Education, Women and Human Nature

Education,Women and Human Nature A reply by David Bridges

Readers of these papers who are familiar with the short piece I wrote two years ago on ‘Feminism and Education” will appreciate that my own views and puzzles about the feminist movement(s)a are not dissimilar from those expressed very much more fully in Dr. Freeman’s paper. I was concerned in that context to distinguish some of the different degrees of radicalness in the feminist literature and, like Dr. Freeman, to grapple with the teasing contra- dictions between the egalitarian and liberal aspirations which are central among the concerns of that literature. In these ways; I think, our philosophical interest in feminism is rather similar.

More importantly, perhaps, we seem to share certain central and substantive political commitments, which I would like to affirm at the outset in case my subsequent philosophical worryings should obscure them. I endorse many of the detailed criticisms of injustice done to women in terms of their access to education, to professional and other employment, a whole range of social opportunities and privileges and not least in the structure of family and interpersonal relations. Women have been and in important respects continue to be an oppressed class. I support the contemporary challenge against the stereotyping and rigid polarization of sex roles. I welcome the requirement that we recognize the common personhood of men and women- and further that the education of people should help them to realize that common personhood and to recognize and combat such social processes as threaten to deny its realization.

It has however become all too easy to mouth what are by now the clichb of western liberalism and to suspend proper critical examination of the foundations upon which they rest-and this the Devil that sits on the philosopher’s shoulder forbids. . . .

Although Dr. Freeman’s paper provides a helpful picture of some of the central arguments in the current debate

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EDUCATION, WOMEN AND HUMAN NATURE 137

about women’s education, it nevertheless omits certain important considerations, and their omission leads to the continued presentation of what seems to me to be a dis- torted picture both of feminism and of women. It is to these considerations in particular that I shall attend.

For the purposes of my argument it will be useful to distinguish three sets of qualities from among those which might be held to characterize people: (a) qualities which belong to persons qua pers0ns-e.g.

reason, responsibility, intentionality, purposing, caring, suffering, delighting;

(b) qualities which define some persons biologically as male or female-a certain hormonal distribution and, more contingently, the presence or absence of certain anatomical parts;

(c) qualities associated with what might be broadly described as the masculine and feminine psyche, with the animus and the anzima, or more mundanely with masculine and feminine psychological traits. It is not difficult to find cultural variation in the identity of these traits though of course Jung and others have argued that they are manifested in certain universal archetypal forms.

The problem I am interested in is the relationship between these three sets of qualities and between these qualities and the distribution of social functions between and among people defined biologically or in other terms as men or women.

My first observation is one which is I think at the core of the feminist movement and one which I wholeheartedly support. This can be summarized as ‘Women are people too’-in other words that persons defined biologically as female (or male) share in those qualities which I described as belonging to persons qua persons, and that, conse- quently, we act irrationaIly if we fail to treat them with the respect, and to acknowledge them the rights, owed to creatures in possession of these qualities. In other words we act wrongly if we treat women merely as sex objects, merely as child bearers, merely as performers of certain social functions and not additionally-or instead-as persons in the sense indicated.

138 A REPLY BY DAVID BRIDGES

But this is the easy part of the argument, and in the rush to endorse this principle we may be trampling under foot considerations of equal significance. These I am less certain how to express, but let me at least indicate the kind of argument which I think deserves attention. This part of the argument may be summarized under the slogan ‘People are women (or men) too’. My concern is that, if we attend exclusively to that humanity, that personhood, in which men and women share and which is the basis for arguments suggesting that they should be regarded in the same way, we may come to ignore or to underestimate those qualities which distinguish men and women or, better, those qualities which characterize the distinctivezy masculine or feminine dimensions of the human psyche. By extension, of course, I must also be suspicious of any comprehensive educational programme which acknowledges and aims to educate only those dimensions of human nature which are common to men and women or which are not distinctively masculine or feminine. An educational programme which attempts to treat people as if their sex were totally irrel- evant to, or indeed a merely contingent part of, their human nature seems to me to rest upon a seriously incomplete conception of that nature, of the human psyche or of what it is to be a person. In so far as any view of the aims of education must be rooted in a view of human nature,’ any theory of education which is seriously mistaken in its understanding of human nature stands little chance of being a properly directed one.

