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i
An Invitation to Feminist Ethics

ii
iii
An Invitation
to Feminist Ethics
Second Edition
HILDE LINDEMANN
1
iv
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
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
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
v
This book is for Ellen and Jack,
pieces of my heart
vi
vi
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
vi
viii Contents
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
ix
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
x
x Preface
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.
xi
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.
xi
xi
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.
xvi
xv
An Invitation to Feminist Ethics

xvi
1
PART ONE
OVERVIEWS
2
3
1
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.”
4
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
5
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
6
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.
10
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?”)
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Vases for different purposes were made of different shapes; each was
beautiful in form, but with its beauty it combined usefulness. The handles on
the water jars are placed just where they are most needed, the oil pours out
of the narrow neck of the oil jug drop by drop so that the quantity could be
easily regulated, and the drinking cup has a slight curve to the rim, so that
one can drink out of it quite easily without spilling the liquid.
There are certain well known forms of these vases: the Amphora is a
large two-handled vase which was used for storing oil and other liquids; the
Hydria has three handles and was used for carrying water; the Krater is a
large vase in which wine and water were mixed; the Lekythos is a jug with a
narrow neck used for pouring out oil slowly in small quantities; and the
Kylix is a wide and shallow drinking cup. A large amphora, often full of oil,
was given as a prize for some of the athletic contests at the Panathenaic
games held in Athens. Such an amphora can always be recognized, as it
bears on one side the figure of Athena with the inscription: "I am from the
Games at Athens," and on the other a painting depicting the contest for
which the vase was a prize.
The quarter in Athens given up to the potters was known as the

