in the moonlight. Sometimes he
would drive the cows home from pasture, or let the sheep out of the
pen. Sometimes he would wrap himself in a sheet, glide about the
house, and appear at our bedside like a ghost. But in the morning he
had no recollection of these things. Of course, we were very anxious
about him, and tried to keep a constant watch over him, but he would
sometimes manage to escape from all our care. Well, that night
there was suddenly a violent outcry set up in the entry. It was Toby,
who shrieked and flapped his wings till he woke my father, who
dressed and went down stairs to see what was the matter. He found
the door wide open, and the hawk sitting uneasily on his perch,
looking frightened and indignant, with all his feathers raised. My
father, at once suspecting what had happened, ran up to William’s
chamber and found his bed empty; he then roused my elder
brothers, and, having lit a lantern, they all started off in pursuit of the
poor boy. They searched through the yard, garden, and orchard, but
all in vain. Suddenly they heard the saw-mill, which stood near,
going. They knew that the owner never worked there at night, and
supposed that it must be my brother, who had set the machinery in
motion. So down they ran as fast as possible, and, sure enough,
they found him there, all by himself. A large log had the night before
been laid in its place ready for the morning, and on that log sat my
brother, his large black eyes staring wide open, yet seeming to be
fixed on nothing, and his face as pale as death. He seemed to have
quite lost himself, for the end of the log on which he sat was fast
approaching the saw. My father, with great presence of mind,
stopped the machinery, while one of my brothers caught William and
pulled him from his perilous place. Another moment, and he would
have been killed or horribly mangled by the cruel saw. With a terrible
scream, that was heard to a great distance, poor William awoke. He
cried bitterly when he found where he was and how he came there.
He was much distressed by it for some time; but it was a very good
thing for all that, for he never walked in his sleep again.
As you would suppose, Toby, received much honor for so promptly
giving the warning on that night. Every body now acknowledged that
he was a hawk of great talents, as well as talons. But alas! he did not
live long to enjoy the respect of his fellow-citizens. One afternoon
that very autumn, I was sitting at play with my doll, under the thick
shade of a maple-tree, in front of the house. On the fence near by
sat Toby, lazily pluming his wing, and enjoying the pleasant, golden
sunshine,—now and then glancing round at me with a most knowing
and patronizing look. Suddenly, there was the sharp crack of a gun
fired near, and Toby fell fluttering to the ground. A stupid sportsman
had taken him for a wild hawk, and shot him in the midst of his
peaceful and innocent enjoyment. He was wounded in a number of
places, and was dying fast when I reached him. Yet he seemed to
know me, and looked up into my face so piteously, that I sat down by
him, as I had sat down by poor Keturah, and cried aloud. Soon the
sportsman, who was a stranger, came leaping over the fence to bag
his game. When he found what he had done, he said he was very
sorry, and stooped down to examine the wounds made by his shot.
Then Toby roused himself, and caught one of his fingers in his beak,
biting it almost to the bone. The man cried out with the pain, and
tried to shake him off, but Toby still held on fiercely and stoutly, and
held on till he was dead. Then his ruffled wing grew smooth, his
head fell back, his beak parted and let go the bleeding finger of his
enemy.
I did not want the man hurt, for he had shot my pet under a mistake,
but I was not sorry to see Toby die like a hero. We laid him with the
pets who had gone before. Some were lovelier in their lives, but
none more lamented when dead. I will venture to say that he was the
first of his race who ever departed with a clean conscience as
regarded poultry. No careful mother-hen cackled with delight on the
day he died,—no pert young rooster flapped his wings and crowed
over his grave. But I must say, I don’t think that the frogs mourned
for him. I thought that they were holding a jubilee that night; the old
ones croaked so loud, and the young ones sung so merrily, that I
wished the noisy green creatures all quietly going brown, on some
Frenchman’s gridiron.
MILLY, THE PONY, AND CARLO, THE
DOG.
When I was ten or eleven years of age, I had two pets, of which I
was equally fond, a gentle bay pony and a small pointer dog. I have
always had a great affection for horses, and never knew what it was
to be afraid of them, for they are to me exceedingly obliging and
obedient. Some people think that I control them with a sort of animal
magnetism. I only know that I treat them with kindness, which is, I
believe, after all, the only magnetism necessary for one to use in this
world. When I ride, I give my horse to understand that I expect him to
behave very handsomely, like the gentleman I take him to be, and he
never disappoints me.
MILLY the pony & CARLO the dog.
Our Milly was a great favorite with all the family, but with the children
especially. She was not very handsome or remarkably fleet, but was
easily managed, and even in her gait. I loved her dearly, and we
were on the best terms with each other. I was in the habit of going
into the pasture where she fed, mounting her from the fence or a
stump, and riding about the field, often without saddle or bridle. You