In her paper ‘On Women’s Education’ Dr. Freeman distinguishes four concepts of woman : (a) a strictly biological concept in which woman would be

characterized by a particular balance of chromosones and hormones, etc.;

(b) a social concept embodying a descriptive notion of the role which women do actually fulfil in a society:

(c) a social concept embodying a socially held normative notion of the role which women ought ideally to fulfil in that society;

(d) a critically evaluative concept being as it were one’s own conception of what women ought to be like.


If I understand things right, the feminist movement in general and Dr. Freeman in particular hold that (a) has, or ought to have little social, cultural or political import; that (b) more or less universally describes a state of affairs in which women are the objects of injustice and oppression; and that (c) typically either supports the actuality of oppression or reflects only such minor tactical concessions to justice as will sustain men in their positions of social domi- nance. I take it that (d) is what the feminist movement is working on. At the very least the literature has been concerned to draw attention to the very important logical point that what is and what has been should not be assumed to be what must be the case.

‘We know what we are, but know not what we may be. The dogmatism of science expresses the status quo as the ineluctable result of law: women must learn how to question the most basic assumptions about feminine normality in order to reopen the possibilities for development which have been successively locked off by conditioning. . . .’‘

Dr. Freeman does not give any very revealing account of her own ‘critically evaluative’ concept, but she seems to imply that i t would be in terms of some alternative account of woman’s social role (see Section I1 para. 4). This con- firms the general picture presented in the paper that for Dr. Freeman ‘woman’ is either a biological concept or a concept embodying the characteristics of a social role (descriptive, normative or evaluative in the senses ex- plained). Dr. Freeman’s account of womanhood seems to me to be a seriously partial and impoverished one. In particular it completely omits reference to that dimension of womanhood which I have indicated by reference to the feminine psyche. This is the dimension revealed more fully by painters and writers than biologists and sociologists-for ‘the concept of woman’ is one which belongs at least as centrally in the domain of aesthetic imagination as in the world of anatomical parts or social functions. Indeed traditionally, and I think universally, it has been the artist and the maker of myths who has distilled the essence of womanhood-presenting her to us as Eve or Helen, Mona Lisa or La Belle Dame Sans Merci, goddess, witch, mer- maid, nymph, earth mother, virgin or fairy princess. Thus


Flaubert is able to recognize something at once unique and universal in his heroine, Madame Bovary :

‘By her constantly changing moods, sometimes mystical, some- time gay, now talkative, now silent, sometimes passionate, sometimes superior-he knew how to evoke a thousand desires in him, a thousand instincts and memories. She was the beloved one of all novels, the heroine of plays, the ‘she’ of all poems he had ever read. On her shoulders he found the ‘amber glow’ of the bathing Odalisque; she had the long waist of ladies in the chivalric age; she also looked like “the pale lady of Barce- lona”; but she was always an angel.’

But Dr. Freeman ignores at once both this psychic dimension of human nature and its distinctively female aspect.

This observation leads me to distrust some of Dr. Free- man’s arguments about women and their education- though it does not enable me to produce immediately any clear alternative. Let me however offer two tentative suggestions as to the kinds of arguments and issues which I think deserve closer attention.

First of all I wonder what role education should play in the transmission, elaboration and development of the archetypes of masculinity and femininity and in their assimi- lation in the individual psyche. Certainly I believe that a world denied its contemporary substantiation and experience of Eve (since it is she who is particularly under threat) and still more a world dominated psychologically and culturally by Adam would be a world psychologically crippled and aesthetically brutalised.

‘Oh woman! Lovely woman! Nature made thee To temper man; we had been brutes without you . . .” Secondly, I wonder how far what I have referred to as

the psychic qualities of womanhood are essentially or merely contingently distributed among people defined biologically as female. In other words, how important in shaping the imagination and genius of an individual is his or her biological, anatomical, hormonal nature? If a person’s biological sex is a significant element in the determination of the character of his /her mind, imagination or psyche (and this still sounds a plausible enough hypothesis


notwithstanding some attacks upon it), then we may have the basis for an argument for some sort of differential education as between boys and girls. This would not be to deny what is I think very importantly the case, that both men and women may share to some degree in male and female qualities. Indeed in the Jungian tradition we would each of us need to come to terms with both dimensions, with the animus and the anima, in our own personality. But it might be to argue that puradigmaticaZZtj at least there is some kind of psychological or logical connection between the kind of psychological /aesthetic qualities of womanhood which I have hinted at and the biological features which distinguish women as women. On this argument our biological nature might be held to set at least some limits to the possibility-in many ways a very liberalising and emancipatory one-of our ‘choosing’ our psychic male / female identity. Occasional sources such as Jan Morris’s extraordinarily honest and sensitive account of a man’s struggle to achieve such female identity6 suggests that this may indeed be the case-but it is a question which needs much fuller study and consideration.

