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Book Reviews and Critical Notices

Review of Núria Sara Miras Boronat & Michela Bella (eds), Women in Pragmatism: Past, Present and Future

Springer, Cham, 2022
Federica Castelli
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Núria Sara Miras Boronat & Michela Bella (eds), Women in Pragmatism: Past, Present and Future, Springer, Cham, 2022

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1Women in Pragmatism investigates the entanglements and resonances between pragmatism and the issues, struggles, and voices of women and feminist thought. As well as describing the theme and contents of the volume, Women in Pragmatism also describes the posture of women who wrote the essays holding together their being women and pragmatists and making the two approaches interact with respect to their own specific disciplines and fields of research.

2Far from being a collection of individual papers held together by an overarching framework, as academic publishing often understands curatorship and collective scholarly works (especially in the humanities), the text organizes itself – its structure, themes, approach, and the issues it raises – in an unexpected, rich and enlivening way that reflects the pragmatist and feminist ideas of knowledge. Thus, this is a pragmatist text not only because it is concerned with pragmatism, but because it itself rehearses many of its precepts. The volume embodies its theoretical posture. It puts it into practice. And importantly, it combines this with a tapestry of knowledge practices that are-and-must-be cooperative and corporeal; where gender and difference are not cast as incidental, as objects of study or as tokens of academic knowledge.

3Right from the introduction, the editors put this perspective into practice, questioning the meaning of producing a collective and cooperative volume aimed not so much at the exclusive production of a scholarly text (which is of very high quality anyway) but at the creation of a community of research. Not a closed volume, then, but one that opens to the multiplication of relationships, approaches and research. In this sense, the book takes up the feminist and pragmatist challenge to the traditional academy, moving from an individualistic idea of knowledge as an end in itself to knowledge that creates alliances, makes kin, and produces practices. The intent of this collective gesture, in which women and non-binary queer subjectivities re-think and re-write pragmatist genealogies, is to give life to, and nurture, a kinship which is at once feminist and pragmatist; a kinship that has been beginning to coalesce since the 1990s, when pragmatist genealogies and voices of women within the pragmatist tradition first began to be claimed. This volume takes up its challenge by reconnecting with that inaugural gesture and reframing it in the contemporary context; one which has radically changed in just a few decades. Of course, being part of the community is not just about being an expert scholar of pragmatist authors. It means becoming mentors, colleagues, and friends of others, putting “sympathetic understanding” into practice.

4The fact that the volume was preceded by an international Conference – the “Women in Pragmatism Conference” held in Barcelona in 2020 (the first of its kind in Europe) – reveals the nature of the volume’s project, which precisely blooms from a context of dialogue and confrontation and aims to build a bridge to continue the exchange and help foster a supportive community of thought and research. During the decades preceding this meeting, several authors and academics had opened spaces to explore possible entanglements between feminisms and pragmatism; those that have occurred, and those yet to occur. The introduction by Marilyn Fischer and Barbara J. Lowe reconstructs a genealogy of proximity made up of meetings, panels, and groups. And challenges. Charlene Haddock Seigfried recounts the play of these entanglements over the years by recovering and building on women’s contribution to pragmatism, putting before us a galaxy born out of a sense of urgency shared by Jane Addams herself: to create channels, to open spaces, in which new energies can flow (p. 9).

5The volume is organized into three parts. The first – Past: The Recovery of the Classics – focuses on the recovery of a long-sidelined – or forgotten – tradition linking women and pragmatism. The aim is not to focus on individual voices as isolated, but to look at reflections and practices to naming approaches and epistemologies outside traditional, universalizing, phallologocentric lines. In this section we find the essay by Sara Núria Miras Boronat (p. 27-40), editor of the volume together with Michela Bella, who demonstrates how a pragmatist feminist theory of oppression “can enrich our views on how oppression is originated, maintained and resisted” (p. 29), in an essay centered on the tools offered by three experiences. First, the projects connected to Hull House (in particular Hull House’s Maps and Papers and its approach to the intersection of gender, race, class) and the creation of a social method aimed at cultivating shared and cooperative knowledge of social situations that lends to the acquisition of political and social agency by marginalized groups in Chicago. Second, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her book Women and Economics (1898), in which an organic theory of economics is intertwined with the denaturalization of women’s oppression, shown as social and not justified by any natural predisposition or characteristic, and the relationship between the sexes is read as an economic relationship. And finally, we find Anna Julia Cooper, the double oppression of black women, her idea of sympathetic knowledge as “the art of ‘thinking one’s self imaginatively into the experience of others’.”

6Similarly, in their essays Susan Petrilli (p. 41-54) and Zoe Hurley (p. 55-66) focus on the contribution made to the reflection on language by Victoria Welby, and her non-anthropocentric, relational, contextual, ethical view of meaning. Michela Bella (p. 67-81) writes on Mary Whiton Calkins, placing her into dialogue with William James, focusing on the possibilities opened up by a “relational” and non-reductionist posture of psychology, which was typical of the analytic tradition flourishing in the United States in those years. Paloma Pérez-Ilzarbe then focuses on Christine Ladd’s innovative view of logic (p. 82- 94).

