Dreaming the World: Feminisms in Public Administration

Author(s): Camilla Stivers

Source: Administrative Theory & Praxis , Jun., 2005, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Jun., 2005), pp.
364-369
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

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 364 Administrative Theory & Praxis *Vol. 27, No. 2

Dreaming the World: Feminisms in Public

Administration
Camilla Stivers
Cleveland State University

Maybe it's because I'm writing just as the old year gives way to a new
one, but this forum spurs me to reflect on my involvement with feminist
theory in public administration, and what lessons it might hold for the
role of feminisms in our field. Constitutionally I'm an optimist, but I
must admit that reflection on the past doesn't make me terribly hope
ful. A bedrock idea, though, in feminisms of all kinds is the ability and
importance of learning from personal experience. On that basis, please
pardon this approach to the topic.
I first began to think about feminism in PA about 20 years ago. (At
that point I would have been delirious at the emergence of "feminism"
of almost any sort, much less "feminisms"). To a graduate student, the
discovery of an unstaked-out piece of theoretical turf is generally
thought to enliven the mind with pioneer spirit, and I have to admit that
as I began working on the first version of Gender Images, I felt much
like an explorer setting off across terra incognita. I had very little idea
of where this quest might actually lead in any substantive way. But I
said at the time "that developing an understanding of the connection
between habits of thought and societal arrangements.. .can lead human
beings to take concrete actions that will change things for the better....
Altering the composition of the public administration 'choir' will do lit
tle unless its members become conscious of the need to sing different
tunes from the ones currently in the repertoire, but that given the latter,
much is possible" (Stivers, 1993, p. 10)?as you see, a lot of optimism,
striking naivete, and no small amount of ego.
The book's two editions sold well, probably because there are a great
many women in PA classes now, and many of them felt as I did when I
was a student: Could the presence of women in public agencies be of
such little moment that it was not worth discussing? Were there no wo
men worth reading except Mary Parker Follett? Had the thorny issue of
the differences between women and men somehow been resolved while
we weren't looking? O. C. McSwite recently observed that Gender
Images "gave the field its intellectual and moral equivalent of 'Diversity
Day'" (2004, p. 418). Using it is proof of one's political correctness, but
it doesn't have to disturb theoretical business as usual. A subsequent

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Hutchinson, et al. 365

book, a history of the field informed by gender, sank like a stone, leav
ing few ripples.
Even within the Public Administration Theory Network, which
might be expected to be a hospitable environment, feminist theorizing
has been a rare bird, a perpetually endangered species. Of the few femi
nist theory panels at Network conferences, I have mostly painful recol
lections. (This is particularly true of the plenary panel at the Richmond
conference in 1997, on "Discussing the Undiscussable," which promi
nently featured issues of gender and sexuality, and to which the audi
ence's negative reaction to the implicit challenge was "We prefer not
to.")
Outside our own beloved wildlife refuge, the scholarly environment
tends toward hostility. Even the word "feminist" seems to evoke scorn,
if not outright snarling. One gray eminence, who shall remain unnamed,
within a few pages of published rejoinder called an essay of mine "bi
zarre," "righteous," "tendentious," "oddly simplistic," "aligned with a
genteel 'cultural feminism,'" "prim," "opportunistic," "biased," "dan
gerous to the profession," "anarchistic," "specious and irrelevant to the
project of running a constitution," and so on. (All this reminds me of
the advice a community organizer gave me long ago: "If they're going
to put you on the hot seat, be sure to wear your asbestos drawers.")
Perhaps at this point you'll be thinking that I should celebrate the
appearance of a forum on "feminisms in PA" instead of belaboring my
own dissatisfaction. I dwell on it only in order to raise a deeper ques
tion, which is: What is it about public administration that has made it so
impervious to feminist inroads? In the mid-1980s, when feminist fer
ment was patent in neighboring fields like organizational sociology and
political philosophy, I could find only one issue of Public Administra
tion Review that included anything dealing with women. The situation is
better today, but not that much better. One can find articles on women
in the practice of public administration, but still very little that takes
seriously the question of how feminism of any kind requires us to think
differently about central questions in the field. (The other authors in
this symposium are the ones to thank for the exceptions to this rule, and
I do thank them all, fervently.)
The organizing assumption behind this forum, that there are many
feminist approaches, is surely correct. Many books on feminist theory in
recent years have attempted to sort out the different types?useful
work, but it seems to me there is probably room for all of them in pub
lic administration. I'm rather more interested in what has made too
many of them pretty well ignored if not derided within the field.

