Sandra Lee Bartky, an influential feminist philosopher who argued that women were subconsciously submitting to men by accepting an unnatural cultural standard for the ideal female body — what she called the “tyranny of slenderness” — died on Oct. 17 at her home in Saugatuck, Mich. She was 81.
The cause was complications of intestinal surgery, said a colleague, Linda Nicholson, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Professor Bartky, who taught philosophy and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, contended that women suffered from self-loathing, shame and guilt — internalized oppression, she called it — fostered by cultural cues about their bodies that devalue them if they do not meet the prescribed standard.
Through the diminishment of dieting and by being undemonstrative, she said, women are encouraged “to take up as little space as possible.”
“The body by which a woman feels herself judged and which by rigorous discipline she must try to assume is the body of early adolescence, slight and unformed, a body lacking flesh or substance, a body in whose very contours the image of immaturity has been inscribed,” Professor Bartky wrote in an essay published in an anthology, “Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance,” in 1988.
She continued: “The requirement that a woman maintain a smooth and hairless skin carries further the theme of inexperience, for an infantilized face must accompany her infantilized body, a face that never ages or furrows its brow in thought. The face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom and experience that we so admire in men.”
In her books “Femininity and Domination” (1990) and “Sympathy and Solidarity and Other Essays” (2002), Professor Bartky argued that women were also programmed to adjust their gestures, cosmetics, ornamentation and every other aspect of their appearance to comply with a dominant patriarchal power structure.
“These are not sexual differences, they are constructed,” she wrote. “The disciplinary project of femininity is a ‘setup’: It requires such radical and extensive measures of bodily transformation that virtually every woman who gives herself to it is destined to some degree to fail.”
Professor Bartky was a founder of the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a founding member of the Society for Women in Philosophy in 1971 — the year after Doubleday published a dissertation by Kate Millett, a freshly minted Ph.D., that became an important feminist study, “Sexual Politics.”
Until then, similar manuscripts had been largely relegated to underground presses. But by the 1970s, the so-called Second Wave of feminism was surfacing.
In “Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness” (1975), Professor Bartky wrote: “Women workers who are not feminists know that they receive unequal pay for equal work, but they may think that the arrangement is just; the feminist sees this situation as an instance of exploitation and an occasion for struggle. Feminists are not aware of different things than other people; they are aware of the same things differently.”
Judith Kegan Gardiner, a former colleague at the University of Illinois, said Professor Bartky had “inspired generations of feminist philosophers to understand oppression, femininity and domination.”
Professor Nicholson, who teaches history and women’s studies, quoted Professor Bartky saying, “Clearly, if there were to be such a thing as feminist philosophy, we who are philosophers and feminists would have to invent it.”
“And invent it she did,” Professor Nicholson said. “She described her own work as ‘a tale of the philosopher become exorcist of her own demons.’”
Professor Bartky was born Sandra Lee Schwartz on May 5, 1935, in Chicago, the daughter of Dr. Harold Schwartz, an orthodontist, and the former Ruth Smith. (Her parents were both shot to death in their garage in 1980 in Highland Park, Ill., in a crime that appears never to have been solved.)
She received her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was hired as an instructor in 1963, was appointed a full professor in 1990 and retired as professor emerita in 2003.
She is survived by her husband, Algirdas Vileisis, with whom she lived in Saugatuck, on Lake Michigan near Grand Rapids; and her brother, Jeffrey Schwartz. A previous marriage, to Scott Bartky, ended in divorce.
Evolving from a liberal to a radical, Professor Bartky applied a feminist lens to the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s vision of how society imposes its discipline over individuals.
“The transformation of oneself into a properly feminine body,” she wrote, “may be any or all of the following: a rite of passage into adulthood, the adoption and celebration of a particular aesthetic, a way of announcing one’s economic level and social status, a way to triumph over other women in the competition for men or jobs, or an opportunity for massive narcissistic indulgence. The social construction of the feminine body is all these things, but at its base it is discipline, too, and discipline of the inegalitarian sort.”
Men may sprawl when sitting, she said, while women typically sit with hands folded and legs pressed together, a tableau that is a vivid manifestation of that same disempowering discipline.
“Whatever proportions must be assigned in the final display to fear or deference,” she wrote, “one thing is clear: Woman’s body language speaks eloquently, though silently, of her subordinate status in a hierarchy of gender.”
As feminist philosophy evolved, Professor Bartky delved into differences among women by class and race and between developed and poorer countries.
By 2002, responding to critics who said she was too doctrinaire, she acknowledged ambivalently that some women found the pursuit of physical perfection — “turning ourselves into properly feminine women” — to be a more positive experience for them than she had imagined.
“It may be the case,” she wrote, “that the business of trying to achieve, as near as one can, physical perfection is even more burdensome than my treatment of the topic suggests, or else there is far more pleasure at stake here than I am willing to admit to myself and to my readers.”
She lamented that her field remained marginalized three decades after she had helped found the Society for Women in Philosophy.
“There is still a good number of mainstream philosophers for whom feminist philosophy has no authentic philosophic content,” she wrote in 2002, “and this judgment gave rise, for some in my generation of feminist philosophers, to a kind of self-doubt that I hope will die out with my generation, the advance-guard of the Second Wave.”
Correction: October 28, 2016
An obituary on Wednesday about the feminist philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky misstated the date of her death. It was Oct. 17, not Oct. 18.