Cerameicus, and here there were a number of workshops owned by different
vase-makers. At the head of each establishment was the master; but he was a
craftsman as well as manager and was able to do everything connected with
the industry: he could not only make the vase, but also design and paint it.
His workmen, however, did most of the turning, shaping and polishing of the
vases. When the vase had been made, it was given to the artist who painted
the design on it, after which it had to be dried, baked and glazed. The black
glaze that was used in Athens was one of the great discoveries of the ancient
potters' art. Time never spoiled it, and it seems as fresh today as when it was
first put on the vases. In some cases it has peeled off in small flakes, but that
only happens when the clay beneath is damp; otherwise it remains
unchanged.
GREEK VASES.
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The earlier vases were painted in black on the red background of the clay;
later, the artist sketched his design on the red clay and gave the vase back to
the workman, who painted in the background in black and then returned it to
the artist, who retouched his design and in some cases added here and there a
touch of colour.
Besides the rooms for the workmen and artists, and the court where the
ovens were placed, a potter's workshop required storerooms where the
finished vases were kept, and a room where the master received his
customers and sold his pottery.
The subjects of the paintings on the vases were always carefully chosen
and were suited to the use to which the vase was to be put. The large vases
had graver and more serious subjects, the kylix had more animated scenes.
This cup was used at banquets and on festive occasions, and so the artists
painted gay and merry scenes on it, and as they tried to attract buyers by the
novelty of their designs, the kylix paintings show a great deal of originality.
The subjects were taken from mythology, or showed battle scenes, or
subjects connected with daily life. If all our other sources of knowledge of
life in Athens were suddenly lost to us, the vases would still be a rich mine
of information, as in one way or another they represent all the varied
experiences of human life.
In all their art the Greeks were chiefly interested in representing the
human form. They themselves did not realize that in doing this they were
taking a step onward in man's great adventure of learning how to live, but in
all the many ways in which they represented man, they showed him going
forth into the outside world of nature, conscious that he had the power to
make of it a world in which he felt at home. Part of the greatness of the
Greeks came from the fact that they did this unconsciously. The craftsmen
and vase-painters themselves were in no way regarded as the equals of the
great sculptors. The Athenians regarded them as quite lowly workers, but
they were artists nevertheless, proved so by the fact that though there was
often copying of a general design, the artist never copied mechanically, but
put into his work something that was his own. In all the great quantity of
Greek vases in the world today no two have been found exactly alike, and so
the craftsmen, though they were unconscious of how later ages would regard
their work, knew the satisfaction that comes from creating beauty in any
form, and they said of their work that "there is no sweeter solace in life for
human ills than craftsmanship; for the mind, absorbed in its study, sails past
all troubles and forgets them."[3]
[1] A. E. Zimmern: The Greek Commonwealth.
[2] Xenophon: The Economist.
[3] Amphis: quoted by G. M. A. Richter in The Craft of Athenian Pottery.
CHAPTER XII
A DAY WITH AN ATHENIAN
I. THE ATHENIAN GENTLEMAN
The day began early in Athens, and as soon as the sun was up everyone
was stirring: the workman was off to his work, the schoolboy to school, and
every booth and stall in the Agora was laden with articles to attract the
buyers who were expected in the market.
Before leaving his house, the Athenian gentleman had his breakfast, a
little bread soaked in wine, after which one of his house-slaves saw that his
himation hung in graceful folds, and then, accompanied by one or more
slaves carrying baskets, he set forth for the Agora. Here the morning
marketing was done, but unless he was giving a very important banquet in
the evening, the gentleman did not himself attend to the household
marketing; his slaves did that for him and took the purchases home. Their
master, in the meantime, would walk up and down the Agora, or take a turn
or two in one of the Porches, where he would meet some of his friends, or go
to the barber's shop, where he would be sure to hear the latest news of the
day: Pericles had proposed to build another temple, and there was much
discussion as to whether the state could afford it; the Spartan army was said
to be stronger than ever, and Sparta had always been jealous of Athens; was
she secretly getting ready for a war, and if so should not Athens be prepared,
or were those right who believed that the greatness of Greece lay in a policy
of peace with Sparta? Perhaps the Olympic Games were being held and the
news had just come and spread like wildfire through the city, that the
Athenians had covered themselves with glory, especially in the chariot race,
and that the victors were even then on their way home, so all must be in
readiness to receive them. Or was it known that a galley had just returned
from a trading voyage on the Aegean, and that the sailors were reporting that
there was a good deal of discontent in some of the islands, and that threats
were being made of withholding some of the tribute money unless the
islanders were allowed greater independence? These and many more burning
questions of the day were made known and discussed without the use of
newspapers.
But the Athenian gentleman did not spend all his morning in talk. If he
were wealthy, he would have definite duties required of him by the State: he
had to fit out and keep in good order one or more triremes for the navy, and
there would be interviews with the captain as to the number of men he
required and how much they should be paid; there were estimates for repairs
to be gone over, and designs for a new and splendid figure-head on the prow
of the ship to be approved. Or perhaps it was his turn to provide for one of
the choruses in the coming dramatic festival, and he must see to it that this
chorus was well-trained and that no expense was spared in making it better
than any of the others, so that he might win the prize.
Then there were other duties towards the State that were demanded of
every free-born citizen. He must sit on the jury and judge law-suits
whenever he was called upon to do so, and as the Athenians were very fond
of such suits the demand came very often. Aristophanes, a dramatist who
wrote a number of plays in which he made fun of a great many of the
Athenian characteristics, said of the juryman:
He is a law-court lover, no man like him.
Judging is what he dotes on, and he weeps
Unless he sits on the front bench of all.[1]
In some way or other every Athenian citizen took part in the actual
government of the state, and in the time of Pericles about nine thousand men
held, during the year, some kind of state position. These officials were
chosen by the people and were seldom re-elected, so that not only was
everybody in turn responsible for certain functions, but everyone was
capable of intelligently discussing the affairs of the state, and this was done
at great length every day whenever Athenian citizens met together.
About once every ten days, the Agora was deserted in the morning, and
every free-born Athenian citizen over thirty years of age, both rich and poor,
was expected to go to the Pnyx, the meeting place of the Assembly. In times
of war, or when some very important question in which everyone was
interested had to be settled, no one stayed away, and there would be great
hurrying in the early morning in order to get a good place.
The Pnyx was a great open-air place of assembly, west of the Acropolis
and not far from the city wall. In shape it was a sloping semi-circle, part of
which was supported by a wall. There were no seats, and the citizens had to
make themselves as comfortable as they could on the bare ground. Facing
the slope was a rock cut in the form of a platform and mounted by steps on
each side. This was called the Bema, and here the orators stood when they
addressed the Assembly. In front of the Bema was the altar on which was
offered the sacrifice that always opened the Assembly, and behind it on a
rock were seats for the state officials who had charge of the meeting.
There were doubtless many days when the business in hand was not very
interesting, but there were times when excitement ran high and no one was
absent. It is not difficult to imagine the scene. Not far off rose the rock of the
Acropolis, symbol of the strength and glory of Athens and of the
guardianship of Athena; in the dim distance was the sea, the great bond of
union between Athens and the islands of the Aegean and the East, and a
symbol of the protecting power of Poseidon; overhead stretched the blue
Greek sky; and there below in the Pnyx was the densely packed crowd of
Athenians, deliberating on matters on which hung their very life or death. It
was there that the decision was made to march to Marathon and to face the
unnumbered Persian foe; that Themistocles pleaded passionately for a navy;
that the messengers from Delphi brought back the answer about the "wooden
walls"; that Aristeides persuaded the Athenians to free the Ionians from their
Persian masters and to form the Delian League which led Athens to become
an Empire; and it was there, too, that Pericles in stately and measured tones
urged the Athenians to beautify their city as no other city in the world had
ever been beautified before.
These and similar occupations took up the morning of the Athenian

