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IN 1983, THE PUBLICATION of Nancy Hartsock's Money, Sex, and Power changed the landscape of feminist theory. The scope of the book alone ensures it a prominent place in feminist thought. It includes a comprehensive critique of positivism, an indictment of masculinist theories of power, and even a textual analysis of Greek mythology. The central concern of the book, however, and the source of its lasting influence, is Hartsock's epistemological and methodological argument. Her goal is to define the nature of the truth claims that feminists advance and to provide a methodological grounding that will validate those claims. The method she defines is the feminist standpoint. Borrowing heavily from Marx, yet adapting her insights to her specifically feminist ends, Hartsock claims that it is women's unique standpoint in society that provides the justification for the truth claims of feminism while also providing it with a method with which to analyze reality.
In the succeeding decade, feminist standpoint theory has become a staple of feminist theory. Nancy Hartsock's essay in Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka's pathbreaking book Discovering Reality (1983) brought the concept to a philosophical audience. In a number of influential publications, Dorothy Smith developed a sociological method from the "standpoint of women." Harding featured feminist standpoint theory in her two important books on science and feminism. Patricia Hill Collins articulated a specifically black feminist standpoint. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s criticisms of the position mounted, and fewer discussions of it were published. Today the concept occupies a much less prominent position. Particularly among younger feminist theorists, feminist standpoint theory is frequently regarded as a quaint relic of feminism's less sophisticated past. Several developments in the late 1980s have led to this declining influence. First, the inspiration for feminist standpoint theory, Marxism, has been discredited in both theory and practice. Second, feminist standpoint theory appears to be at odds with the issue that has dominated feminist debate in the past decade: difference. Third, feminist standpoint theory appears to be opposed to two of the most significant influences in recent feminist theory: postmodernism and poststructuralism. The Marxist roots of the theory seem to contradict what many define as the antimaterialism of postmodernism. For all of these reasons, the conclusion that feminist standpoint theory...