Women, class and generation
This book sounds fascinating, even if I suspect one might also sometimes wish to have at the subjects (or at least Murdoch) with a codfish: Boo to the Boo-Hurrahs: how four Oxford women transformed philosophy. Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley took on the male consensus-and revolutionised modern ethics: The four profited from the opening of Oxbridge to female students during the war. Winning a place was a torturous process in the late 1930s: Oxford’s entry rules expressly stipulated a ratio of four men to each woman, meaning only 250 places were available. Applicants were also required to have two or three languages, including Latin and Greek, subjects often unavailable to girls. “In normal times,” noted Midgley, “a lot of good female thinking is wasted because it simply doesn’t get heard.” But these were not normal times. From 1939 to 1942, the war meant the student body was predominantly female. The effect, notes Midgley, was not only to “make it a great deal easier for women to be heard in discussion,” but also-and this is understood with greater clarity now-for a diminution of “the amount of work that one thinks is needed to make one’s opinion worth hearing.” It allowed space for the women to tackle the philosophy dominating Oxford at the time.
(I hope some credit is given to Dame Janet Vaughan as Principal of Somerville at the time... that entry is not very good: I suspect it was due to her presence on the relevant committee that all medical schools were opened to women at the inception of the NHS.)
We note - and I think this is a combination of their position as elite intellectuals in a particular milieu and at a very specific period: One area not explored much is that of sex and gender. In a way, this mirrors the women’s writing. Lipscomb notes that only Midgley wrote anything about the (philosophical) question of “women,” and then mostly in the context of being allowed to think and to work. This blindness to feminist ethics is revealing. In part it is a function of the era in which they worked, but not completely; they all lived through various waves of feminism. And yet the ethical battles they were involved in-even when about abortion-were, it seems, purely intellectual ones. One can imagine contemporary feminists seeing some maddening abstraction in their work, as they themselves did in the Oxford ethicists. Questions about female embodiment and intersectionality, so crucial to current feminist thinking, are absent from their “gender-neutral” work-and from this book. In fact, Lipscomb does not mention feminism at all until the penultimate chapter; and, despite the title, there is no attempt to situate these philosophers’ ethical positions as women in a wider context.
While in Murdoch's novels abortion does very occasionally feature it does so rather as an abstract ethical issue over which the male characters angst pretty much as much or more than the women, and her novels certainly lack that engagement with embodied experience around reproduction etc found in contemporaries such as Doris Lessing or the 'rebel women' in critical works lately discussed here.
A rather lovely contrast may be found here: Vernacular Discourses of Gender Equality in the Post-War British Working Class.
I think possibly it underestimates preceding influences within Women's Labour/Cooperative Guild on women in the communities explored. But it does suggest the role of popular media (women's magazines) though possibly not so much radio (which gave Winnicott's ideas massive circulation); and the move of married women into 'second shift' paid work.
Though it doesn't mention - and I do wonder about it as a factor in women thinking about themselves differently - this was the generation which first received the Family Allowance, recognising women's contribution as wives-and-mothers and something paid directly to them.
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