The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays (review)

The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essays. By Nancy C. M. Hartsock. Boulder: Westview, 1998.

Approaching The Feminist Standpoint Revisited, I was both hopeful that Nancy Hartsock would continue to provide a strong Marxist-feminist voice in an intellectual milieu increasingly hostile to materialist feminism, yet wary that this collection might merely rehash previously published and now moribund articles. Neither emotion was quite validated: this is a useful volume that charts twenty-five years of valuable Marxist and feminist thought, while also revealing Hartsock's growing frustration with the evolution of feminist theory. Her critical analysis of her own intellectual biography and of challenges to standpoint feminism provides a noteworthy overview of recent formative issues. This book will be dissatisfying, however, for anyone looking for a novel approach to these all-too-familiar debates; this volume's primary goal is to sum up an existing corpus, while also—as its Hollywood-style title implies—injecting a dose of intellectual nostalgia.

The volume contains eleven of Hartsock's essays, almost all previously published, arranged in roughly chronological order. The book is divided into three sections, interspersed with short commentaries in which Hartsock explains the development of her thought. These interludes are perhaps the best bit: one gains insights into how Hartsock's life shaped her thought, and vice versa, and her more first-personal meta-analysis of the state of feminist theory reflects her long political experience. She identifies two core themes in all these essays—power and epistemology—and is surely right to point out that "the importance of issues of power for activists committed to social change cannot be exaggerated. We need to know how relations of domination are constructed, how we participate in these relations, how we resist, and how we might transform them."

It seems a natural and vital step from an interest in "systematic power relations" to "questions involving the appropriate methods for research, alternative epistemologies and ontologies, and the relation of theories of knowledge to human activity" (1998, 7-8).

Part One: "Political Movements and Political Theories," contains four of Hartsock's earliest essays, the first three published in Quest in 1974, 1975, and 1976. In her section introduction, Hartsock talks about working on Quest with other feminist activists, and her commitment to linking theory and practice is evident. The essays "Political Change: Two Perspectives on Power" (a call for political change strategies that integrate key feminist insights), "Fundamental Feminism: Process and Perspective" (a feminist critique of the "white, male-dominated Left in the United States"), and "Staying Alive" (a Marxist-feminist analysis of alienated labor) invite the greatest nostalgia. Hartsock writes in short, pithy sentences, and makes a plethora of bold claims. However, she herself acknowledges that "these essays bear the marks of the time in which they were written," and the very simplicity and directness of this work might make it still useful for undergraduate teaching. The final, prescient essay in this section, "Difference and Domination in the Women's Movement: The Dialectic of Theory and Practice" was originally presented in 1980. It's already more theoretically interesting, and anticipates many later debates. I disagreed with a number of Hartsock's methods: she uses the term "Difference" to capture the reification of certain "differences" into relations of domination in a theoretical move that raises more questions than it answers. She too quickly implies that the ontology of separatism entails maintaining an "avoidance of difference," and she tends to assume that membership in social groups is clear-cut and dichotomous (a persistent difficulty in later essays, too). However, it's too easy to see these elisions twenty years later, and it only takes a little imagination to see why Hartsock's work has been pivotal in defining these questions.

Part Two: "Reoccupying Marxism as Feminism," is a set of three essays written between 1977 and 1991. The first, "Objectivity and Revolution," is a meticulous piece of scholarship that makes a sophisticated case for the mutual implication of these...