Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!usc!orion.cf.uci.edu!uci-ics!tittle
From: gretchen@cattell.psych.upenn.EDU (Gretchen Chapman)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: sex/gender
Message-ID: <8907112038.AA14297@cattell.psych.upenn.edu>
Date: 11 Jul 89 22:22:40 GMT
Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu
Lines: 43
Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu

In article <19431@paris.ics.uci.edu> Cindy Tittle quotes me and replies:

>In article <8907071844.AA10158@cattell.psych.upenn.edu>,
>gretchen@cattell (Gretchen Chapman) writes: 
>|	None of these differences, nor any empirical finding
>|imaginable, flies in the face of feminism.  All of these differences
>|and the reasons behind them are *DESCRIPTIVE*; they simply describe
>|the way the world is.  Feminism is a *PRESCRIPTIVE* position; it
>|states the way we should behave to change the world (not everyone
>|agrees on exactly what feminism says, but we all agree that it is
>|prescriptive).

>I disagree with this.  It has been my impression that one of the
>things feminism did was to challenge the *prescriptive* roles for
>women in our society.  I don't see feminism as prescriptive, except
>perhaps for a radical subgroup that condems any woman choosing to
>follow some aspect of a traditional role.  But for the most part, I
>see feminism as a way of encouraging women to see past a largely
>prescriptive role for them in society and discovering what else they
>can do if they want.

>--Cindy

I think you are constraining the meaning of *presciptive* too much.  A
prescriptive position is anything that contains a *should* or an
*ought*.  One prescriptive position could certainly disagree with some
other prescriptive position.  So for example, prescriptive positions
could be something like "Womens should be able to pursue any career
they are interested in" or even "No one should tell anyone else what
to do."  Just because we are challenging other prescriptions does not
mean that we ourselves are not being prescriptive.  My point was only
that our job as feminists is not to deny descriptive facts about the
world (which is one way this gender/sex discussion could go), but to
propose prescriptions about how we should change the world.  My first
example above is an instance of prescribing a *goal*, something we
want to achieve (equal opportunity and all that), but we can also
prescribe *beliefs* (i.e. We should all believe in the equal value of
both women and men) and *actions* or decisions (i.e. We should start a
TV show with better female role models).  We may not all agree on what
these prescriptions should be, but I'd rather have us arguing over
that than trying to re-describe the world in a way that it isn't.
(Describing the world is a fine thing to do, but I don't see that as
the goal of feminism).