Women

3 Pages 806 Words

This is a good book, it shows, by careful research of an open-ended kind, that women's intellectual development does not follow the same path as that of men, particularly as outlined in the influential research of William Perry. Perry traced, in college students, a progression from basic dualism to passive learning, to an appreciation of multiplicity of views, to a subjectivism which says that my opinion is as good as any other, to a relativism subordinate, where the objectivity of an academic discipline is respected as a way of knowing, to a full appreciation of relativism, where it becomes the real way a person thinks, and not just something adopted within a discipline. Knowledge is therefore constructed, not given - that is the final stage of learning. This all sounded likely enough, but it made abstract objectivity the only way forward, and this seemed to be a repeat of much the same error as Carol Gilligan had found in the research on ethical outlooks of Lawrence !
Kohlberg. Gilligan, a former co-worker of Kohlberg, had shown that his scoring system did not do justice to the ethic of care, responsibility and connectedness which many women adhered to in their thinking. It focussed strictly on questions of abstract truth and justice, and again the emphasis was on objectivity. What the authors found in their research on women was a somewhat different developmental model. The first and most basic position they found was silence. Many women had simply been silenced, firstly by their own families and then by their husbands and other men. They had no voice and did not acknowledge any right to think. The second position was received knowledge, gained from listening to the voices of others. Women at this stage had no respect for their own opinions and regarded other people and books as the source of all knowledge. I say "stage", but the authors of this book are much less confident than Perry or Kohlberg that these positi...