Epistemologies of the Oppressed: Pragmatist and Feminist Approaches to Class, Gender, and Race

Abstract

In the last decades, several scholars have reviewed the official genealogy of pragmatism and have challenged the orthodox narrative of its origins. The paper vindicates the legacy of Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Anna Julia Cooper, who were active in the foundations of both movements, feminism and pragmatism, but their contributions remain, until now, barely acknowledged. Following Charlene Haddock Seig- freid’s suggestion in Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweav- ing the Social Fabric (1996), that pragmatist feminism during the progressive era lacked a theory of oppression, a critical examination of their social philosophies is of- fered in order to prove that they did have original thoughts on oppression. An epistemology of the op- pressed is presented in three senses. First, it looks at Jane Addams’s and Hull-House residents social experi- mentalism as a form of producing almost simultaneously social knowledge and concrete social interventions. Second, it takes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” as an example of the use of political imagina- tion to denounce the gender bias of our androcentric culture, which might be an effective means to prevent human costs derived from male domination. Third, it recovers Anna Julia Cooper’s pointing at the ontological negation that affects groups suffering multiple forms of oppression, as Black women of the South, as an inherent danger of the implicit, unconscious dynamics of exclu- sion within activism. To conclude, the paper proposes paths for further research in the direction of a radical feminist and pragmatist approach to social philosophy based upon the perspective of the epistemology of the oppressed.