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

# metadata.dc.description.abstract[].value
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.

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Articles publicats en revistes (Filosofia)

# metadata.dc.title[].value
Epistemologies of the Oppressed: Pragmatist and Feminist Approaches to Class, Gender, and Race