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Standpoint theory is a feminist approach to knowledge, according to which there is a distinctive perspective on reality which pertains to feminists or to women. They have a distinctive outlook because their experiences are different from those of people who occupy other positions in society. (Tanesini 1999) Women have access to a special standpoint that gives them an epistemic advantage or makes them ‘epistemically privileged’. (Saul 2003:240)

Marxist Origin
Feminist standpoint epistemology finds its ancestor in the Marxian notion of a standpoint of the proletariat. (Gardner 2006) According to Marx, the positions occupied in society by different classes give them distinct perspectives on social reality. (Gardner 2006) Marx claims that the class division of labor ensures that some manual productive work is done only by members of the proletariat; thus, the lives of the working-class is systematically different from those of the members of other classes. This unique perspective of the proletariat in a capitalist system is privileged from an epistemic viewpoint. (Tanesini 1999)

Defining Feminist Standpoint
The original formulations of feminist standpoint theory hold that women’s labor, like workers’ labor, gives them access to a privileged perspective on social reality. (Saul 2003) Their work in giving birth to and raising the next generation, and in supplying the basic necessities of daily life for themselves and their families, makes them especially central to society’s functioning. As a result, women were said to have access to a privileged standpoint for understanding the world. (Saul 2003)

Sexual division of labor
Nancy Hartsock (1983) pioneered the formulation of a feminist standpoint. Hartsock finds in the specificity of women’s experiences the basis for a distinctive perspective. For her, a feminist standpoint emerges from what she calls the ‘sexual division of labor’. (Hartsock 1983:284) “Women as a sex are institutionally responsible for producing both goods and human beings and all women are forced to become the kinds of people who can do both.” (Hartsock 1998:113) Childbearing and childrearing are complex social activities which give rise to distinct experiences. (Hartsock 1998) Even in the production of goods for subsistence, women’s activities differ structurally from men’s. Women spend more time than men in the production of goods in the house, goods which are not sold as commodities. (Hartsock 1998)

“Women’s reproductive labor provides them with a distinctive perspective on reality; their socially marginal role under patriarchy, when combined with their essential function in its preservation, guarantees the epistemic privilege of their perspective.” (Tanesini 1999:140)

Insider/outside status
Dorothy Smith (1988) maintains that the division of labor accounts for the difference between men’s and women’s experience since women do the work which makes it possible for men to engage in intellectual work. For Smith, what makes women’s experience valuable from an epistemic viewpoint is their dual marginal and central position in the current set of social relations. Women’s position is central because they do the work which sustains the current patriarchal system and also produce the invisibility of such work as work. (Smith 1988) They are marginal because they do not occupy a position of power within the system. Thus, women occupy the position of insiders/outside: insiders because they are crucial to the continuation of the current system, but also outsiders because they have no power within it. (Smith 1988) It is because they occupy this dual social role that a woman’s experiences reflect more accurately than a man’s the reality of current relations. (Smith 1988)

Criticism
Critics have remarked that standpoint epistemology appears to entail false essentialisms and universalizations. (Tanesini 1999) “To claim that there is a unique cognitive style or set of experiences which pertains to women seems to presuppose that women have essential features and to ignore the many important differences among women.” (Tanesini 1999:145)

Objective thought
Sandra Harding criticizes that standpoint theorists ‘tend to center a difference between the genders at the … expense of clearly focusing on differences between women or between men in different races, classes, and cultures’. (1991:178) According to her, women’s experience cannot provide the foundations of knowledge because ‘experience itself is shaped by social relations’. (Harding 1991:123) For example, one experiences a remark about one’s body from a work colleague as either a normal form of interaction between men and women in the workplace, or as an instance of sexual harassment. (Tanesini 1999:150)

Harding stresses objectivity in defining standpoint by starting research from women’s lives rather than experiences. In doing so, it is recognized that experience is not immediately given but assumes some theory and understanding. (Harding 1991) Objectivity also acknowledges that women belonging to different groups lead different lives. (Harding 1991)

For Harding, a person has taken up a feminist standpoint if they manage to ‘start their thought’ from women’s lives. (Saul 2003:245) It is not only women who are capable of doing this, according to her, although it comes more easily to women. (Saul 2003) Harding maintains that it is possible for men to take up a woman’s standpoint, or for whites to take up a black standpoint. (Saul 2003)

Multiple Standpoints
Patricia Hill Collins refers to a standpoint as a “historically shared, group-based experience”. (Collins 1997:375) Groups have a degree of permanence over time such that group realities transcend individual experiences. For her, standpoint theory places less emphasis on individual experiences within socially constructed groups than on social conditions that construct such groups. (Collins 1997)

"Take, for example, the differences between how U.S. Black women> interpret their experiences as single mothers and how prevailing social science research analyzes the same reality. Whereas Black women stress their struggles with job discrimination, inadequate child support, inferior housing, and street violence, far too much social science research seems mesmerized by images of lazy ‘welfare queens’ content to stay on the dole."

- (Collins 2000:255) Collins (2000) also maintains that there are a variety of privileged standpoints and that each provide privileged yet partial knowledge- a black lesbian, a Latina heterosexual and an Asian man all have different standpoints available to them, and each standpoint is epistemically privileged in its own way. None of these standpoints can be considered the best for obtaining knowledge, but each should instead be considered vital for providing at least part of the truth.

"Each group speaks from its own standpoint and shares its own situated knowledge. But because each group perceives its own truth as partial, its knowledge is unfinished. Each group becomes better able to consider other groups’ standpoints without relinquishing the uniqueness of its own standpoint or suppressing other groups’ partial perspectives."

- (Collins 2000:270)

A Privileged Standpoint
Men have predominantly ruled the field of science, as they have been the ones formulating scientific theories for a very long time. Women, as outsiders to the scientific world, are in a better position to notice blind spots, errors and things that have been left out. (Saul 2003) One can argue that better science can be done from a women’s standpoint because women are more likely to notice mismatches between theory and reality. (Saul 2003)

Women also have (in general) less power than men in society. Following the Marxist tenet, those with less power will have a less distorted perspective on society. Those with more power will have an interest in maintaining systematically biased understandings of society that legitimate the status quo as just and appropriate. (Saul 2003) The less powerful in society are forced, by their relative lack of power, to develop a good understanding of not only their own position but also the position of the more powerful. (Saul 2003) Since women tend to have less power in society than men, women are able to improve scientific research by bringing their perspectives to bear on scientific issues. (Saul 2003)