Volume 09, Number 2 Spring 2010 APA Newsletters NEWSLETTER ON FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY © 2010 by The American Philosophical Association ISSN 2155-9708 FROM THE EDITOR, CHRISTINA M. BELLON ABOUT THE NEWSLETTER ON FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY SUBMISSION GUIDELINES AND INFORMATION NEWS FROM THE COMMITTEE ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN, ERIN MCKENNA ARTICLES MIRIAM SOLOMON "APA Panel on Mid-Career Issues, December 2008: Introduction to Panel" ANITA L. ALLEN "Novel Thought: An African American Woman Philosopher at Mid-Career" CHESHIRE CALHOUN "Mid-Career Issues and Post-Tenure Opportunities" SHARON M. MEAGHER "Pushing the Boundaries of Philosophy" CANDICE L. SHELBY "Mid Career...or Second Career?" CLAIRE KATZ "Some Reflections on a Bad Relationship" NORAH MARTIN "Mid-Career Suicide? It Depends on How You Define 'Career'" BOOK REVIEWS Amy Allen: The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory REVIEWED BY DEBRA JACKSON Iddo Landau: Is Philosophy Androcentric? REVIEWED BY VANCE A. RICKS Gail Weiss: Refiguring the Ordinary REVIEWED BY AMANDA GIBEAULT Warren Farrell: Does Feminism Discriminate against Men? REVIEWED BY MAUREEN SANDER-STAUDT CONTRIBUTORS ANNOUNCEMENTS APA NEWSLETTER ON Feminism and Philosophy Christina M. Bellon, Editor Spring 2010 Volume 09, Number 2 FROM THE EDITOR This issue of the Newsletter finds us once again engrossed in discussion of important professional concerns, this time those affecting women philosophers in the middle of their careers. The essays which comprise this issue are taken from two CSWorganized panels on mid-career issues for women philosophers held at the APA Central and Pacific Division meetings in 2008 and 2009. From these authors' sharing of insights gleaned through several years of working, writing, teaching, organizing, and living philosophy, we can see, first, that women philosophers have a wealth of both positive and negative career experiences. We can also see that what these successes, challenges, and failures mean to those who experience them can be shared, as they resonate with the experiences of others despite or across differences in detail. Finally, we see that sharing our experiences is among the best ways to contribute to the enhancement of career success and the mitigation of failures or impediments to success for those who come after us. Mid-career, as you will see from the following essays, means grappling with post-tenure review, finishing old and beginning new research agendas, opportunities (and impetuses) to change institutional or departmental affiliations, assuming administrative roles, and, for some, the question of remaining in professional philosophy at all. I invite you to read these contributions in the context in which they fall relative to the two preceding Newsletter issues, also on career concerns, the focus of which was on the numbers of women in professional philosophy, barriers to our undertaking successful careers in philosophy, and some strategies for improving our numbers at all levels, including the numbers of women in undergraduate and graduate study. This issue on mid-career challenges and opportunities should be read against this background; a background which shows we are yet a long way from parity, a longer way from feminizing philosophy and the institutional settings in which it is done, and perhaps longest yet from participating in a rich and inclusively diversified profession. To this end, for all those women at their mid-careers, keep on keeping on (OK, I know that's a bit too '70s of me); for all those women at the beginning of their careers, have heart and learn from our mistakes; and for all those women at their career-prime or nearing retirement, thank you for showing us the way and for bringing us along. ABOUT THE NEWSLETTER ON FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY The Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy is sponsored by the APA Committee on the Status of Women (CSW). The Newsletter is designed to provide an introduction to recent philosophical work that addresses issues of gender. None of the varied philosophical views presented by authors of Newsletter articles necessarily reflect the views of any or all of the members of the Committee on the Status of Women, including the editor(s) of the Newsletter, nor does the committee advocate any particular type of feminist philosophy. We advocate only that serious philosophical attention be given to issues of gender and that claims of gender bias in philosophy receive full and fair consideration. SUBMISSION GUIDELINES AND INFORMATION 1. Purpose: The purpose of the Newsletter is to publish information about the status of women in philosophy and to make the resources of feminist philosophy more widely available. The Newsletter contains discussions of recent developments in feminist philosophy and related work in other disciplines, literature overviews and book reviews, suggestions for eliminating gender bias in the traditional philosophy curriculum, and reflections on feminist pedagogy. It also informs the profession about the work of the APA Committee on the Status of Women. Articles submitted to the Newsletter should be limited to 10 double-spaced pages and must follow the APA guidelines for gender-neutral language. Please submit essays electronically to the editor or send four copies of essays via regular mail. All manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous review. References should follow The Chicago Manual of Style. 2. Book Reviews and Reviewers: If you have published a book that is appropriate for review in the Newsletter, please have your publisher send us a copy of your book. We are always seeking new book reviewers. To volunteer to review books (or some particular book), please send the editor a CV and letter of interest, including mention of your areas of research and teaching. - APA Newsletter, Spring 2010, Volume 09, Number 2 - - 2 - 3. Where to Send Things: Please send all articles, comments, suggestions, books, and other communications to the editor: Dr. Christina Bellon, Department of Philosophy, Sacramento State University, 6000 J Street, Sacramento, CA 95819-6033, bellon@csus.edu. 4. Submission Deadlines: Submissions for Spring issues are due by the preceding September 1st; submissions for Fall issues are due by the preceding February 1st. NEWS FROM THE COMMITTEE ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN We look forward to another exciting year of work as the Committee on the Status of Women gets ready to welcome its new members on July 1st : Judith Green (Fordham University), Jill Gordan (Colby College), and Dorothy Rogers (Montclair University). These new members bring a wealth of experience and energy to our work. Several of these new members have already contributed ideas and taken on assignments! This also means it is almost time to say goodbye to Margaret Walker (ASU) and Nancy Holland (Hamline University). Nancy has done wonderful work organizing several sessions for various Central Division meetings and Margaret will be working beyond her term to organize sessions for the 2010 Eastern Division meeting. I would like to thank them for their work. I know they will continue to support the efforts of this committee and women in philosophy in general. We continue to be active putting together interesting sessions for the various divisions of the APA. We just had two exciting sessions at the Eastern APA meeting: Handling the Hiring Process and Pre-tenure Life: This session provided reflections and advised on the process of presenting oneself on paper, in an interview, at receptions, and on campus. It also discussed negotiating a contract, understanding tenure and promotion requirements, and strategies for balancing teaching, scholarship, and service in the pre-tenure years. Examining Journals: This session examined a variety of journals in philosophy. Following on recently published reporting about submission and acceptance rates, this discussion looked more deeply at several specific journals to see if gender bias influences what gets published and, if so, what the causes and sources of such bias might be. The panel also made suggestions for overcoming any such bias. At the Central APA meeting in spring 2010, the CSW scheduled an impressive panel on current work in continental feminism, organized by Nancy Holland (Hamline University). The panelists included Silvia Stoller (University of Vienna/University of Oregon), who presented "The Forgotten Anonymity: Why Gender Theory Needs a Concept of Anonymous Gender"; Namita Goswami (DePaul University), who presented "DeLiberating Traditions: The Female Body of Sati and Slavery"; and Robin Schott (Danish Institute for International Studies and School of Education, Aarhus University), who presented "Pain and Abjection in a Narrative of War Rape." At the Pacific APA meeting, later this spring, the CSW hosted a session on feminism and humor, organized by Sharyn Clough (Oregon State University). The panelists included Lisa Johnson (University of South Carolina, Upstate), Ingra Schellenberg (University of Washington), Cynthia Willett (Emory University), and Julie Willett (Texas Tech University). Starting at the Eastern meeting in 2010 the CSW plans to hold sessions at each of the three APA meetings on issues pertaining to the professional climate in which philosophy is done by women and about women. Among the guiding questions is, Has the climate for women in philosophy changed-in the profession generally, in departments, in the world of publishing, in teaching, and in the search for employment? As always, we welcome your ideas for future sessions. The APA's Inclusiveness Committee continues the work begun by the CSW with the National Office to gather membership and job placement information so that we can get more accurate data on the status of women in the profession. We also continue to work with the Inclusiveness Committee to raise awareness about the APA's Ombudsperson for Nondiscrimination, currently Laurie Schrage. In its capacity to hear complaints, concerns, and facilitate solutions, the office of Ombudsperson is a valuable resource for all members of the APA. This year, the CSW began an informal survey on the percentage of women undergraduate majors. That work will continue and we will be assembling the data and analyzing it with an eye toward providing members with advice on enhancing their recruitment of women majors. Thank you to everyone on the committee for all the work you have done. And thank you to everyone who supports the work we do. Erin McKenna, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy, Pacific Lutheran University Chair, APA Committee on the Status of Women ARTICLES APA Panel on Mid-Career Issues, December 2008: Introduction to Panel Miriam Solomon Temple University Tenured philosophy professors have extraordinary job security, but little professional mobility. Women often have even less mobility for family reasons. Working at the same tasks in the same environment can become tedious after a decade or so. The purpose of this panel is to expand knowledge of options for philosophers in mid-career, with special attention to issues faced by women. For some, the question is whether or not to stay in philosophy, which is not always welcoming to nontraditional approaches and/or women and minorities. Many successful senior women in philosophy have taken positions in other departments such as political science, women's studies, and law. For others who wish to stay in philosophy but to move to a different department and institution, the challenge is to negotiate the job market for senior candidates. For many, the best option is to stay in the same professional position, but to take on projects that transcend this. And, finally, some choose to move into administrative roles. I put together this panel with the goal of representing these different choices, and with representing the diversity of women in philosophy. Anita Allen, who received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan, has become a prominent law professor and is currently at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the keynote speaker at the first meeting of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers in 2007, and she has increased her - Feminism and Philosophy - - 3 - activity in public outreach. Cheshire Calhoun, now professor of philosophy at Arizona State University, has moved three times since receiving tenure and has taken leadership roles in committee work for The American Philosophical Association. She is currently chair of the APA's Committee on Inclusivity in the Profession. Sharon Meagher, professor of philosophy at the University of Scranton, has stretched the limits of a tenured job in philosophy, negotiating two years of leave to work in an applied public policy center in Washington, D.C., and using her experiences from that leave to enrich subsequent philosophical work. Jan Boxill (who spoke at the panel but was not able to write for this Newsletter) spoke about her work with athletes at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, her professional interest in philosophy of sport, and her directorship of the Parr Center for Ethics. The panel showed a rich variety of experiences and choices that may be of help to those stymied in mid-career, so we publish some of the talks here, aiming for a wider audience. Novel Thought: An African American Woman Philosopher at Mid-Career Anita L. Allen University of Pennsylvania It is extraordinary for an African American woman to speak of a "mid-career" in academic philosophy. There have only been a few of us. And a number left the field of philosophy after just a few years, without achieving satisfaction or tenure. African American women first received Ph.D.'s in philosophy the 1960s and 1970s, with mixed results. It is believed that Joyce Mitchell Cook, who received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale in the mid-1960s, is the first African American woman in history to earn a doctorate in philosophy. She was followed by Laverne Shelton, who earned a Ph.D. in philosophy, I believe, from the University of Wisconsin in the 1970s. Both Cook and Shelton were denied tenure and pursued other work inside and outside education-related fields. For example, Cook worked in the White House for a while, and Shelton worked for the Educational Testing Service. The problem these gifted women faced in the academy seems to have been gender, not race. Cook was denied tenure by Howard University, a historically black institution; Shelton by a historically white one. The next two black women who received Ph.D.'s in philosophy from American institutions were Adrian Piper and I. We both left graduate school around 1979 to take tenure-track jobs in philosophy. Piper earned a Ph.D. from Harvard and took a job at Michigan. I earned a Ph.D from Michigan and took a job at Carnegie Mellon University. Both Piper and I have remained in teaching long enough to reach mid-career status, though not without travail. Piper was denied tenure at Michigan, despite an impressive number of publications and prestigious fellowships. She later taught at Georgetown University, the University of San Diego, and Wellesley. Piper has been a productive moral philosopher and a distinguished figure in the art world as well. She has held visiting professorships and fellowships at various prestigious European institutions. A Kant scholar, Piper is fluent in German. Piper filed a widely publicized lawsuit against Wellesley several years ago, and recently parted ways with the school under unhappy circumstances. I went to teach at Carnegie Mellon University under a cloud. I was only 24. Soon after accepting a position there, the head of the philosophy program called me and asked me not to come, so that his school could make an offer instead to a white male candidate from MIT. They only had one slot. I declined to give up the position and went where no one really wanted me. I taught logic and ethics. I can recall being told by one of my CMU colleagues (who later became a friend) that I didn't clearly have the "candle power" for philosophy, and that I had "too much juice" for philosophy. I didn't stick around to see if I would get tenure. After barely two uncomfortable years at Carnegie Mellon, I wound up going to Harvard Law School. After getting my law degree and working as a lawyer in a Wall Street law firm for a short time, I returned to the academy, but as a law professor. I have been successful, moving up the ranks of law school from the third tier University of Pittsburgh Law School, to Georgetown Law School, and finally to the University of Pennsylvania Law, a top-ranked school. I have a secondary appointment in the Penn Philosophy Department. I hold an endowed chair in the law school. I have been a visiting professor at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard. I received tenure (at Georgetown) with no problem, based on a book and several articles. I have now written several books and more than a hundred articles. At mid-career, I am enjoying the fruits of choices I made early in my career. Having a law degree and a Ph.D. has enabled me to take full advantage of the interdisciplinary direction of higher education at Penn. Not only am I on the law and philosophy faculties of my university, I am also a Bioethics Fellow, and have advisory roles in Women's Studies and Africana Studies. The dual degree helps outside the university, too. I believe I was tapped to serve on the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research in the early 1990s because I was both a lawyer and a philosopher who could help with the "ethical, legal and social implications" of genome research. The next two black women philosophers received their Ph.D.'s in the early 1980s. Michele Moody-Adams received her doctorate from Harvard and Georgette Sinckler received hers from Cornell. Both of these women have been successful by the usual measures. They received tenure from good schools and currently have comfortable academic jobs. Moody-Adams is on the faculty of Cornell University, where she has directed an ethics center and taken on major responsibilities on the administrative level. Professional life has not always been easy for these women; they have their horror stories. We all have horror stories and bruises. We have all been demeaned, disrespected, harassed, regarded as problems or burdens of affirmative action, and denied our due. But what I would like to emphasize is that we are here. There are black women in philosophy or trained in philosophy who have survived to the mid-career point at good institutions. That fact alone is extraordinary. We have real jobs in real institutions; we are publishing real articles and books; we are teaching real students and making a real impact inside and outside the academy. Professor Kathryn Gines, who now teaches in the Philosophy Department at Penn State University, has taken it upon herself to organize African American women in philosophy. She has established an organization called the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers. Gines has identified about thirty black women with graduate training in philosophy currently teaching. The first conference of the Collegium was held at Vanderbilt in 2007; I am pleased to have been the keynote speaker. The historic and stimulating event was reported in two articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and a long piece by Carlin Romano in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The next Collegium meeting was planned for May 2008 at Penn State with Michele Moody-Adams as keynote. - APA Newsletter, Spring 2010, Volume 09, Number 2 - - 4 - At mid-career, I have escaped the fate of my University's first black philosopher, William Fontaine. A new biography of Fontaine lays out his tragedy. He died young; felt unappreciated by his colleagues at Penn; managed to publish a substantial book about a year before his untimely illness and death-but the book was not reviewed or discussed in any journal for more than forty years after its publication. I confess that I do not want to be ignored and forgotten. I am ambitious. My ambition is fueled by insecurity rather than by a surplus of self-esteem. Perhaps I have something to prove in an endless quest for a degree of self-esteem Jim Crow and post-civil rights racism have kept at a distance from me. The mid-career issues that have dominated my life most can be grouped into two categories: moving up and moving on. Mid-career philosophers may find that they have many opportunities to move up the ladder. Should one do it? What are the costs and benefits of change, of sticking one's neck out? There are advantages to longevity in one town and institution. I have had many opportunities to make lateral moves to other schools. I have been a visiting professor at five schools, including Waseda Law School in Tokyo. I have little interest in moving to another full-time permanent faculty position, though. One reason is that my experiences with being a job candidate at Harvard and Yale were traumatic. My year-long "look see" visits at both schools turned into referendums on affirmative action and institutional racism. But I have also explored and/or turned down opportunities to be a