Bartky, Sandra Lee

Educated at the University of Illinois at Urbana (BA, MA, PhD), Sandra Lee Bartky (b. 1935) is a passionate theorist of political responsibility and moral agency. From the late 1950s, she was active in the civil rights movement. Later, she joined her university's chapter of New University Conference, which by her own account led her away from existentialism and into Marxism (Strobel 1995:57). In the 1970s, Bartky's experiences as an activist led to her central role in forming a women's liberation group as well as a women's studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she began and now continues her academic career. Today, the Gender and Women's Studies Program is a thriving enterprise. Bartky has also participated in the environmentalist movement as well as various antiwar movements. She is also a founder of the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP).

Feminist philosopher and award-winning professor, Bartky stands on the cutting edge of feminist theory. Her work illustrates how a feminist phenomenology, informed by Marxian and other ideas, can promote not only personal transformation but also social change and cultural transformation. Dramatically illustrative is the contemporary classic Bartky has contributed to feminist theory. Widely used in women's studies and philosophy classes, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (1990) is a masterpiece that emphasizes the thoroughgoing embodiment of consciousness. It underscores Bartky's commitment to raising women's consciousness while also influencing the women's movement. Like other feminist theorists but more powerfully than most, Bartky (1990) also has academic goals. She seeks to intervene in “traditional philosophy” as well as in social constructions of the “chauvinized woman.” Hers is interventionist social theorizing centered on women's embodied consciousness.

Bartky's theorizing in Femininity and Domination revolves around a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Suspicious of her own interpretive stances as well as those endorsed across various institutions, her analytical voice is as careful as it is forceful. At the same time, it is both critical and hopeful, blending a “pessimism of the intellect” with an “optimism of the will.” Bartky's own lived experiences, occasionally revisited with disciplined passion, serve her as a theoretical resource, as do her astute readings of Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, and Jean-Paul Sartre (among others).

That Bartky's feminist theorizing is fundamentally phenomenological becomes clear in the first essay, “Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness.” Approaching social reality as a “social lifeworld” and seeing feminist consciousness as “anguished,” “uncertain,” and “confused,” Bartky argues that feminists are conscious of the same realities as other members of society, but they define those realities differently and respond to them critically. As the phenomenologist Alfred Schütz might have put it, feminists typically bring a distinctive system of relevances to their experiences. The realities they experience as “alien,” “hostile,” and “unjust” continually sediment their women-centered relevances.

From Bartky's perspective, what fuels feminist relevances is, above all, alienation. Given her alienated, that is, divided or split consciousness, the female person with feminist consciousness is attuned to the deceptive, contradictory character of the social lifeworld. She thus inclines toward wary anticipation of the affronts built into respectable, taken-for-granted practices. Worst of all, perhaps, feminist consciousness includes wariness of one's self that characteristically finds expression in self-vigilance. Bartky concludes that feminist consciousness emerges in a person not only alienated from her world but also split within herself, whose everyday life occasions substantial resistance as well as continual vigilance.

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