The author argues that the contributions of Jane Addams and the women of the Hull House Settlement to pragmatist theory, particularly as formulated by John Dewey, are largely responsible for its emancipatory emphasis. By recovering Addams’s own pragmatist theory, a version of pragmatist feminism is developed that speaks to such contemporary feminist issues as the manner of inclusion in society of diverse persons, marginalized by gender, ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation; the strengths and limitations of standpoint theory; and the need for feminist ethics to embrace the social nature of morality. The model of social democracy that informs the pragmatist shift from a detached theory of knowing to an engaged theory of understanding differentiates it from both liberal individualism and communitarianism. Dewey’s repeated attacks on the incoherence of the model of classical liberal individualism, for example, are even more persuasive when seen in the context of the model of the intersubjective constitution of the individual that Addams develops from examining the relation of personal development to social interaction among the women residents of Hull House.
Unlike our counterparts in Europe who have rewritten their specific cultural philosophical heritage, American feminists have not yet critically reappropriated our own philosophical tradition of classical American pragmatism. The neglect is especially puzzling, given that both feminism and pragmatism explicitly acknowledge the material or cultural specificity of supposedly abstract theorizing. In this article I suggest some reasons for the neglect, call for the rediscovery of women pragmatists, reflect on a feminine side of pragmatism, and point out some common features. The aim is to encourage the further development of a feminist revisioning of pragmatism and a pragmatist version of feminism.
This essay introduces some of the many interests, methodologies, and goals that the philosophical tradition of classical American philosophy, usually referred to as pragmatism, shares with feminist theories. Because pragmatism developed along with the emergence of departments of philosophy in the United States, it also begins recovering the shared history of some of the first women to receive philosophy degrees. It claims that women in and out of the academy influenced pragmatism and shows how contemporary feminist philosophers continue to challenge and appropriate it.
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