7The second part of the volume – Present: Contributions to Current Pragmatist Debates – focuses on current debates within pragmatism from an embodied, gendered, and situated position. This section features essays on the intertwining of pragmatism and feminism between linguistic, ethical, and epistemological issues, such as those by Llanos Navarro (p. 97-109), Spivey (p. 110-21), and Wellan (p. 123-34). Here, Teresa Roversi (p. 135-45) reflects on how Dewey can be a useful interlocutor for rethinking the historical, relational and social dimensions of personhood, going beyond individuality and selfhood, and showing how the anti-metaphysical positions of pragmatism can meet the situated, relational and embodied ontologies of feminism. Dina Mendonça’s (p. 146-58) and Maura Striano’s (p. 159-70) essays focus on the contribution of the pragmatist vision to Philosophy for Children and educational theories by virtue of the pragmatist approach centered on emotions and care, mental non-resistance, sympathetic knowledge, which redefine the idea of subjects and democracy with both epistemic and practical implications. Adopting a pragmatist view of truth – which renders truth a function of context –, sound judgment can only emerge from knowledge of the complexity of social situations. Logical processes and political ideals are validated not by formal processes, but from a contextual and social perspective (p. 161). Truth, therefore, develops and changes over time. This requires an experimental, flexible, imaginative, resilient, open and above all situated approach (which meets Sandra Harding’s feminist standpoint epistemology), with obvious moral and social implications. Focusing on the epistemic and educational value of experience is, according to Striano, particularly urgent in the contemporary setting: “The challenge of immigration and intercultural education is, indeed, an exemplary political and social test for contemporary democratic societies and a good test bench for Addams’s ideas” (p. 169).

8Finally, the third part – From the Past to the Future: Interdisciplinary Approaches and Global Changes – explores the chances and challenges of this dialogue made of interdisciplinarity and contaminations. Laura Camas Garrido (p. 173-86) takes into account the Playground Movement and the attention given by Addams to the nexus of play, sociality and citizenship as tools for today, in order to rethink roles and agency in the public sphere and “socialize” our democracies. In a similar vein, Ager Pérez Casanovas (p. 187-98) brings Maxine Green’s notion of “aesthetic education” into dialogue with the Philosophy of education, proposing a redefinition of the role of education with respect to democratic life, whilst Ann Warde (p. 199-212) explores resonances between Addams’ approach and art education.

9Pauline Lefebvre (p. 213-23) questions proximities and distances, encounters made and missed, between a feminist and a pragmatist view of architecture. Another relevant theme is raised by Agnieszka Hensoldt (p. 237-49), who reads degrowth and environmental issue from a pragmatist and feminist perspective, through Addams, Gilman, Crane, and their intertwined critique of capitalism and patriarchal domination. Finally, in this section we find Brosseau’s essay (p. 225-35) on the use of pragmatist tools in the analysis of feminist issues, geared toward the production of knowledge of oppressed groups. In reimagining the group not in terms of shared “identity” but as shared social experience, the author puts Young and Dewey in dialogue: Is it possible to apply Dewey to feminism? If so, to what effects?

10These three sections show the possibility of doing feminist and pragmatist genealogy along different, intertwined lines: pragmatism and women; pragmatist women who have pursued struggles and research with a posture that we now call feminist; pragmatist women who are feminists because they root into this intertwining; women who revive the reflections of women who have crossed pragmatism to respond to new questions opened by the contemporary world; the genealogy of a feminist and pragmatist community. And many others. The approaches of the essays vary according to the varied philosophical orientations and disciplinary modes that each embodies. But rather than organizing the essays according to such disciplinary divisions, the volume brings them together organically, teasing-out on the concatenations and correspondences between the issues and approaches of each contribution.

11Plural and intertwining genealogies, situated knowledge, relation, contamination (which is not the assimilation of each other’s thought), intersectional approach, embodied gaze, neither neutral nor universalizing, cooperative intelligence: the vitality and richness of this kinship are vivid and perceptible in each essay. The volume, therefore, exposes in a plural, lively, yet articulate way how pragmatism and feminism are connected to one another and why it is necessary for both to recognize each other. It works on entanglements and conjunctures, showing how debates about oppression, domination, exploitation, and discrimination are now central to both feminist and pragmatist debates. For this reason, the volume works at the interweaving of various disciplines, realizing in practice the interdisciplinarity intrinsic to both feminism and pragmatism.

12In the Introduction, moreover, the situatedness of the feminist personal-political nexus emerges clearly. The lives of the authors and editors during the pandemic are recounted, foregrounding how this volume is born of relationships and shared experiences that accompany the volume over time, amid difficulties, surprises, and desires. The editors name the ties – scientific and relational – that bound them through years. In this sense, the volume is really the fruit of the intertwining experiences of a community that comes to life in an embodied sense, not merely with a view to a specific scholarly or editorial product, nor in the abstract, almost ideological sense of a convergence of knowledge. Knowledge is made and remade together, day by day, enfolding lives lived and prefiguring lives to be lived. The text, as the editors say in the introduction, stands as “testimony of the sorority growing within the pragmatist and feminist community” (p. xii). What emerges is the absolute necessity of occasions like this in every field of research. A radical new sense of what it is to be a scholar, against and beyond the individualizing and neoliberal logics that mark academic contexts. A space to name connections, debts, and esteem for the work of others. As a woman and as a feminist interested in approaches to knowledge that can open up spaces, can create support, and can engender networks, I think the volume is precious and inestimable, for practices, posture, and content.

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Federica Castelli, Review of Núria Sara Miras Boronat & Michela Bella (eds), Women in Pragmatism: Past, Present and FutureEuropean Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy [Online], XVI-2 | 2024, Online since 19 December 2024, connection on 23 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/4417; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12yw2

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Federica Castelli

Roma Tre University
federica.castelli[at]uniroma3.it

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