The Question of Women

Abstract

It is argued that the characteristic labour of women in the domestic sphere both instantiates all the main moments in the development of critical realism and prefigures the good society. Women necessarily and spontaneously tend to (1) recognise the intransitivity of nature (the truth of the body); (2) engage in ‘right-brain’ thinking (intuitive, holistic, unconditional, in tune with the qualities of the ground state) that runs counter to the ‘masculine’ ‘right-brain’ instrumental, conditional thinking that shores up male domination and skews science in that direction; (3) consciously understand their work as reproductive and transformative; (4) continually make valid transitions from facts to values, and practice an ethics of love and care rather than subjective preferences; (5) find ways of transcending dichotomies and dualisms (e.g. reasons and causes); (6) be aware of absence, lack and deficiencies in human practices; and (7) be more in their ground state than men. This last point suggests that women do not need to wait upon emancipatory theory to engage in the process of self- and social transformation. The postmodernist emphasis on difference and uniqueness is considered both as reinforcing alienation and split and as providing grounds for women to be more assertive.