Toward a Pragmatist and Feminist Theory of Oppression: Thoughts on Class, Gender, and Race

Abstract

The pragmatist political tradition has often been accused of assuming an excessively optimistic view of democracy and of lacking an appropriate account of how class, gender, or race can shape the experience of the most vulnerable citizens within our political systems. The pragmatist genealogy has indeed reproduced the bias of the traditional philosophical canon by neglecting the contributions of theorists who at the very beginning paid attention to the vulnerability of certain collectives and sought to overcome this bias by using pragmatists and progressivist tools. This chapter proposes to recover the insights of Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. E. B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper on social issues that are useful not only to understand the sufferings of the less privileged but also to offer solutions to these social evils.