ABSTRACT
Beliefs about the ways in which women and men differ from one another constitute one of the most significant and compelling illusions in a society's ideological repertoire. Gender ideologies commonly perform their cultural work by locating male/female differences in the natural or sacred order of things, postulating that the respective roles played by men and women, and the respective characteristics they exhibit, flow from inherent differences between the sexes. As "natives," tend to see the gender oppositions current in culture in terms of differential characteristics attributable to women and men respectively. One of the dominant tendencies within feminist thought has been to emphasize differences between women and men, and to engage in a project of seeking out, defining, and according value to qualities characteristic of women. Feminist criticism in the field of philosophy has ranged from reformist discussions of sex discrimination in the profession to the daring and radical view that women and men think in basically different ways.