will see by this that I was a sad romp. Milly seemed to enjoy the
sport fully as much as I, and would arch her neck, and toss her
mane, and gallop up and down the little hills in the pasture, now and
then glancing round at me playfully, as much as to say, “Aint we
having times!”
Finally, I began to practise riding standing upright, as I had seen the
circus performers do, for I thought it was time I should do something
to distinguish myself. After a few tumbles on to the soft clover, which
did me no sort of harm, I became quite accomplished that way. I was
at that age as quick and active as a cat, and could save myself from
a fall after I had lost my balance, and seemed half way to the
ground. I remember that my brother William was very ambitious to
rival me in my exploits; but as he was unfortunately rather fat and
heavy, he did a greater business in turning somersets from the back
of the pony than in any other way. But these were quite as amusing
as any other part of the performances. We sometimes had quite a
good audience of the neighbours’ children, and our schoolmates, but
we never invited our parents to attend the exhibition. We thought that
on some accounts it was best they should know nothing about it.
In addition to the “ring performances,” I gave riding lessons to my
youngest brother, Albert, who was then quite a little boy. He used to
mount Milly behind me, and behind him always sat one of our chief
pets, and our constant playmate, Carlo, a small black and white
pointer. One afternoon, I remember, we were all riding down the
long, shady lane which led from the pasture to the house, when a
mischievous boy sprang suddenly out from a corner of the fence,
and shouted at Milly. I never knew her frightened before, but this
time she gave a loud snort, and reared up almost straight in the air.
As there was neither saddle nor bridle for us to hold on by, we all
three slid off backward into the dust, or rather the mud, for it had
been raining that afternoon. Poor Carlo was most hurt, as my brother
and I fell on him. He set up a terrible yelping, and my little brother
cried somewhat from fright. Milly turned and looked at us a moment
to see how much harm was done, and then started off at full speed
after the boy, chasing him down the lane. He ran like a fox when he
heard Milly galloping fast behind him, and when he looked round and
saw her close upon him, with her ears laid back, her mouth open,
and her long mane flying in the wind, he screamed with terror, and
dropped as though he were dead. She did not stop, but leaped clear
over him as he lay on the ground. Then she turned, went up to him,
quietly lifted the old straw hat from his head, and came trotting back
to us, swinging it in her teeth. We thought that was a very cunning
trick of Milly’s.
Now it happened that I had on that day a nice new dress, which I
had sadly soiled by my fall from the pony; so that when I reached
home, my mother was greatly displeased. I suppose I made a very
odd appearance. I was swinging my bonnet in my hand, for I had a
natural dislike to any sort of covering for the head. My thick, dark hair
had become unbraided and was blowing over my eyes. I was never
very fair in complexion, and my face, neck, and arms had become
completely browned by that summer’s exposure. My mother took me
by the shoulder, set me down in a chair, not very gently, and looked
at me with a real frown on her sweet face. She told me in plain terms
that I was an idle, careless child! I put my finger in one corner of my
mouth, and swung my foot back and forth. She said I was a great
romp! I pouted my lip, and drew down my black eyebrows. She said I
was more like a wild, young squaw, than a white girl! Now this was
too much; it was what I called “twitting upon facts”; and ’twas not the
first time that the delicate question of my complexion had been
touched upon without due regard far my feelings. I was not to blame
for being dark,—I did not make myself,—I had seen fairer women
than my mother. I felt that what she said was neither more nor less
than an insult, and when she went out to see about supper, and left
me alone, I brooded over her words, growing more and more out of
humor, till my naughty heart became so hot and big with anger, that it
almost choked me. At last, I bit my lip and looked very stern, for I
had made up my mind to something great. Before I let you know
what this was, I must tell you that the Onondaga tribe of Indians had
their village not many miles from us. Every few months, parties of
them came about with baskets and mats to sell. A company of five or
six had been to our house that very morning, and I knew that they
had their encampment in our woods, about half a mile distant. These
I knew very well, and had quite a liking for them, never thinking of
being afraid of them, as they always seemed kind and peaceable.
To them I resolved to go in my trouble. They would teach me to
weave baskets, to fish, and to shoot with the bow and arrow. They
would not make me study, nor wear bonnets, and they would never
find fault with my dark complexion.
I remember to this day how softly and slyly I slid out of the house
that evening. I never stopped once, nor looked round, but ran swiftly
till I reached the woods. I did not know which way to go to find the
encampment, but wandered about in the gathering darkness, till I
saw a light glimmering through the trees at some distance. I made
my way through the bushes and brambles, and after a while came