dean, center head, and college president. Family issues more than any other have kept me in place. When I was associate dean at Georgetown Law School with an infant daughter, I hired a nanny and two babysitters to help me juggle my responsibilities. Moreover, one cannot drag a spouse and two children all over, too much. Finally, one of my children has special needs. Once we mastered the education and health care system in Pennsylvania, I was reluctant to leave. With a special needs child, being an administrator is much less attractive than being a regular professor with a flexible schedule. Moving on, rather than moving up, has been my strategy to keep my career interesting and to sustain my sense of purpose. I have "moved on" in several senses. I have not left the field to write novels and garden, one of my fantasies. I have moved on in the sense of immersing myself in not-for-profit leadership, and writing and speaking to non-academic audiences. I have served on or chaired the board of numerous organizations related to health, such as Planned Parenthood, the Family Planning Council of Philadelphia, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, the Maternity Care Coalition, and the Women's Medical Fund. I currently chair the West Philadelphia Alliance for Children, which provides volunteer support for seven schools in the city's poorest neighborhoods. I have moved on in the sense of writing for non-academic audiences. I published a non-academic book on ethics in 2004. I wrote an ethics column in the Newark Star Ledger for more than two years. I continue to be an ethics expert featured in O, the Oprah Magazine. Recently, I have blogged about privacy and fertility on the dailybeast.com. I have moved on in the sense of being a voice for ethical responsibility in the major media. I was for two years an ethics commentator on MSNBC, appearing on television every week. I have been a TV commentator on issues related to abortion for CBS and CNN. I have appeared on shows like Nightline, 60 Minutes, and Face the Nation. I have been featured on major NPR shows, including Talk of the Nation. I have stood back from my "public intellectual" activities and given some thought to the significance of "moralizing in public" and have a developed a belief that bringing normative philosophical and legal insights to broader audiences is worthwhile and even something of an obligation for those of us also committed to university teaching, university service, and academic scholarship. As part of an effort to make sense of being a public intellectual, I gave a lecture at Hofstra University on the subject of "moralizing in public." (The lecture has been published as: Anita L. Allen, "Moralizing in Public," Hofstra L. Rev. 1325 (2007).) Why should a university professor spend so much time on something that takes one away from the university? My answer appears in the article I wrote, which I would like to quote here: I once feared that becoming a highly recognizable public-moralizer would take my mind away from the classroom and detract from my teaching. However, if anything, my teaching has improved. My experience in engaging a national audience through live television has translated to my abilities to form a connection with my classroom audience. Further, by taking on the role of a public-moralizer, I add to the synergies of a wellrounded professional life and encounter new materials and perspectives to bring to the classroom. For example, after commenting on the current U.S. immigration reform debates on television, I did some further research on the topic and decided to add immigration policy to the curriculum of "Law, Justice and Morality," an undergraduate philosophy class I teach at Penn. After a lecture on immigration reform, I asked my students which of three policy directions they preferred: (1) the 2005 House of Representatives bill that would build 700 miles of fence across the border with Mexico, criminalize assisting the entry of noncitizens, and make illegal entry a felony; (2) a guest worker program for registered immigrants; or (3) a true, full amnesty program enabling aliens to quickly obtain green cards and citizenship. An overwhelming majority favored (2), a guest worker program like the one endorsed by President George W. Bush. My students argued that the full amnesty option I preferred would condone wrongdoing and serve as a slap in the face to legal immigrants who played by the rules to earn their lawful status. I was surprised and challenged by my students. I was moved to write a newspaper column attacking the "slap in the face" argument and defending amnesty. After the column was published in the Ledger, I posted it on the class website. My students' views of moral justice in immigration differed from my own. I suspect that on a range of issues, the moral values of other people differ from mine. But I am no less enthusiastic about moral engagement. Together, as communities of difference and similarity, we craft the ethical foundation on which American law will rest. Let's turn our minds to moral values, reflect on them, refine them, then shout them out, so others can hear; and so that the tide of the sea of ethics will produce new currents, and the law, if need be, can take on new directions. I have moved on. My work at mid-career is not constrained by narrow notions of "philosophy" or "university service." I - Feminism and Philosophy - - 5 - have moved beyond worrying about whether I am a loyal, true philosopher. I am grateful that Professsor Carol Gould encouraged me, very early in my career, to give thought to feminist concerns; and I am also grateful, in a way, for the misadventures at Harvard Law School that prompted me to think more about race. My preoccupations with gender and race, like my public moralizing, may place me outside of some imagined mainstream of philosophy. But it is in this work that I have found meaning, relevance, and acceptance, and it is to this work that, at mid-career, I realize I have entrusted my legacy. Mid-Career Issues and Post-Tenure Opportunities Cheshire Calhoun Arizona State University The subject of this session-"Post Tenure Career Opportunities"- is ambiguous between two things. First, one might be interested in opportunities for getting a different job where that job might be a different teaching position, an administrative position within academia, or a job outside of academia. Here, the emphasis is on job mobility within academia and from academia to some other place. Second, one might be interested in the opportunities for doing new and different sorts of things as a philosophy professor that become available post-tenure. Here, the emphasis is on the different content that one's academic life might be expected or chosen to have once one passes the tenure hurdle. Getting a Different Job I have been on the job market three times since receiving tenure: 10 years into my career, 20 years, and 27 years. And, I have obtained a position each of these three times. The first was at an associate level. It required giving up tenure, and going through the full tenure process again, albeit within three rather than seven years. The second was as a visiting full professor and acting chair in a position that would have converted to a tenured position had I chosen to stay. The last was as a tenured full professor. A goal in all three job hunts was upward career mobility, measured variously by status of the institution, lightness of the teaching load, and presence of a graduate program. Two of the job hunts were at least initiated with the aim of securing a spousal hire for my partner at the time, who was an academic in Religious Studies. Here, I can only offer observations drawn from my personal experience of these job hunts. Applying for jobs. I do not think that selective applications to a few institutions stands a great chance of success. The blitz method has worked well for me. I've applied to everything that was a reasonable candidate, using both JFP and invitations to apply. And I gave myself a three-year period of doing this as a reasonable time-frame for securing an acceptable position. Invitations. One of the opportunities that becomes available with seniority is invitations to apply. It's hard for me to assess what it actually means for a senior woman to get on the invitation list, as, at the junior level, one wonders to what extent the department is serious and to what extent it just wants to appear nondiscriminatory. The fact that, in addition to placing national ads, search committees for senior positions typically invite a select set of candidates to apply changes the landscape of the job market. For senior positions advertised in JFP there is always some uncertainty about the extent to which the job ad is really a serious ad or a necessary formality. My own impressionistic sense is that it is worthwhile to apply for senior positions that one has not been invited to apply for. The landscape of senior job searches is also affected by the fact that those who are brought in for interviews may be more interested in getting leverage to improve their current job than in moving to a new job. Spousal hires. In large universities, the request that one's spouse also be hired does not appear to be an unusual request and is indeed taken seriously-although in hard economic times universities may be more reluctant to make this more expensive sort of hire. Interestingly, the fact that the "spousal hire" would have been for a same sex partner was, in my experience, a total non-issue both for department chairs and for institutional deans, even in conservative parts of the country-such as Kentucky. The principal obstacles to a spousal hire are economic (can the institution afford it?) and the size of the institution (small institutions with small faculties may be opposed to increasing the number of faculty via spousal hires). Feminist philosophy. I think there is a very strong bias against regarding faculty who work in feminist philosophy (or a diversity related area) as equal contenders for jobs that are not specifically conceived of as feminist philosophy jobs or as jobs where some level of interdisciplinarity is desirable. I have insider information that I've failed to make the final cut for exactly this reason. Chair positions. The positions for which I had the easiest time getting serious consideration were chair positions. I would heartily recommend developing administrative credentials as a boon to job mobility. Of course, the down side is that departments hiring external chairs may not be particularly easy departments to come into or in which one can work effectively. But having demonstrable leadership skills can be a plus even for departments that are not presently hiring a new chair. Negotiation. My own experience was that the best thing I have ever done for my career in terms of salary and institutional perks was to go on the job market. Having another job offer in hand, for example, enabled me to renegotiate my salary at Colby, something that was followed in a year with an endowed chair. The worst thing I ever did for my career was to not negotiate-accepting a bad deal upon entering one institution kept my salary depressed below my peers for years. Just what is negotiable depends on the institution and how much they want you, but my sense is that the negotiable items include: salary, start date, permanent or startup research funds, research assistants, teaching load, semesters without teaching duties, sabbatical, and spousal hire. One can also negotiate to come in first on a trial visiting position that will automatically convert to a tenured position. What the full array of options are for negotiation and how to manage job moves is something I wish we in the profession talked more about publicly. My sense is that at the senior level the terms of the contract are highly negotiable, but it's hard to know what your options are without someone on the inside to advise you about the institution and without general knowledge of the sorts of things that might be options. Bad behavior. I encountered an astonishingly high rate of egregiously bad behavior in these job search ventures. In one case, the academic dean flat out lied when he called to offer me a job and told me he had heard nothing about my wanting a spousal hire. He then threatened to withdraw the job offer unless I took it without further discussion of a spousal hire. At another institution, when I went for a campus interview, I was scheduled to meet with only two people and told that I should go around and knock on other faculty members' doors and try - APA Newsletter, Spring 2010, Volume 09, Number 2 - - 6 - to talk to them (which I refused to do-I had a nice lunch with a graduate student instead). One of the two faculty members I was scheduled to meet with was so relentlessly abusive that I nearly terminated the entire department interview when he was finished with me. At another institution, at least half the department was away when I came for my on-campus interview. There, the department chair was utterly uncommunicative after I left campus, failing to respond to emails or phone calls even though he had originally given every indication of being strongly interested in hiring me. The Content of One's Professional Job Although an array of new options in one's current job might appear post-tenure, not all of these are new desirable options. At least some of the things one has the opportunity to do post-tenure-for example, serve on tenure and promotion committees-can be exceedingly onerous. I am going to focus on the down side of the post-tenure career opportunities. One comment I have frequently heard from not-yet-tenured faculty is that once you have tenure, then you don't have to work so hard; indeed, you don't have to do research at all. The post-tenure career opportunity imagined here is a kind of job leisure. Quite the reverse is true. If one has done one's job right pre-tenure, things only get harder post-tenure. Service. Here is a short list of career "opportunities" that become available upon tenure, and increasingly available as one goes along in a reasonably successful career. These are the sort that make one's work life harder rather than easier: • Opportunities to chair committees, including committees that make a big difference to other persons' lives, such as tenure or promotion review committees, or search committees. • Opportunities to serve on major institutional committees, such as the institution-level tenure & promotion committee, or institutional reaccreditation committees, or searches for a new dean or president. • Opportunities to chair one's department, or to direct an interdisciplinary program with which one has been involved. This particular opportunity is often the reward for having demonstrated competence and dutifulness with respect to department or program tasks. • Opportunities for service to the profession. Anyone who has been reasonably successful in her research career will have opportunities to review journal manuscripts, book proposals, book manuscripts, and grant proposals. The more successful one's research career, the more such opportunities. Then there is service to other institutions' philosophy departments in the form of being an external scholarship referee for their tenure and promotion decisions. One may also be asked to participate in formal reviews of other philosophy departments, as well as do consulting work for them. Participation in any professional philosophical organization, including the APA, will offer opportunities for service; and some of these forms of service are likely to be available only post-tenure, such as election to the Executive Committee or divisional president, or chairing various committees. • Opportunities to serve students and colleagues. With seniority comes the status to write recommendations- for both students and colleagues who are applying for jobs or fellowships-that have more clout. So the volume of letters of recommendation and behind the scenes communications may easily increase. One thing to note about these opportunities to serve one's department, one's academic institution, and the profession is that one often cannot adopt a "just say no policy" and continue to regard oneself as a decent human being. Careers are sometimes at stake-most obviously in any service related to tenure. Saying "no" may mean that someone less qualified to assess a candidate does the job one refuses to do. This is especially worrisome where candidates who work in feminist philosophy or gay and lesbian philosophy (or indeed any diversity-related philosophy) are concerned. Not only are careers sometimes at stake, but fairness and avoiding being a free rider are sometimes at stake. Taking one's turn rather than passing the buck is part of being a morally decent participant in one's academic or scholarly community. While one has reason to resent colleagues who are service slackers and routinely let others do the dirty work, one does not thereby acquire reason to follow suit. Scholarly invitations. In a somewhat different category from these service opportunities are opportunities connected to research that at one level are honors but that simultaneously mean more work. Those include: being invited to present lectures or lecture series that involve producing new material; being invited to deliver comments; being invited to contribute to topical collections, special journal issues, or festschrifts-again in ways that require producing new material; being invited to review books; being invited to contribute a book to a book series; being invited to edit a journal or a book series. These are all wonderful opportunities within one's research career so long as they actually further one's own research. But such invitations-a good share of which may be difficult to turn down either because of the honor involved or because one has debts to be repaid (as one might repay a debt of gratitude by writing a festschrift entry)-can have a way of swamping one's research agenda. This is particularly true if one has become known for one's work in a particular area: one may find that invitations have a way of locking one into yet more work in that area and delaying or preventing opportunities to move ahead into new areas. Time. The mid-to-late-career issue is, I think, time: having enough time to do one's own research; having enough time to do well what one has agreed to do; and having time to do something other than work (for example, I am writing this at 8:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning because there's no other available time to get it done). Shortage of time is not a problem that can reasonably be solved by "just saying no." There are professional debts to be paid; there are wonderful opportunities that are too good to be passed up; there are opportunities to do good things for the profession and for people in the profession; and there's just being a good citizen in academia. Nor is the problem to be solved by better time-management. At the pre-tenure level, you may be working very, very hard, but you're generally in a good position to know where your time is going to be going each week and each month. Predicting one's workload becomes increasingly difficult when one's job ceases to be centered primarily on teaching, research, and a couple of service activities. The shortage of time with which academics can easily end up wrestling is an institutional workload issue. Because institutions see themselves as paying for classroom instruction, service to their own institution, and the professional status of their faculty, a large portion of senior-level work doesn't get treated as part of one's workload. This is especially true of service to the profession. Institutions end up being free-riders - Feminism and Philosophy - - 7 - on a system that depends upon faculty saying "yes" to all sorts of tasks that are both unpaid and not accommodated within one's institutional work week. Pushing the Boundaries of Philosophy Sharon M. Meagher University of Scranton A major issue that women philosophers at mid-career must face is whether and how to stay "in" philosophy. For some women philosophers that decision was made (or made for them) prior to mid-career, that is, they have not held appointments in philosophy departments, but do philosophy in political science, in interdisciplinary ethics or humanities programs, in women's studies, or perhaps at the margins of, or outside of, the academy. But for those mid-career women philosophers who hold tenured appointments in philosophy departments, the issue often arises anew: Do I move "out" of philosophy and into administration? Do I accept a joint appointment in another department? Do I move to another disciplinary department where my work is better recognized? These questions of "in" and "out" also remain important for those who stay put in their departments, as they must evaluate and mentor female colleagues more junior to them who also might struggle to stay "in" philosophy or whose work is not read as "philosophy" by their male colleagues. They also might find that, as their own philosophical voice matures, their own work is no longer recognized as philosophy by many of their departmental colleagues. There appear to be multiple problems that make it difficult for women to stay in philosophy; here, I can only briefly