Reviewed by Jo Triglio
Bentley College

The work of Nancy Hartsock has played a fundamental role in the development of feminist epistemology. In her latest book, The Feminist Standpoint Revisited, she provides a valuable compilation of the most significant portions of her work. The book is more than a simple reprinting of old essays. Having read and reread a great deal of Hartsock’s work through the years, I thought that the book would be a boring rehashing of familiar and tired ideas. What makes the compilation particularly interesting is the autobiographical accounts that she includes in the introduction of the book and in the introductions to the three sections of the book. This autobiographical component provides an important historical context, which allowed me to reread the essays in a different light and with renewed interest. Taken as a whole, the autobiographical accounts and the organization of the reprinted essays provide an excellent resource for understanding the political commitments, theoretical methodology, and philosophical influences which structure the life’s work (to date) of a significant, influential feminist theorist and feminist epistemologist.

The most persistent, and in my opinion, most important emphasis that runs through the entire book is her perspective on the relationship between theory and practice. In the introduction, Hartsock states that two central convictions motivated the essays in the book, namely, that theory plays an important part in political action for social change and that political theorists must respond to and focus energy on problems of political action. In the second essay of the book, "Fundamental Feminism: Process and Perspective," originally written in 1975, she articulates her understanding of the interactive relationship between theory and practice that characterizes all of her thinking. According to Hartsock, feminism is a method of approaching life and politics rather than a set of political conclusions about the oppression of women. Her vision is one that twenty-five years later bears repeating and merits consideration. It is an understanding of feminism, both in theory and practice, that begins with and focuses on everyday activity and everyday life. Hartsock argues that feminist method enables us to connect everyday life with an analysis of the social institutions that shape life. In this early essay, she (of course) points to consciousness raising groups as a practice of feminist method. But despite the fact that consciousness raising groups are a thing of the past, her general point is a valuable one: feminism as an approach to life "relies on the idea that we come to know the world, change it, and be changed by it, through our everyday activity" (36). Feminist change, then, requires that the relationship between theory and practice be interactive—that our theory guide our activity, and that our activity inform our theorizing. Hartsock emphasizes the second part of this formula, that our activity inform our theorizing. According to Hartsock, theorizing is an attempt to examine and clarify what we already know from our practical activity. "Feminists are in fact creating social theory through our political action" (39). But the aim of theorizing is always forward looking. Its goal is to point us toward new understandings and new strategies.

It is this perspective on the relationship between theory and practice which underlies the theory for which Hartsock is perhaps best known—feminist standpoint theory. Hartsock’s standpoint theory relies on women’s experiences and activities as a starting point for developing an epistemology. She notes that in contemporary capitalist societies, the labor and activity of women differs from that of men. This sexual division of labor provides women with a different and unique perspective—a standpoint. Because women’s labor involves them in concrete relations with others and their surroundings, women’s experience has the potential to expose the partiality and perversity of the abstract masculinity from which dominant, masculinist epistemology arises. But the feminist standpoint is not a given; it is a potential that must be developed through theoretical and practical work.

In the last chapter of the book, "The Feminist Standpoint Revisited," Hartsock responds to some of the most common criticisms launched against her version of feminist standpoint theory. Here, she also revises and updates her argument to address what she sees as flaws in the original. The most common criticism of her work charges that her account makes universalizing, cross-cultural claims, and contends that a single "woman’s" point of view exists. Critics interpret Hartsock’s claim that the institutionalized sexual division of labor produces commonality in the activities and experiences of women as a universalizing, cross-cultural claim. Though Hartsock does not consider the possibility, I suspect that this misreading is in part due to her attempt to ground an explanation of the differences between men and women in the psychoanalytically based object-relations theory of Nancy Chodorow. As Hartsock correctly points out, most critiques of her version of standpoint theory fail to recognize the Marxist dimension of her account. Certainly, a close reading of her account, one that properly situates her work within the context of an historical materialist tradition, reveals that she holds that the historical conditions of material life structure our experience of the world, and that human nature itself is socially constructed. She posits that differences between men and women, and commonalties of experience among women, are manifestations of the institutionalized sexual division of labor.

The second common criticism charges that her account puts forward a unitary subject constituted solely by oppression and is innocent of complicity in a social system that contains various forms of oppression. In response to this charge, she admits she did not give proper attention to differences among women. She realizes that she made the same sort of mistake for which she criticized Marx—relying too rigidly on a two-class model of analysis (ruling class/proletariat; men/women) which does not account for other important social relations. As a result, she made no theoretical space to account for race and class.

In revising of her original argument, Hartsock wants to pluralize the idea of a feminist standpoint so that it might more adequately deal with differences among women. Her revision is influenced by Jameson, who claims that each oppressed group, due to its situation in the social order, lives the world in a phenomenologically specific way that allows it to see features of the world that remain obscure for other groups. As a result, each form of domination must be understood to produce its own specific epistemology. Although the specifics of how these standpoints are to be developed and how they are to operate are not fleshed out, Hartsock seems to be suggesting that multiple standpoints be developed.

Despite her attempt to address the problematic nature of the "two-class" system found in her original account, she still goes on to talk uncritically about "dominated groups and oppressed groups" and cites several theorists who emphasize the dual nature of their consciousness. It seems to me that theories that divide the world into oppressed groups and dominant groups have difficulty accounting for the fact that members of some oppressed groups are also at the same time members of other dominant groups. Lapses such as these make me wonder if it would not be more politically effective to abandon talk of standpoint altogether and begin to talk instead of concrete political communities organized around commitments to end multiple forms of oppression. While it is true that shared critical reflection on experiences structured by oppression can lead to insight in developing explanatory analyses and strategies for change, an emphasis on this detracts from political organization and action that arises out of a shared sense of social ethics and social justice. Standpoint theory too easily lends itself to single issue politics and allows particular oppressed groups to neglect the ways in which they are also complicitous in other forms of domination and oppression. Standpoint theory posits the possibility of a privileged epistemological perspective for particular oppressed groups, but it does not make provisions for how these same groups are to account for their possible status as complicitous members of other dominant groups.

In her chapter on difference, Hartsock states, "the history of feminist understanding of difference and power makes it clear that different strategies are appropriate at different times… Each strategy contains an implicit analysis that needs to be ‘read out’ of the practice and theorized in order to show us the new possibilities toward which it points" (70). It is possible that standpoint theories serve as useful tools for organizing and theorizing in early stages of movements dedicated to ending oppression. Certainly, much of Hartsock’s work arises out of the formative stages of second wave feminist theory in the United States. But, political struggles to end racist, sexist, and heterosexist oppression may have moved beyond this point, and are now using strategies of ally development and coalition building. Using Hartsock’s own advice, what we need now are epistemologies that arise from these practices and point to new ones.