The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

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V. Denise James

Classical Pragmatism and Feminist Recovery Projects

In the late nineteenth century, classical pragmatism found its first explicit exponent in the philosopher William James, who credited the epistemological and methodological insights of fellow US philosopher Charles S. Peirce with opening up a new route in philosophical inquiry that was necessarily linked to experience. Although Peirce would later decry the connection between his views and James’s interpretation of his epistemology, James went on to develop a theory of truth that he claimed was first articulated by Peirce. Following Peirce’s lead, James would call the philosophical orientation associated with this theory of truth and its consequences pragmatism. Pragmatism, for James, was a philosophical attitude, “The attitude of turning away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (James 2000: 33). John Dewey took up the banner of James’ pragmatism, expanding it to include the associated theories of the social and political world that would be influential not only for academically trained philosophers but also for the growing progressive movements of his day, especially in education policy and democratic theory.

For Dewey, pragmatism was primarily about inquiry and knowing, but what Dewey meant by “to inquire” and “to know” diverged from what he deemed a false dichotomy of knowing versus practice operative in philosophical discourse at the time. Dewey gives a genealogy of pragmatism and an explication of his own views in the essay “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy” (Dewey 1980: 3–48). He follows James and locates the first use of the term “pragmatism” and the first theoretical commitments to a form of pragmatism in Peirce, with his insistence on the fallibilism and verifiability of knowledge claims. Dewey defends James’ notion that ideas must “cash in” to have value, by explaining that verifiability requires existential proof in our lived experience. Dewey deepens James’ view and resists the allure of a philosophy that would only deal in concepts. He asserts, “Concepts are so clear; it takes so little time to develop their implications; experiences are so confused, and it requires so much time and energy to lay hold of them” (Dewey 1980: 44). It is this “laying hold” that would characterize Dewey’s theoretical production and his work in schools and policy. Intelligence was creative and future oriented on Dewey’s view. Inquiry required the use of imagination and vigilance about experience. Philosophy would only prove to be useful if it served to help to articulate, clarify, and ameliorate what Dewey called “human difficulties of a deep seated kind” (Dewey 1980: 46). Attuned to the progressive era in US politics, Deweyan pragmatism was influential both in academic philosophy and wider society.

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Even as some of its themes inspired many analytic philosophers such as W.V.O. Quine and Hillary Putnam, pragmatism lost influence as analytic philosophy rose in prominence in US universities. Pragmatist theories of truth, language, and mind, which prioritized consequences and situational thinking over tight, systemic argumentation and linguistic exploration, went out of fashion during what is now sometimes called the “epistemological turn” (Seigfried 2002: 4). However, more recently there has been a revival of interest in pragmatisms old and new, due in no small part to the work of contemporary feminist pragmatists who have undertaken various recovery projects, as well as to those who have begun to use pragmatist methodologies in their work.

It is only in the last few decades that important contributions of women as pragmatists, either as students of the recognized classical male pragmatists or as advocates of their own pragmatic viewpoints, have started to be appreciated by academic philosophers. The list of classical pragmatists is now often updated to include the noted social settlement innovator and contemporary of Dewey, Jane Addams. When the list of early pragmatists is expanded to include other notable figures with Addams, such as Josiah Royce, George Herbert Mead, and George Santayana, increasingly cases have been made for the inclusion of other women who were their contemporaries such as Mary Parker Follett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ella Lyman Cabot, Alice Chippman Dewey, Mary Whiton Caulkins, and Ella Flagg Young. Contemporary feminist pragmatists have recovered the work of these women from the classical era of pragmatism and claimed that there are vital points of connection between feminist philosophical orientations and pragmatism.

Feminist Pragmatism or Pragmatist Feminism?

