Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness: Sandra Lee Bartky

by  TERRELL WALKER

      "To be a feminist, one has first to becomc one." In becoming a feminist, the person must be able to transfigure her or himselfand her or his personal perspective of experiencing.
       The feminist consciousness, changes behavior and consciousness of those becoming. A change in behavior relates to the type of life one has, the bearing one has with it and when one acts in the "social reality." The changes in consciousness, are changes in how you perceive or interpret, and define meaning in one's life. The social reality Bartky speaks of the reality of women's social collective lives, is where women are oppressed.
       Bartky first, shows the superficiality of the Marxist theory regarding the oppression of women. Marxism relates women's oppression back to the economic development and one's relative position to the means of production. "The fact of economic development are crucial to an understanding of any phenomenon of social change, but they are not the phenomenon in its entirety." What the Marxists need is the infusion of an open system, the phenomenological perspective in the analysis social change.
       Bartky, outlining her existential feminism states, "The very meaning of what the feminist apprehends is illuminated by the light of what ought to be: the given situation is first understood in terms of a state of affairs not yet actual and in this sense a possibiliy, a state of affairs in which what is given would be negated and radically transformed. . .  Feminists are not aware of different things than other people; they are aware of the same things differendy." Feminist consciousness is a new state of mind and view of the total social world, and that of the encompassing oppression of women.       Feminist consciousness is a consciousness of being victimized. A person experiences victimization when she is receiving any form of offensive harm. Bartky states that "feminist consciousness has a positive and negative effect." The positive effect, "leads to the search both for ways of overcoming those weaknesses in ourselves which support the system and for direct forms of struggle against the system itself"; the negative effect, the tendency to produce confusion, guilt, and paralysis in the political sphere."
       Through culture and language, our dialect, choice of words and expression sometimes have more meaning subliminally than on the surface. Bartky wants feminists to be aware constantly that "many things are not what they seem to be, and since many apparently harmless sorts of things can suddenly exhibit a sinister dimension, social reality is revealed as deceptive."  With this some feminists, she states, suffer from "double ontological shock; first the realization that what is really happening is quite different from what appears to be happening; and second, the frequent inabiliy to tell what is really happening at all."
       Bartky wants to elucidate that feminist consciousness is that consciousness which rips women from their own world and forces them to deal with the ill-morals and fatal inconsistencies of the male dominating world. From this position, women are plain objects of malice, and without the stability of an ethical realiy, women suffer from a socially-instilled paranoia, from the ambiguity of an institutional gender-based hatred. This consciousness for Bartky should allow "coming to see things differendy, we make out possibilities for liberating collective action as well as unprecedented personal growth possibilities that a deceptive sexist social reality has heretofore concealed." And when people totally understand things, it opens up new avenues to change them.