This is a complement to another post focusing on the ethic of care as it relates to my next project. In that post, I try hard to remove any man vs woman, masculine/feminine, patriarchy mentions because it triggers things I do not wish to shine a light on in that context.
But the whole point of the book is about those splits. In my project I am trying to apply it in a different way, but some things deserve to be mentioned. So, another post then.
page 17: where patriarchy is in force and enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance.
My curiousity about the “end of expertise” emerged during an extreme drought in Cape Town, around 2014, which was also around the time that Trump rose to political prominence and eventually became elected. Then life moved on and I wondered if this will still be as relevant (you know, research funding also moves with the fashions). But wow, here we are. And I see people – not least my family – doubling down on really damaging views, not least to themselves. I remain fascinated, why, on earth, do people behave like this? Why did white women vote for Trump? Why does my mother, who has all the money and all the power, still yield to the bad habits of the men in her life?
page 20:
why a majority of white women who voted, as far as one can see, chose white supremacy over gender solidarity by voting for Trump in both the 2016 and the 2020 elections.
initiation into a culture that values honor over life and privileges the voices of fathers
page 21:
how women’s voices and women’s silences give us insights into understanding what otherwise is a puzzle in human development: why we accommodate to a culture that compromises our humanity
page 22:
A not knowing was culturally inscribed and socially enforced. What I had learned to think of as steps in a developmental progression – the separation of reason from emotion, of the mind from the body, and the self from relationships – milestones on the march toward rationality, autonomy, and maturity, held this not knowing in place. Because if we cannot think about what we are feeling, if our mind doesn’t register what is going on in our body, and if our self becomes like a mighty fortress, defended and boundaried rather than open and engaged in relationships, then we cannot know what otherwise we would know. Because it is only when our thoughts and our emotions are connected, when our minds and our bodies are joined, and when we are living in relationship with others rather than standing apart from them, that we can make sense of the human world.
page 25:
Every aspect of child development – from cognition to relationships – is shaped by macrolevel ideologies (e.g. white supremacy, patriarchy)
Rather than focusing on adjustment, it is necessary to “direct the field’s attention away from ‘fixing’ individuals and microsystems and toward disrupting the macro-ideologies that shape them.”
women’s submission may reflect a keen assessment as to the costs of freedom
a woman’s submission to the constraints of a patriarchal order may reflect a shrewd cost-benefit analysis on her part concerning the price she will pay for freedom
page 27
Within a patriarchal order, a woman’s voice becomes disruptive, precisely because she is positioned to see what cannot be seen (the vulnerability of men) and to say what cannot be said if things are to continue in the way they have been. Think of #MeToo. As Naomi Snider likes to say, if women’s voices weren’t threatening there would not be the need to silence women
page 28
In the end, then, my story is not about women; it’s about what it means to be human. Yet girls’ voices hold a key given the ability of girls to narrate both their resistance and their accommodation to an initiation that would lead them to internalize the ideologies of white supremacy and patriarchy, that would have them silence the voice that says what they really feel and think and want and know, and cover that voice with a voice that is readily mistaken for their own. The biggest surprise of my research has been the discovery of how much people know, and how accessible the under-voice is, once you question the cover.
I learned to listen for this under-voice. I discovered how it is cued by the words “actually” and “really,” and by the phrase, “to be honest”…
To hear it, you may need to question the cover voice – the patriarchal voice, which is in fact adaptive.
Chapter 2 talks about the abortion studies, which is where Carol started this work, and she wonders why no one talks about these studies. Why does it cause discomfort?
page 31:
Political context: In this, the authority of the court was pitted against other authorities such as the church or fathers, so that the authorities themselves were in conflict. But by legitimizing a woman’s voice and her right to make this decision, the court also was countering a longstanding tradition that equates goodness in women with selflessness
Psychological context: According to Kohlberg, (quoting Socrates) there is only one virtue and its name is justice. Kohlberg referred to his stages as stages of justice reasoning, and his moral stages aligned with, and in fact were contingent on, Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, which tracked the shift from concrete to formal operational thought.
“The arc of developmental theory leads from infantile dependence to adult autonomy, tracing a path characterized by an increasing differentiation of self from other and a progressive freeing of thought from contextual constraints” – a path marked by steps toward autonomy and rationality, seen as the hallmarks of maturity. In their focus on separateness, theorists of psychological development overlooked the reality of interdependence, failing to acknowledge what to Martin Luther King was self-evident: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. What affects one directly affects all indirectly”
So, potato potahto. You say mature, I say broken.
page 32:
Care context: an understanding of care and care ethics that was at odds with the morality of the Angel in the House. Because, of all the things one can imagine the Angel doing, abortion is not on the list.
To have a woman make a decision on abortion upsets the centuries-old passivity of dependence while at the same time imposing on her the responsibility for care. Thus, the abortion decision brings to the core of feminine apprehension, to what Joan Didion calls “the irreconcilable difference of it – that sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death,”
As a woman, you’re fucked either way.
care ethics engaged the critical issues of responsibility and choice in situations where hurting was inescapable and matters of life and death were at stake. To the question “Can one be a good woman and have an abortion?”, I added: “Can one be a good woman and have a voice?”
page 33:
The political shift that gave women a legitimate voice had placed them in conflict with moral traditions that linked women’s goodness to women’s silence. … to break a silence that is essential to maintaining a patriarchal order
Since moral dilemmas arise in situations where hurt is inescapable, there is no “right” or “good” solution. Rather than seeking justification, the moral imperative becomes “an injunction to care, a responsibility to discern and alleviate the ‘real and recognizable trouble’ of this world.”
(that’s as far as I am with the book so far)