upon my copper-colored friends. In a very pretty place, down in a
hollow, they had built them some wigwams with maple saplings,
covered with hemlock-boughs. There were in the group two Indians,
two squaws, and a boy about fourteen years old. But I must not
forget the baby, or rather pappoose, who was lying in a sort of
cradle, made of a large, hollow piece of bark, which was hung from
the branch of a tree, by pieces of the wild grape-vine. The young
squaw, its mother, was swinging it back and forth, now far into the
dark shadows of the pine and hemlock, now out into the warm fire-
light, and chanting to the child some Indian lullaby. The men sat on a
log, smoking gravely and silently; while the boy lay on the ground,
playing lazily with a great yellow hound, which looked mean and
starved, like all Indian dogs. The old squaw was cooking the supper
in a large iron pot, over a fire built among a pile of stones.
For some time, I did not dare to go forward, but at last I went up to
the old squaw, and looking up into her good-humored face, said, “I
am come to live with you, and learn to make baskets, for I don’t like
my home.” She did not say any thing to me, but made some
exclamation in her own language, and the others came crowding
round. The boy laughed, shook me by the hand, and said I was a
brave girl; but the old Indian grinned horribly and laid his hand on my
forehead, saying, “What a pretty head to scalp!” I screamed and hid
my face in the young squaw’s blue cloth skirt. She spoke soothingly,
and told me not to be afraid, for nobody would hurt me. She then
took me to her wigwam, where I sat down and tried to make myself
at home. But somehow I did’nt feel quite comfortable. After a while,
the old squaw took off the pot, and called us to supper. This was
succotash, that is, a dish of corn and beans, cooked with salt pork.
We all sat down on the ground near the fire, and eat out of great
wooden bowls, with wooden spoons, which I must say tasted rather
too strong of the pine. But I did not say so then,—by no means,—but
eat a great deal more than I wanted, and pretended to relish it, for
fear they would think me ill bred. I would not have had them know
but what I thought their supper served in the very best style, and by
perfectly polite and genteel people. I was a little shocked, however,
by one incident during the meal. While the young squaw was helping
her husband for the third or fourth time, she accidentally dropped a
little of the hot succotash on his hand. He growled out like a dog, and
struck her across the face with his spoon. I thought that she showed
a most Christian spirit, for she hung her head and did not say any
thing. I had heard of white wives behaving worse.
When supper was over, the boy came and laid down at my feet, and
talked with me about living in the woods. He said he pitied the poor
white people for being shut up in houses all their days. For his part,
he should die of such a dull life, he knew he should. He promised to
teach me how to shoot with the bow and arrows, to snare partridges
and rabbits, and many other things. He said he was afraid I was
almost spoiled by living in the house and going to school, but he
hoped that, if they took me away and gave me a new name, and
dressed me properly, they might make something of me yet. Then I
asked him what he was called, hoping that he had some grand
Indian name, like Uncas, or Miantonimo, or Tushmalahah; but he
said it was Peter. He was a pleasant fellow, and while he was talking
with me I did not care about my home, but felt very brave and
squaw-like, and began to think about the fine belt of wampum, and
the head-dress of gay feathers, and the red leggins, and the yellow
moccasons I was going to buy for myself, with the baskets I was
going to learn to weave. But when he left me, and I went back to the
wigwam and sat down on the hemlock-boughs by myself, somehow I
couldn’t keep home out of my mind. I thought first of my mother, how
she would miss the little brown face at the supper-table, and on the
pillow, by the fair face of my blue-eyed sister. I thought of my young
brother, Albert, crying himself to sleep, because I was lost. I thought
of my father and brothers searching through the orchard and barn,
and going with lights to look in the mill-stream. Again, I thought of my
mother, how, when she feared I was drowned, she would cry bitterly,
and be very sorry for what she had said about my dark complexion.
Then I thought of myself, how I must sleep on the hard ground, with
nothing but hemlock-boughs for covering, and nobody to tuck me up.
What if it should storm before morning, and the high tree above me
should be struck by lightning! What if the old Indian should not be a
tame savage after all, but should take a fancy to set up the war-
whoop, and come and scalp me in the middle of the night!
The bell in the village church rang for nine. This was the hour for
evening devotions at home. I looked round to see if my new friends
were preparing for worship. But the old Indian was already fast
asleep, and as for the younger one, I feared that a man who
indulged himself in beating his wife with a wooden spoon would
hardly be likely to lead in family prayers. Upon the whole, I
concluded I was among rather a heathenish set. Then I thought
again of home, and doubted whether they would have any family
worship that night, with one lamb of the flock gone astray. I thought
of all their grief and fears, till I felt that my heart would burst with
sorrow and repentance, for I dared not cry aloud.