gentleman. After a light meal in the middle of the day, he would go to the
Academy or one of the other gymnasia, where he would spend the cool of
the day in exercising himself, or in watching the youths at their games; in
walking in the pleasant groves talking over the events of the day with his
friends; or in discussing with some philosopher all kinds of questions
concerning new interpretations of old beliefs and new ideas about man,
whence he comes and whither he goes. Some of these were questions which
were discussed for the first time in the history of the world, and never before
and but seldom since has there been such an eager desire to know the truth
about all things, as there was in this Athens of the fifth century B.C.
But as the evening drew on and it grew dusk, the Athenians left the
gymnasia and returned to the city. All day long they had been in company,
and in the evening the most was made of every opportunity to meet again,
for they held that "to eat your dinner alone was not dining but feeding," so it
was very likely that the day would end by a banquet. If that were so, the
guests would all have been invited in the morning, either by the host himself
when he met them, or by a message carried by a slave. Preparations were
usually made for more than the invited number of guests, as it was a
common custom for guests to bring some additional friends of their own,
and uninvited guests would often come without any special bidding. Since
leaving the gymnasia, all the guests would have been at their homes. There
they would have bathed and clad themselves in fresh chitons and mantles,
and slaves would accompany them to the house of their host.
At a banquet the guests reclined on couches, and the food was brought to
them on low tables. The evening meal was the chief meal of the day in
Athens. It began with fish or meat and vegetables, and when this course was
over, the tables were removed, water was poured over the hands of the
guests, and garlands were often passed round. Then came the second course
of fruits, confectionery and various kinds of sweetmeats, after which the
tables were again removed, and replaced by smaller ones on which stood
beautifully shaped drinking cups. The guests were given more garlands and
wreaths, and the slaves brought in the large kraters, in which the wine and
water were mixed, and the after-dinner entertainment of the evening began.
This entertainment was called the Symposium, and it began with the
pouring out of three libations: to the Olympian gods, to the Heroes, and to
Zeus. Then the health of the hosts and of his guests was drunk; after which
began the entertainment. This consisted of conversation, singing, listening to
music, watching dancers, in playing games, telling stories or passing round
jests. Just what was done at the Symposium depended on the kind of guests
present. "When the company are real gentlemen and men of education," said
Plato, you will see no flute-girls, nor dancing girls, nor harp girls; they will
have no nonsense or games, but will be content with one another's
conversation." More often, however, the guests were less serious. They
enjoyed the music of the flute and other instruments, they played games, and
watched dancing, they "chatted and talked pleasant nonsense to one
another."
When the party came to an end, a libation was offered to Hermes, the
slaves were called, who attended their masters home, lighting their way with
torches or lamps. The older men would go sedately home, the younger
would keep up their merriment and go noisily and boisterously through the
streets until, having knocked at the doors of their houses, the sleepy porter
would wake up and let them in, and silence would at length reign in the
streets of the city.
II. THE ATHENIAN LADY

