SUSAN HAACK
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als are far, far more significant than any supposed commonalities among
women. (To be sure, women who have been taught at an impressionable
age that there are women's ways of philosophizing
do
manifest a certain
uniformity of thought; it would be surprising if they didn't, but it is of no
relevance that they do.) It is discouraging enough when the special insights
claimed for women are, as they sometimes are, reminiscent of those old,
sexist stereotypes of women as emotional, intuitive, and all that. It is even
more discouraging when the claim is that women bring special insights
because they are oppressed-which
(unless, unlike myself, one is convinced by
the epistemological pronouncements of Marx or Foucault or their admir–
ers) is apt to prompt, besides the worry that it will promote a tendency to
dwell excessively on our grievances, the protest that it neglects to mention
the most important qualities talented women have to offer philosophy–
logical acumen, textual sensi tivi ty, creative imagination, analytic rigor,
conceptual penetration, and subtlety.
But that individualistic, old-fashioned-feminist thought, unlike the
special-insight idea, may not be so congenial to those who formerly man–
aged to confine women to the old ghetto of the permanently-temporary
lecturer, and when "forced to appoint a woman," wouldn't altogether mind
if the woman they are forced to appoint confines herself to what Harriet
Baber has shrewdly identified as the new pink-collar ghetto of academia;
nor does it offer any relief to the cognitive dissonance of those who would
like to think they're hiring on merit, but are under pressure to treat sex as
relevant; nor any comfort to those, of both sexes, who still harbor a lin–
gering suspicion that maybe women
can't
do philosophy, as traditionally
conceived; nor the same opportuni ties for-well, for opportunism.
I don't doubt that preferential hiring has sometimes done good, that it
has, in some cases, led to the appointment of women who would not oth–
erwise have been hired, and who are such good philosophers, and such
straightforward people, that they have advanced our discipline
and
helped
to ease their students and colleagues out of any disinclination, conscious or
otherwise, to see women as full participants in the life of the mind. But I
also think it has done harm; and, I fear, more harm than good, failing reli–
ably to get the best person appointed, feeding men's reluctance to take
women seriously and women's diffidence about their own abilities, divert–
ing energy into efforts to show the relevance of sex, and undermining our
already enfeebled sense that it
matters
whether the best person gets the job.
No wonder it makes me so uncomfortable; it pulls both against taking phi–
losophy seriously, and against taking serious women philosophers seriously.
The question about preferential hiring of women is the point at which
a whole tangle of issues about women in the labor market, not all of which
have anything specifically to do with academia, intersects with a whole
