Reading Singing in the Fire:
Stories of Women in Philosophy is like attending a great dinner party,
where every guest is smart and fascinating, and you stay too late, knowing
you’ll regret it at work the next day but you don’t care, because you want to
talk, really talk, to everyone there. 
That the book includes black-and-white photographs of the contributors,
not formal book jacket portraits but mostly decades-old family-album-type
snapshots from graduate school, greatly enhances this sense of intimacy and
warmth so seldom found (or expected) in a philosophy book.

It isn’t clear whether the
contributors were given a "topic" €“ instead, each essay seems to be a
free-form answer to the question, "What was it (or is it) like for
you?"  The late Teresa Brennan
tells us that "the editors’ brief for this good idea (women philosophers
tell the truth) is to say something useful from the vantage point of younger
women" (23), and each of the twelve contributors, as well as our
"host," editor Linda Martín Alcoff, has certainly done that.  Whether the reader is interested in
philosophical autobiography, the effect of American feminism on academic
philosophy, or simply anecdotes about the history of the profession, younger
women and men alike will find something "useful" in it €“ and
something enjoyable and inspiring, as well. 

The contributions range from the
deeply personal and confessional (Andrea Nye, who reflects on her
transformative relationship with her high school English teacher, Miss Grant)
to the more explicitly formal and professional (Kristin Shrader-Frechette, who
shares some biographical information about her mother and her past as a
Catholic nun, but focuses primarily on her litigation with the University of
South Florida, and everything in between (Stephanie (Mrs. David "possible
worlds") Lewis, the sole non-Ph.D. holder but a significant force in the
American Philosophical Association (APA)). 

Several contributors address
practical issues relating to pregnancy, motherhood, and a career in philosophy
(Virginia Held, Alison Jaggar, Martha Nussbaum, Shrader-Frechette), though one
wishes more were said about the philosophical effects (if any) of motherhood
itself.  Claudia Card shares her
experiences as a closeted lesbian graduate student and junior person fixated on
theories of punishment and penology, and later, as an openly gay feminist philosopher.  Though all but one have tenured philosophy
jobs, not all have "scaled the heights" of endowed chairs in the most
prestigious universities, or national offices in the APA.  Most hold (or have retired from) philosophy
jobs in more "ordinary" places €“ Syracuse, Wisconsin, Colorado.

A number of contributors express
legitimate hurt, even outrage, at having subjects they take seriously belittled
€“ whether as a Continentalist in an analytic department (Sandra Bartky), a
practitioner of "applied ethics" (Held), or an ecofeminist (Karen
Warren, who abandoned a dissertation on Leibniz’s Monadology to write
about whether trees have legal standing). 
It is unquestionably true that a central task for all philosophers, and
perhaps especially for feminist (not just female) philosophers, is developing confidence
in "the importance of what we care about" (in Harry Frankfurt’s
words).  These contributions provide a
new way of approaching questions like whether anything a philosopher is
interested in is philosophy; whether anything taught by a person with a
doctorate in philosophy is philosophy; and most of all, why it matters so much
to philosophers whether something in particular is or is not philosophy. 

Nussbaum (neé Craven), the eminent
classicist and philosopher, takes us into the most elite academic precincts €“
the Harvard philosophy and classics departments in the 1970s, and the Harvard
Society of Fellows (of which she was the first female member, in 1972) €“ to
share priceless reminiscences of her experiences there as a mother, as well as
an object of sexual harassment and anti-Semitism (by marriage).  She has kind words for Bernard Williams,
Hilary Putnam, and Robert Nozick, the last of whom created a
"world-historical moment" (105) for her by interrupting a visiting
speaker with an announcement that he had to pick up his son from hockey,
thereby introducing the forbidden subject of children and child care into
Emerson Hall.  Perhaps due to the
distance provided by decades, Nussbaum seems indulgently, even excessively,
forgiving of Hellenist G.E.L. Owen, her alcoholic thesis advisor who
"walked into my room at 8 a.m. and simply lay down on top of me, an act
that in some sense I count as an attempted rape, although his physical weakness
allowed one [why not "me"?] to push him away quite easily"
(99).  Distance gives way to immediacy,
however, in her discussion of one former department chairman €“ not named, but
instantly recognizable to anyone who ever knew him €“ as a "satanic
figure" whose "career would show a good actor how the role of Iago
ought to be played" (104).  The
experiences she recounts make her rather doctrinaire prohibitionist position on
sexual relationships between male faculty and female students (and even junior
faculty) €“ none, ever €“ at least understandable.

