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Women and the Human Paradigm: An Exploration of Gender Discrimination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
The contemporary debate about the place and role of women in the Church is proving to be a painful and difficult business. Language itself contributes to the problems in the sense that certain tacit assumptions —overwhelmingly negative about women—are embedded deep in our talk about human persons. The answer is not to be found simply in tinkering with non-sexist language. The practical difficulties facing women are compounded by the fact that the language in which the discussion is conducted depends for its meaning on gender images that are implicitly discriminatory. The clue to this problem is to be found in certain key assumptions about the nature of human persons.
The experience of intra-human discrimination has certain common elements. Those discriminated against are in one way or another denied rights accorded to other human beings, their needs are subordinated to those of others, and their behaviour tends to be interpreted in causal rather than psychological terms. What is characteristic about this experience is that it involves a refusal to treat those discriminated against as persons in the full sense of that term, for to recognize someone as a person is precisely to accord them certain rights, to take note of their needs, and to see them as subjects whose experience can only be adequately explained in terms of psychology. In this essay we shall attempt to uncover those features of our talk about persons that give rise to the possibility of discrimination and following this we shall consider the particular difficulties facing women.
It has been customary for philosophers when analysing the concept of a person to begin by listing the kinds of things we say about persons.
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- Copyright © 1989 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
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2 It is important to note here that personal predicates are those implying that something has a conscious, rational, and moral life. This does not mean that bodily/physiological identity and personal identity are two separate and distinct things. But it does mean that there is a conceptual distinction between talk about persons (and consequently about human beings as persons) and talk about bodily identity. To talk about a human being as a person is to invoke a framework of reference and explanation which is distinct from the empirical framework of biology and physiology. Persons may have bodies but when we talk about them as persons we are addressing aspects of experience that cannot be reduced to bodily experience. The identification of the feminine with the bodily senses is therefore an important factor in the conceptual exclusion of women from their full status as persons. To identify their gender with images of the body is effectively to rule them out of the category of persons.
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11 Ibid. p. 103.
12 Shere Hite, The Hue Report on Male Sexuality (Macdonald, London, 1981).
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17 De Trinitate, XII, iii, 3.
18 Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Methuen, London, 1958), pp. 613–614.