Abstract
This book concerns itself with change—perhaps not the unlimited improvement John Dewey had in mind, but nonetheless with change. It, too, takes as its starting point the necessity for social transformation, and affords human nature a central role in an elucidation of change. The impetus to do so stems from feminism, which in its normativity requires the realization of change. For, although feminism is many things to many people, it uniformly presumes a lack, dysfunction, or inadequacy in current states of affairs, and seeks to redress these—whether this be called the realization of gender equality, the dismantling of capitalist-patriarchy, or the destruction of the “master’s house,” 1 underpinning the manifold of feminisms is a belief in the need for change.
Wary, experienced men of the world have always been sceptical of schemes of unlimited improvement. They tend to regard plans for social change with an eye of suspicion. They find in them evidences of the proneness of youth to illusion, or of incapacity on the part of those who have grown old to learn anything from experience. This type of conservative has thought to find in the doctrine of native instincts a scientific support for asserting the practical unalterability of human nature. Circumstances may change, but human nature remains from age to age the same.
—Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct
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Notes
Lorde, A., “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, Trumansburg, NY, 1984.
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Even where these texts are not directly quoted, their influence on my development of a feminist-pragmatism has been invaluable—see, for example, Addams, J., Democracy and Social Ethics, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1964;
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See Nye, A., Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic, Routledge, London, 1990;
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As will be elaborated upon later, Dewey outlines the self by means of an analogy with a house—see Dewey, J., Experience and Nature in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 1: 1925, Boydston, J. A. (ed.), Southern Illionois University Press, Carbondale & Edwardsville, 1981, p. 64.
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for a rather textbook like exposition see Dewey, J. and Tufts, J., Ethics in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 7: 1932, Boydston, J. A. (ed.), Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale & Edwardsville, 1985;
for a brief comparative analysis of ethical theories see Dewey, J., “Three Independent Factors in Morals” in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, Vol. 5: 1929–1930, Boydston, J. A. (ed.), Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale & Edwardsville, 1984;
See for example, Aboulafia, M., Bookman, M., and Kemp, C. (eds.), Habermas and Pragmatism, Routledge, London, 2002;
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and Coppock, V., Haydon, D., and Richter, I., The Illusions of “Post-Feminism”: New Women, Old Myths, Taylor & Francis, London, 1995.
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© 2014 Clara Fischer
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Fischer, C. (2014). Introduction. In: Gendered Readings of Change. Breaking Feminist Waves. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342720_1
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