review some of them. But the fact of the struggle seems quite clear-even with the few statistical studies we have available. The recent Committee on the Status of Women's employment survey certainly supports the claim that it is a struggle for women to stay in philosophy. As discussed in the spring 2009 volume of this Newsletter, only 21 percent of philosophers are women, and there is a significant gender difference in the attrition rate between recipients of the Ph.D. in philosophy and those who obtain positions in academe.1 While I know of no study, much anecdotal evidence suggests that even women at mid-career continue to leave philosophy departments. We need to consider this situation as we advise other women. I argue that women philosophers at mid-career must push the boundaries of philosophy to make it possible for them to thrive and to create more space for women (and men) to think philosophically. If we look at the history of boundaries of the philosophical genre (as Catherine Villanueva Gardner does in the case of moral philosophy2), we find that the boundaries seem to have much less to do with philosophy and much more to do with gender. Although key figures in the canon of philosophy play with a range of genres, women's writing has often been discounted as "not philosophy" if it fails to fit the much narrower genre of an impersonal philosophical argumentative essay.3 It still remains the case that philosophy is a white, middle-class male discipline. The boundaries of philosophy are patrolled primarily by white, middle-class men (although sometimes favored Others get deputized or curry favor with those in power by acting as vigilantes); those of us who are not white, middleclass men are likely to be disciplined when we cross the line-or happily shown the way outside philosophy's boundaries. And this is just one way in which women philosophers face limitations and barriers. Philosophy itself is marked by "masculine-feminine divisions" that it "has helped to articulate and refine," as Michèle Le Doeuff argues.4 The ramifications for women in philosophy are tremendous; as Elizabeth Minnich puts it, "it is all too easy to judge a woman's work less sound, significant, valuable than is required for hiring, tenure, promotion, publication" when domains of life associated with women remain "minimally philosophized."5 But neither Le Doeuff nor Minnich suggest that women (or men) should therefore abandon philosophy. Le Doeuff argues that philosophy (and its conceptual apparatus) is inescapable.6 And Minnich argues that "philosophy ought to be, and evidently can be, a discipline that helps us locate and dissolve the errors, the absurdities, the tortuous reasoning that mark the spot where injustices skew thinking, reasoning, judging."7 While we certainly should acknowledge that formal protections such as sexual harassment and anti-discrimination laws as well as the social and institutional changes affected by feminism have made some things easier for women in philosophy, barriers remain. I am most grateful for the anthology Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy, edited by Linda Martín Alcoff.8 I learned from the brave struggles of these women in mid-career, and their stories helped me to navigate my own career to its midpoint. Singing in the Fire anthologizes the stories of several women philosophers who recount how their lives shaped them as philosophers and how they pushed the boundaries of philosophy so that philosophy continued to matter to their lives. These are the stories that we are not supposed to tell-if we assume that philosophical questions come from on high and are resolved impartially and universally. But those are the assumptions regarding philosophy that keep women effectively down and out. If the stories anthologized tell us what philosophy is and why it matters, then these are philosophy. The stories may not be structured as explicit arguments, but neither are Platonic dialogues. They are stories that instruct us, and we should claim them as philosophy (regardless of the fact that the book has been classified by the Library of Congress catalog as feminism/autobiography). Feminism and autobiography can be a part of philosophy, not other than it. While we cannot reduce these women's accomplishments in philosophy to these stories, reclaiming their stories as philosophy is both a political and a philosophical act. Most women have, at least at one time or another, been suspected (or outright accused) of not doing "real" philosophy or "good" philosophy or being "real" philosophers or being "good" philosophers. Some of the contributors to Singing in the Fire might themselves object to my insistence that their essays are philosophy, although almost all of them have been subjected to the accusations of not being philosophers (or good enough philosophers). Some contributors may have consciously chosen the genre of autobiography to escape philosophy, or might think it only possible to criticize philosophy from the outside. But taken together the essays produce a powerful argument and testament to the transformative power of feminism, not just in their lives, but in philosophy. And for most of these women, they could not have continued in philosophy at mid-career if they had been forced to continue to submit to the discipline. Those who have maintained appointments in philosophy (and not all of the contributors have done so) have had to find ways to push the boundaries of the discipline (and, correlatively, find their own philosophical voices) so that they could comfortably stay in philosophy. Martín Alcoff summarizes the themes of the book in the introduction as threefold: first, the women tell us how they found ways to make philosophy "meaningful" or "relevant"; second, they help us understand how each of us might have a - APA Newsletter, Spring 2010, Volume 09, Number 2 - - 8 - private life as well as a professional one; third, they admit their own struggles with lack of confidence.9 I think that the "singers" and we can explain these issues as follows. First, the primary cause of the lack of confidence on the part of these women was caused by having been disciplined, that is, told that they were not "real" or "good" philosophers at some point in their careers. Women still struggle to be taken seriously as philosophers, and thus struggle to take themselves seriously. Women internalize those views-even at mid-career. Second, philosophy's inhospitality to women causes them to have difficulty in finding private and professional lives and can also contribute to a lack of confidence. Third, pushing the boundaries of philosophy is both a way to make philosophy more meaningful to our lives and a way to make philosophy more hospitable to women. The fact that I have the opportunity to tell my story is only possible because other women philosophers before me dared to tell theirs. And in telling our stories we push the boundaries of philosophy in ways that hopefully make it possible for ever more women to find ways to have flourishing careers in philosophy. While my own story comes later than those in the anthology, the themes remain the same. I achieved tenure with relative ease, but with a modicum of stress because of the extreme homophobia of one colleague. Pre-tenure I nevertheless struggled to write, partly because of some health problems and mostly, I only discovered later, because I had not yet found my voice. I found it increasingly difficult to write about the issues in ethics and politics that I really cared about by echoing the voices of male philosophers. During the year I went up for tenure, I wrote a critical essay about the problem of writing (philosophy) as a woman. Instinctively, I omitted the essay from my promotion application materials. But that essay, together with work that I was doing in my urban neighborhood, really helped me find my voice. I began writing essays in which I reflected on what it meant to do urban community organizing as a philosopher, and other essays in which I reflected on how doing community organizing challenged some of my philosophical views. And then I took a two-year unpaid leave from my position as associate professor of philosophy (and director of women's studies) at the University of Scranton. I left to work in an applied public policy center in Washington, D.C. I found the work to be incredibly rewarding, and I also found my knowledge and skills as a philosopher to be very useful. Yet, my colleagues in Washington were always surprised to learn that I was a philosopher, and often asked me to explain the connection-which I happily did. So I had not left philosophy, but my philosophy colleagues certainly perceived me as having done so. I returned to the University of Scranton with a renewed interest in teaching philosophy and a new sense of how and why philosophy mattered. But when I applied for promotion to full professor, the philosophy department voted overwhelmingly against me on two grounds: 1) my writing was not "philosophy" and 2) the fact that I left my position in a philosophy department was further proof that I was not serious about philosophy. They argued that my work was not philosophy because I wrote essays that were critical of mainstream philosophy and I used the pronoun "I." I called on some feminist philosophers more senior than I to write letters on my behalf. They argued that women philosophers often faced such prejudices and that feminist philosophy is philosophy, but is still sometimes misunderstood. And one cheekily pointed out that philosophers such as St. Augustine used the pronoun "I." The board of rank and tenure overturned the philosophy department's recommendation, and I was promoted to full professor six years ago. I was recently elected the department chair of our new interdisciplinary department of Latin American Studies and Women's Studies (which goes by the acronym LA/W/S). When I took on my new role, I was asked by the dean if I wanted to leave philosophy and move full-time into the new department. I replied, "hell, no-I worked too hard to move up in the ranks in philosophy." So I negotiated a deal whereby I chair the new department and retain my position as professor of philosophy-even though my university does not offer formal joint appointments. But prior to my promotion to full professor, I would have jumped at the chance to leave a department that was inhospitable to my work. I therefore understand both why women fight to stay in philosophy, and why some are anxious to leave. In what follows, I draw out the practical implications of my analysis and story. Here is my advice to mid-career women philosophers (wherever they may be): 1. Pursue the philosophical questions you think are most important. At mid-career, we have to turn off the voice (frequently internalized) that makes us doubt whether the questions we pursue lie within the boundaries of philosophy. Claudia Card speaks of how her vision of philosophy has evolved: "I seek wisdom not in relation to the abstraction of human life considered simply as human but in relationship to lives fleshed out as gendered, as members of species, as having certain ethnic, economic, and religious backgrounds, even sexual orientations-things that vary, things that are not universal."10 I always have been and always will be a philosopher, but I play at the margins of the discipline. As long as mainstream "philosophy" refuses the wisdom Card and others (including myself) seek, then we need to draw on other disciplines that do engage in the specificities of life and knowledge. In my opinion, that is where the real intellectual action is-at those points where disciplines intersect, overlap, and sometimes collide. These are the places where women are likely to find their voices. 2. Find your voice. As Teresa Brennan asked, "Have you ever written precisely and exactly what you truly think and believe, without editing yourself down? Have you ever thought about writing not for a present-day audience but for the future?"11 Claudia Card tells the story about how she recognized (sometime at mid-career) that she did not have her own philosophical voice, and suspected that philosophy served interests opposed to her own. In her coming out talk she found her voice-and kept it with the support of the feminist community. She then was able to stop worrying about making "satisfactory progress" as a philosopher and instead began teaching and writing from her life.12 I found my own philosophical voice when I began using it to reflect critically on philosophy and when I started to write about what interested me most-cities and urban issues. 3. Find yourself a good home. It is more important that you do philosophy than that you do it in a philosophy department. To flourish-and sometimes even to survive, many women have to leave philosophy departments. We cannot begrudge women who choose this path; none of us should sacrifice ourselves for the greater good of "philosophy." Furthermore, some women (for example, those who hold senior level administrative positions) might be able to stretch the discipline's boundaries from the "outside," as they supervise and evaluate colleagues, set standards for research and teaching, and oversee tenure and promotion processes. But for those of you who can and want to stay, please do! Many (male) philosophers falsely think that their judgments that "she wasn't really a philosopher" are confirmed and justified when/if that woman leaves her - Feminism and Philosophy - - 9 - philosophy department. While we cannot let such judgments dictate our movements, we need to recognize that much of the work necessary to transform the discipline, that is, to push its boundaries, must occur from within. 4. Negotiate, negotiate, negotiate. Do not give up tenure when you might be able to take an unpaid leave of absence instead. I retained my position at the University of Scranton when I took a position as a director in an applied policy center in Washington, D.C., by negotiating such a leave. As I noted above, I recently worked with my union to find a way for me to retain my position in philosophy while chairing another department. Use leaves and varying visiting arrangements to spread your wings and find your voice. 5. Think about how we teach and mentor-are we merely reinforcing the boundaries of the discipline or not? Even if we are comfortable doing philosophy that is more likely recognized as philosophy, do we stop the intellectual bullying of those who do feminist work or who push the boundaries of the discipline as they are usually enforced? Martha Nussbaum notes that while the creativity and daring of younger male philosophers who refuse to follow the leads of their mentors is often rewarded, women are just as often not.13 We need to recognize and reward the creative thinking of all. We need to support one another. We especially need to support those most marginalized by current disciplinary boundaries, both in our work as philosopher-scholars and in our work in service to the discipline and to academe. I feel privileged to be able to push the boundaries of philosophy from the inside. I feel I have a responsibility to do so. Endnotes 1. See Miriam Solomon and John Clarke, "CSW Jobs for Philosophers Employment Study," APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 8, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 3-4 and the discussion articles on the survey in that same volume. 2. Catherine Villanueva Gardner. Women Philosophers: Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988). 3. See also Janet A. Kourany, "Why Are Women Only 21% of Philosophy?: Introduction to the Panel Presentations," APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 8, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 9-10. 4. Michèle Le Doeuff. "Long Hair and Short Ideas." In The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 101. 5. Elizabeth K. Minnich. "Women in Philosophy: 21% of What?" APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 8, no. 2 (Spring 2009): 11. 6. Le Doeuff, "Long Hair and Short Ideas," 101. 7. Elizabeth K. Minnich, "Women in Philosophy," 112. 8. Linda Martín Alcoff, ed. Singing in the Fire: Stories of Women in Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 9. Linda Martín Alcoff, "Introduction," in Singing in the Fire, 7. 10. Claudia Card, "Finding my Voice: Reminiscence of an Outlaw," in Singing in the Fire, 46. 11. Teresa Brennan, "My Open Agenda, or How Not to Make the Right Career Moves," in Singing in the Fire, 12. 12. Claudia Card, "Finding my Voice," 45-46. 13. Martha C. Nussbaum, "Don't Smile So Much," in Singing in the Fire, 103. Mid Career...or Second Career? Candice L. Shelby University of Colorado, Denver One of my favorite mentors in grad school imparted to me two main pieces of advice over the course of twenty years (he was not a man prone to impose his views). For one, remain focused. Get the dissertation done, and then stay the course until tenure. After tenure, I would be free to study anything I wanted-which in my naive view was what I was doing in graduate school. The second piece of advice, imparted two decades hence, was that I should steer clear of administrative positions. Universities these days seek out women administrators, he said, but women who get entangled in that sort of work often become distracted and overworked, ultimately losing out on things that had attracted them to academic life to begin with. I found him to be right on both of these points, as on nearly everything. After tenure, I found myself forcing my research in the history of philosophy. Having trained as a Leibniz scholar, I could no longer find the work of clarifying the influences on and developments of his work as engaging and important as I once had. I sought connections between his work and the other moderns to contemporary philosophical issues that concerned me, but found that the links were weak at best. Attempts at finding relevance in my work kept falling flat. At the same time, several circumstances converged to make it possible for me to make a shift into an area of philosophy in which I had no training, but for which I discovered I had an avid interest. One of those factors was a very subtle shift in my teaching. Since none of the other faculty in my department had any interest in teaching analytic philosophy, I started to offer courses in the history of the tradition, as well as in contemporary metaphysics and epistemology. Having been trained in an analytic department, this was not much of a stretch, but choosing the readings for those courses took me into areas in which I had forgotten or had never known that I had strong interest. It dawned on me after several years of this that I had reached the post-tenure stage, and that I could read the things that piqued my interest. I realized that I no longer needed to discipline myself to find interest in the things from which I could get publications useful for showing progress on my research agenda, which it also occurred to me I had never consciously chosen anyway. The other factor that facilitated my switch in focus was administrative: my department was moving toward a rotating chair system, and I was the only person with tenure on the faculty, besides the person who was in the position at the time. So I did a thing that I knew full well to be unwise in some ways, and accepted a three-year term as chair of the department. My advisor had been right; this job was even more disruptive to my research than had been living as a single parent, serving as PTO president and team mom. I immediately discovered the near impossibility of doing any writing while managing all the concerns of the faculty and administration, along with the teaching load that I continued to carry. So I spent my time preparing classes that I thought would be interesting for myself and my students, directing honors and master's theses, and writing reports. One of the honors theses that I directed focused on certain arguments regarding qualia, in the philosophy of mind. As I helped the student to develop his bibliography, I made copies of the lists, and added them to my own reading. If one lacks time to write, as any philosopher knows, one can at least read. So I read, and I found myself completely absorbed by the philosophy - APA Newsletter, Spring 2010, Volume 09, Number 2 - - 10 - of mind, and the cognitive science to which those philosophical issues led me. I took numerous courses online and watched endless videos on neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. I studied everything from the proteome of the synapse to computer models of face recognition processes, to the effects of addiction on brain physiology. In addition, I read widely on the philosophical debates concerning consciousness, the existence (or not) of propositional attitudes, and the internalism or externalism of mental content, as well as the whole constellation of debates surrounding the fundamental issue of the nature of mind itself. Drive time was spent listening to lectures and podcasts on minds and brains. To my great fortune, during the first two years of my tenure as chair, our department had a postdoctoral fellow whose contract included an emphasis on interchange between our campus downtown and the medical campus with which we had recently been administratively joined. This young woman's contract stipulated that she do