What, in the meantime, was the Athenian lady doing? She was at home,
managing all the household affairs and bringing up the children. She
educated her sons until they were seven years old, when they went to school,
and her daughters until they were about fifteen, when they were considered
old enough to be married.
The Greek writer Xenophon wrote an account of what were considered

the duties of an ideal Athenian wife. He imagines the husband of a young
bride telling her what he expected of her, and in what way he hoped the
household affairs would be managed.
You will need to stay indoors, despatching to their toils without, such
of your domestics whose work lies there. Over those whose appointed
tasks are indoors it will be your duty to preside, yours to receive the stuffs
brought in, yours to apportion part for daily use, and to make provision
for the rest, to guard and garner it so that the outgoings destined for a year
may not be expended in a month. It will be your duty when the wools are
brought in to see that clothing is made for those who have need. Your
duty also to see that the dried corn is made fit and serviceable for food.
Then, too, if any of the household fall sick, it will be your care to tend
them to the recovery of their health.
But there are other cares and occupations which are yours by right.
This, for instance, to take some maiden who knows nothing of carding
wool, and to make her skilful in the art, doubling her usefulness; or to
receive another quite ignorant of housekeeping or of service, and to
render her skilful, loyal, serviceable, till she is worth her weight in gold.
But the greatest joy of all will be to prove yourself my better; to make me
your faithful follower; knowing no dread lest as the years advance you
should decline in honour in your household, but rather trusting that
though your hair turn gray, yet in proportion as you come to be a better
helpmate to myself and to the children, a better guardian of our home, so
will your honour increase throughout the household as mistress, wife and
mother, daily more dearly prized.[2]
Some further good advice was then given, and the husband concluded by
recommending exercise as the best means of preserving both health and
beauty. He said:
I counsel you to oversee the baking woman as she makes the bread, to
stand beside the housekeeper as she measures out her stores; to go on
tours of inspection to see if all things are in order as they should be. For,
as it seems to me, this will be at once walking exercise and supervision.
And as an excellent gymnastic, I urge you to knead the dough, and roll
the paste; to shake the coverlets and make the beds; and if you train
yourself in exercise of this sort you will enjoy your food, grow vigorous
in health, and your complexion will in very truth be lovelier.[3]
Added to all these occupations was the education of the children. The
Athenian lady had nurses for them, Spartan slave-women, if they were to be
had, for their discipline was sterner than that of other Greeks, and the
Spartan nurses had the reputation of being able to keep their young charges
in particularly good order. All kinds of toys were provided for the children,
hoops and balls, spinning-tops and go-carts, dolls and toy animals. The
Athenian mother learnt to be a good story-teller, for it was in these early
days that the children wanted stories told them, and many a tale would she
relate of the gods and heroes of old, of the nymphs and spirits of the forests
and mountains, of the sea and of the air. And when night came and the
children must go to bed, then she would sing them to sleep with a slumber
song:
Sleep children mine, a light luxurious sleep,

