Analytic feminism applies analytic concepts and methods to feminist issues and applies feminist concepts and insights to issues that traditionally have been of interest to analytic philosophers. Analytic feminists, like analytic philosophers more generally, value clarity and precision in argument and use logical and linguistic analysis to help them achieve that clarity and precision. Unlike non-feminists, they insist on recognizing and contesting sexism (practices that take women and feminine things to be inferior to men and masculine things) and androcentrism (practices that take males or men or men's life experiences to be the norm or the ideal for human life). Analytic feminism holds that the best way to counter sexism and androcentrism is through forming a clear conception of and pursuing truth, logical consistency, objectivity, rationality, justice, and the good, while recognizing that these notions have often been perverted by androcentrism throughout the history of philosophy. Analytic feminists engage the literature traditionally thought of as analytic philosophy, but also draw on other traditions in philosophy, as well as work by feminists working in other disciplines, especially the social and biological sciences.

Analytic feminists assert the sex/gender distinction, a distinction between the biological concept of sex and the socially constructed concept of gender (non-isomorphic to sex), though they may disagree widely on how this distinction is to be drawn and what moral or political implications it has. Although they share the conviction that the social constructions of gender create a fundamentally unjust imbalance in contemporary social and political arrangements, there is no other political thesis generally held by them. Many analytic feminists are not political philosophers, but those who are defend political views that reflect progressive positions found in contemporary non-feminist political philosophy, from liberalism (Okin, 1989) to socialism (MacKinnon, 1989). They also draw on views of previous generations of feminist political philosophers from John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft to Friederich Engels, Emma Goldman, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Analytic feminists, like non-analytic feminists, have written much about social and political issues like abortion, pornography, prostitution, rape, sexual harassment, surrogacy, and violence against women. What characterizes analytic feminism here is the use of logical analysis and, sometimes, decision theoretic analysis (Cudd, 1993).

Analytic feminists often defend traditional analytic methods and concepts against criticism from non-analytic feminists. Many non-analytic feminists charge (in various ways) that the notions of reason, truth, objectivity, or the methods of logical and linguistic analysis are hopelessly masculinist, and cannot be reclaimed for feminist purposes. They criticize canonical philosophers, including Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Rousseau, Frege, Quine, and Rawls, as sexist or at least androcentric, and at times suggest that these philosophers have nothing useful to say to women. These charges challenge feminist philosophers who have been trained in the analytic tradition and who find that tradition valuable. To reject philosophers on those grounds, they argue, would indict similarly almost the entire history of philosophy. The question analytic feminists ask is whether those androcentric or sexist writings can be corrected and rescued by an enlightened critical reader. Annette Baier's work on Hume in "Hume, the Women's Moral Theorist?" and "Hume, the Reflective Women's Epistemologist?" (Baier, 1994), Marcia Homiak's work on Aristotle in "Feminism and Aristotle's Rational Ideal" (Antony and Witt, 1993), Barbara Herman's work on Kant in "Could It Be Worth Thinking About Kant on Sex and Marriage?" (Antony and Witt, 1993) exemplify such attempts.

Analytic feminism holds that many traditional philosophical notions are not only normatively compelling, but also in some ways empowering and liberating for women. While post-modern feminism rejects the universality of truth, justice, and objectivity and the univocality of "women", analytic feminism defends these notions. They recognize that to reject a view because it is false or oppressive to women, one needs some rational, objective ground from which we can argue that it is in fact false or oppressive. An important task for analytic feminism involves investigating the objectivity of science. Helen Longino's Science as Social Knowledge (Longino, 1990) was the first such analytic feminist work. Elizabeth Anderson's "Feminist Epistemology: An Interpretation and a Defense" (Anderson, 1995) shows how a carefully aimed feminist critique can improve the objectivity of science by distinguishing and illustrating four ways that feminist critiques have corrected the distorted lenses of masculinist science: through the critique of gendered structures in the social organization of science, through the analysis of gendered symbols in scientific models, through exposing sexism in scientific practices and focuses, and through revealing androcentrism in its concepts and theories. In its analysis of traditional philosophical topics like objectivity and new topics such as sexism in language (Vetterling-Braggin, 1981), analytic feminism reveals the blurriness of the distinction between metaphysics, epistemology, and social/political philosophy.

Bibliography

     Anderson, Elizabeth, "Feminist Epistemology: An Interpretation and a Defense," Hypatia, vol.10 (Summer 1995).

     Antony, Louise M. and Witt, Chalotte, eds., A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, Boulder, Colorado, 1993.

     Baier, Annette C., Moral Prejudices, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994.

     Cudd, Ann E., "Oppression by Choice," Journal of Social Philosophy, vol. 25 (1994).

     Cudd, Ann E. and Klenk, Virginia, eds., Hypatia, vol.10 (Summer 1995). (This is a special issue of the feminist philosophy  journal devoted to analytic feminism.)

     Grimshaw, Jean, Philosophy and Feminist Thinking, Minneapolis, 1986.

     Longino, Helen, Science as Social Knowledge, Princeton, 1990.

     MacKinnon, Catharine A., Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989.

     Nelson, Lynn Hankinson, Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism, Philadelphia, 1990.

     Okin, Susan Moller, Justice, Gender and the Family, Boston, 1989.

     Vetterling-Braggin, Mary, ed., Sexist Language: A Modern Philosophical Analysis, Lanham, Maryland, 1981.