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 366 Administrative Theory & Praxis Vb/. 27, No. 2

I remain committed to a commodious definition of feminism, one

that makes room for every variety I've encountered so far. To be a fem
inist, in my book, binds one to three things: (1) to the idea that gender
is a crucially useful category of analysis, a framework or lens that en
ables one to see important things that otherwise remain invisible or ob
scured; (2) to a critical perspective on women's current status and
prospects, and, (3) as Gerda Lerner once put it, to "a system of ideas
and practices which assumes that men and women must share equally in
the work, in the privileges, in the defining and dreaming of the world"
(quoted in Astin & Leland, 1991, p. 19).
People of both sexes, of course, can look through what has been
called the gender lens. What they see is patterns of behavior, of inter
personal dynamics, of the allocation of resources, of power, that are
hard if not impossible to see otherwise. It has long puzzled me why so
few men in PA have availed themselves of this lens (despite, I might
add, personal encouragement, not to say pleading, from me and others).
True, the roles society has assigned to women give rise to paradoxes in
their lives (what sociologists unfelicitously love to call "role strain")
that men by and large tend to escape. Feminism helps women make
sense at last of experiences that otherwise seem crazy to them?exper
iences they once chalked up to their own hang-ups. (The word Gloria
Steinem and other second-wave feminists used for these sudden insights
was "Click!") I don't know, however, of any fundamental reason why
men should not have these moments of enlightenment as well?unless
you believe that privilege insulates people from enlightenment, which I
do not. Some of these moments are powerful enough to change you
forever. In a broader sense, they arm you to see certain things that go
on in the world as conditional rather than inevitable, to enable you to
find, as Foucault once said, "in what is given to us as universal, neces
sary, obligatory," that which is "singular, contingent, and the product of
arbitrary constraints" (1984, p. 315).
Feminist theory is not so much instrumental as constitutive?world
creating. Rather than being a tool to apply to reality "out there," as a
hammer to a nail, feminist theory organizes, frames, and makes the
world meaningful. What is distinctive about feminism is not its reality
construction but the animating norms that shape the construction pro
cess, which have to do with equality in defining and dreaming the
world. Such equality is more difficult to bring off than it might seem. It
has little to do with positions at the starting line (as in "equal opportu
nity") and much to do with dropping unnecessary conceptual baggage
and comfortable but limiting life practices.

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Hutchinson, et al. 367

I like Richard Rorty's way of characterizing this effort?as

"redescription," which entails feats of the imagination, refusing to ac
cept descriptions of the "real" that keep us from addressing questions
that seem eccentric from within the existing boundaries of discourse.
"Inventing a reality of our own" that supports "our judgment of the
worthwhile life" (1998, p. 216) has been criticized as wishful thinking,
but in that respect feminist theory seems little different to me from The
Republic, Utopia, or Leviathan. All forms of political theory are efforts
at redescription, which hope to make a persuasive argument in favor of
certain aspects of reality and against others. As the world's significance
changes, ideas and practices that once seemed ordinary get called into
question. These include one's own. This may be why the prospect of
aligning with feminism seems daunting to some. Beforehand, it seems
like a terrible leap into the void. On the other hand, the little moments
of enlightenment have a way of taking on a critical mass, if you let
them, so that eventually you find yourself living differently, yet still the
same in some fundamental way.
Feminism may be different from other redescriptions in one respect.
It is not the sort of theory that can comfortably remain in your own
head or within the confines of journal articles and books. It is, and al
ways has been, as much a practice as a theory. Given this, it is particu
larly strange that a discipline in which the theory-practice question is
endlessly debated has paid so little attention to a framework in which
the two are so thoroughly blended. We'd rather delve into postmodern
ism or pragmatism (two of my favorite topics, I hasten to add). I don't
spend a lot of time (at least not anymore) wondering why this is so. It
undoubtedly has to do with the deep, largely unconscious dimensions of
being human that are destabilized in the face of feminist criticism. (One
indication might be the level of feeling evoked when we actually at
tempt to discuss the undiscussable.) It is perhaps not mere chance that
most of the great redescriptions of Western political theory speak in the
name of order and stability. Feminism doesn't?or at least, it appears
not to on the surface. Underneath, however, can be seen the desire not
for chaos but for reaching a new basis for stability (Feminists don't just
want a place at the table, we want to join with others in making a new
table.)
Of PA theorists, it seems to me O. C. McSwite (1997, 2004) has con
sidered most deeply the issue of gender and its implications for the
field, and attempted to sketch out the practicality of redescribing it this
way. To my knowledge, only s/he gives an inkling of the possible costs

