Women's Ways of Bullying

A survivor of a feminist co-operative tells all.

By Laura Miller

Jan 13, 1997 | In 1986, four academic women  Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger and Jill Mattuck Tarule  published a book called "Women's Ways of Knowing." A couple of years later, I went to work at a small business that would eventually become a worker-owned, feminist co-operative. When I finally left that company after seven years, I'd learned to curse Belenky et. al., along with a whole passel of other feminist theorists, whose ideas, I believe, helped to make my workplace the most poisonous and depleting I've ever encountered.

"Women's Ways of Knowing," like the more popular writings of psychologist Carol Gilligan ("In a Different Voice"), claimed, in the words of two followers, that "women's thought patterns are more contextual and more embedded in relational concerns than those of men." Women are supposed to be co-operative rather than competitive, more inclined toward empathy and less toward seeking dominance. In opposition to "the rationalism, separation and false 'objectivity' of masculinist models of knowledge," women were touted as caring more about personal experience, feelings and intuition, which are felt in the body ("gut" feelings) rather than the head. Even people who've never heard of "Women's Ways of Knowing" or Gilligan recognize such ideas  if only because they parrot traditional notions of femininity, with the connotation neatly switched from negative to positive.

Depending on your politics, a democratically-managed, feminist co-operative might sound intriguing, heavenly or nightmarish. People who have worked in other "alternative" organizations tend to offer a knowing, sympathetic groan of agony when I talk about that part of my past. My former workplace suffered from a litany of woes that plague such idealistic groups, most of which just boil down to childish behavior. The difference was, in our organization the perpetrators had a ready-made ideological justification for every tantrum and dropped ball, every passive-aggressive stratagem and rank prejudice, the wheel spinning and the finger-pointing. It was all, somehow, a more feminist and womanly approach, an attempt to topple the patriarchy by defying its cruel, oppressive, rational standards of behavior. That ideology, picked up in college Women's Studies programs and various feminist books and journals, came courtesy of theorists like Goldberger, Tarule, Clinchy and Belenky.

Now, with "Knowledge, Difference, and Power: Essays Inspired by 'Women's Ways of Knowing,'" the four authors have anthologized writings by people whose lives were changed by their original book  although not, unsurprisingly, malcontents like me. To be fair, reading it I learned that many of the boosters of "Women's Ways of Knowing" have gravely misinterpreted and simplified its authors' ideas. But I also learned that this (deliberate or just plain stupid) misreading keeps cropping up again and again. Students who read "Women's Ways of Knowing," as one contributor to "Knowledge, Difference, and Power" reports, invariably "heard [the] authors as praising 'connectedness,' a voice of one's own, emotionality, 'embodied' knowledge and other characteristics," all described as typical of women.

Our company ran a retail store and mail order business. Trying to accomplish the necessary, nuts-and-bolts tasks of such an operation, while appeasing those staff who demanded that the company emulate this "connected" vision of feminism, felt like playing tennis underwater. The authors of "Women's Ways of Knowing" don't seem to recognize that the "female" style of behavior they champion is the direct result of women having had very little power throughout most of history. It completely fails us when we actually have some economic and social muscle. But many feminists, like many leftists, have such a moral phobia about power that they have no idea how to exercise it constructively.

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