Classical American Philosophy’s Invisible Women

Canadian Review of American Studies 1992Special Issue, Part I ClassicalAmericanPhilosophy'sInvisibleWomen Charlene Haddock Seigfried In 1910 an American author wrote: Humanity, thus considered, is not a thing made at once and unchangeable , but a stage of development; and is still ... 'in the making.' Our humanness is seen to lie not so much in what we are individually as in our relations to one another; and even that individuality is but the result of our relations to one another. It is in what we do and how we do it, rather than in what we are. Some, philosophically inclined, exalt 'being' over 'doing.' To them this question may be put: 'Can you mention any forms of life that merely "is," without doing anything?' 83 (Gilman [1910]1914,16-17)1 This passage captures such characteristic pragmatist themes as process, evolutionary development, the self defined in relation to others, and praxis as determinative of being. 2 It could have been written by any of the classical American pragmatists. What follows it, however, could not have been: during the comparatively short period of written history, "we have had almost universally what is here called an Androcentric Culture. The history, such as it was, was made and written by men. The mental, the mechanical, the social development, was almost wholly theirs. We have, so far, lived and suffered and died in a man-made world" (Gilman [1910] 1914,17). For someone immersed in pragmatist philosophy, the contrast is especially striking. The irruption of a feminist perspective into familiar thought pat- 84 Canadian Review of American Studies terns is so unexpectedly incongruous that it forces recognition of what has been missing in the discourse of the classical American pragmatists. Furthermore , the similarities and differences are significant enough to require a revision of the pragmatist canon. Maureen L. Egan, for instance, argues that Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of the opening quotation, should be included in the canon of classical American philosophers citing, as common ground, her pragmatism, her "search for a scientific explanation of culture and thought, and an evolutionary starting point for philosophy" (1989, 103). Like John Dewey, the central figure of American pragmatists, Gilman argues that growth, not combat, is the major process and highest value of life and that the Social Darwinist exaltation of competition is seriously mistaken. Unlike Dewey, however, she attributes the theoretical appeal to competition as determinative of life and as a basic constituent of morality to "the universal masculine error" of assuming that what is true of males is true of life in general (Gilman [1910] 1914, 139). The recovery of Gilman's obviously feminist version of pragmatism provides an opening for recognizing others whose lives and works have not survived in the public records of academically based philosophy. Who else besides Gilman has been overlooked by the gatekeepers of serious, academic philosophy? The first aim of my very preliminary investigations is to identify female philosophers who wrote from a pragmatist perspective and who influenced or were influenced by the canonically recognized founders of classicalAmerican philosophy. I will especially concentrate on those who, unlike Gilman and Jane Addams, are not even mentioned in books on American philosophy. This recovery will make explicit-by concrete examplethe usually hidden mechanisms of academic exclusion and marginalization. My second aim is to explore the extent to which their writings are specifically feminist or even demonstrate a particularly feminine angle of vision. Only by further research extending my initial analysis of their writings will it be possible to determine the extent to which they revisioned pragmatism from a special angle of vision derived from their experiences as women. I hope that this recovery of a tradition of female pragmatists will enrich contemporary formulations of feminist pragmatism and pragmatist feminism, which has so far lacked a historically concrete context in the discipline of philosophy. Moreover, I hope that bringing back late-nineteenth- and early- CharleneHaddock Seigfried / 85 twentieth-century female pragmatists into the philosophical conversationwill encourage a revision of what constitutes classical American philosophy.3 The Problem of Recovery According to Max H. Fisch, "most American philosophers have been amateurs ; that is, they have been something else in the first place and philosophers in...