Toward a Gender-Sensitive Ideal of Critical Thinking: A Feminist Poetic

The last decade or so has witnessed the appearance of what Jane Roland Martin calls "the new scholarship on women."' A very short list of these scholars would include Mary Belenky and colleagues,' Carol Gilligan,' Evelyn Fox Keller,4 Sarah Ruddick" and Jane Roland Martin." Reading the writings of these and many other women opens up windows that allow us to look out upon lively new educational landscapes. One such window has been opened with the renewed role that unreconciled paradoxes, contradictions, and contraries are often allowed to take in their images of rational thinking and the rational thinker. We have been struck repeatedly by the way that writers within the new scholarship will explicitly present some of their most important insights and results in the form of permanent paradoxes and irreconcilable but complementary contraries.