I have suggested, I hope not too impertinently, that Dr. Freeman has not provided us with an adequate account of womanhood. I am inclined too to suggest that she has not given us an adequate account of feminism or at least its more radical wing-though this is understandable enough given the diversity and diffuseness of the elements in the feminist movement. It seems to me that, in emphasis- ing the distinctiveness and the particular contribution of womanhood and the female in human culture and experi-, ence, I am reflecting more accurately the tenor of radical feminism than are writers like Dr. Freeman who, notwithstanding their qualifications and reservations, seem to want almost to neuter women educationally. But, just as radical Black communities seek not the same education as Whites (or even one which Whites can provide) but a distinctive education which gives proper respect and appreciation to what is rich and unique in Black experience, so radical women’s groups have been trying in recent years to identify and put into proper perspective the socially and educationally neglected experience of womanhood. On some accounts at least (see for example Joanna Mack on ‘Women’s Studies


in Cambridge’).’ This is something which only women themselves can do.

There is another way, too, in which I think Dr. Freeman misrepresents feminism. Her preoccupation with social roles leads her into supposing that feminism is about role change. I believe it is if anything more importantly about change in va2ues. The injustice and oppression which women experience in the social system is the symptom; the disease is the dehumanizing distortion of our values which leads us to admire fierceness above gentleness, aggression above compassion, anxious ambition above patient acceptance, the will to dominate over the willing- ness to submit-and which allows us to esteem and reward the sale of insurance policies and the manufacture of arms above the care of a young child or the nursing of an aged cripple.

But to suppose that what is required is some change in social roles, e.g. for men to take on what have traditionally been women’s roles or pursuits, is seriously to confuse the argument. Society might be expected to value its ‘female’ roles and dispositions not because they begin to be assumed by men (this is sexism in the extreme) but because of their own intrinsic and particular importance. If there are some dispositions, some activities, some roles to which either women or the womanly side of persons is inherently best suited, then this merely illustrates the social and cultural importance of woman or the womanly-and this is what deserves recognition.

This is not to deny the reality of oppression and of social injustice in our treatment of women or to suggest that all we need is some sort of attitudinal shift. Of course the changes in values must be reflected in changes in social structures and social institutions. What I think I am saying however is that such changes should be guided by a sense of what I still want to regard as the awesomeness of woman’s particular aesthetic and psychic identity rather than by a blunt determination to ignore or destroy rich and fundamental variations on the human theme for the sake of a crude and oversimple principle of equality.

Homerton College, Cambridge


NOTES AND REFERENCES

‘Bridges, D. ‘Feminism and Education’ in The Making of the Second Sex-a special issue of The New Era, Vol. 55 , No. 6, July 1974.

2For simplicity’s sake I shall talk of ‘the feminist movement’ though I am uncomfortably conscious of the variety of different and indeed in some respects conflicting causes grouped under this heading.

S‘Education . . . is a postulant to a human condition learning to recognize himself as a human being in the only way in which this is possible: namely, by seeing himself in the mirror of an inheritance of human understandings and activities and thus acquiring . . . the ability to throw back upon the world his own version of a human being in conduct which is both a self-disclosure and a self-enactment.’

Oakshott, M. ‘Education : the Engagement and its Frustration’ in Proceedings of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Vol. V, No. I, January 1971. See also Francis Dunlop’s paper on ‘Education and Human Nature’ in the 1970 volume of these Proceedings which similarly indicates the centrality of a view of human nature to any view of the purposes and nature of education.

4Greer, G., The Female Eunuch, Paladin, London, 1971. ”Thomas Otway, Venice Presetved 1 (i). 6Morris, J., Conundrum, Faber & Faber, London, 1974. 7Mack, J,, ‘Women’s Studies in Cambridge’ in New Era, Vol. 55,

NO. 6, July 1974.

Education, Women and Human Nature

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