The Theory and Practice of Philosophical Sisterhood
’’Not every night has to be a girls’ night!’’ – says Barbie at the end of Greta Gerwig’s movie.
But some of them – must be. And here’s why.
***
It was one of these long Estonian winters. I had not seen the sun in months. I was also writing my Master’s thesis in philosophy – about death, of all things. It was also in the middle of the COVID-19 outbreak. As a non-EU citizen, I found myself trapped in a foreign country: at some point, it became impossible to go home to Ukraine, even if I wanted to. Thinking about death every day for at least half a year and teaching a course on the Philosophy of Death while receiving increasingly disturbing news and death tolls is quite an unusual way to exist in the world. To say the least, I was very stressed.
One of life's most joyful (and terrifying) traits is that you never know when everything will change irreversibly. My entire worldview turned upside down while I was doom-scrolling on Facebook.
Someone posted a paper, ‘Biobehavioral Responses to Stress in Females: Tend-and-Befriend, Not Fight-or-Flight’, written by a group of researchers from the Department of Psychology in UCLA – Shelley E. Taylor, Laura Cousino Klein, Brian P. Lewis, Tara L. Gruenewald, Regan A. R. Gurung, and John A. Updegraff – in 2000. Here is the access link if you want to see for yourself: https://scholar.harvard.edu/marianabockarova/files/tend-and-befriend.pdf
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This paper challenges the scientific consensus around fight-or-flight stress response in humans and other mammals as gendered. The article suggests that we women do not react to stress the same way as men do because our hormonal systems are wired differently. The authors discovered that most of the research so far has been done by men, with experiments conducted on male subjects. I was outraged to learn that female subjects were consistently excluded from the research because the results they delivered were irrelevant to the hypothesis of fight-or-flight theory. When presented with such results, does one correct the hypothesis or call the subjects ‘hysterical’? The biologists of the past chose the second path.
This case is, unfortunately, far from being the only one in science. It is a part of the data gender gap issue in natural sciences. Women live in a world where ‘human’ means ‘male’, and scientific research has been done exclusively by men for too long. For those sceptical, let me inform you that the first research testing menstrual products with blood was released in 2023 AD. Before, the menstrual products were tested with water or saline solutions, not blood.
When we became a part of scientific research, we noticed these discrepancies. We became curious about ourselves, and the paper I stumbled across is an excellent example of pursuing such curiosity.
***
It turns out that when stressed, we show different hormonal reactions than males, and even if our behaviours might be similar, the motivation and the chemical process are different. Instead of ‘fight-or-flight’, we exhibit a ‘tend-and-befriend’ response. Because female mammals are tending to their children, we cannot afford to ‘flight’ or put ourselves at risk of ‘fight’. Instead, our first instinct is to protect the ones who are smaller than us, and we prepare for stressful situations by befriending other females. It is so intense that the flight attendants must remind us to put the mask on ourselves first. Or did you assume this rule was made for men?
Reading this paper as a female mammal and a philosopher who was very stressed was a life-changing experience. I was really into Camus back then. Doesn’t his rebellion against the absurd resemble a fight response, while (philosophical) suicide – flight? It is not surprising that his writing made me only more stressed, even though I was taught to enjoy that by my philosophy professors, who used to be almost exclusively male.
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That day, I decided two things. First – I should philosophise about birth and not death. And – I should read more female philosophers. In my personal life, to alleviate stress, I immediately initiated a girls’ night with my neighbours.
***
The longer I read female philosophers, philosophised about birth, and threw girls' parties, the more obvious it became to me that these must be united. What if we had a philosopher girls’ party? As in, a fun party, but also a political party?
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Female friendship is a powerful force of nature. The ‘brotherhood of men’ will not save the world. Under ‘brotherhood of men’, there are slaughterhouses, genocides, spaceships, shopping malls, push-up bras, slavery, plastic, human trafficking, golf courts, nuclear bombs, bullfights, child pornography, torture, female prisons, and many other weird things. A sisterhood of women would do a better job – or at least it is worth a try.
***
One of the most successful weapons of patriarchy, maybe after the phosphorous bomb and AK-47, is the separation of women. Patriarchy consistently prevents us from building female friendships, which makes us more stressed all the time and easy to control. It prevents us from seeing each other as sisters – it plants the idea of competition. Here’s what Bell Hooks (1986) has to say about this:
"Male supremacist ideology encourages women to believe we are valueless and obtain value only by relating to or bonding with men. We are taught that our relationships with one another diminish rather than enrich our experience. We are taught that women are 'natural' enemies and that solidarity will never exist between us because we cannot, should not, and do not bond with one another. We have learned these lessons well. We must unlearn them if we are to build a sustained feminist movement. We must learn to live and work in solidarity. We must understand the true meaning and value of Sisterhood."
Your and your children’s survival and well-being, my dear sister, are contingent on how strong your sisterhood network is, not only on your man. And I say that as a Ukrainian. Have you noticed how often there is only one man in a woman’s life to support her? But you are a sister to an endless number of women.