Suddenly, I heard a familiar sound at a little distance,—it was Carlo’s
bark! Nearer and nearer it came; then I heard steps coming fast
through the crackling brushwood, then little Carlo sprang out of the
dark into the fire-light, and leaped upon me, licking my hands with
joy. He was followed by one of my elder brothers, and by my mother!
To her I ran. I dared not look in her eyes, but hid my face in her
bosom, sobbing out, “O mother, forgive me! forgive me!” She
pressed me to her heart, and bent down and kissed me very
tenderly, and when she did so, I felt the tears on her dear cheek.
I need hardly say that I never again undertook to make an Onondaga
squaw of myself, though my mother always held that I was dark
enough to be one, and I suppose the world would still bear her out in
her opinion.
I am sorry to tell the fate of the faithful dog who tracked me out on
that night, though his story is not quite so sad as that of some of my
pets. A short time after this event, my brother Charles was going to
the city of S——, some twenty miles away, and wished to take Carlo
for company. I let him go very reluctantly, charging my brother to take
good and constant care of him. The last time I ever saw Carlo’s
honest, good-natured face, it was looking out at me through the
window of the carriage. The last time, for he never came back to us,
but was lost in the crowded streets of S——.
He was a simple, country-bred pointer, and, like many another poor
dog, was bewildered by the new scenes and pleasures of the city,
forgot his guide, missed his way, wandered off, and was never
found.
CORA, THE SPANIEL.
The pet which took little Carlo’s place in our home and hearts was a
pretty, chestnut-colored water-spaniel, named Cora. She was a
good, affectionate creature, and deserved all our love. The summer
that we had her for our playmate, my brother Albert, my sister Carrie,
and I, spent a good deal of time down about the pond, in watching
her swimming, and all her merry gambols in the water. There grew,
out beyond the reeds and flags of that pond, a few beautiful, white
water-lilies, which we taught her to bite off and bring to us on shore.
Cora seemed to love us very much, but there was one whom she
loved even more. This was little Charlie Allen, a pretty boy of about
four or five years old, the only son of a widow, who was a tenant of
my father, and lived in a small house on our place. There grew up a
great and tender friendship between this child and our Cora, who
was always with him while we were at school. The two would play
and run about for hours, and when they were tired, lie down and
sleep together in the shade. It was a pretty sight, I assure you, for
both were beautiful.
It happened that my father, one morning, took Cora with him to the
village, and was gone nearly all day; so little Charlie was without his
playmate and protector. But after school, my sister, brother, and I
called Cora, and ran down to the pond. We were to have a little
company that night, and wanted some of those fragrant, white lilies
for our flower-vase. Cora barked and leaped upon us, and ran round
and round us all the way. Soon as she reached the pond, she sprang
in and swam out to where the lilies grew, and where she was hid
from our sight by the flags and other water-plants. Presently, we
heard her barking and whining, as though in great distress. We
called to her again and again, but she did not come out for some
minutes. At last, she came through the flags, swimming slowly along,
dragging something by her teeth. As she swam near, we saw that it
was a child,—little Charlie Allen! We then waded out as far as we
dared, met Cora, took her burden from her, and drew it to the shore.
As soon as we took little Charlie in our arms, we knew that he was
dead. He was cold as ice, his eyes were fixed in his head, and had
no light in them. His hand was stiff and blue, and still held tightly
three water-lilies, which he had plucked. We suppose the poor child
slipped from a log, on which he had gone out for the flowers, and
which was half under water.
Of course we children were dreadfully frightened. My brother was
half beside himself, and ran screaming up home, while my sister
almost flew for Mrs. Allen.
O, I never shall forget the grief of that poor woman, when she came
to the spot where her little dead boy lay!—how she threw herself on
the ground beside him, and folded him close in her arms, and tried to
warm him with her tears and her kisses, and tried to breathe her own
breath into his still, cold lips, and tried to make him hear by calling,
“Charlie, Charlie, speak to mamma! speak to your poor mamma!”
But Charlie did not see her, nor feel her, nor hear her any more; and
when she found that he was indeed gone from her for ever, she gave
the most fearful shriek I ever heard, and fell back as though she
were dead.
By this time, my parents and a number of the neighbours had
reached the spot, and they carried Mrs. Allen and her drowned boy
home together, through the twilight. Poor Cora followed close to the
body of Charlie, whining piteously all the way. That night, we could
not get her out of the room where it was placed, but she watched
there until morning.
Ah, how sweetly little Charlie looked when he was laid out the next
day! His beautiful face had lost the dark look that it wore when he
was first taken from the water; his pretty brown hair lay in close
ringlets all around his white forehead. One hand was stretched at his
side, the other was laid across his breast, still holding the water-lilies.