outreach, in the form of public talks, or symposia, or other events that would include members of both our academic and the larger community. At the urging of my honors thesis student, I suggested to our fellow that we arrange an interdisciplinary conference, bringing professionals from both campuses together in a public forum to discuss something of mutual interest, and of interest to the community. The theme that we chose for that conference was very popular that year: the problematic relation between religion and science. We had physicians, biomedical researchers, cellular biologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and a large contingent of the community come together for a full day of papers and panel discussions. It was very well received, and many participants and audience members urged that we hold another such event in the following year. The next year we decided to enlarge the event to two days, to bring in keynote speakers, and to seek both greater participation and more publicity. We chose for the theme of this second conference the relation of mind to brain, and we put out a national call for papers. We received an excellent set of submissions, and were able to this time invite neuroscientists, neurosurgeons, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and medical practitioners to talk about the subject that had so engaged my interest. Once again the conference was a huge success, and once again I was grateful to have the chance to parlay what could have been a set of burdensome tasks (the organization of an inter-campus event, the oversight of our postdoctoral fellow, as well as the direction of a grant-funded undergraduate research team) into a wonderful learning experience for myself. Through these activities and the others that I had created or fallen into, I have managed to make much of my time as chair that might have been otherwise just a huge lacuna in my development as a philosopher. Although I have written nothing during this period other than some book reviews and short presentation papers, I feel that I have learned more than I have at any time since graduate school. Also, I feel a sense of rejuvenation with regard to my philosophical work-I have a new direction, and one which stirs my passion. In the present year, my last as chair, because I am familiar with the demands of the job, I have been able to fit in a bit more writing, and organizing for future writing. As a result of the training I have put myself through, I have also forged new friendships and found areas of research that will keep me busy for the foreseeable future. In short, I am excited about doing philosophy again. To be sure, this is not a path for the faint of heart. Indeed, I have heard from many professional acquaintances that starting a whole new research agenda is the last thing that they would want to do. For one thing, the energy that it takes to sustain basically two careers at once-teaching, advising, and administering on the one hand, and reading, studying, and attempting to write in a field in which one has no expertise, on the other-is significant, and if you add to that the normal demands that all single mothers face, the result can be daunting indeed. For another, returning to the intimidation and potential for humiliation that go with breaking into a new field, particularly for those of us who are accustomed to being recognized with some respect for our expertise, may not seem very appealing. Numerous times I have thought, "what am I doing here?" as I sat in conference rooms full of strangers, all of whom seemed to know one another, as I know the modernists. I have remembered what it is to be on the outside, looking for a way to fit in. I know what it feels like to be a middle-aged novice in the middle of an assembly of highly proficient and remarkably young professionals, finding myself asking questions that even I can see, in retrospect, were only on the edge of relevance. Not only that: contrary to my previous experience, an NEH grant proposal that I was most confident of was rejected because I had no track record in the field, and I have had to suffer dents to my ego brought about by dead-on criticisms of certain of my errors, made through sheer ignorance of a single important paper in the field. But this kind of experience was what I lived for in graduate school, and to face new challenges and to learn how little I know about fascinating subjects continues to make me feel alive. It means that there is still so much to do, that there is a grand future to which I can look forward. Of course, the really nice thing about making such a change when I am 50 and tenured, is that I no longer have to wonder whether the path I am on will secure for me a career in philosophy. In the developing stages of my career, I would only allow myself to think of what work I knew I could do well enough to convince people that I was a competent philosopher. I focused on what I did best, which seems to me now to be only what I had done the most. As an undergraduate I had focused on the history of philosophy, simply because of the contingent fact of the limitations of the department in which I was trained, and as a graduate student I continued to develop my expertise in that direction because it was the area with which I was most comfortable, and in which I believed that I had the greatest chance of getting published. This is not to say that I didn't have wonderful and inspiring teachers, or that I regret for a minute that I took the path that I did; quite the contrary. I loved what I was doing when I was in graduate school and for some time afterward. As I tell my students, the reason that I am a professor is that I loved being in school when I was a student, so much so that I never left. I still love it, and for the same reasons that I did when I was much younger: new things are exciting. In making a major shift in my area of research, at a stage in which one might think that I would rather work on something regarding which I have some expertise, I have revitalized that sense of excitement and discovery that characterized those early years. Although the price for making the change is high, as was the price in choosing philosophy over law school or business in the first place, the payoff is tremendous. One afterthought: with respect to that other piece of advice I was given by my mentor in grad school, I will say that he is mostly right. Administration can be a pitfall for women at mid-career. Many of my professional acquaintances either have become mired in open-ended chair appointments, managing departments much larger, more complex, and more contentious than mine, or they have moved from departmentlevel administration to collegeor university-level positions. While some have flourished, developing new skills and interests and enjoying being out of the classroom, most seem to me to - Feminism and Philosophy - - 11 - be more tired and less satisfied with their work than when they were working as faculty members. I was just this year recruited for an assistant dean's position, and I saw why they would choose me, and why they might think that I would like the position. It was a position that would have enabled me to help a number of students who needed and deserved the help. But I know how days with interruptions interrupted by interruptions go, and I know that at the end of them, I feel that I have accomplished nothing. The attractions of the academic life are not bureaucratic frustration, long hours, or years with no vacations. I am grateful for having had the opportunity to serve as my department's chair for these past two and a half years, but mostly because working in this capacity has set the conditions for me to start a second career, in the only profession I ever loved. Some Reflections on a Bad Relationship1 Claire Katz Texas A&M University We often compare academia to dating-from the dance card (the Eastern APA) to the engagement (tenure track position) to the marriage (tenure). Well, if the metaphor fits.... My name is Claire Katz and I left a bad relationship: abusive, mean, disrespectful, unappreciative, and cold. Others believe that my former flame was beautiful-virile, strong, accomplished, wealthy, good reputation. I stayed in this relationship for six years and we eventually married-in the metaphorical sense (tenure), but the relationship was already in serious trouble. Yet, like most relationships that are bad, it was not until the situation became completely untenable that I started looking around-"cheating" is probably the appropriate term. Maybe that is too strong a word, but I was definitely flirting. Although temporary time away from the bad situation would certainly have been welcome, I was not interested in an affair. I was looking for a whole new marriage. Like many women in troubled relationships, I thought therapy would help. So while I was seeking a new marriage-since it seemed clear that this one had very little future-I had also arranged for professional help, in the form of founding an AAUP chapter on my campus. To be sure, some of these academic marriages in fact continue happily and celebrate rather impressive anniversaries; others end rather quickly in divorce. Still others fall somewhere in between-they should end in divorce but they continue, and the toxic atmosphere is debilitating to everyone caught in their wake. There is a reason that the dating metaphor fits the academy-because it fits. My point here is that it is just as important to know when to leave a university partnership-at any point-if that relationship is detrimental to one's well being, as it is to leave an intimate relationship when that relationship is also harmful. Unfortunately, deciding if and when to leave a bad relationship-and this is a gross generalization-is something that most people, but in particular women, have trouble determining. Many women internalize the view that if they just worked a little harder, maybe the situation would improve. They are often told that making a relationship work is their responsibility and they carry that view with them into the workplace. Moreover, I would argue that like the system that governs intimate partnerships, the system is not designed to favor women who have suffered at the hands of their colleagues or the university. Certainly it is the case that many relationships have problems that need to be addressed at some point or other. However, there is a distinction to be made between a relationship with problems and disagreements and a relationship that is toxic, abusive, and dangerous. One might be worth saving; the other is not. While it might seem as though this distinction should be obvious, especially when one person is physically violent to the other, often the psychological abuse that preceded the physical violence renders the person less able to leave the relationship. In the case of the university relationship, violence is most likely not going to be present, thus making the distinction more difficult. There won't be bumps or bruises. Nonetheless, the systemic emotional or psychological abuse can be just as present and just as debilitating. In the same way that good counseling can help you "see" the intimate relationship for what it is, so too, seeking an outside perspective may help confirm your intuitions about the university-outside advice and perspective might help you see what is good and what is bad. It might help simply by telling you that you do not deserve to be treated this way and that those who are acting out are wrong for doing so. Although I hope that my comments here will provide some helpful ideas, leaving a university position, like leaving a bad relationship, is not a question that I or anyone else can answer for you. It is something that ultimately each faculty member must decide for herself. However, good counsel and advice can help someone sort out the good from the bad, provide ideas and questions to consider, and help determine if the situation in which someone finds herself is simply the result of an imperfect institution or is truly toxic and harmful. Let me begin my discussion with those features that make leaving a bad situation not only difficult but also make staying tempting. On a professional level, the institution may carry a reputation that opens doors for you. The available resources seemed pretty good-not as good as some places but certainly better than others. You may enjoy the particular appointment that you have. For example, I was jointly appointed in a Jewish Studies program and that affiliation was important to me. Thus, one might justify the abuse by thinking that the other features of the relationship compensate for it. There might also be personal reasons for staying-you might like the town, your friends, or the location. In my case, my husband and I both had tenured positions and we did not take that for granted. We knew how difficult it was and still is for a couple to have employment of any kind in the same town. For many of us, being in a bad employment situation but being able to live together and make a life together is often better than being in a good employment situation but sacrificing the daily time spent together as a couple or a family. Additionally, we had two small children and we had made a life for ourselves outside of the university environment. We had to consider what it would mean to uproot our children and leave our friends. We stayed as long as we did because of other benefits that were important to us. I was given a semester paid maternity leave with my first baby and I was reasonably certain that I wanted a second baby. The loss of this kind of benefit was, quite frankly, not worth risking. Nonetheless, I had to weigh these benefits against how I was being treated and what the climate was like for me and other vulnerable women-untenured professors (or even tenured associate professors) and graduate students. For most of us with a conscience, a hostile environment for others affects all of us and one needs to make a concerted effort to turn away from that kind of situation. I could not turn away and my outspoken support of those colleagues and graduate students increasingly put me at risk and continued to make my life unpleasant. Although I finally made a decision to leave, for reasons which I will turn to in a moment, let me state briefly that my time at my previous institution was not simply unpleasant.2 - APA Newsletter, Spring 2010, Volume 09, Number 2 - - 12 - It was, at times, scary. Before I had even begun my second year teaching there, and while I was pregnant with my first child, I already had reason to visit the Affirmative Action Office. I did not file a complaint, but I did want it put on record that I had been there and had indicated that there were systemic problems in the department. At the time, I did not realize how deep nor did I realize that these problems extended well outside of the department. There were two primary reasons I made a decision to leave. First, it was becoming increasingly apparent that doing the job for which I was hired-teaching, research, and service-was becoming ever more difficult to carry out. My time was being spent defending my job, protecting my colleagues and myself, and fighting a corrupt system, rather than spending time teaching or doing research. Second, the toxic environment in which we were working was beginning to affect my real, nonmetaphorical, family. That is, the stress and anxiety we faced in our work environment could not be contained at the university; it was coming home with us. In order to continue to be people we respected when we looked in the mirror, there would be no end to the fight. We could not see ourselves as faculty members or colleagues who shrunk away and said, "This is not our concern." To do so would have been antithetical not only to what it means to be colleagues in a university, but also, quite frankly, to what it means to be professors of philosophy, and for me, what it means to be a feminist. To be a feminist is not simply to fight to have what men once kept from us; it means standing up to those very men-who are in fact still around-for ourselves and for others, especially those who are even more vulnerable than we are. When it became apparent that under the current dean and the current configuration of our department, the opportunities we would have at that university would be severely limited, that our time would be spent in the Sisyphean task of fighting a corrupt and unethical system, and that the toxic waste of fighting this kind of system would continue to infect our home life, then it was time to leave. More significantly, when it became apparent that there was simply nowhere to turn on the university campus for help, when the AAO office was captured by the Provost's office and thus could no longer act with autonomy or integrity to protect those who were in trouble, when it was clear that we were considered troublemakers because we thought graduate students and junior women should not be harassed, when it was clear that no one with power to effect change was willing to help us or make those changes-that is, when it became clear that one part of the relationship was not interested in changing-that is when it was clear that it was time to part ways.3 Once we made a decision to leave, the next question was, of course, "How do we leave?" Keeping with our dating metaphor, I am not sure there are 50 ways to leave the university. Certainly there are several- each with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Most obviously, one can leave the academy altogether and move into a different profession. This decision is not always the easiest one to make. Most of us are trained specifically to be university professors and our academic disciplines do not easily translate into jobs outside of the academy. More importantly, most of us enter the professoriate because we love ideas, books, teaching, and writing. Leaving the academy means leaving a particular kind of life. Regardless, it is an option and some people discover, with or without a toxic environment, that the university is not the right place for them. Along the same lines, some folks discover that a particular kind of academic setting is not working-public versus private, religious versus secular, small college versus a larger university. These are all things to figure out and there is no shame in determining that the fit is not right. If the academic setting is right, but there is something wrong with the position, there are other ways to move. Some move into administration simply to get away from toxic colleagues. If the toxic level is confined to just the department, this move can be helpful and provide some perspective. My one caveat, and others might disagree with me on this point, is that I do not recommend making this move unless you are a full professor. If not, then either negotiate that promotion with the job offer or negotiate something that will help you achieve that promotion, for example, time off or a reduced teaching load down the line. Administration is a time sink and far too often women are promoted into these positions only to find out they will continually be passed over for promotion to full professor. The problem with taking on the administrative position without tenure should be obvious, but let me restate it here-if you do not fulfill the publication requirements for tenure that your department, college, and university expect, they will be in a position to fire you. The service that you provided as an administrator will not necessarily justify the absence of the other materials. The service issue is also an issue that is problematic for women and other minorities. In both cases, individuals might be called upon to diversify not simply one committee, but all the committees that need diversification. Significantly, women often have trouble saying "no" to these invitations. They might fear they will be viewed as selfish or not a team player. Or, in light of the real circumstance of pay difference, they might find the initial offer of extra pay enticing. My advice is simply not to take these offers unless you can see your way clearly to the next promotion. Finally, you can simply make a lateral move to a similar position or even what appears to be a step down to a position at another university. Both of these kinds of moves will bring changes-some positive, some negative, but all might serve to refresh and revitalize you. And if it removes you from the toxic position you once occupied, no position will seem like a step down. This is the move that I made-a lateral move to a similar university. I suspect that some would consider the move I made from my previous position to my current one a step down. I did move from Pennsylvania to Texas! The Ph.D. program in my previous position was well established, it attracted good students, and the department was viewed as having a faculty with an international reputation. I think these judgments are relative to the one who makes them and the grass always looks greener to those who only see the surface, and not the poisonous soil in which that grass is planted. For me, the question is not a question of which position is better. In every position, one could select characteristics to be compared, and which characteristics are important are contingent on who is doing the comparing. Of course there are things I gave up when I moved-there are people I wish I could see more frequently, I miss my bagels and coffee at Wegman's, and I worry that I will die intellectually without a Jewish Studies program. Is my current institution perfect? Absolutely not. The maternity leave policy, quite frankly, is terrible (though getting better), but, unfortunately, this problem is less about the institution than it is about the state of Texas and what is allowed legally. Nonetheless, there is a women's faculty network and there are women on the faculty senate who have been working hard to get a maternity policy in place. The university seems to be run out of the governor's office, and even if that is not the case, we have a chancellor to whom the faculty gave a vote of "no confidence" this past summer. The Board of Regents appears to be hostile to the "outspoken" faculty, the faculty is concerned about the diminishing existence - Feminism and Philosophy - - 13 - of shared governance, and I am very concerned about the shifting personnel at the upper administrative levels. We have trouble recruiting and retaining African-American faculty and students and the campus climate is still not great for women and other minorities. So why do I think this is still a better place? Quite simply, while there are problems that need our attention, the campus is not yet toxic (I say "not yet," only because I do not want to tempt fate by making a declarative statement). On a very personal level, it is a different atmosphere for me. I can teach my classes without anxiety, participate on committees that serve the university, feel good about my colleagues, be proud of the units in which I am appointed, and work easily with an administration that I respect. In short, my colleagues and my administrators are not trying to destroy my life.4 Additionally, there are structural issues that make my current position better-objectively. In my current university, there are more resources available for everyone at all ranks and there is more transparency and oversight about how those resources are distributed. There is more honesty about the campus climate for women and other minorities. Junior colleagues are not treated as serfs to be discarded in a few years-the attitude in our college is, "We hired you; what can we do to help you succeed?" All of these things contribute to increased morale-and contrary to what the dean at my previous institution thought, good morale is good for everyone. As much as I like having resources for myself-who doesn't?