***
Your blood sister might not be sisterly in this sense, and your best friend might be anti-sisterly. We aim for unconditional love for each other and relieving competition, but we cannot and will not tolerate all types of behaviours from one another.
In her commencement address at Barnard College in May 1979, black woman writer Toni Morrison told her audience:
"I want not to ask you but to tell you not to participate in the oppression of your sisters. Mothers who abuse their children are women, and another woman, not an agency, has to be willing to stay their hands. Mothers who set fire to school buses are women, and another woman, not an agency, has to tell them to stay their hands. Women who stop promoting other women in careers are women, and another woman must come to the victim's aid. Social and welfare workers who humiliate their clients may be women, and other women colleagues have to deflect their anger."
Moreover, not all models of sisterhood are as powerful as they could be because some are not radical enough. My view of Sisterhood is calling for political solidarity. In this, I even more agree with Bell Hooks:
"Women are enriched when we bond with one another, but we cannot develop sustaining ties or political solidarity using the model of Sisterhood created by bourgeois women's liberationists. According to their analysis, the basis for bonding was shared victimisation, hence the emphasis on common oppression. This concept of bonding directly reflects male supremacist thinking. Sexist ideology teaches women that to be female is to be a victim."
As a Ukrainian, I feel this strongly. Feminism in Ukraine is a complicated issue (and a long story for a separate essay). Still, victimisation is one of the many reasons why it is hard for my Ukrainian sisters to accept Western feminism. My great-grandmother gave birth to 13 children and lost five of them in their early childhood; she lived through two genocidal famines, two world wars, slavery, and occupation; her husband was drinking too much and did not always treat her body with respect. But if someone tried to tell her she was a victim, she would hit that person with a wooden spoon or whatever else she would have in her hands, even in her 90s.
Bell Hooks: "Women who are exploited and oppressed daily cannot afford to relinquish the belief that they exercise some measure of control, however relative, over their lives. They cannot afford to see themselves solely as 'victims' because their survival depends on continued exercise of whatever personal powers they possess. It would be psychologically demoralising for these women to bond with other women based on shared victimisation. They bond with other women based on shared strengths and resources. This is the woman bonding feminist movement should encourage. It is this type of bonding that is the essence of Sisterhood."
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I am sure that academia will benefit from Sisterhoods flourishing within universities, within fields, within scholarships, and intersections. However, they would be hard to maintain until the second half of the last century because of how little women were in academia. Now, there are more of us – and we should unionise for political aims and personal ones, too. We can and will benefit intellectually and professionally from bonding with other women and creating and enlarging support networks.
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One of the great examples of a philosophical sisterhood is an Italian feminist collective, Diotima, which grows from building relationships and thinking in the presence of others. It is named after Diotima of Mantinea (440 BCE), a Greek priestess and philosopher mentioned in Plato’s dialogue “Symposium”. In a conversation about the meaning of love, she teaches Socrates about the true Eros.
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With all this in mind, I initiated the practice of a Philosophical Sisterhood at the Centre for Ethics. This is an informal female circle for academics (philosophers, religious studies scholars, historians, and more).
Once every three weeks, we gather around a table in a tearoom to have a discussion based on a short text/poem/song that one of us picked to share our experiences and relax in a cosy and accepting environment.
We practice our Sisterhood for over a year now. I am sure I will speak for all of us when I say we created a special friendship in this group. I love how we take at least half an hour before starting the meeting to tell each other how our day was and to share the news, how we laugh and gossip over dinner after the sessions, and how we lead our discussions, accepting each other without judgement and allowing any emotions to be manifested.
Our next step is calling for joint creativity. When women do philosophy, how is it different? This is an open question, and we have very little data to answer this question. However, we can already start the conversation. And I believe that in this conversation, we might unlock the ancient power of philosophy that cannot and will not be contained in the campus walls.
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To sum up, the practice of Sisterhood is rooted in strengthening the bonds between women within communities. One such community is academic philosophy. The aims are diverse: friendship, relaxation, fun, creativity, contemplation, safe space, learning, exchange of experience, political action, mutual support, research, and anything our minds, souls, and bodies can dream of. It is scientifically proven that such practice reduces stress for us. I truly believe that female friendship is one of the powers that still holds the world together despite all odds.
To all my philosophical sisters who read this and feel like you agree, remember that you can create a sisterhood in your university, research centre, or field. This practice can look different, be offline or online, and include various activities. Please reach out to me if you want to chat about this.
If you disagree with anything or if you have questions, please also reach out: let us talk!
If you are also doing something similar already, please reach out and let me know; I would love to learn from you.
I envision a global community of philosophical sisters doing our thing with our discussions, publications, and shared leisure. If we want patriarchy gone, we should start discussing what exactly we want to replace it with. For this, I really need you to let me know that I am not the only one who thinks we can do it.
Pardubice, 27th November 2023
Olena Kushyna
PhD student
Centre for Ethics