Contemporary feminist pragmatists have argued that the methodological practices and theoretical claims made by pragmatists and feminists are not only complementary but that a more careful inventory of each would bear fruit for the aims of both. The work of Charlene Haddock Seigfried has been pioneering and pivotal in the emergence of feminist pragmatism as a subfield in pragmatism. In 1993, Seigfried edited a special issue of the feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia, about these connections. Seigfried set the stage for the special issue two years earlier, in an edition of the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, when she called feminist pragmatism “the missing perspective” (Seigfried 1991). The Hypatia special issue served both to legitimize and galvanize inquiries into feminist pragmatism, as some preferred, or pragmatist feminism, as others preferred. The difference in labels, then and now, seems primarily to reflect priorities in orientation and not deep disagreement. The feminist pragmatist, for the most part, engages with the methods, claims, and conversations of pragmatism from a feminist standpoint. While the pragmatist feminist might use the methods and basic insights of pragmatism, they see their main orientation as feminist, drawing from a wide range of resources in the history of feminist theory and activism. To understand this distinction we only need to look at the difference between the works of two historical women who are often counted as both pragmatists and feminists, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jane Addams.

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Novelist, essayist, and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman did not work with the early pragmatists to develop her ideas about pluralism and progress, but it could be argued that her understanding of the social formation of the individual and of the possibilities for the amelioration of social problems by human efforts is in line with the overlapping set of ideas that we recognize as characteristic of pragmatism. In works such as her most well-known story, The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman gives a fictionalized account of the life of a housewife confined to a room to protect her delicate nature, only to be driven mad by the control of her husband and the titular wallpaper (Gilman 1997 [1892]). Gilman’s attention to the lived experience of white women in her era as sources for social recommendations reflects her deep commitment to the importance of perspective and rejection of the subordination of women. Gilman also wrote about the economic and social repression of women, advocating that women assert new selves to take on new roles in society. Her analyses of class and gender are identifiable as predecessors to more contemporary considerations (Kimmel and Aronson 1998 [1898]). Gilman, virtually overlooked by non-feminist academic pragmatists, is rightly regarded as a key figure in US feminism.

On the other hand, Jane Addams, the renowned writer, peace activist, and social settlement pioneer, worked alongside John Dewey in Chicago, influencing his ideas about democracy. Her place in the history of pragmatism is most often supported through appeals to her ties to Dewey. Dewey did not credit her ideas with citations in his long philosophical works, but he made public and private declarations about the importance of her thinking in speeches and correspondence. While Addams is seen as seminal to the field of social work and is more often considered as part of the canon of classical pragmatists, Addams’ feminism was more apparent than explicit, its full expression found in the explication of her work by contemporary feminist pragmatists who have taken up the recovery of her thought with zeal.

The various recovery projects of Addams’s work have seeded other feminist investigations into the shared claims, methods, and roots of feminism and pragmatism. Seigfried has argued that despite their similarities, feminists and pragmatists have, for the most part, ignored the fruits of the others’ labors (Seigfried 1996: 17–40). Early women pragmatists may have been taken up by feminists, but not explicitly as pragmatists. Pragmatists who had been socially or politically feminist may have pursued studies of Dewey or James or Royce, but little had been done to evaluate their work as good sources for feminism. Seigfried and the contributors to the Hypatia special issue in 1993 were the vanguard of a growing group of scholars interested in the connections of feminism and pragmatism. The articles included those that sought to recover women’s voices in early pragmatism, those that analyzed the feminist or anti-feminist leaning of the classical male pragmatists, and finally articles that suggested that pragmatism and feminism could be wedded to create better social, epistemological, and political orientations. Yet not all contributors to Seigfried’s special issue agreed that pragmatism had something special to offer feminists.

Notably, Richard Rorty claimed that, like postmodernism, which had reached the height of its popularity in the early 1990s, pragmatism was not specially suited for feminist use and could very well be used for cross purposes. He argued,

Pragmatism—considered as a set of philosophical views about truth, knowledge, objectivity, and language—is neutral between feminism and masculinism . . . Neither the pragmatist nor the deconstructionist can do more for feminism than help rebut attempts to ground these practices on something deeper than a contingent historical fact—the fact that the people with the slightly larger muscles have been bullying the people with the slightly smaller muscles for a very long time.