He was not dressed in a shroud, but in white trousers, and a pretty
little spencer of pink gingham. He did not look dead, but sleeping,
and he seemed to smile softly, as though he had a pleasant dream in
his heart.
Widow Allen had one other child, a year younger than Charlie,
whose name was Mary, but who always called herself “Little May.” O,
it would have made you cry to have seen her when she was brought
to look on her dead brother. She laughed at first, and put her small
fingers on his shut eyes, trying to open them, and said, “Wake up
Charlie! wake up, and come play out doors, with little May!” But
when she found that those eyes would not unclose, and when she
felt how cold that face was, she was grieved and frightened, and ran
to hide her face in her mother’s lap, where she cried and trembled;
for though she could not know what death was, she felt that
something awful had happened in the house.
But Cora’s sorrow was also sad to see. When the body of Charlie
was carried to the grave, she followed close to the coffin, and when it
was let down into the grave, she leaped in and laid down upon it,
and growled and struggled when the men took her out. Every day
after that, she would go to that grave, never missing the spot, though
there were many other little mounds in the old church-yard. She
would lie beside it for hours, patiently waiting, it seemed, for her
young friend to awake and come out into the sunshine, and run
about and play with her as he was used to do. Sometimes she would
dig a little way into the mound, and bark, or whine, and then listen for
the voice of Charlie to answer. But that voice never came, though the
faithful Cora listened and waited and pined for it, through many days.
She ate scarcely any thing; she would not play with us now, nor
could we persuade her to go into the pond. Alas! that fair, sweet
child, pale and dripping from the water, was the last lily she ever
brought ashore. She grew so thin, and weak, and sick, at last, that
she could hardly drag herself to the grave. But still she went there
every day. One evening, she did not come home, and my brother
and I went down for her. When we reached the church-yard, we
passed along very carefully, for fear of treading on some grave, and
spoke soft and low, as children should always do in such places.
Sometimes we stopped to read the long inscriptions on handsome
tombstones, and to wonder why so many great and good people
were taken away. Sometimes we pitied the poor dead people who
had no tombstones at all, because their friends could not afford to
raise them, or because they had been too wicked themselves to
have their praises printed in great letters, cut in white marble, and
put up in the solemn burying-ground, where nobody would ever dare
to write or say any thing but the truth. When we came in sight of
Charlie’s grave, we talked about him. We wondered if he thought of
his mother, and cried out any when he was drowning. We thought
that he must have grown very weary with struggling in the water, and
we wondered if he was resting now, sleeping down there with his
lilies. We said that perhaps his soul was awake all the time, and that,
when he was drowned, it did not fly right away to heaven, with the
angels, to sing hymns, while his poor mother was weeping, but
stayed about the place, and somehow comforted her, and made her
think of God and heaven, even when she lay awake in the night, to
mourn for her lost boy.
So talking, we came up to the grave. Cora was lying on the mound,
where the grass had now grown green and long. She seemed to be
asleep, and not to hear our steps or our voices. My brother spoke to
her pleasantly, and patted her on the head. But she did not move. I
bent down and looked into her face. She was quite dead!
JACK, THE DRAKE.
I have hesitated a great deal about writing the history of this pet, for
his little life was only a chapter of accidents, and you may think it
very silly. Still, I hope you may have a little interest in it after all, and
that your kind hearts may feel for poor Jack, for he was good and
was unfortunate.
It happened that once, during a walk in the fields, I found a duck’s
egg right in my path. We had then no ducks in our farm-yard, and I
thought it would be a fine idea to have one for a pet. So I wrapped
the egg in wool, and put it into a basket, which I hung in a warm
corner by the kitchen-fire. My brothers laughed at me, saying that the
egg would never be any thing more than an egg, if left there; but I
had faith to believe that I should some time see a fine duckling
peeping out of the shell, very much to the astonishment of all
unbelieving boys. I used to go to the basket, lift up the wool and look
at that little blue-hued treasure three or four times a day, or take it
out and hold it against my bosom, and breathe upon it in anxious
expectation; until I began to think that a watched egg never would
hatch. But my tiresome suspense finally came to a happy end. At
about the time when, if he had had a mother, she would have been
looking for him, Jack, the drake, presented his bill to the world that
owed him a living. He came out as plump and hearty a little fowl as
could reasonably have been expected. But what to do with him was
the question. After a while, I concluded to take him to a hen who had
just hatched a brood of chickens, thinking that, as he was a
friendless orphan, she might adopt him for charity’s sake. But Biddy
was already like the celebrated
“Old woman that lived in a shoe,
Who had so many children she didn’t know what to do.”