The book gains added depth and
conversational flavor from the contributors’ institutional or personal
connections with one another.  Bartky,
Jaggar, and Card were early members of the Society for Women in Philosophy
(SWIP), and movingly describe its value to them, while Nussbaum indirectly
blames SWIP for contributing to the suicide of a colleague.  Ofelia Schutte and Jaggar were at Miami
University of Ohio at the same time (1970-1972), and remember it fondly.  But while Schutte seems happy to have joined
the University of South Florida faculty as the head of women’s studies, and has
apparently congenial relationships with the philosophy department,
Shrader-Frechette (now holder of a named chair at Notre Dame) devotes most of
her essay to an account of her litigation against the same institution. 

Unsurprisingly, nearly all the
contributors discuss the hugely transformative and liberating effects of
intellectual and academic feminism on their personal and professional lives and
self-understandings.  At the same time,
at least a few confess to the debilitating effects of profound self-doubt, to
which most graduate students in philosophy (of either gender) can relate.  Indeed, if something is missing from the
feminist analyses offered by several contributors, it might be a failure to acknowledge
that although as and for women, a sense of inadequacy in the discipline has
historically been (and continues unfortunately too often to be) tied up in
gender (and for women of color, in race and nationality as well), even straight
white men confront crises of confidence in philosophy. 

Those who pursue philosophy have
often selected the discipline that is most difficult, rather than easiest, for
them.  When a discipline has been around
for millennia, with heroes who are "immortals," everyone has a reason
to feel inadequate.  Robert Nozick, no
sufferer from low self-esteem, once remarked about himself, "Isn’t it
ludicrous for someone just one generation from the shtetl, a pisher
from Brownsville and East Flatbush in the Bronx, even to touch on the topics of
the monumental thinkers?  Of course it
is.  Yet it was ludicrous for them
too.  We are all just a few years past
something or other, if only childhood. 
Even the monuments themselves, so serenely in command of culture and
intellect, must have been children once and adolescents €“ so they too are
immigrants to the realm of thought" (Philosophical Explanations,
Acknowledgements, viii (1981)).  Held
makes a similar point in her essay (with a more careerist spin) when she says,
"although I may not be very capable or competent at all [at philosophy], I
may be not very much less capable or competent than others who occupy
the positions they are already in" (51), a crucial confidence-builder for
us all. 

A final caveat about the
philosophers selected: all of the contributors other than the editor and Uma
Narayan were born before the early 1950s, meeting Alcoff’s goal of
"collect[ing] the stories of women who are generally over fifty and thus
senior enough to have seen some significant changes in the academy"
(5-6).  Alcoff openly confesses that she
"was loose with the age limit to try to ensure some ethnic diversity"
(6), but this well-intentioned decision mars the history.  Although Narayan’s essay about her
experiences as a Tamil woman, raised in Uganda and India, now practicing
philosophy in the U.S., is certainly interesting, the inclusion of someone born
around 1960 who did not complete her Ph.D. until after 1990 unfortunately
exemplifies a phenomenon Narayan herself identifies and decries €“ "the burden
of being constantly asked to participate €¦ because legitimate concerns that
women of color be represented €¦ translate into responsibilities for which there
are only a few of us to shoulder" (92). 

A more honest history of academic
philosophy in America would necessarily reflect the painful exclusion of women
of color.  (Narayan’s essay would be a
valuable centerpiece of essays from "the next generation.")  The other essays, however, provide an
invaluable window on the experience of being and becoming a woman in philosophy
during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

© 2004 Diane J. Kein

Diane J. Klein, J.D. (UCLA School of Law), Ph.D. candidate
(philosophy) (U.C. Berkeley), is Associate Professor of Law at Albany Law
School, Union University, Albany, New York.  Her philosophical areas of
interest include virtue ethics and moral theory; her areas of legal scholarship
include professional responsibility, race and gender, and trusts and estates.

Categories: Philosophical, Memoirs