Brother with brother: sleep, my boys, my life:
Blest in your slumber, in your waking blest.[4]
The girls had to be trained to all the duties of an Athenian wife, and there
was much to learn in the short years of their girlhood. It was a domestic
training that they were given; of other things they learned as much or as little
as their mother knew herself and was able to teach them, probably not more
than a little reading and writing. A girl was not encouraged to take up any
kind of intellectual pursuits, and during her life before her marriage she was
generally "most carefully trained to see and hear as little as possible, and to
ask the fewest questions."[5]
But it was not all work for the maiden, and many a time did she sit in the
swing in the courtyard and idle away a warm afternoon gently swinging to
and fro, and many a merry game of ball did she have with her companions. It
was she who made the fresh garlands and wreaths for the altars or the house,
and who, when the moon was full, laid offerings on the tomb of her
grandparents, and, most glorious of all her girlhood privileges, it was she
who helped to weave the robe taken to the temple of Athena at the time of
the great Panathenaic festival and who bore baskets of offerings to the
goddess in the great procession.
When the Athenian maiden married, all this life came to an end, and she
took upon her young shoulders the training of her own household, even as
she had seen her mother do. Her marriage had usually been arranged for her,
and she often knew but little of her future husband. Before the marriage day,
she offered all her girlhood treasures to Artemis, the goddess who had
watched over her childhood.
Her tambourines and pretty ball, and the net that confined her hair, and
her dolls and dolls' dresses, Timareta dedicates before her marriage to
Artemis, a maiden to a maiden as is fit; do thou, daughter of Leto, laying
thine hand over the girl Timareta, preserve her purely in her purity.[6]
When these symbols of her youth had passed from her keeping into that
of the goddess, the maiden was dressed in beautiful raiment, crowned with a
wreath and covered with the bridal veil for the marriage ceremony. This took
place in the evening on a day when the moon was full, and when she was
ready, the bride was led by her attendant maidens to the court where the
bridegroom and her parents and the invited guests awaited her. The marriage
took place in the court, a sacrifice was offered and a libation poured out to
the gods, and then the marriage feast followed, at which cakes of sesame
were always eaten. This was the only occasion on which women were
allowed to be present at a feast, but through it all the bride remained closely
veiled. When the feast was over, the bridal chariot was driven up to the door,
and the bride took her seat in it beside her husband, her mother walked
behind it bearing the marriage torch with which the fire on the hearth of her
new home would be lighted, the guests surrounded it and with flute-playing
and singing escorted the bride to her new home.
If the bridegroom lived in a distant place, the bridal procession broke up
at the gates of the city, but if he lived in Athens, he and his bride were
escorted to the door of his house, where they were met by his mother, and
then, to the music of a marriage song, the bride was led into her new home.
Did the Athenian lady have no amusements or recreations? Did she leave
all that was gay behind her when she became a wife? The Athenian lady
seldom left the house, and never unless attended by a female slave. She had
practically no society but that of her slaves. The peasant woman in the fields
and the few women who sold in the market had the society of their friends,
but such companionship was denied to the well-born lady. She saw no men,
except those of her own family. If her husband dined at home alone, she
shared his meal, but if he had guests she was unseen. From time to time she
took part in the great religious festivals and processions, and occasionally
she was permitted to be present in the theatre when a tragedy was performed,
but she was never permitted to see a comedy for the wit and humour were
often coarse and were considered unfitting for her ears.
In many ways it was a strange life that the Athenian lady lived, one that
seems as if it were in contradiction to all that the Athenians held of the
highest importance, for the
Athenian lady lived in the house among a people that lived out of
doors. Among a people who gave great importance to physical training
she was advised to take her exercise in bedmaking. At a time when the
human spirit was at its freest she was enclosed on all sides. Art and
thought and letters were reaching the highest development they were ever
to know, but for her they hardly existed.
But whatever was the actual life of the Athenian lady, the Athenian ideal of
womanhood was very high. In the wondrous temple that stood high above
the city, looking down upon it and guarding it, was the figure that
symbolized to the Athenians all that was good and beautiful and true, and it
was the figure of a woman. It was always the figure of a woman that
represented Victory, and nearly all the great Greek dramas deal with the fate
of a woman, who was generally the wife or daughter of a King. The Sacred
Mysteries of Eleusis, mysteries of such deep meaning that it was said that
"partakers in them had better hopes concerning death and all eternity,"
centred round the story of the love and sorrow of a woman. A race that could
produce such great figures as these must have thought nobly of womanhood.
[7]
And so, in spite of her subordinate position in the background, the