-I like that others have access to these same funds. An environment that promotes intellectual activity is simply a better place to be when people are treated fairly and are supported in their research. It is also important that when they are not treated fairly they have recourse to do something about that. There are people here in positions of power whom I trust when I have a concern. There are people here in positions of power who also have the desire to make TAMU a better place for women and minorities. This university is absolutely not perfect. But right now, it is not only not toxic; it is also trying to make itself a better place. What I learned in my move to Texas A&M is that evil and injustice are not inherent traits of a dean's office, an administrative chain of command, or even a philosophy department, though they might be traits of some of them. In spite of all the comedic novels that tell the tale of academic dysfunctional behavior, this behavior need not be toxic to members of a department or college. And so the most important thing that I would say is that the narrative that tells women in academia that it is okay for our colleagues and our administrators to treat us badly is simply a false narrative, and we must battle this view just as we no longer tolerate the view that it is okay for husbands to beat their wives. Most importantly, we must battle it even when-especially when?-it is others who are suffering from it. No institution runs perfectly, but it is not part of the mission of academia that you be treated miserably.5 So when you think about the things that worry you or bother you, try to take a step back and figure out if they are a function of an imperfect institution or if they are a symptom of something larger and more insidious.6 Is it a relationship that can and wants to be repaired or is it one that is, for whatever reason, beyond repair? In my own situation, I abide by the story of the Zen master: To my assertion that this move was a good move, the Zen master will reply, "perhaps." And certainly time will tell how good this move was for me. Some things to consider: 1. What is the campus climate for women and other minorities- gay and lesbians, people of color, different religious groups? Ask hard questions and do not assume that women are feminists or that women who claim to be feminists will defend you. Be especially wary if decisions are made by the water cooler, that is, there is a lawlessness that is tolerated and a lack of external oversight that enables this lawlessness to continue. These situations can be especially bad for women, since the women "chosen" to enter an inner circle are able to do so only because they have betrayed or exploited other women in their midst. But more importantly, often these women will be the first to be cut loose and purged from that inner circle. 2. Is this a place where faculty are allowed to work at home-or are they expected to be on campus, all the time? This will make a difference down the road if or when you choose to start a family. It will also make a difference for how and when you are supposed to do your research. 3. What kinds of policies are in place for maternity and paternity leaves and does the institution make spousal hires or partner placements? These issues might not be of concern for you personally, but it will have a bearing on the opportunities to hire others and how those already there are treated. If they don't make spousal hires, then your faculty is limiting itself to a particular kind of faculty member. 4. If you move, what do you need? Negotiate wisely-think about what you really need and ask for it. Project two years out. If you are given a raise that is similar to the raise you would get at your home university, you are not making any more money than you would make simply by staying. When I say negotiate wisely, I mean think outside of raw/base salary. Take into account the cost of moving-that is getting set up, finding your way around, etc. There will be lost time. Sometimes it is better to negotiate non-monetary things, e.g., a reduced course load for the first year, one month of summer salary for two summers, research bursary, more travel money, etc. Endnotes 1. As I write this essay, I am reminded of the many people who saved my sanity while I endured the academic equivalent of hell. It was not simply an uncomfortable situation; it was at times frightening. First and foremost I thank my husband, Daniel Conway, who not only encouraged me to stand up for myself and stood by me when I did, but who also was among the few and among the first who spoke out against the bad behavior. Mitchell Aboulafia, Emily Grosholz, and Cathy Kemp have the kind of courage from which we can all learn. They demonstrated every day what it meant to be a colleague, a friend, and a philosopher. As much as I believe I stood up for what I believed was right, observing them, I also know that I could have stood up even more than I did. Doug Anderson was able to leave the department before things really went south, but I am grateful for his support and I admire him for making what were probably very difficult decisions. I think often about my colleagues whom I left behind and who are still treated miserably-I feel helpless so far away, so I can only hope that things will change for them. Finally, I think about the students who were caught in the crossfire, some who were its actual target. I am grateful that they landed softly and in places that know a good colleague when they see him/her. To them I say, there is justice in this world and the best revenge is living well. I dedicate this essay to Alan Block and Constance Weaver. 2. I use "I" throughout the paper, but in many cases the decisions were made jointly with my husband. For example, the decision finally to leave was a decision we made together after exhausting all avenues to make changes in the way the university, the college, and our department were run. - APA Newsletter, Spring 2010, Volume 09, Number 2 - - 14 - 3. Here is an abbreviated dirty laundry list of some things I experienced in my previous position: 1. Questioning the validity of the research of junior members of the department, when that research travel requires them to miss class. 2. Spying on select faculty to see if they missed classes for professional travel and how they made up the time missed. 3. Unnecessarily questioning the pedagogical practices of junior faculty, for example, the use of films in class (not which films, but using any films). 4. Commenting on a junior colleague's personal life in an annual merit evaluation: "It is unprofessional for you to travel with your spouse." 5. Asking illegal or inappropriate questions during job interviews: "Do you plan to have children and if so, will you return to work afterwards?"; "Will your religious commitments interfere with your job responsibilities?" 6. Accusing a colleague in another department of bias and prejudice because his research was focused on organized crime, and thus focused on particular ethnic groups. 7. Cronyism 8. Harassing and/or bullying junior women and graduate students. 9. Retaliating against those who publicly voiced dissent about the direction of the university or its sub-parts (the College or its respective Departments)-for example, minimal or no raises, unattractive teaching schedules, exclusion from certain committees, and so forth. 10. Acting in a manner that exemplifies general ethical misconduct, professional misconduct, and retaliatory behavior by several senior colleagues towards those who have disagreed with the dean or spoken out against procedural violations, such as bogus searches. 11. Ignoring shared governance and coercing departments, and individuals in those departments, to act against their desires, best interests, and, in some cases, their conscience. 12. In my six years at my previous institution, I had eight department heads, including a short period of time where our department was in receivership and being administered by an associate dean of the college. 4. I admit that it seems strange to write a sentence like that, but it is far stranger to have been a faculty member at a university where I could not have written a sentence like that. 5. To continue the dating metaphor, remember that universities are polygamous-they marry many people. Think of this as the Big Love approach, which means simply that the honeymoon cannot last very long since new partners are sought continuously. (Thanks to Pam Matthews for that excellent reference.) 6. There is no question that the grass always looks greener- someone else's spouse looks more attractive, especially when you are in a bad relationship. I admit that I often caution friends against moving from one relationship to another, without time to reflect on what went wrong. We all have friends who find themselves moving from one spouse or partner to another-for financial, among other, reasons. And we know that there are many reasons that women stay in these bad relationships. Women often internalize a view that persists in the culture that this is simply "how it is supposed to be." Others may say things like "no relationship is perfect," as if to emphasize that if you want a relationship, these are just the lumps that you have to take. Or, women might internalize that it is all their fault-"if only I..." As many of us know, victims of abuse are often embarrassed, afraid to complain. Thus, they remain alone and isolated in their suffering and, worse, they continue to believe that because they are alone, they are unique-and thus the narrative that this must be their fault takes a deeper hold. So, first and foremost, I advise seeking outside opinions and advice from people and organizations whom you can trust. Mid-Career Suicide? It Depends on How You Define "Career" Norah Martin University of Portland This paper is based on my presentation on a panel addressing mid-career options for women in philosophy at the Pacific APA meeting in 2009. Each of the panelists told her own story and gave her own views as to what options are available, and to be recommended, for women at mid-career. Two of the people who spoke before me specifically discussed the administrative path as "career suicide" for those who have not yet achieved the rank of professor. I am an associate professor who at that point was in my fifth year as department chair and had just accepted an appointment as associate dean. The advice my fellow panelists gave the audience was never to take such administrative positions prior to becoming a full professor. They are probably right that doing so is likely to lead to "career suicide" as a philosopher, but is it a viable option for some women philosophers at mid-career nonetheless? I believe that for some people, in some circumstances, and with certain ways of looking at their lives, it is. In my 15 years as a non-Catholic at a Catholic university, I have come to think not so much in terms of "career" as I do in terms of "mission" and "vocation." The question I ask myself, and which I recommend other women approaching mid-career in philosophy consider asking themselves, is not only "what will best further my career?" but, rather, "what is my mission and vocation?" Why and How I Became Department Chair Only a few years before becoming department chair I had survived a bloody tenure battle that tore the department apart and left those members of the department who had most vociferously opposed me alienated. For several years after I got tenure, my relatively small department (then seven full-time members) could not have department meetings because one member refused to be in the same room as me. The person who was chair at that time did a wonderful job under very difficult circumstances, often having to meet with department members individually to get anything done. We finally started having regular department meetings only after I returned from a year-long sabbatical, three and a half years after my tenure decision was announced. The meetings were still awkward, but at least we were all in the same room. Needless to say, the long and bloody tenure battle that left me fighting first to defend my teaching, then to defend my scholarship, and then finally to defend my character, took its toll on my self-esteem and confidence. In addition, I spent an inordinate amount of time doing things to counter the attacks against me. The dean, who did everything she could to be supportive, put me on extra committees so that people around campus could get to know me and see that I was not, in fact, difficult to work with, despite what some of my departmental colleagues continuously and vociferously asserted. This extra committee work achieved its intended purpose, but it meant I spent far more time on service than other junior faculty and thus far less time developing my research program. I had more than enough publications at tenure time, but I had lost much of my enthusiasm for professional philosophy. Indeed, having had to - Feminism and Philosophy - - 15 - consider seriously what I would do if I did not get tenure, I had given considerable thought to life outside of the profession. Given the tensions in the department and the particular animosity towards me, it was certainly surprising that I became department chair four years after I was granted tenure. Earlier that year an endowed chair was placed in the department. She had a direct line to the upper administration, and she clearly had some ideas as to how we ought to be. I will not go into the details of all that happened, but suffice it to say that the department quickly found itself in the doghouse with both the dean and the provost. The primary issue was the accusation, which came as quite a surprise to all of us since this issue had never been raised before, that we were not "on board" with the Catholic mission of the University, and indeed did not even "get" the mission. The upshot of all this was that the chair of the department resigned. The department unanimously agreed that I should take over as chair. The fear was that the endowed chair, whom the department saw as having caused many of these problems in the first place, would be made department chair. Whatever some people in the department thought of me, I had to be better than her. It helped that two of my detractors had recently retired. Every then current permanent member of the department, including the member who had most vociferously opposed my being granted tenure, signed a letter of support for me that stated that I should be completely the chair, not a figurehead who had to check with the endowed chair before every decision. Fortunately, I had a very good relationship with the dean, and the provost had always liked me. These facts played a significant role in my selection by the department. The department's letter was accepted and I became chair. It all happened pretty quickly, and I must say it was all a bit of a surprise to me given my experiences in the department up to this point. The person who could not stand to be in the same room with me a couple of years before actually made an effort to be genuinely supportive as I took over. My Mission as Chair Upon becoming chair, I focused on identifying my mission. This is my advice to anyone taking an administrative position, whether willingly or not. Decide on what your mission will be and then consider how to accomplish that mission. Otherwise you will not know how to focus your time or why you are doing what you are doing. That is a recipe for quick burnout and alienation. My mission was two-fold: first, I wanted to get the department out of the doghouse with the dean and provost; second, and at least as important, I wanted to make the department the kind of place in which I would want to be a junior faculty member, a place where no one would have to go through what I went through. This second part of the mission became more relevant when we hired two female assistant professors my first year as chair, the first female assistant professors to join our department since I was hired. The first part of my mission, to get the department out of the doghouse, itself had two main foci. First, there was the reason we were in the doghouse with the provost, the Catholic mission issue. Second, there was the reason or reasons we were in the doghouse with the dean, which were quite different: we were not doing anything meaningful with respect to assessment (in fact, as a department we thought the assessment stuff was a way for people who didn't know anything about philosophy to tell us what to do); we were not making sufficient progress in implementing the new core curriculum (in which philosophy played a significant role); and, finally, she saw us as a service department and we were fighting her attempts to cut our upper division offerings. Given the limitations of space, I will not discuss how I got the department out of the doghouse. Suffice it to say that we have now just finished a very successful program review, our upper division courses are safe, and we are campus leaders with respect to assessment. Instead, I will focus here on the part of my mission that may be of greater interest to women philosophers thinking about their mid-career options: making the department a good place for junior faculty rather than the poisonous place it had been for me. There was a long history in my department of people undermining each other. I saw my job as making it possible for everyone else in the department to do their best work. This was the case for senior as well as junior faculty. I made a particular effort with the person who had refused to be in the same room with me. I supported him completely in his application for merit pay (even having a special meeting with the dean to convince her that it was warranted as she was still bitter about the way he had acted around my tenure decision), I strongly supported his nomination for a scholarship award, and I supported his application for a summer grant. In short, I was as generous with him as I could possibly be. He is now a happy and contributing member of the department rather than bitter and alienated. He, in turn, has been generous with me in my years as department chair. With respect to the junior faculty, I have made an effort to make sure that they feel supported. I know how incredibly difficult it is to feel scrutinized for five years until you submit your tenure application. There is a lot of paranoia generally amongst the junior faculty at my institution. I wanted to make sure that my junior faculty members knew that they could absolutely count on me. I knew that they were good-that is why we hired them! If there were a few things that came up on the teaching evaluations, I supported them while giving gentle suggestions for how to do things a little bit differently. That