Epistemology or Bust: A Maternal Feminist Knowledge of Knowing

Mattuck Tarule document women's struggles to find voice in educational contexts dominated by men.' Women must traverse serious social hurdles in the development of their minds. Confident at age eleven, confused by sixteen, girls "go underground." In Carol Gilligan's words, "they start saying, 'I don't know. I don't know. I don't know"'; they begin not knowing what they had known in response to a culture that sends the message "keep quiet and notice the absence of women."2 Even more critically, women learn to doubt not only what and how they know but even how they go about knowing. At the same time, several women in the Belenky study point to a particular life experience that dramatically transformed their ways of knowing: the process of becoming a mother.3 Does this suggest that there are some qualities particular to a mother's way of knowing? What might it mean to acclaim "maternal thinking," to use Sara Ruddick's term, as a significant * Special appreciation to the Society for Pastoral Theology, who heard an earlier version of this article at the annual meeting in June