- Feminist Interpretations of William James eds. by Erin C. Tarver and Shannon Sullivan
Feminist Interpretations of William James is the third volume on a classical pragmatist in the generally excellent Penn State book series, Re-Reading the Canon. The series dedicates itself to a reconstruction of the work of prominent philosophers, and has already brought a critical, feminist perspective to the lives and thought of Jane Addams and John Dewey. This latest installment of the series is a welcome and lively contribution on William James, and adds significantly to the series’ wider reconstructive project, which typically highlights and critiques a philosopher’s problematic, sexist assumptions; examines the effects such assumptions may have had on the thinker’s wider body of work; re-inscribes women’s contributions to the development of the latter; and identifies theoretical tools from the thinker’s repertoire that may be mined by feminist philosophers. Feminist Interpretations of William James, unsurprisingly, engages in each of these techniques of the reconstructive project, as James comes to be revealed as a controversial but appealing figure, in many of the book’s chapters.
Following a short introduction from the editors, the volume opens with Charlene Haddock Seigfried’s chapter, “The Feminine-Mystical Threat to Masculine-Scientific Order.” This forms a promising start to the collection, as the bulk of the chapter is a re-print from Seigfried’s pioneering 1996 book, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric, itself widely recognized as the quintessential feminist text of the neo-pragmatist turn. Several essays respond to this opening chapter and to Seigfried’s earlier work on James (notably, a monograph titled William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy) by engaging with the depiction of James as a quite obvious, Victorian sexist whose “feminine style” may, nonetheless, be critically re-appropriated by feminists. [End Page 309] In this sense, Seigfried’s chapter often acts as a reference point for the rest of the book, as linkages are made between existing and newer commentary on James – a device that is put to further use in conjunction with a concluding Afterword or occasional response piece by Seigfried, to allow for the raising and reappraisal of themes that span the historical junctures of James’s own period, the 1990s revival of (feminist-) pragmatism, and the contemporary moment.
The picture of the philosopher thus emerging from the pages of this book is not always flattering, but at least consistently complex. Upon re-reading her original chapter, Seigfried notes how struck she is “by the depth of James’s misogyny” and “the pervasiveness of his masculinist assumptions” (15). She laments his inability to translate radical philosophical insights and curiosity (such as his alternative to the traditional, one-dimensional view of rationality) into “his perceptions and values” (16), and contrasts this inability with Jane Addams’s early feminist redeployment of Jamesian thought, as “she made the connections that he failed to make” (17). In an analysis of a review article written by James as a student on John Stewart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, and on Horace Bushnell’s anti-emancipatory treatise, Women’s Suffrage, Seigfried identifies an uncharacteristic closed-mindedness in James that ultimately leads to his support of Bushnell’s sexist thesis that women should be prohibited from governing, given their inferior nature (24). Moreover, Seigfried points to a more subtle, even tempting, version of sexism that appears sporadically in James’s work, as he espouses a kind of gender complementarity that ascribes a mysterious self-sacrificing, superior virtue to women (18). She warns that such constructions of womanhood are simply “two sides of the same coin” (18), and questions inconsistencies in James’s thought that allowed him to support women’s education while at the same time holding more or less explicit, problematic views on women’s nature (48).
Continuing the first section, The Promise and Peril of James’s Philosophy for Feminism, is Jacob L. Goodson’s chapter, “The Woman Question.” Here James’s 1869 review essay makes a reappearance, as Goodson disputes Seigfried...