is all new faculty members generally need. When they are already beating themselves up over negative student comments, the last thing they need is a chair who takes the attitude that the faculty member has a problem. I have, of course, been clear with junior faculty and adjunct faculty about the expectations of the institution. But it is possible to be clear and supportive. Indeed, if you are not clear, you are not really being supportive. For every member of the department, including the parttime faculty, I write yearly evaluations that are supportive and encouraging. I do make suggestions where warranted, but always in the context of support and encouragement. I spend a lot more time on this aspect of my job than chairs in other departments, and I do so because I have identified this as key to my mission. I spend very little time, on the other hand, on my budget and certain other aspects of being chair that are important to other chairs. Again, this is because I cannot focus on everything and my mission has given me a clear way to focus my energy. I also do not spend any time or energy on empire building, which is a sure way to create a bad atmosphere in a department. While the department still has challenges, I would say that I have been successful in creating the kind of supportive environment that I wish I had had and that the productivity of my faculty, both with respect to their own teaching and scholarship, and with respect to the work of the department on assessment and curriculum development, is evidence of this. Concluding Thoughts The advice of my fellow panelists is good advice. Becoming department chair or taking on other administrative responsibilities before promotion to full professor significantly decreases the likelihood that you will ever be promoted. It is also generally true that one cannot move much higher in administration than associate dean if one has not achieved the highest academic rank, so if you are not yet a full professor, you should not plan - APA Newsletter, Spring 2010, Volume 09, Number 2 - - 16 - on using stints chair or associate dean as a way to move into higher levels of administration. What has been decisive for me, however, is the recognition of the importance of my mission. Too many philosophy departments are like mine in that they have a long history of people undermining each other. To change this we must change the conditions. We must, as Philip Zimbardo argues in his book The Lucifer Effect, create "good barrels," that is, environments in which people can be their best selves rather than "bad apples." Too often it is the long history of people being undermined that creates the "bad apples," or "difficult colleagues," and which drive people, even those who survive the tenure decision, out of philosophy altogether (sometimes out of the academy completely, sometimes to other areas of the academy such as Women's Studies). Zimbardo argues that people do not start out as "bad apples" or, in our case, "difficult colleagues," though some may have greater potential to turn bad than others. Rather, toxic environments turn them bad. If we create supportive environments, if we break the cycle of undermining people (one of my most vociferous opponents had himself been undermined and mistreated early in his time in the department), we make us all better people and better philosophers. Making oneself vulnerable as a philosopher, or as a teacher, or as a person, is essential to becoming a better philosopher, teacher, or person. In toxic environments, those who display vulnerability are attacked rather than nurtured. To improve you must acknowledge and explore your weaknesses. But to expose one's weaknesses in an environment where this provokes attack is foolhardy. In such environments growth is stunted for everyone and deformity takes its place. As a department chair in the right circumstances, one can be in a position to detoxify, or at least reduce the toxicity of, the environment of a department, thereby allowing the members of the department, including oneself, to grow and improve as teachers, as philosophers, and as people. Works Cited Zimbardo, Philip. The Lucifer Effect. New York: Random, 2007. BOOK REVIEWS The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory Amy Allen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 248 pp. $34.50. ISBN 978-0-231-13622-8. Reviewed by Debra Jackson California State University, Bakersfield, djackson9@csub.edu Contemporary Critical Theory struggles with the seemingly intractable tension between subjection and autonomy: How can we theorize subjection without sacrificing the possibility of autonomy? And, how can we theorize autonomy without denying the reality of subjection? This tension, most recognizable in the debate between Foucault and Habermas and revisited in the debate between Butler and Benhabib, is the focus of The Politics of Our Selves. On the one hand, Foucault and Butler offer compelling accounts of how subjects are socially and culturally constructed in and through relations of power and subjection, yet their critics accuse them of denying or undermining the possibility of agency and autonomy. On the other hand, Habermas and Benhabib develop robust conceptions of autonomy as the grounding of critique and social transformation, yet they are criticized for failing to adequately account for the power relations that are constitutive of subjectivity. Amy Allen bravely tackles this tension head on by reconciling these two aspects of critical theory. She writes, "My goal is to offer an analysis of power in all its depth and complexity, including an analysis of subjectivation that explicates how power works at the intrasubjective level to shape and constitute our very subjectivity, and an account of autonomy that captures the constituted subject's capacity for critical reflection and self-transformation, its capacity to be self-constituting" (2-3). She accomplishes this goal in two major moves, rereading Foucault and reframing Habermas, and discussing the implications of these moves for feminist analyses and critiques of gender subordination. Allen's first move is the highlight of The Politics of Our Selves. After Chapter One's excellent description of the tension between subjection and autonomy, and the stakes involved, particularly for feminist theory, Allen devotes the second and third chapters to righting the record regarding Foucault. Standard critiques of Foucault, from both Habermasian and feminist critics, accuse him of celebrating the death of the subject, and undermining agency, autonomy, and self-reflexivity, thus making social critique not only pointless, but impossible. These charges are, Allen argues, based on a serious misunderstanding of Foucault's work and its relationship to the Kantian Enlightenment project. To correct this misunderstanding, Allen turns to Foucault's unpublished thèse complémentaire on Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and his account of Kant in The Order of Things. She argues that what is often read as a total critique of Kant is better understood as immanent critique, one that radically transforms the Kantian critical project. Foucault can be understood as taking up Kant's famous four questions, historicizing and contextualizing them along the way: "What can I know?" becomes, in Foucault's archaeologies, "how have discursive structures positioned me as a speaking and knowing subject?" "What ought I do?" becomes, in Foucault's genealogies, "how have norms functioned insidiously to position me as a normalized, disciplined individual?" "What may I hope?" becomes, in his late work, "how can I attempt to turn myself into an ethical subject and my life into a work of art via practices and techniques of the self?" And... "what is man?" [is recast] as "what has human subjectivity been and what might it become?" (40) By reading the subject, not power, as the general theme of Foucault's oeuvre, Allen further argues that his account of disciplinary and normative power does not undermine subjectivity, agency, and autonomy. By examining his late work on technologies of domination and technologies of the self, Allen explores how Foucault's critical-genealogical project presupposes the possibility of autonomy insofar as individuals are capable of both critical reflection and deliberate self-transformation. And, further, she argues, this conception of autonomy is consistent with his analyses of power and subjection insofar as it recognizes the ways that autonomy is always bound up with power. As a supplement to Foucault's analysis of power and subjection, Allen turns to Butler's examination of how subjects become passionately attached to, and thus come to desire, their own subjection. Such an account is necessary for both explaining the recalcitrance of subordination-Why do we - Feminism and Philosophy - - 17 - continue to subject ourselves to disciplinary norms even after recognizing them as such?-and for moving us toward developing strategies for resistance and social transformation-How do we distinguish ways of being that are subversive from those that reinforce our subjection? Although Allen holds that this work is an important addendum to Foucault's analysis of subjection, she argues that Butler mistakenly conflates dependency with subordination and fails to consider the possibility of mutual recognition as a strategy of resistance. On this first point, Allen argues that even though "the fact of primary dependence renders individuals vulnerable to subordination" insofar as we are compelled to attach to whatever is available to us, this fact of subjectivation need not always be subordinating (81). On the second point, Allen argues that Butler's ambivalence towards the notion of recognition ultimately results in "a rejection of recognition as an ideal on the grounds that it is intrinsically bound up with subjection (understood as a subordinating mode of subjectivation)" (85-86). While I can't say that Butler provides us with the needed vision of alternative modes of attachment that can ground individual and collective resistance to subordination, I am not convinced that she conflates dependency with subordination nor that she ultimately rejects recognition for always being bound up with subjection. Butler's description of a subject's passionate attachment to his/her own subjection characterizes those relations of dependence emerging in the context of subordination, not all relations of dependence. Moreover, Butler is ambivalent towards the notion of recognition because of her concern that any attempt at resistance to subordination can be misunderstood and fail to be recognized as resistance. Indeed, Allen makes just this point later in the chapter when discussing alternative modes of attachment and structures of social recognition: "the existence of these alternative sources of recognition makes it possible for individuals to risk becoming unrecognizable in the terms set by regulatory regimes" (93-94). So, here, I understand Allen and Butler in agreement on this point. The remaining challenge is developing strategies for resistance and social transformation. For this, Allen turns to Habermas and Benhabib. Allen's second move is concentrated in the fifth and sixth chapters of the book. She begins by showing that despite Habermas's insistence that he never intended to claim that the lifeworld is free of power relations, his two attempts of accounting for power, via his colonization of the lifeworld thesis and his analysis of the ways in which power is capable of penetrating the structures of communicative action, don't really help account for subjection as a form of power. Additionally, even though his discussion of individuation through socialization brings him close to Foucault's and Butler's views, he nevertheless fails to offer a satisfactory account of the ways in which power works through socialization processes to constitute individuals as subjects. Yet, despite this failure to account for the role that cultural/symbolic power plays in the formation of subordinated identities, Allen wants to preserve the heart of the Habermasian project, namely, his claim for "the rootedness of autonomy in the communicative use of language and its definitive role in the development of the human person" (96). This requires giving up the demand for purity entailed in his commitment to the context-transcendence of validity claims and his staunch moral-political universalism in lieu of an account for the entanglement of validity with power. In this way, interpreting Habermas in a more historicized, contextualist, and pragmatic direction, as done by Cooke and McCarthy, reveals that any remaining differences between Habermas's and Foucault's approaches are negligible. In the seventh chapter, Allen examines Benhabib's attempt to develop a contextualist and pragmatic version of Habermas's intersubjective account of subjectivation. Benhabib aims to provide a better grounding for agency and resistance while avoiding essentialism. Allen argues that despite Benhabib's critique of the excessive rationalism of Habermas's communicative ethics, her own interactive universalism commits the same kind of rationalist error. In characterizing subjects as able to choose which narratives of gender to enact, Benhabib's narrative conception of the self presupposes an ungendered core. Allen argues that this claim fails to account for "the ways in which our basic narrative and critical capacities are shaped and structured by social and cultural realities" (171). By her first move, Allen powerfully shows that the FoucaultHabermas debate is based upon a misunderstanding of Foucault's work. Clearing up this misunderstanding significantly helps resolve the longstanding tension assumed between autonomy and subjection. Allen's second move shows that Habermas's critical social theory needs to be reworked into one that is historicized, contextualized, and pragmatic in order to accommodate the role power plays in the development of subjectivity. While this interpretation helps bridge the perceived gap between Foucault and Habermas, I am struck that there is no misunderstanding of Habermas parallel to that of Foucault. Allen makes a compelling case for Foucault, but the rationale for retaining Habermas is weaker. This leaves me wondering what would be lost if we turn toward efforts to find and/or develop accounts of autonomous self-transformation that begin with the entanglement between power and validity rather than revising Habermas's critical social theory. The Politics of Our Selves is a must read for anyone theorizing about subordination and troubled that any robust account of subjection raises difficulties for theorizing resistance. Her courageous account of the complexity of the issue and demonstration that the tension between subjection and autonomy can be resolved provides a valuable addition to the literature for both feminist and critical social theory. Is Philosophy Androcentric? Iddo Landau (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). Pp. vii + 181. ISBN 0-271-02906-4 (cloth, unavailable); ISBN 978-0-271-02907-8 (paper, $19.95) Reviewed by Vance A. Ricks Guilford College, vricks@guilford.edu According to Iddo Landau, efforts by feminist philosophers to identify philosophy's pervasively androcentric character, and to correct it, "should be abandoned" (p. 165). After examining several arguments for the conclusion that philosophy is androcentric, Landau concludes, "philosophy is androcentric, but significantly less so than is frequently claimed" (p. 159). That news might come as a surprise to anyone worried that philosophy is irreparably tainted as the malest of the dreaded Dead White Male intellectual traditions, replete with examples of sexist-if not outright misogynist-presuppositions, conceptual structures, and claims. First we need some definitions. By "philosophy," Landau generally means works that are commonly referred to, discussed, and taught as "philosophical," except for (a) modern "Continental" philosophy and (b) non-Western philosophy (p. 4; p. 9). "Androcentric" is, for Landau, both a - APA Newsletter, Spring 2010, Volume 09, Number 2 - - 18 - descriptive and a normative term. Used descriptively, it means "suit[ing] men's experiences or minds more than women's, or involv[ing] male discrimination against women, or lead[ing] to the domination of women by men"; Landau assumes at the outset that descriptively androcentric claims are, for that reason, untrue (p. 6; p. 7 fn 14, though he does not explain why that should be). Used normatively, it means "should be rejected, or reformed, because [it is descriptively androcentric]" (emphasis in original). Finally, androcentrism (both descriptive and normative) is a matter of degree-it can be "pervasive" or "nonpervasive," depending upon how thoroughly it reflects the biases previously mentioned. To the degree that a philosophy (or philosophy as a discipline) can remain mostly unchanged after readers or critics renounce its androcentric elements, it is nonpervasively androcentric. To the degree that removing those elements seriously alters the remaining aspects of the philosophy (or philosophy), it is pervasively androcentric. Landau identifies and assesses seven different types of argument for philosophy's androcentrism, many of them articulated by important theorists (e.g., Nancy Tuana, Susan Moller Okin, Susan Mendus, Allison Jaggar, and Lorraine Code) in the 1980s and 1990s. Those types of arguments are based on any of the following: (1) explicitly androcentric statements in some philosophers' writings; (2) philosophers' use, in philosophical contexts, of categories or concepts that have been associated, in other contexts, with androcentric stereotypes or social practices; (3) philosophers' reliance on notions that are directly androcentric-and therefore harmful to women's interests-even within a philosophical context; (4) philosophers' use of androcentric metaphors; (5) claims about the differences between women's and men's interests/values; (6) claims about the differences between women's and men's mentalities; and (7) the omission, by (male?) philosophers, of issues relevant to women's experiences (in contexts where those issues themselves are relevant). Landau believes that all seven types of arguments fail. Argument types 1, 4, and 7 show that some philosophies are androcentric, but fail to show that they are pervasively so. Types 2, 3, 5, and 6 fail even to show that philosophy is nonpervasively androcentric (p. 159). Because Landau responds to-and, largely, dismisses-so many argument types, I will focus on just two of his responses that I believe are largely illustrative of his project. Consider an argument of types 1 or 4-for instance, that Aristotelian philosophy is pervasively androcentric because (a) Aristotle claims that the female of the species is a deformity and (b) by removing those passages we could no longer make sense of Aristotle's theories. Landau responds that there are two different ways to show that we could not "make sense of" a philosophy shorn of its androcentric passages. The first is to show "that all or most of the philosophy in question discuss [sic] in an androcentric way women, men, or the relation between them...elaborately and extensively" (p. 15). The second is to show that androcentric statements "are tied to (sufficiently many) other, nonandrocentric statements, so that rejecting the androcentric statements requires rejecting the other, nonandrocentric ones as well" (p. 15). Landau asserts that he knows of no philosophy that meets the first condition, and he expresses grave doubts about whether the second condition is ever fulfilled. Because most philosophical writings are "almost always less cohesive than they appear," it turns out to be surprisingly easy to show that when we examine (say) Aristotle's androcentric passages, we find that they either contradict his non-androcentric statements or are "merely consistent" with such statements. By contrast, it is "difficult" to find examples of androcentric statements that are either sufficient or necessary conditions for non-androcentric ones (pp. 16-17). What about the possibility that the entailment relationship goes in the other direction-that a philosophy could contain non-androcentric claims that are sufficient conditions for androcentric ones? For example, what of the possibility that some of Aristotle's claims (e.g., about the naturalness of certain kinds of hierarchy, or that the family is an object of property), while not themselves androcentric, entail statements that are? Landau suggests (pp. 20-24) that Aristotle's moral and political theories are sufficiently flexible (and unclear) to require perhaps some changes, but not "major" ones, to correct those problems (p. 21, esp. fn 18). A different sort of argument (type 2 and possibly type 3) proceeds from the appearance in a philosophical text of terms or categories (such as "reason" and "objectivity") that are used androcentrically in other contexts, concluding that the text that employs those categories is androcentric by association. Genevieve Lloyd argues, for instance, that Descartes' mindbody distinction is not in itself androcentric. But when it is put in the context of a (Western) culture that identifies mind and/or rationality with maleness, and body and/or non-rationality with femaleness, and