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Sophie Doesn't: Families and Counterstories of Self-Trust

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Hilde Lindemann Nelson
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Abstract

Girls learn the lesson of cognitive deference most clearly, perhaps, growing up in patriarchal families. Taught to discount their own judgments and to depend on those of the family's dominantmen, they lose self-trust and cannot take themselves seriously as moral deliberators. I argue that through the telling of counterstories, which undermine normative stories of oppression, it is sometimes possible for women to reclaim these families as places where they have cognitive authority.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 11 , Issue 1: Special Issue: The Family and Feminist Theory , Winter 1996 , pp. 91 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 by Hypatia, Inc.

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