Thoughts on Thirty Years in the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy

In an article in the January/February 2011 issue of Academe, Renata Kobetts Miller of the English Department at City College of New York reflects on her mentor’s retirement and asks “what it means to be a feminist in the humanities today.” Part of her answer is that “helping to shape our departments, divisions, and colleges is an essential feminist act,” and one assumes she would say the same about professional societies such as the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP).¹

For me, SPEP has always been about the women. Trained in an analytic graduate program, then for many years the only phenomenologist/postmodernist—much less the only feminist/phenomenologist/postmodernist—for literally hundreds of miles in any direction, situated in a pluralist but not Continental department, I have never been anyone’s student at SPEP, or anyone’s colleague, or until very recently, anyone’s teacher. For a long time, the women at SPEP were the only people with whom I had any connection.

At my first SPEP meeting thirty years ago at Northwestern, a group of women that included Arlene Dallery, Dorothy Leland, and Iris Marion Young—I hesitate to name names because I’ll be sure to forget someone, so please forgive me if I do—took me under their collective wing. I ran into Nancy Fraser and Linda Bell, whom I’d already met, either there or the following year at Penn State; I met Peg Simons and Lenore Langsdorf, I think, in St. Louis the year after that. When motherhood and finances allowed, I continued to return to SPEP year after year, despite the usually indifferent, occasionally hostile atmosphere outside the close but growing circle of women whose friendship meant so much.

Of course, I’ve had male colleagues here whose friendship I value, too, from Bill McBride, who could have been one of them but was always one of us, to former students who are now members of SPEP. Still, I’m not sure those friendships would have been enough to keep me coming back in those early years.

Eventually a day came when I was no longer one of the “younger” women at SPEP. My generation had been replaced by Sharon Meagher and Ladelle McWhoter’s. For many of these women, their primary loyalty was to their graduate school mentors and faculty colleagues, not to my generation of women, for whom mentors and colleagues had not always been reliable sources of support—intellectual, material, or emotional. Time goes on; people and situations change.

Many of us responded to these changes in the feminist way Miller suggests—we transformed SPEP, on an institutional level (a crisis point I unfortunately missed) and then on an operational level. We organized panels that highlighted the important work women at various points in their careers were doing in Continental philosophy. My c.v. attests that many of my publications and most of my SPEP presentations have resulted from work done, one way or another, with the women I’ve met here. Without them, I would not be the scholar I am. And we opened SPEP in other ways. Women organized the first panel on African American philosophy at SPEP and, I believe, the first to include a paper from an openly gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender/intersex perspective.

But the more things change, the more they stay the same. As we have heard, and I suspect will continue to hear, gender still plays a significant role in a philosopher’s professional life and in the life of this organization, although other dynamics, such as race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality, are clearly at work, too. I hope you will forgive me if I take a few minutes to ruminate on a possible reason for the persistence of specifically the gender disparities, despite so many efforts to create a level playing field for all members of SPEP (and thanks to Gail Weiss for suggesting that I include these thoughts in this essay).

Many, too many, years ago I made the argument in my first book that Continental...