that favors the rational over the nonrational, then Cartesian philosophy relies on gendered categories and is therefore androcentric. Landau says that such a link is "too loose," "can prove too much," and is even pernicious ("those with less power [should not] accept these associations") (pp. 36-38). I want to raise two concerns about Landau's work. The first is this: considered piecemeal, each of Landau's responses is plausible and even convincing, yet the cost is a work that seems curiously disconnected from larger issues in feminist philosophy and in philosophy generally. I believe, for example, that Landau's (counter-)arguments would benefit from a far more extensive and extended discussion of questions of interpretation, and of entailment, than he provides. With the exception of a section on Derrida's deconstructionism, Landau's book provides little context-feminist or otherwise-for wrestling with what are very knotty questions about the relationships between concepts, words, power, and social realities. Though he refers (p. 4) to the possibility that his critiques might be useful for parallel debates about the Eurocentrism and/or heteronormativity in various philosophers' works, Landau does not examine the ways in which the lessons learned from those parallel debates might affect or constrain debates about androcentrism. I think that explicitly incorporating some of the literature from those debates would have helped here. As a result, it is frequently unclear just how he seems able so easily to distinguish examples of nonpervasive androcentrism from the more pervasive kinds. The second is this: perhaps partly because he is countering others' arguments, Landau is frequently equivocal about the scope of the term "philosophy." Generally he means a specific philosopher or philosopher's works, yet at the same time he seems to mean a particular (contested) tradition as a whole-including, but not limited to, specific philosophers and works. Here, the omission of non-Western philosophies, and of Continental philosophies, is especially evident. It might also be interesting to learn how the participants in the debate regard the possible androcentrism of women philosophers ranging from Hypatia to Lady Cudworth to Mary Wollestonecraft, but Landau does not discuss that question. But "philosophy" can also refer to a particular academic discipline and profession. Several philosophers, irrespective of their feminist credentials, have recently focused their concerns about androcentrism here- both professional (Who gets hired, and in which subfields? Who gets published, and in which journals? Who gets invited to speak at conferences?) and cultural (Which methods, and - Feminism and Philosophy - - 19 - styles of discourse, predominate? Which questions are treated as peripheral? Who is attracted to study philosophy in the first place? What sort of reception do they get from instructors and peers?).1 I am curious about how those concerns might reshape Landau's (or his interlocutors') arguments. Landau's book is organized well and written clearly, and does a good job of pressing its points that some discussions of androcentrism may rest on problematic readings of specific philosophers, generalize from too small a sample, or imply more than they were intended to. Its presentation of several interrelated debates about androcentrism will likely be most useful to those encountering those debates for the first time. Those who are already familiar with (and possibly participating in) those debates may find the book less satisfactory, but still worth their time. Endnotes 1. See Sally Haslanger, "Changing the Ideology and Culture of Philosophy: Not By Reason (Alone)," Hypatia 23, No. 2 (Spring 2008): 210-23. Refiguring the Ordinary Gail Weiss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 264pp. $24.95. ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21989-3. Reviewed by Amanda Gibeault gibeault@bc.edu In her recent book, Refiguring the Ordinary, Gail Weiss argues that "only by interrogating the 'ordinary' dimensions of experience is it possible to arrive at an understanding of the dynamic forces that give meaning to individual lives and that are both the obstacle and the vehicle to achieving lasting social change" (5). This phenomenological inquiry into the structuring role of horizons brings together a great deal of fruitful phenomenological work. Weiss argues convincingly for the relevance of phenomenological resources in understanding the harmful effects of what is passively considered acceptable. In some respects, however, this work covers familiar terrain and can, in its turn, re-inscribe the questions and concerns that feminist academic philosophers, however well-meaning we may be, consider central. Traditionally, phenomenology has inquired into "ordinary" events as understood from a perspective of relative privilege: perceptual events, androcentric heterosexual bodily encounters, and white angst have all had their turn. Yet the resources of phenomenology, with careful attention to first and second person perspectives on our everyday experiences, seem particularly apt for uncovering layers of oppression as well as strategies of resistance. For many, as Weiss notes, misery and suffering define everyday experiences (5). For many-oppressed and their aspiring allies-there is little room to hope we can shift the underlying attitudes that re-inscribe oppression at seemingly every turn. Instead of casting the resistance to oppressive, hegemonic structures as an exercise of agency, which, she notes, pits the individual or minority community against society, Weiss seeks to understand the horizons of beliefs and practices that ground racist, sexist, and ableist acts. Her method is to "reanimate the past" by drawing our attention to and developing new readings of familiar horizons; this is done largely through re-readings of rich philosophical and literary works (6). Weiss does this over eleven chapters separated into five parts. First, in "Figuring the Ground," she develops the central philosophical terms of the discussion, offering helpful accounts of often complex phenomenological terms. Second, in "Narrative Horizons," she argues that meaning and meaningfulness are embodied, and that meanings emerge in the relationship between the horizon and the foregrounded elements. Third, in "(Re)Grounding the Figure," Weiss addresses how oppressive ways of knowing the world become re-sedimented. Fourth, in "Urban Perspectives," she explores the city as both horizon and as "flesh." Finally, in "Constraining Horizons," she reins in any expectation that horizons can simply and efficiently be shifted by addressing how choice itself must be questioned and the lasting tensions between some identities must be acknowledged. In the two chapters of "Figuring the Ground," Weiss argues that change is impossible without addressing the constitutive roles of the everyday (12) and that the indeterminacy of horizons needs to be understood as central to understanding experience (37). She distinguishes between perspectives, contexts, and horizons (20), explaining that horizons underlie contexts and they collectively provide a context for one's ordinary experiences (25). To understand ordinary experience, one must understand the horizons which enable an experience to be an ordinary one. Yet these horizons are indeterminate, as Husserl and his heirs noted. For one thing, they typically form the background of our beliefs and actions, which presents a challenge for turning our attention to (aspects of) them: When we foreground our horizons, what then operates at the background? Weiss addresses the many ways this indeterminacy has been addressed in phenomenology, but her main point is that this indeterminacy needs to be thought of as an ongoing important challenge which enables us to keep our thinking fresh and alive (27). In "Narrative Horizons," Weiss addresses how messages are shared and communicated (61), and how the body is a narrative horizon, always already engaged in everyday experiences (62). Through a discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre's and Søren Kierkegaard's reflections on writing, Weiss addresses the links between writing, reading, and responsibility. She takes up Toni Morrison's point that we must be responsible for the racialized (and other) assumptions in writing, and addresses the conceptions of writing and reading that enable such a responsibility. Weiss approves of Sartre's and Kierkegaard's conception of writing as an "embodied call to action" (57-58). Through a reading of the ambiguity of author and meaning in Kierkegaard's work, Weiss shows how to "read and write between the lines," necessary to take up the responsibility she calls for (58). Weiss appeals to Paul Ricoeur on the production of meaning through narrative, where metaphors disrupt meaning in a way that shows we are never quite coherent to ourselves or others. By contrast to intellectualized views such as Alasdair MacIntyre's, Weiss grounds the intelligibility of a narrative in the body, which is also "that which frustrates narrative identity" by always changing (70). The frustration is well captured in the image of Kafka's Samsa, whose body continues changing and resists being made intelligible. When we are aware of how bodies resist being made utterly intelligible, we can resist allowing oppressive practices from becoming sedimented and ordinary. In "(Re)Grounding the Figure," Weiss inquires into how horizons become habitual over time and why we need to turn our attention to the horizon in order to understand how oppression becomes residemented, and also how to resist it. Through a discussion of William James, Pierre Bourdieu, Merleau-Ponty, and others, Weiss explores the role of habit in forming character, naturalizing some (but not other) bodily responses, and allowing room for transformation. She fruitfully and sensitively addresses the events of 9/11 to show both how this might have been an opportunity for undermining oppression, since it was an event for which we had no ready- - APA Newsletter, Spring 2010, Volume 09, Number 2 - - 20 - made responses (84), and how the features that were among the most moving for her were the New York Times profiles of the victims, which typically listed everyday activities. Though Weiss acknowledges that habit can be stultifying (76), she argues that it is also at the level of the concrete, material life of ordinary, habitual experience that we can best assess our commitment to social change (91). This simple picture is complicated when she considers the horizon against which habits are formed (and which indeed form habits). Taking the so-called "Rodney King Incident" and the critical writing that emerged from it as a case for discussion (102), Weiss addresses the racist horizons that enabled Rodney King's police attackers to be acquitted, while finding gaps in the pervasiveness of the racism that may allow room for contestation. The tension between the pervasiveness of racism, and the ability sometimes to identify it from a position of resistance, underscores the importance of making the horizon apparent, and focusing on it rather than on a foregrounded figure, such as an "isolated" racist event (107). In "Urban Perspectives," Weiss addresses the constraints and possibilities afforded by considering cities as spatial horizon, displacing our image of sunsets, and intersecting with overlapping horizons of race, class, and gender (116). In these chapters, her method of articulating two opposing views and working in the tension between them is most apparent. The city is both a physical and imaginary horizon, and the constraints and possibilities are constituted in the ways in which these features are intertwined (119). For example, horizons of race, class, and gender often come together in conflicting ways (116), while potentially affording possibilities for transforming the collective imagination of public spaces (118). The city can function as an incarnate, organizing principle of everyday life (128), and can literally embody spaces of possibility. Weiss discusses Elisabeth Grosz and Edward Casey, in their affirmations of the productive tension between bodies and cities, though she reminds us of the challenges of privileging the city as a site of homes and dwellings, since so many are without them. The space of possibility must be reaffirmed, Weiss reminds, by appeal to feminists and disability activists who are ever attentive to the challenges presented by urban infrastructure (137). In this part of the book, Weiss shows how attention to human dwellings and humanity is messy and resists any purifying, simplifying affirmation of the positive nature of urban space. In "Constraining Horizons," Weiss discusses issues that can constrain or limit our horizons. She reconsiders the solitariness of authenticity in Heidegger by incorporating the social, interpersonal aspects of living towards death evinced by Cathy Hainer, a journalist who published a column in her final months of living with cancer (148-149). Despite the mundanity of our social lives, Weiss maintains, something unique is conveyed through many of the unsurprising facts that describe us (159). In the chapter entitled "Challenging Choices," Weiss acknowledges both that choices can themselves be ambiguous, and that the primacy of choice in our understanding of what constitutes our humanity ought to be challenged. Her discussion of choice flows into the final chapter, on the possibility that some identities are mutually incompatible, such as being a mother and an intellectual. I often found this work enlightening, and found Weiss made fruitful connections I had not thought of. This book undoubtedly brings fruitful phenomenological resources to an already rich discussion of the role of ordinary lives in our theorizing about humanity, sociality, oppression, and knowledge. Weiss's discussion of works in both traditional and contemporary phenomenology is insightful, clear, and helpful for phenomenologists and those trained in different methods alike. This book ends quite suddenly, without a conclusion to link the many insights of the preceedng chapters, which left me unsure of where the discussion had taken us. Though the depth and breadth of Weiss's scholarship is impressive, I was disappointed by some important gaps in her discussions. For example, many of the insights about ordinary life, and the constraining horizons of urban life, have been at the forefront of Black feminist thought, at the very least since bell hooks's Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), and most particularly in the essays in Yearning (1990). Weiss does cite hooks twice, but I am troubled by the use of this work as a brief example (115-116). Moreover, the value of choice and its primacy in our understanding of our humanity was compellingly criticized in a paper by Susan Babbitt in a prominent anthology from 1993. Moreover, while I appreciate that there must remain great challenges to being an intellectual and a mother, which Weiss articulates convincingly, I am not compelled by this choice of constraining horizons. Choosing where to focus one's rhetorical energy is a choice made in politically laden contexts. As Weiss acknowledges in citing Eva Kittay and Sara Ruddick, we have had many opportunities to reflect on the challenges of motherhood for philosophers, from these published discussions to the many informal conversations to which I have been privy. Given Weiss's acknowledgment of strong spousal and caregiver support through the book-writing process, I am a little concerned that emphasis on the middle class experience of balancing motherhood and professional career allows us to continue to cover over the everyday experiences of most women in North America, and especially of most mothers who are increasingly poor. This choice of discussion point seems to illustrate a way in which there is always a danger of allowing certain horizons to remain at the background, and how acknowledging privilege is not sufficient to genuinely foreground them in transformative ways. Out of these criticisms, however, there is an important praise: Weiss has written a book that gives us such rich tools of analysis that we cannot resist deploying them against her own work. This is very fruitful indeed. Bibliography Babbitt, S. "Feminism and Objective Interests: The Role of Transformation Experiences in Rational Deliberation." In Feminist Epistemologies, edited by L. Alcoff and E. Potter. New York: Routledge, 1993. hooks, b. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1984. hooks, b. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1990. Does Feminism Discriminate against Men? A Debate Warren Farrell (with Steven Svoboda) and James P. Sterba (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 258 pp. Paper, $17.95. ISBN: 978-0-19-531283-6. Reviewed by Maureen Sander-Staudt Arizona State University, Phoenix, Maureen.Sander-Staudt@asu.edu This book opens with a side note to student readers from Warren Farrell, who remarks on the exceptionality of professors who assign it as part of a social science course. The aura of an underlying challenge to standard practice and ideology permeates his writing, but only adds to the appeal of this book for use in the classroom as well as general reading for those interested in feminist philosophy. The book is set up as a two- - Feminism and Philosophy - - 21 - part debate between Farrell, three-year former board member of the National Organization for Women turned male advocate, and James Sterba, vocal philosopher renowned for his broad defense of feminism. In the first half of the book Farrell develops his claim that feminism wrongfully discriminates against men, citing evidence from male experience in military service, health care, domestic violence, child custody, media, public education, and popular culture. While Farrell's argument is convincing as well as entertainingly accessible, Sterba makes for a formative and equally readable opponent, responding in the second half of the book to each point, while correcting perceived errors in Farrell's overall characterization of feminism. Farrell recounts his personal evolution as an advocate of feminism into an increasingly disillusioned critic, a conversion expedited by the death of his younger brother, Wayne, who perished, according to Farrell, as a result of gallantry. The disparate coercive propulsion of men toward bodily destruction on behalf of women is a pervasive theme of his analysis, revealed in how boys are pressured to participate in violent sports, and face a sex-specific draft for the military. Challenging feminist platitudes, Farrell argues that men don't have the powers attributed to them by feminists, but in fact suffer from a general misandrist derisiveness and sexual rejection, as well as equal rates of victimization by domestic violence, neglect in health care and education, lack of a male birth control pill, and regular genital mutilation in the form of circumcision. Challenging the view that the women are paid less because of gender discrimination, Farrell posits that men earn more because their jobs are harder and allow less leisure time. Legally, men are vulnerable to being falsely accused of rape, and to face harsher penalties for violent crimes than women. In response to the claim that employed women are plagued by "double duties" of paid work and housework, he offers the "male housework list" or "Honey-Do list," which he claims is not only lengthier than that of women's, but invisible in feminist analyses (67). Such a list dispels the myths that women's domestic labor alone is demanding, sex-specific, unreciprocated, underappreciated, and unpaid. Moreover, men are more alienated from their families than women due to inflexible workplace accommodation for fatherhood, and divorce and custody arrangements that favor women. Farrell's argument is especially compelling when it comes to the representation of men in popular culture. Peppered with cartoons, advertisements, and images from things like greeting cards and draft posters, Farrell's argument traces double standards of political correctness that encourage women to deride men as foolish and worthless, but allow them to hypocritically express outrage when the trend is reversed. Farrell's writing is rich in provocative quips, such as "feminists call it sexism to refer to God as 'He'; they don't call it sexism to refer to the Devil as 'He'" (9). But his argument also has a theoretical edge, rooted in an evolutionary understanding of traditional gender roles. Farrell finds that the "underlying biology of men and women is to adapt," but that "male-female roles that were functional for the species for millions of years have become dysfunctional in an evolutionary instant" (1). He is skeptical that women really desire sensitive men, noting the attraction of physically aggressive athletes and economically commanding businessmen, and holds that "both sexes are the way they are because that is what made them appealing to the other sex" (101). He speculates that "complaining and asking for help is not an evolutionary shift for women," but it is for men (103). Subsequently, women have inherited responsibility without accountability, and standards set by the self rather than by others. Farrell argues that this is seen in how