Tracking down the source…
Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind
by Mary Belenky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger, Jill Tarule
This 1996 edition is the 10th aniversary edition – originally from 1986
From interviews with 135 women (mostly privileged college students) regarding their search for truth and knowledge, the authors (all female faculty members of colleges or universities) determine five learning “perspectives” that characterize “women’s way of knowing.” The somewhat philosophical text, which skillfully blends narration, documentation, and excerpts from interviews, sees higher education’s teaching methods as more responsive to male “impersonalness” than female “connectedness” and recommends ways to improve the situation. On the whole, a work ironically geared more to the dialectician or feminist scholar than to the “integrated constructivist” or “passionate knower.” For large public and academic libraries. Janice Arenofsky, formerly with Arizona State Lib., Phoenix Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The story interestingly continues, in 1996:
Knowledge, Difference and Power: Essays Inspired by Women’s Ways of Knowing
by Nancy Rule Goldberger, Jill Mattuck Tarule, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Mary Field Belenky
From Publishers Weekly
Ten years ago, the editors, all educators working in the field of psychology, published a theory of epistemology based on interviews with women that caused ripples in academic circles. This anniversary volume contains 15 articles, including one by each editor, that deal with the controversies that arose from the original work, Women’s Ways of Knowing, and the ways in which the writers have since changed their thinking. Several pieces, including one by feminist Sara Ruddick, deal with the concept of “connected knowing,” which, according to the authors, means acquiring knowledge by entering the belief world of another person; it has been criticized by some as contributing to a gender-determined system of learning. An interesting piece by social psychologist Aida Hurtado addresses the issues of race and class in relation to ways of knowing. These scholarly contributions will be of interest primarily to those already familiar with the original work.
This led me to a pdf:
A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction
Carol Cohn and Sara Ruddick
to be published in: Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction
eds. Steven Lee and Sohail Hashmi, under review at Cambridge University Press.
Which in turn has interesting references:
The phrase “alternative epistemology” comes from Margaret Urban Walker, “Moral
Understandings: Alternative ‘Epistemology’ for a Feminist Ethics,” Hypatia, vol. 4, no. 4
(1989) pp.15-28.
They go on to refer mostly to the two books above… so it seems we are at the source.
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