Lesson 3 - Women’s Ways of Knowing
- Western male reasoning uses images that are related to visuals, seeing or illumination to
represent knowledge.
- A study on women by institutions of learning showed that listening is more representative of
their knowledge than seeing.
- Women associate silence with knowledge as they themselves were often left unheard and silent.
- In the study, silence and voice were dominant themes for women – a person who had
knowledge and authority was supposed to be listened to, but women who spoke out
were silenced.
- To be quite was to feel dumb as the voice had come to represent one’s intellectual
and ethical development.
- To have a voice was to have a self.
- To have a voice was to develop a sense of voice.
- The role of universal caregiving in all societies was given to women.
- Girls learned to be women by copying their mothers and boys learned to be men
through a disassociation with their mother’s role.
- Girls learned through association and connectedness
- Women learned through empathy.
- Men learned through the separation of the self from the other.
- Women use the following perspectives to see the world and to understand knowledge and truth:
1. Silence. This indicates an absence of thought or reflection.
- They are often disconnected from their families and communities due to their
situation, the geographic separation of the families from the greater
community and suffocation.
- These women usually come from families that are abusive or violent.
- Their knowledge comes from authorities and focuses on their need to survive.
- They lack the ability to understand abstract thought
- They do not enjoy a space for introspection given their environment growing
up.
- There is no dialogue with the self.
- Women without a voice end up having no internal voice as well, no
self-perception and lack of identity.
2. Receive knowledge: listening to the voices of others. Received knowledge is developed
by absorbing knowledge
- Women listen to friends and authorities and understand what is being said
enough for them to repeat the words.
- Women are able to do the right thing by following the rules of authority
figures.
- They value authority and cannot comprehend paradoxes
- If two of her authorities have contradicting information, she will not be able to
distinguish which one is correct.
- She will use arbitrary means to decide who is telling the truth
- Western male reasoning uses images that are related to visuals, seeing or illumination to
represent knowledge.
- A study on women by institutions of learning showed that listening is more representative of
their knowledge than seeing.
- Women associate silence with knowledge as they themselves were often left unheard and silent.
- In the study, silence and voice were dominant themes for women – a person who had
knowledge and authority was supposed to be listened to, but women who spoke out
were silenced.
- To be quite was to feel dumb as the voice had come to represent one’s intellectual
and ethical development.
- To have a voice was to have a self.
- To have a voice was to develop a sense of voice.
- The role of universal caregiving in all societies was given to women.
- Girls learned to be women by copying their mothers and boys learned to be men
through a disassociation with their mother’s role.
- Girls learned through association and connectedness
- Women learned through empathy.
- Men learned through the separation of the self from the other.
- Women use the following perspectives to see the world and to understand knowledge and truth:
1. Silence. This indicates an absence of thought or reflection.
- They are often disconnected from their families and communities due to their
situation, the geographic separation of the families from the greater
community and suffocation.
- These women usually come from families that are abusive or violent.
- Their knowledge comes from authorities and focuses on their need to survive.
- They lack the ability to understand abstract thought
- They do not enjoy a space for introspection given their environment growing
up.
- There is no dialogue with the self.
- Women without a voice end up having no internal voice as well, no
self-perception and lack of identity.
2. Receive knowledge: listening to the voices of others. Received knowledge is developed
by absorbing knowledge
- Women listen to friends and authorities and understand what is being said
enough for them to repeat the words.
- Women are able to do the right thing by following the rules of authority
figures.
- They value authority and cannot comprehend paradoxes
- If two of her authorities have contradicting information, she will not be able to
distinguish which one is correct.
- She will use arbitrary means to decide who is telling the truth