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(Rorty 1993: 101)

Rorty’s claim about pragmatism’s neutrality met with resistance from feminist pragmatists because it seemed to miss an important set of distinctions that can be made about pragmatism. On the one hand, we can agree with Rorty from a historical perspective if we only count the male pragmatists, such as Peirce, James, or Dewey, as the keepers of the pragmatist tradition. We can follow feminist historian Estelle B. Freedman’s claim that “movements cannot be feminist unless they explicitly address justice for women as a primary concern” (Freedman 2002: 8). The most progressive of the big three pragmatists, Dewey, seemed to suggest that the status of women in society ought to be improved but did not take anything close to a decidedly feminist stance in his philosophical writings. There was not, at least if we are only counting the male pragmatists of the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a feminist movement in classical pragmatism.

However, Rorty’s claim is not primarily historical or about the history of a feminist wave in pragmatism. We can address his claim without appeal even to the women that we have already mentioned as frequently associated with early pragmatism. His claim is that pragmatism’s methods and beliefs are neutral. There is good reason to reject neutrality as either the pragmatist’s method or attitude. Much of what we recognize as pragmatism comes from Dewey. Dewey extends and deepens the meaning of pragmatism. Whereas Peirce’s early pragmatism was a defense of the scientific method and verification through empirical study, and James’ pragmatism prioritized practical aims over metaphysical truths, it could be argued that what prevails, especially in conversations about feminism and pragmatism, is not the supposed neutrality of Peirce or James’ view, but the pragmatism of Dewey. Dewey’s pragmatism, by method, attitude, and in practice required a belief in a democratic way of life that is not value neutral. Perhaps we would not call Dewey a feminist after reading his few sparse lines on women’s rights, but he produced a body of work rich for feminist enlargement.

It could be argued that this is what Seigfried had in mind when she countered Rorty’s view and argued that

[t]he first-generation pragmatists, like contemporary feminists, refused the false neutrality of the epistemological turn and argued that theory be joined to practice and that practice be held accountable to the values that make life worth living for all members of the varied Communities that make up the larger social order.

(Seigfried 1993: 13)

This perspective is clearly Deweyan. A Deweyan pragmatism is not neutral in the sense that Rorty claims, and lends itself especially to feminist interpretation and uptake. Seigfried’s argument relies on the view that Dewey did not live up to the full consequences of his pragmatism in regard to women’s issues, but she ably demonstrates that this oversight was that of the man, Dewey, and not of the values or methods of pragmatism. Whereas Rorty claimed that pragmatism was value neutral, Seigfried argues that it is value rich. She even suggests that pragmatism can be understood as a feminine rather than masculine endeavor, arguing that

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[t]he pragmatist goal of philosophical discourse, which is shared understanding and communal problem solving rather than rationally forced conclusions, is more feminine than masculine, as is its valuing of inclusiveness and community over exaggerated claims of autonomy and detachment. The same can be said for its developmental rather than rule-governed ethics.

(Seigfried 1996: 32)

We need not masculinize or feminize pragmatism to take up Seigfried’s rebuttal of Rorty’s claim. A rightfully pragmatist project would have a difficult time being intentionally masculinist, as the emphasis on shared understanding and pluralism go against that stance. Even if it could be argued that pragmatism had, prior to contemporary feminist intervention, only advanced masculinist projects in the hands of male pragmatists, we need not turn away from the overlapping claims and aims of the two theoretical and practical orientations.

Erin McKenna highlights similar lines of connection in her estimations of pragmatism and feminism. She contends that, “Pragmatism and feminism share philosophical roots in rejecting dualism, taking a perspectival stance, developing values from concrete experience, and giving feeling a role in experience and knowledge” (McKenna 2003: 5). She argues that joining pragmatism—with its emphasis on processes, growth, mutuality, and engaged philosophy—with feminism—which fights against women’s subordination—results in a form of flexible feminism. Flexible feminism is found even in the early women pragmatists.