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 368 Administrative Theory & Praxis *Vol. 27, No. 2

to the field and to society of not doing so. (Talk about the "great
refusal!").
I have no way of evoking these costs here except by means of a cau
tionary tale, derived from Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies
Choose to Fail or Succeed (which at the moment of writing I know only
from the detailed New Yorker review, since the book has not yet been
released). Evidently Diamond's argument is that societies collapse not
because of catastrophes beyond their control, such as a dramatic sudden
climate change, but because their cultures bar them from the steps nec
essary to adapt and survive. Not having read the entire book yet, I can't
be sure of its implications in detail, but one story from the review
strikes me.
A thousand years ago, Vikings sailed from Norway and settled along
protected fiords on the southwestern shore of Greenland. The civiliza
tion they established lasted for 450 years, and then vanished. It was
based principally on cattle-raising, which turned out to be ecologically
disastrous, since the short growing season made it impossible to sustain
the grasses, shrubs, and trees necessary to support livestock. The Norse
reproduced the predominant northern European civic model of the
time, and built, among other things, a massive cathedral, complete with
stained-glass windows, bronze candlesticks, and opulent robes for its
clergy. In the end, though, they seem to have starved to death.
True, the climate did get colder in the early 1400s. But the Inuit sur
vived, without the advantages of a more varied food supply, iron tools,
and the ability to exchange goods with Europe. Extensive anthropologi
cal investigation has brought to light the likely answer: on the shores of
an ocean teaming with fish, the Norse refused to eat fish! For some
reason, they had a cultural taboo against it (as well as against intermar
rying with Inuit). Not eating fish was an important element in what it
meant to the Norse to be Norse, and they died rather than change. As
things got worse, they ate their cattle, their newborn calves, even their
dogs?as bones found at the settlement sites attest. "But not fish bones,
of course. Right up until they starved to death, the Norse never lost
sight of what they stood for" (Gladwell, 2005, p. 73).
For me, the lesson of this story is this: The 21st century promises to
be an era in which the United States has to confront the possibility that
survival depends not on ever greater and more effective control over
the circumstances that affect us, but on redescribing the world we live in
and bringing ourselves into some kind of productive relationship with
that world. (Of course, other nations have to learn the same lesson in
their own ways, but I believe the learning will be hardest for us.) I know

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Hutchinson, et al. 369

of few elements in our culture as resistant to change as the ones that

have to do with gender. Many of the taboos associated with it seem to
me similar to the Norse refusal to consume fish when the alternative
was extinction. As we think about how to acquire the wisdom and
strength to deal with terrorism, global warming, the transformation of
the nation-state, and the other pressing challenges that have become
only too familiar, I hope somehow we will find the courage to confront
aspects of ourselves and our society we least like to talk or think about,
and bring up from the Grand Banks of our collective imagination the
insights and practices that will sustain us.

REFERENCES
Astin, H. S., & Leland, C. (1991). Women of influence, women of vision: A
cross-generational study of leaders and social change. San Francisco: Jos
sey-Bass.
Foucault, M. (1984). What is enlightenment? In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault
reader (pp. 32-50). New York: Pantheon.
Gladwell, M. (2005, January 5). The vanishing. The New Yorker, 70-73.
McSwite, O. C. (2004). Creating reality through administrative practice: A psy
choanalytic reading of Camilla Stivers' Bureau Men, Settlement Women.
Administration & Society, 36, 406-426.
McSwite, O. C. (1997). Legitimacy in public administration: A discourse analy
sis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Rorty, R. (1998). Feminism and pragmatism. In Truth and progress: Philosophi
cal papers (Vol. 3, pp. 202-227). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.
Stivers, C. (1993). Gender images in public administration: Legitimacy and the
administrative state. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

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