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An Invitation to Feminist Ethics 2nd

Edition Hilde Lindemann

An Invitation to Feminist Ethics

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

This book is for Ellen and Jack,

1. What Is Feminist Ethics? 3

4.3 Repairing the Damage 64

The second part of the book, “Close-​ups,” zooms in on three

Many people have helped me write this book. Particular thanks go

An Invitation to Feminist Ethics

In a roughly similar vein, morally competent adults don’t have

1.1. What Is Ethics?

Ethics is the scholarly study of morality. It sets out to understand

What Is Feminist Ethics? 5

ethics, and virtue ethics. We also find accounts of integrity, oppres-

Ethics Sketch Map

Monism: all moral values are commensurable; there can be no gen-

Moral Epistemologies (theories of moral knowledge)

What Is Feminist Ethics? 7

1.2. What Is Feminism?

What, then, is feminism? As a social and political movement with a

serious problems. Which men do women want to be equal to? Women

What Is Feminist Ethics? 9

invention. According to this invention, which is widespread in “civili-

“Men’s differences from women are equal to women’s differences from

1.3. What Is Gender?

What Is Feminist Ethics? 11

that men are supposed to occupy positions of religious authority and

categories that the simple male/​ female distinction acknowledges.

What Is Feminist Ethics? 13

acknowledged that, given the circumstances, murder was a bit much,

either. Those not-​identities, though, don’t offer any positive depiction

What Is Feminist Ethics? 15

1.4. Power and Morality

our moral training. For whom or what are we ethically responsible?

1.5. Description and Prescription

So far it sounds as if feminist ethics devotes considerable attention

What Is Feminist Ethics? 17

moral assumptions: “That the subordination of women is morally

What Is Feminist Ethics? 19

1.6. Morality and Politics

If moral theorizing dates back over two thousand years in Western

What Is Feminist Ethics? 21

neutrality, androcentrism, difference, and oppression, all of which I’ll

For Further Reading

Baier, Annette. 1994. Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Cambridge,

Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2007. “Evil Deceivers and Make-​ Believers: On

On 19 June 2001 a class-​action sex-​discrimination lawsuit was filed

2.1. Gender Neutrality

One common-​sense solution to the problem of gender discrimina-

Discrimination and Oppression 25

passed, it would have been unconstitutional for Congress or the state

The second problem with gender neutrality is that it doesn’t re-

Another way to put this second criticism of gender-​neutral policies is

Discrimination and Oppression 27

that she is an “undeveloped man.” And because regarding man’s body

anyway, women’s hormonal cycles might complicate the picture. But

“Full twenty suns have risen and set

“As thy foe did rob thee of a leg

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The second part of the book, “Close-ups,” zooms in on three

categories that the simple male/ female distinction acknowledges.

either. Those not-identities, though, don’t offer any positive depiction

Bettcher, Talia Mae. 2007. “Evil Deceivers and Make- Believers: On

On 19 June 2001 a class-action sex-discrimination lawsuit was filed

One common-sense solution to the problem of gender discrimina-

Another way to put this second criticism of gender-neutral policies is