Athenian woman was of real influence in Athens. She reigned supreme in
the household, and as her sons grew up, they recognized in her those
qualities which every Greek and especially the Athenian, was taught to value
so highly: that quiet courage which by its very steadfastness overcomes all
the little anxieties and annoyances of daily life; and that self-control and
self-mastery which, putting self in the background, sets free the individual
for service to others. The Athenian ideal of service was that the man should
give it wholly to the state, and the woman wholly to her home, but narrow as
was her horizon, limited as were her opportunities, the Athenian woman
exercised an influence in Athens, that helped to strengthen and preserve
some of the noblest Athenian qualities.
[1] Aristophanes: The Wasps, translated by B. B. Rogers. (By permission

of Messrs. G. Bell and Sons.)
[3] Ibid.
[4] Theocritus: From Idyll, XXIV, translated by S. C. Calverley. (By

permission of Messrs. G. Bell and Sons.)
[6] Author Unknown: From Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology,
translated by J. W. Mackail.
[7] See Emily James Putnam: The Lady.

CHAPTER XIII
THE ATHENIAN SCHOOLBOY
The chief aim of Athenian education was the building of character. The
Athenians were more concerned that their sons should grow up to be good
citizens, loving what was beautiful and hating all that was ugly, than that
they should know any great number of facts. The object of any education is
to teach a child how to live, and a system of education is good or bad
according as it fulfils this aim. As different states and countries, at different
periods, have had different ideals as to what is meant by living, so they will
all have had different kinds of education, each thought out in such a way as
best to train the child for that conception of life believed in by his state or
country. For example, the Spartan conception of life was that every citizen
should be a good soldier, able to defend his country and to go out and fight
her wars. Whether the Spartan ideal was a good one or not, may be
questioned, but it cannot be denied that Spartan education was an excellent
preparation for such a life.
The Athenians had a much wider ideal than the Spartans. They, too,
believed in the training of the body, and in making patriotic citizens who
would count it a glory to die in defence of their city, but they also believed
that it was a glory to live for their city, and to this end they trained the mind
and the imagination as well as the body. To an Athenian a good man was a
good citizen, one who, being physically perfect, would be able to defend his
city in time of war, who, being able to think, would be capable of governing,
and loving all that was beautiful would set high standards of taste in art, in
letters, and in conduct. Praxiteles gave outward form to this ideal in his
statue of Hermes, and though the Athenian ideal was not complete, Athenian
education produced a warrior like Miltiades, statesmen like Themistocles
and Pericles, a poet like Sophocles, artists like Pheidias and Praxiteles,
philosophers like Socrates and Plato, and a historian like Thucydides.
THE FLUTE LESSON, THE WRITING LESSON. (ABOVE A
WRITING-ROLL, A FOLDED TABLET, A
RULING SQUARE, ETC.)
From the Kylix of Douris, now at Berlin (No. 2285).
Monumenti dell' Institute, ix. Plate 54.
The Athenians believed that training which aimed only at money-making,

or bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelligence, was mean and
vulgar and did not deserve to be called education. True education, they held,
made a child long to be a good citizen and taught him both how to rule and
to obey. It must not be supposed that the Athenians despised wealth or the
power of wealth. Only a wealthy state could have built the Parthenon or
celebrated the great Panathenaic Festival, but the Athenians despised mere
money-making, and they believed that a man's success was not to be
measured by the amount of money he had made, but by the use to which he
put it, and they believed that an education which taught a boy to be
industrious and thrifty, to despise self-indulgence and luxury, to think
straight and see clearly, would make him a better citizen than one which
aimed only at making him a successful man of business. So they aimed at
giving every boy a good education.
First among things, [said one of their teachers], I reckon human
education. For if you begin anything whatever in the right way, the end
will probably be right also. The nature of the harvest depends upon the
seeds you sow. If you plant good education in a young body, it bears
leaves and fruit the whole life long, and no rain or drought can destroy it.
[1]
The Athenian boy went to school when he was seven years old. At this
age he was placed in the charge of a pedagogue, a trusted slave who
accompanied him when he went to school, carried his books for him, and
helped him, when necessary, with his lessons. The pedagogue was also
expected to keep him in good order, to teach him good manners, to answer
all his many questions, and to punish him whenever he thought fit, which
was probably very often.
Schools opened early, so early that Solon made a law forbidding

schoolmasters to open their schools before sunrise and requiring them to be
closed before sunset, so that the boys should not have to walk about the dark
and empty streets. The Athenian boy, then, had to be early astir. "He gets up
at dawn, washes the sleep from his eyes, and puts on his cloak. Then he goes
out from his father's house with his eyes fixed upon the ground, not looking
at anyone who meets him." (A modest and unassuming appearance in public
was required of every boy.) "Behind him follow attendants and pedagogues,
bearing in their hands the implements of virtue, writing-tablets or books
containing the great deeds of old, or, if he is going to a music-school, his
well-tuned lyre."[2]
Arrived at the school, the pedagogue remained in an ante-room, where he

waited with all the other pedagogues until morning school was over. The boy
entered a larger room beyond, where he settled down to his lessons. The
boys sat on low benches with their writing-tablets on their knees, and the
master sat on a higher chair in front of them. Lyres and other musical
instruments, a book-roll or two, or perhaps some drinking-cups hung on the
walls.
Athenian boys were taught three main subjects: letters, music and
gymnastics. The first thing connected with letters was to be able to read and
write. The first writing lessons were given on wooden tablets covered with
wax, and for a pen a stylus with a sharp metal point was used. With this
stylus the letters were scratched on the wax. When a boy had learnt to write
better, he was allowed to write on papyrus with a reed dipped in a kind of
sticky substance which took the place of ink.
When the boy has learned his letters [we are told], and is beginning to
understand what is written, as before he understood only what was
spoken, they put into his hands the works of great poets, which he reads
sitting on a bench at school; in these are contained many admonitions,
and many tales, and praises of ancient famous men, which he is required
to learn by heart, in order that he may imitate them and desire to become
like them.[3]
Athenian boys had no books for children—they began by reading great

poetry and literature. Much of the literature they learnt by heart, standing in
front of the master who recited it to them, and they learnt it by repeating it
after him line by line. In this way they mastered passages from the Iliad and
the Odyssey, and though it must have been unusual, it was not an unknown
feat for a boy to be able to recite the whole of those poems by heart. "My
father," said one man speaking of his school days, "in his pains to make me a
good man, compelled me to learn the whole of Homer's poems, and even
now I can repeat the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart."[4] Reciting poetry in
an Athenian school was by no means a dull affair, for the boys acted as they
recited. The art of reciting poetry was held in high esteem not only in
Athens, but all over Greece, and in all places where the Greek tongue was
spoken and where Greek ideals prevailed. During the disastrous war that
Athens waged against Sparta at the end of the fifth century B.C. an Athenian
expedition was sent to Sicily. After a terrible fight in the harbour of
Syracuse, the Athenians were utterly defeated, and all those who survived
the battle were taken as prisoners and confined in the stone quarries near the
city.[5] They were exposed to the sun and the rain and almost starved to
death. But any man who could recite a chorus or one of the scenes from a
play of Euripides, the great Athenian poet, was given his freedom and
allowed to return home.
A certain amount of arithmetic was also taught, for it was considered a
good training for the mind.
"No branch of education is considered so valuable a preparation for
household management and politics, and all arts and crafts, sciences and
professions, as arithmetic; best of all by some divine art, it arouses the
dull and sleepy brain, and makes it studious, mindful and sharp,"
and it was said of arithmetic that "those who are born with a talent for it are
quick at all learning, while even those who are slow at it, have their general
intelligence much increased by studying it."[6] But Athenian children, like
others, sometimes found it difficult to learn, and "I am pretty sure," said an
Athenian, "that you will not easily find many sciences that give the learner
and student so much trouble and toil as arithmetic."[7]
THE LYRE LESSON, AND THE POETRY LESSON. (ABOVE IS AN