Historical Connections

Jane Addams is the historical woman who is most frequently associated with feminist pragmatism today. It is easy to connect Addams with views readily associated with classical pragmatism, especially those attributed to Dewey. Addams and Dewey each believed that democracy was a way of life that depended on the associational nature of the individual and her or his relationships with others as the source of both social intelligence and progress. Sharing with Dewey as she did a commitment to social reform and melioration, Addams’ writings and speeches—most notably Twenty Years at Hull House, her book-length reflections about her attempts to support the growing immigrant community in Chicago—can be read as field notes to pragmatism in practice (Addams 1999 [1901]). When contemporary readers have sought to identify Addams’ feminist themes, it requires us to use a label “feminist” that Addams did not use herself, so we must proceed with care, making sure not to attribute views to her that she did not hold. Maurice Hammington has argued that Addams’ work resists easy labeling because there is a “resistance to ideology inherent in her pragmatism” (Hammington 2009: 30). Yet Hammington, along with others, finds Addams’ work ripe for feminist insight.

In her social work and public writings and speeches, Addams supported women’s suffrage and worked to garner sympathy as well as social access for prostitutes, immigrant, and other poor, disenfranchised women. In her life and writing about these issues, Hammington identifies several key themes that are easily recognized by contemporary feminists. He argues that Addams employed forms of standpoint epistemology in her writing and care ethics in her practice. As a standpoint epistemologist before the phrase came into use, Hammington asserts, “Addams links social identification, social expression, and democracy together” (Hammington 2009: 55). Addams highlighted the importance of attending to the lived experience of all people in our efforts to address social problems. Of a piece with the attention to standpoint, Addams practiced an ethics of care in her relation to the women at the settlement house, and advocated the importance of deep, reciprocal interactions in her calls for peace at times of war.

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Hammington makes a more controversial claim about Addams as a feminist when he contends that we can find a “proto-lesbian ethics” in her life and works (Hammington 2009: 61). Following the biographical explorations of Hull House women produced by Mary Jo Deegan (1996), in spite of Addams making no public assertion of herself as a lesbian, Hammington frames Addams’ personal life, deep friendships with women, the formation of an all-female learning and living environment at Hull House, and objections to the prominence of Freudian theories of sexuality, as indicative of an ethos of same-sex love that is hard to pin down as sexual but should not be overlooked (Hammington 2009: 61). Citing Sarah Hoagland’s (1988) conceptualization of lesbian ethics, Hammington argues that the all-woman environment at Hull House and Addams’ resultant views on social development are in line with Hoagland’s claims that a lesbian ethics would emphasize “connection, growth and integrity rather than rules or calculations of straight behavior” (Hammington 2009: 65).

Whether or not one agrees with Hammington’s claims about the relevance of Addams’ apparent affiliative preferences, his analysis of her work and life along those lines throws into relief one of the (arguably) most distinctive and fruitful parts of the feminist pragmatist historical recovery projects made possible by pragmatism’s rejection of traditionalism. Contemporary feminist pragmatists, such as Marilyn Fischer (2013), John Kaag (2008), Erin McKenna (2012), and Judy Whipps (2012) have mined the works of women thinkers from the early twentieth century to offer us not only a glimpse into the past that is more diverse than we once presumed but also to point out new sources for our current feminist and pragmatist projects. The historical consciousness of the feminist pragmatist is most often productive and instructive. The point of recovery projects is not just getting what the classical woman pragmatist said “right” and understanding what she intended in her context. Key to the pragmatist attitude is considering not the eternal veracity of claims but what use they might be to us. Contemporary feminist pragmatists have exemplified what was once considered the distinct attitude of classical pragmatism when they have endeavored to expand and use historical sources for their own purposes.

Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism

The nearly quarter century since the 1993 publication of the special feminist pragmatist issue of Hypatia has seen a proliferation of feminist pragmatist academic production. Some of these have been recovery projects, for example Marilyn Fischer and Judy Whipps’ book on Jane Addams’ peace writing (2003) and John Kaag’s exploration of Ella Lymon Cabot as a pragmatist and feminist (2013), while others attempt to use the resources of feminism and pragmatism to articulate new paths for philosophical inquiry. These projects have been wide-ranging and diverse in their methodologies and recommendations. Most of the published work in feminist pragmatism has been in the form of essays and articles. To understand the what and how of feminist pragmatism, it is illustrative to consider two of the few book-length projects in feminist pragmatism (McKenna 2001; Sullivan 2001) and a recent edited collection (Hammington and Bardwell-Jones 2012).

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In her 2001 book, Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism, growing out of what she calls a “cross fertilization” of the ideas and theories of pragmatism and feminism, Shannon Sullivan argues that bodies are transactional (Sullivan 2001: 7). She finds resources for her conception of transactional bodies in Dewey’s notion of the organism. In Dewey, Sullivan uncovers the seeds of a deeply phenomenological account of corporeal existence, even as she notes that “the phenomenological side of his pragmatism is not often recognized” (Sullivan 2001: 4). She describes the mutuality of bodies and environments as co-constituting. What results is a self-aware perspectivalism that joins pragmatism and feminism in a project that aims to take the lived experience of gender and race seriously in a standpoint theory of truth that would give “an account of truth as flourishing contact between organic bodies and world” (Sullivan 2001: 10).

In The Task of Utopia: A Pragmatist Feminist Perspective, Erin McKenna also advocates a feminist pragmatism that relies on the development of a standpoint theory that would take into account the lived experience of women and others. She sets out to theorize a “process model of utopia” (McKenna 2001: 2). Against those who would argue that utopian thinking and social planning are either too idealistic to be taken seriously or, worse, would only result in a totalitarian society, McKenna asserts that a Deweyan pragmatic method of positing goals and making attempts to reach them while constantly re-assessing both the attempts and the goals would not lead to fascism or escapism. Rather, it would be representative of a dynamic process model of utopia, of which she sees evidence not only in Dewey’s philosophy but also in the utopian fiction of feminist writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Sally Miller Gearhart (McKenna 2001: 3).

Maurice Hammington and Celia Bardwell-Jones’ edited volume, Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism (2012) is a collection of essays on topics as varied as patriotism, pets, hip-hop, epistemic exclusion, and care ethics. The organizing question of the volume is “What does feminist pragmatism have to offer to reflections on contemporary issues and ideas?” (Hammington and Bardwell-Jones 2012: 1). The editors argue that the framework they present is not a unified answer to the question, rather it shows how the essays hang together. The framework identifies several methodological commitments that the feminist pragmatists all promote in some form throughout the volume. First, they argue that a commitment to “the importance of context and experience” is a binding tie between the texts (Hammington and Bardwell-Jones 2012: 2). Second, joining pragmatism and feminism offers an increased and more nuanced approach to epistemology and value theory. Being a white woman, a Latina, or a Chinese American man are, for the feminist pragmatist, not incidental factors to be bracketed in philosophical explorations. Rather the social and historical occurrence of the use of these identity markers reveals much about the situated, temporal nature of what we value and call knowledge and thus what we mean by objectivity (Hammington and Bardwell-Jones 2012: 3). Third, feminist pragmatism “emphasizes the need for diversity and thus dialogue among differently situated social groups” (Hammington and Bardwell-Jones 2012: 4). Pluralism is valued by both the pragmatist and feminist traditions not only because diverse viewpoints can reveal that our knowledge is contextual, but also because social intelligence offers us different answers to our pressing questions and problems. They contend: “Rather than appealing to abstract conceptions of humanity and ignoring the situated character of experience, feminism and pragmatism conceive of the self engaged in social interactions with others” (Hammington and Bardwell-Jones 2012: 6).

