Gender and the Exclusionary Politics of Social Knowledge: men and women in the Civic Federation of Chicago

This study of the men and women of the Civic Federation of Chicago, which included both academics and activists, considerably expands scholarship surrounding two competing gendered paradigms of knowledge—the masculine neutral, distanced, objective expert versus a feminine mode of inclusive, participatory knowledge and activism. It suggests that this second mode allowed reformers to see values and practices as socially constructed, not as the result of natural laws. These conclusions have implications far beyond the realm of social science or the national boundaries of the United States. The epistemology that ‘won’ is implicated in the very foundations of liberal democracy, and its elitist tendencies.