ABSTRACT
Empathy, which figures in nostalgic narratives about bygone and putatively more connected eras as a “natural” human capacity, has fallen into disfavor in the climate of scientific instrumentality that prevails in the late-twentieth-century western world. Its status as a lost—and devalued—art is peculiarly significant for feminist theorists and activists, I shall suggest. For the places where empathy is still, or again, encouraged (and minimally rewarded) are on the softer, outer edges of social structures and institutions, away from the hard, core practices, where real work, informed by real knowledge, is said to take place. Those outer edges, in the main, are the places still reserved for women's traditional activities, informed by their stereotypically “lesser” skills, of which empathy counts as one. Scientific—and, derivatively, social scientific—knowledge is better, so the prevailing wisdom goes, to the extent that it eschews empathy, with its affective (hence not objective) tone, and its concern with the irrelevancies of human particularity.