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Claudia Gillberg’s contribution to the volume, “A Methodological Interpretation of Feminist Pragmatism,” serves as a good example both of the methodological commitments that the editors attribute to feminist pragmatists and of what forms the practice of feminist pragmatism can take outside of academic discourse. Gillberg writes, “As an action researcher and educational researcher who embraces feminist pragmatism, I wish to be particularly aware of the role that research can play for social or organizational change towards more inclusive, democratic ways to organize our lives” (Gillberg 2012: 218). Feminist action research, like the practices of pragmatists such as John Dewey and Jane Addams, uses the end goal of a more democratic everyday life to direct collaborative models of social change and problem solving.

Gillberg gives examples of how one might work as a feminist pragmatist action researcher. One of the examples is particularly instructive. She worked with preschool teachers to, first, figure out whether and how the gendered nature of toys and playground equipment was affecting the children in their school. Instead of rushing to de-gender the toys and change the program, the teachers and Gillberg read and discussed research on gender and children, increased their knowledge of associated background theories, visited other schools, and pondered possible parent reactions to any changes. The group considered possible obstacles to their planning and used a collaborative approach to address potential problems. Gillberg played the role of “critical friend” who facilitated the teachers’ discussions and actions but did not direct the teachers from on high. From her practices, Gillberg identifies several feminist pragmatist concepts at work that include notions of community, reciprocity, and the use of study to act toward reform and increased democratization (Gillberg 2012: 224–227). While Gillberg makes the connection to pragmatist and feminist academic sources in her practice explicit, the work is reminiscent of work done by other feminist practitioners, such as black feminists, who have long used the label pragmatist and similar methods without an indebted connection to the classical pragmatists or academic feminist philosophy (James 2009).

In the early 1990s, black feminists from a wide range of academic disciplines and areas of activism met several times for a Black Feminist Seminar. These meetings led to the publication of an anthology titled Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women (James and Busia 1993a). In the introduction, Stanlie M. James articulates a wide-ranging agenda that unites the black feminist work included in the volume.

Black feminists are simultaneously envisioning incremental changes and radical transformations not only within Black communities but throughout the broader society as well. Ultimately, the humanistic visionary pragmatism of theorizing by Black feminists seeks the establishment of just societies where human rights are implemented with respect and dignity even as the world’s resources are equitably distributed in ways that encourage individual autonomy and development.

(James and Busia 1993b: 3)

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This “humanistic visionary pragmatism” of black feminists is rooted in a long tradition of black women activists and thinkers, not often included in professional philosophical discourse, as well as black feminist engagement in movements for civil rights and social justice. The pragmatism of the black feminists identified by James has obvious, significant points of overlap with classical and feminist pragmatism in the discipline of philosophy. Many black feminist pragmatists and Dewey agree that having hope or a vision of the future plays a vital role in what we do to promote democracy in writing and in practice today. The emphasis on meliorism, fallibility, and the related view that society and individual are co-constituting are found in both pragmatisms, even as the roots and impetuses for the work diverge. Considering black feminist pragmatism along with contemporary and classical philosophical sources enlarges the available resources for pragmatist social justice and theory projects (James 2009: 93).

Feminist Pragmatist Futures

Pragmatism as an academic discourse arose just as the United States was completing its westward expansion, debating white women’s suffrage, codifying Jim Crow laws, and asserting its military power in increasingly global conflicts. America was becoming America. The philosophies of the classical pragmatists came to be and are still often known as American philosophy. Increasingly, just as people have begun to question more frequently the use of the term “American” to signify only the people and products of the United States, there have been calls to rethink the habit of naming only the efforts of the classical US pragmatists “American philosophy.” Both these critiques of our naming practices are in line with the methodologies of both pragmatism and feminism. In their myriad expressions, each discourse has sought to question the entrenchment of tradition for tradition’s sake and to champion the pluralism of perspectives that is necessary in epistemology and ethics.