women are not held accountable for being the mothers of children who steal, and are not scrutinized for how they use child support. Women who wear sexually revealing clothing at work are not held accountable for sexual solicitation. Conversely, men who coach a failing team can expect to be fired, and men who respond to sexual cues at work are accused of sexual harassment. For such reasons, Farrell proposes that the ERA be changed from the "Equal Rights Amendment" to the ERRA, or the "Equal Rights and Responsibilities Amendment." The larger solution to these problems according to Farrell is neither a women's movement, nor a men's movement, but a "gender transition movement" that would prepare the sexes to change together, promote empathy, and move to "stage II" social institutions that transcend survival-based protectionism. Farrell encourages feminists to lead this movement because women's interests cannot be advanced without willing changes in men, but is skeptical that feminists are willing to do so. A gender transition movement will teach relationship language, prepare women better for the sacrifice of careers while promoting the ability of men to be primary caregivers, and allow men more control over the choice of when to have a child. State funded "male child abuse" in the form of "onesex, smash face football" will be replaced with sports that are connected to lessons for life journeys. Sex education will strive to reduce the idea that sex is dirty, and that boys need to be "learning to be earning" in order to avoid sexual rejection. Ultimately Farrell concludes that the sexes must work together to achieve mutual equality and satisfaction, because "when one sex wins, both sexes lose" (105). In response to Farrell's sweeping critique, Sterba argues that feminism in its diverse historical formulations has not discriminated against men, or, more exactly, that feminism has not been appropriately used by its defenders to discriminate against men (131). He points out that the second and third waves of feminism were characterized by a move away from a kind of essentialist thinking grounding Farrell's objections, and that "feminists can no more reach their goal of equality by ignoring relevant perspectives provided by women than they can by ignoring relevant perspectives provided by men" (129). Moreover, Sterba finds that many of the changes promoted by Farrell are entirely compatible with feminism, such as reducing male violence, encouraging progressive men's studies, male birth control, and freedom for men to adopt traditionally female forms of work and comportment. The premise of male power need not lead feminists to deny that women also have power, but Sterba denies that female power is equal, much less greater than that of men in general. He points to the disparate norms that diminish the worth of women in work, politics, and the military because of how power is associated with masculinity. The exclusion of women from the military draft and active combat is not a sign of female privilege, but of degraded expectations that keep women from the most prestigiously lucrative military and political positions. In health care, women have been excluded from longitudinal medical research, drug trials, and AIDS research. Disproportionately greater funding for breast cancer over prostate cancer may be due more to age than sex discrimination, and lobbying disparities. The shorter life expectancy of men may not be due to health care bias, but of other factors such as smoking, drinking, and auto accident related deaths, and may shrink altogether in the next fifty years. Sterba further takes issue with the accuracy of Farrell's other claims, citing conflicting study results and incomplete reporting regarding the equal rate of reciprocal domestic violence toward men by women, false rape charges, favoritism toward women in the criminal justice system, and the wage gap. He accuses Farrell of mischaracterizing sexual harassment as failed courtship, or misguided joke, when its legal definition - APA Newsletter, Spring 2010, Volume 09, Number 2 - - 22 - explicitly specifies quid pro quo whereby unwanted sexual exchange becomes a condition of employment, or the creation of a hostile work environment that goes beyond bad humor. Sterba criticizes Farrell's "Honey-Do" list on the grounds that many of the tasks it names (such as hanging pictures or changing the oil) are not daily or even weekly tasks on the same demanding level as cooking, cleaning, and childcare. Sterba further casts aspersions on Farrell's claim that the legislative branch privileges women in marriage and custody battles, noting that men's higher salaries translate into greater legal power, and that over 46 percent of custody decisions are decided outside of court. In terms of popular culture and education, Sterba provides his own series of images depicting "male-bashing," whereby he concedes Farrell's point that men are sometimes derided in the media. But he notes that women are largely the favored targets of degradation in the fashion and pornography industries. Humorous books that poke fun of men are "tame" in juxtaposition to these violent and disturbing images of women. In education, Sterba argues that there is no particular bias against men given that men and women from the highest income brackets attend college in equal numbers, suggesting that discrepancies elsewhere are related to factors of class, race, and ethnicity. Sterba cites the need to encourage more women to major in the sciences and engineering, by socializing men and women so they are both willing to split domestic work, and to equally desire such careers. At the end of the day, both authors find common ground in the belief that men and women are better off when their options are expanded beyond that allowed for by traditional norms, but they depart in their estimation of feminism as guilty of discrimination against men, and of its potential. Because Sterba concludes that feminism has not discriminated against men (in any illegitimate fashion) he finds that "the future of feminism and men looks very promising indeed," especially if enough men push for the feminist ideal of equality so that it can be legally enforced (210). Conversely, Farrell warns that "we can't jump right into gender transition studies" because the agenda is "likely to be set by women's studies," defeating the purpose (12). As such, this book provides a broad overview of one of the thornier and less asked questions of feminism, that of its legitimate scope and inclusiveness. This book is supremely accessible to young readers and those less familiar with the nuances of feminist theory, and provides a nice example of debate methodology, although, as Farrell claims, the real job of this "debate" book is not to teach debate (which he characterizes as "divorce training") but, rather, to teach listening. However, in terms of elucidating the finer points of feminist theory and of generating synthesis, the book falls short. A great part of the promise of the feminist movement is its resistance to essentialism in sex and gender, challenging the idea that sexual categories are natural, fixed, or distinct presocial givens. Following from the post-modern feminist analysis of Elizabeth Spelman, Judith Butler, and others, it becomes clear that the title question overly simplifies the fluidity of sex and gender identity (Spelman 1988; Butler 1990). Moreover, there is no synthesis of the disparate visions offered by the authors, leaving the reader to wonder whether the feminist movement prescribed by Sterba is compatible with the evolutionary-based gender transition movement prescribed by Farrell. Nonetheless, this book provides new and timely insight into the contentious nature of sexual equality, and is likely to challenge readers even as they find themselves agreeing with one, or both, or neither of its authors. Bibliography Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York, NY: Routledge, 1990. Spelman, Elizabeth. Inessential Woman. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. CONTRIBUTORS Anita L. Allen is the deputy dean for academic affairs and Henry R. Silverman professor of law and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a senior fellow of the university's Bioethics Department in the School of Medicine. Her work has focused on the law and ethics of privacy and data protection, race relations, and feminist philosophy. She is the author of numerous articles and several books: Privacy Law and Society (2007); Why Privacy Isn't Everything: Feminist Reflections on Personal Accountability (2003); and Uneasy Access: Privacy for Women in a Free Society (1988). Allen's book The New Ethics: A Guided Tour of the 21st Century Moral Landscape (2004) reflects her interest in applied and everyday ethics. Allen is a former ethics columnist for the Newark Star Ledger and O Magazine, and contributes to the dailybeast.com. She sits on the board of the Hastings Center, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, the Maternity Care Coalition, the Electronic Information Privacy Center, and the National Association for Women Lawyer's Judicial Evaluation Committee. Cheshire Calhoun is professor of philosophy at Arizona State University, series editor of Oxford University Press's Studies in Feminist Philosophy, and associate editor of Hypatia. She is author of Feminist, the Family, and the Politics of the Closet, and editor of Setting the Moral Compass: Essays by Women Philosophers and works in the areas of feminist ethics, moral psychology, gay and lesbian studies, and the emotions. Amanda Gibeault completed her Ph.D. at Boston College in feminist epistemology and phenomenology in April 2009. She is currently pursuing research on disability, ethics, and assistive devices in Canada. Claire Katz is an associate professor of philosophy and women's and gender studies at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Levinas, Judaism, and the Feminine: The Silent footsteps of Rebecca (Indiana 2003) and the editor of Emmanuel Levinas: Critical Assessments (Routledge, 2005). She has published articles in the areas of feminist theory, philosophy of education, phenomenology, philosophy of religion, ethics, and modern Jewish philosophy. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript that engages Levinas's ethical project and his writings on Jewish education. Norah Martin is associate professor of philosophy, associate dean for curriculum and chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Portland. She completed her Ph.D. at Stony Brook in 1994. Before becoming department chair in 2004, she served for five years as the advisor for students applying for nationally competitive scholarships and three years on the University of Portland's Committee on Rank and Tenure. She is a member of the National Association of Fellowships Advisors Founding Board of Directors. Her publications include papers in the books Philosophy and Seinfeld (W. Irwin, ed.), All Creation is Groaning (C. Dempsey and R. Butkus, eds.), Recognition, Responsibility, Rights: Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (H. Nelson and R. Fiore, eds.) and in The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. She is also co-editor (with Peter Ludlow) of Externalism and Self-Knowledge (CSLI Press, 1998). Her recent work largely involves creating learning outcomes and - Feminism and Philosophy - - 23 - assessment plans, and helping faculty in other departments to do the same (and to find the process worthwhile!). Sharon M. Meagher [last name pronounced "MARR"] loves to walk the streets of cities-as transgressive as that might be for a (woman) philosopher! Some information about her philosophical walking tours can be found on her website: http://www.philosophyandthecity.org. She is working on a monograph, Philosophical Streetwalking: Grounding Philosophy and the City, that rethinks the task of philosophy and the relationship of philosophy to the city and public life. Vance A. Ricks is an associate professor of philosophy at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. His research and teaching interests include friendship, information technology ethics, and John Stuart Mill. Maureen Sander-Staudt is an assistant professor at Arizona State University where she teaches feminist ethics, bioethics, environmental ethics, and world literature. She specializes in feminist ethics of care and has published on topics such as care ethics and virtue ethics, artificial womb technology, the moral status of embryos, and the political agency of caregivers. Her ongoing interests are in the areas of reproductive equality, care as political practice, and family ethics. She is currently working on projects that explore care as a corporate virtue and polygamous marriages in the U.S. She is the co-editor of two forthcoming anthologies on care ethics and business ethics, and motherhood and philosophy, and the author of the forthcoming book, Care Ethics and Reciprocity. She lives in El Mirage where she is creating an oasis in the desert with her three children, husband of fifteen years, and animal companions. Candice Shelby has been a single mom for most of her career as a philosopher. She received her Ph.D. in 1989 from Rice University, with a seven-year-old in tow. She began her career as an historian of philosophy, publishing mostly on the works of Leibniz, but writing intermittently on feminist ethics, logic, and the philosophy of education. Now chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Colorado, Denver, she has made a major shift, working on philosophy of mind, and, in particular, on new ways to understand the reasoning of addicts. Her work in philosophy most often followed her interests and problems at home, rather than the research agenda suggested to her by her mentors. Miriam Solomon is professor of philosophy at Temple University. She served on the CSW from 2006-2009, focusing her efforts on trying to improve professional data collection in the APA. She led a study of hiring in the 2007-2008 season, which was published in this Newsletter (Spring 2009) and in the Proceedings and Addresses of the APA (May 2009). She looks forward to a time when collecting and analyzing data on the profession becomes routine at the APA. Miriam Solomon was founding chair of the Women's Caucus of the Philosophy of Science Association and a founding member of the Women in Philosophy Task Force. ANNOUNCEMENTS Call for Papers The most recent issues of the Newsletter (including the one currently in completion) were devoted to the question of the numbers and status of women in professional philosophy (explanations for why we comprise a mere 21% of professional philosophers, survival strategies, coping strategies for those who survive, and enhancement strategies to bring more women in, success strategies for promotion). This and coming years will also prove a challenge for many women in philosophy as state and federal budgets are balanced by cuts to academic and educational institutions and to public services which support those who make up the politically marginalized and vulnerable populations. These hard economic times affect all women, whether we are in professional philosophy struggling for promotion, research funding, or just to keep our jobs, or we are returning to school to improve our chances of getting or keeping work, or we are trying to keep hearth and home together, children fed, companions in good spirit, and ourselves economically viable. It seems appropriate and timely to address a question central to the lives of many women: motherhood. The next issue of the Newsletter will be devoted to the question of motherhood in its full breadth and depth. Essays on any topic related to motherhood will be considered. Please format your essays according to Newsletter requirements and should be prepared for anonymous review. Length is limited to 4,000 words inclusive of all endnotes and references. Submissions must be received by October 15th, 2010. Send submissions electronically in either Word or PDF formats to Christina Bellon, bellon@csus.edu, using an appropriate subject heading. Call for Papers: Disability and Philosophy: Missing Voices Eastern Society for Women in Philosophy At the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division meeting, Boston, MA, Dec. 27-30, 2010. DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: May 1, 2010. For more information, contact Maeve M. O'Donovan, Executive Secretary, Eastern Society for Women in Philosophy, modonovan@ndm.edu. Call for Papers: Retributive Emotions Special Issue of Philosophical Papers; Guest Editor: Lucy Allais (Witwatersrand and Sussex) The deadline for receipt of submission is June 30, 2010. This special edition of Philosophical Papers, which will contain both invited and submitted papers, will appear in November of 2010. Further enquiries can be addressed to Lucy Allais (Lucy. Allais@Wits.ac.za) or Ward Jones, Editor, Philosophical Papers (w.jones@ru.ac.za). - APA Newsletter, Spring 2010, Volume 09, Number 2 - - 24 - Call for Proposals: Argumentation: Cognition & Community The Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA) will host a conference to be held on May 18-21, 2011, at the University of Windsor. Abstracts prepared for anonymous refereeing must be submitted electronically no later than SEPTEMBER 7, 2010, to ossa@uwindsor.ca. Additional information is available on the conference website, www.uwindsor.ca/ossa. Call for Papers: Sex, Gender, Species Wesleyan University will host a conference on Sex, Gender, and Species on February 25 & 26, 2011. Deadline for abstract submissions: October 1, 2010. Submission guidelines: Please email a 1-2 page (500-750 word) abstract for your proposed paper to lgruen@wesleyan.edu and Kweil@wesleyan.edu. For more information visit the conference website at http://depts. washington.edu/hypatia/cfps.html#animal_others. Conference Announcements International Conference Announcement: Global Justice Concepts, Theories and Constraints, held in Bucharest, May 18-19, 2010, sponsored by the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest. The conference program will be available soon at http://filosofie.unibuc.ro/calls#globaljustice. The Albany Law School, Rapaport Ethics Across the Curriculum Program of Union College, and the Bioethics Program of Union Graduate College and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine are pleased to invite you to the upcoming conference on Disability and Ethics through the Life Cycle: Cases, Controversies and Finding Common Ground. This conference will be held Friday, May 21 and Saturday, May 22 at Union College in Schenectady, NY. For additional information, please contact blooma@union. edu or noltea@uniongraduatecollege.edu. Conference Announcement: Dialogue Under Occupation IV The focus of "Dialogue Under Occupation" is the ongoing exploration of dialogue and discourse in areas of the world experiencing occupation. The conference is June 1-4 in Washington, D.C. For more information, visit the conference website at www.dialogueunderoccupation.org/washdc2010/. An interdisciplinary faculty workshop, Feminist Ethics and Renewing Women's Studies, funded by the "Mellon 23," will take place June 2-5, 2010, at the Janet Prindle Center for Ethics at DePauw University in Indiana. For more information, including fees and funding, please see our website at http://depauw. edu/acad/women/workshop2010. The International Association for Women Philosophers, XIV IAPh Symposium 2010 on Feminism, Science and Values will be held June 25-28, 2010, at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. This symposium is co-hosted by the Department of Philosophy and the Rotman Institute of Science and Values. Registration and full program information can be found at: http://www.uwo.ca/philosophy/events/iaph2010/ index.html. The School of History and Philosophy at The University of New South Wales is pleased to host the 2010 Australasian Association of Philosophy (AAP) Conference. The AAP Conference is held annually by the Australasian Association of Philosophy. Conference dates: July 4-9, 2010; Venue: Kensington Campus, The University of New South Wales, NSW, Australia. To register or for further information, please visit www.aapconferences.org.au. Twenty-Seventh International Social Philosophy Conference, sponsored by the North American Society for Social Philosophy will be held on July 15-July 17, 2010, at Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario. Special attention will be devoted to the theme of Poverty, Markets, and Justice. For more information, contact Margaret Crouch (mcrouch@emich.edu), Lisa Schwartzman (lhschwar@msu.edu), or Alex Wellington (awelling@ryerson. ca). The Canadian Society for Women in Philosophy will host a special session at the 49th annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), November 4-6, 2010, at the Marriott Château Champlain, Montréal. For more information on the invitation for proposals, visit the following websites: CSWIP website (http://www.cswip.ca/) or SPEP website (http://www.spep.org/) or contact Ami Harbin at amiharbin@dal.ca. National Women's Studies Association conference announcement: DIFFICULT DIALOGUES II, November 11-14, 2010, in Denver, CO. For more information, visit the conference website at http://www.nwsa.org/conference/cfp.php.