ORNAMENTAL MANUSCRIPT BASKET.)
From a Kylix by Douris, now in Berlin (No. 2285).
Monumenti dell' Instituto, ix. Plate 54.
Part of the day was given to the study of letters, and then the boys went to
the music school, where they learnt to play the lyre and to sing. A song
accompanied by the music of the lyre was a favourite part of the
entertainment after a banquet, and every Athenian gentleman was expected
to be able to sing and play whenever he was called upon. So much was it the
mark of a gentleman, that "He who doesn't know the way to play the lyre"
became a proverbial expression for an uneducated person.
Very little is known about Greek music, but it was considered very
necessary that the music taught should be of an ennobling and inspiring
kind. The Lydian melodies were held to be altogether too soft and
sentimental, and the Athenians preferred those known as Dorian, because
they were simpler and sterner and of a kind to inspire men to noble and
manly deeds. Aristotle who wrote so much about the ideal state, wrote also
about the education an ideal state should give to its children. He held that
"music is neither a necessary nor a useful accomplishment in the sense in
which letters are useful, but it provides a noble and worthy means of
occupying leisure time," and Aristotle, like all Athenians, believed that it
was the part of a good education to teach not only how to work well, but also
how to use leisure well. The Athenians thought music was a good medicine
for all ills. One philosopher, when his temper had been ruffled and he felt
irritated and tired, used to take up his harp and play, saying, "I am calming
myself."
In the afternoon the boys were taken by their pedagogues to the palaestra
or wrestling-school, where they learned gymnastics. It was as important that
the boy should have a well-trained, graceful body, as that he should have a
clear and well-furnished mind, and so he spent a good part of each day
running, jumping, wrestling, and throwing the discus under a special master.
According to Plato, this education turned the Athenian boy from being
"the most unmanageable of animals" into "the most amiable and divine of
living beings." This change had not taken place without many a punishment
of the boy, and it was a proverb that "he that is not flogged cannot be
taught." Not long ago an old Greek papyrus was discovered which gives a
vivid account of the discipline that was thought necessary by both parents
and teachers, for the schoolboy who preferred, as he probably often did, to
play games instead of learning his lessons. A mother brought her truant boy,
Cottalus, to his schoolmaster, Lampriscus, to receive a flogging for his
misdeeds, and she said:
Mother.
Flog him Lampriscus,

Across the shoulders, till his wicked soul
Is all but out of him. He's spent my all
In playing odd and even; knuckle bones
Are nothing to him. Why, he hardly knows
The door of the Letter School. And yet the thirtieth
Comes round and I must pay—tears no excuse.
His writing tablet which I take the trouble
To wax anew each month lies unregarded
In the corner. If by chance he deigns to touch it
He scowls like Hades, then puts nothing right
But smears it out and out. He doesn't know
A letter till you scream it twenty times.
****
Yet he knows
The seventh and the twentieth of the month,
Whole holidays, as if he reads the stars,
He lies awake o' nights dreaming of them.
But, so may yonder Muses prosper you,
Give him in stripes no less than—
Lampriscus (briskly).
Right you are.

Here, boys, hoist him
Upon your backs. I like your goings on,
My boy! I'll teach you manners! Where's my strap,
With the stinging cow's tail?
Cottalus (in terror).

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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

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