A Philosopher's Walk

Perhaps it is my imagination but it seems to me that the NYT has a tendency to frame stories about women, work, and family in a way that is somewhat reactionary.  This morning’s story, “Coveting Not a Corner Office, but Time at Home,” is a case in point. The thrust of the article is that most middle class working women with families don’t want to “lean in” and climb the corporate ladder but rather are looking for jobs with flexible schedules and good benefits  – although the article does note that ideally they would like the job to be rewarding as well.  But isn’t this something that working men with families also desire?  The answer to that question – according to an analysis of a longitudinal study released by the Pew Research Center this spring – is likely to be “yes”.  And yet, the Times article is exclusively about women.

Part of the reason for that seems to be that it is framed as a response to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In (the much-discussed article by Anne-Marie Slaughter in last summer’s Atlantic Monthly is also referenced), even though the article notes that these pieces offer advice from and to elite women – not the average working class woman.  This framing is reminiscent of the critique of second wave feminism that it did not address the needs of most women – which was somehow supposed to make the critique less legitimate.  While sexism takes on different shapes and nuances when combined with class (as well as race, ethnicity, disability, and different gender identities) it is nonetheless sexism.  That a particular author addresses one version of sexism but not others does not thereby invalidate their observations.

Sadly, the Times has a history of undermining women through stories that might appear to be speaking to them. There was Lisa Belkin’s infamous “The Opt-Out Revolution” in 2003, for example.  This sort of article paints a world in which feminism has largely achieved its goals and women are now free to make choices, including the choice to opt-out of the work force (as in the case of the women that Belkin describes) or at least opt-out of the cut-throat-corporate-ladder-climbing work force that they are being urged into by women who don’t understand them (like Sheryl Sandberg).  These articles embrace “choice feminism” – as this view is sometimes called.  They do not question the very assumptions that keep systemic sexism in place – assumptions such as: it is women who are (and should be) primarily interested in and caring for children and the choices people make within particular societal structures should be read as if they were choices made from all possibilities (not just all of the options that are readily available given the very real constraints of those social structures).

Perhaps I am being unfair in expecting that a newspaper story (even in the NYT) would manage to engage in some deeper social critique rather than standard, unreflective fare.  But I would think that the idea that many humans are (or should be) invested in the well-being of the members of their families and not merely in their own careers is not something that should be treated as a story about women.

Next week’s The New Yorker (January 17) has an article by David Brooks, What the science of human nature can teach us: newyorker.com.  It’s actually is is an excerpt from his forthcoming book which is primarily about education, according to his description.   The excerpt, however, reads like a sequel to his 2001 Bobos in Paradise with the new upper class now described as the “Composure Class.”  The thrust of the piece is that contemporary neuroscience and evolutionary psychology tell us that human nature is not so much rational as “sentimental,” as in the Humean meaning of “sentimental.” (Brooks describes it so in his live chat today at Ask the Author Live: David Brooks on the Composure Class.) His primary point is that our connectedness – our social nature – is more fundamental than our rational nature.


But if we see sentiment and reason as dichotomous we may be in trouble and this is something that’s perhaps a flaw in my previous post.  There I say that a certain rhetoric “pushes us” away from reason. I think it might be clearer to say that as well as befuddling reason, the sort of confusion such rhetoric causes also undermines real sentiment.  Though I am not wild about David Brooks politics and his I think there are problems with some of the science that he uses (see below*), what I did like in this article was the interplay or, maybe even, looping that takes place between the rational and the emotional. 


And this brings me to Obama’s speech last night and back to the issues of the previous post.  The speech was a good one and it did several things that I think are very important.  First, he pointed out that we should refrain from belief when we do not have the evidence: “For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind.”  Secondly, he called for civility, without which we cannot have rational discourse.  “And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their deaths help usher in more civility in our public discourse, let’s remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud.” (Quoted from the transcript on The Washington Post website.)  He combined rationality and sentiment – we want to be connected to each other and be a community and to do so we need to recognize what our goals are and how to achieve them.  But to do that we have to put aside false feeling and convictions that are not grounded in reason.  






*One particular example that stuck out for me was that he buys the evolutionary psychology story about women being pickier about who they have sex with because of the need to have a mate who sticks around to help with the child-rearing. There is an empirically equivalent story that has women being promiscuous in order to rope as many males as possible into a community of caregivers all of whom have some reason to think the child might be their. One might argue that the second explanation doesn’t jibe with the pickiness of contemporary women, but the natural response there is to point out that social factors and changed circumstances (modern society is not Pleistocene society).

Budget cuts hit broad swath of Cal State — latimes.com

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Scroll down in the article and you will see that among the departments mentioned for possible cuts at Cal Poly Pomona is philosophy. Something to think about.

This fall the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy contains my article, Women in the Profession: The Persistance of Absence. One of the main themes of the article is that philosophers need to recognize that the absence of women in the profession is a danger to the profession as a whole. I focus specifically on the absence of women at the undergraduate level as providing one of the most disturbing signs for the profession. In this I am following the lead of the work that Evelyn Brister has done on this topic and blogged about at Knowledge and Experience. She has a number of excellent and thoughtful posts on women in philosophy and so I haven’t linked a specific post.

Today I find another article which I think supports the idea that we ought to be worried about philosophy seemingly not having a larger appeal. Though the report is about British universities, we should certainly take notice. Thanks to Jacob Hale for his Facebook news feed link to “Being philosophical may be limited to ‘leisured’ classes”.