A strength of this study is this detailed exploration of different ways of understanding oneself as knower. Many of us will recognise ourselves at different times, and in different contexts, moving backwards and forwards between all of these perspectives. But their study appears to be influenced by a traditional hierarchical model, suggesting a linear development from one stage to the next, rather than more circular understandings of change and growth. Kazemak (1988), however, suggests that this work should lead us to design literacy programmes for women that are less individually oriented and more in keeping with women's understanding of themselves as contextually-bound in caring relationships with others.

The Belenky et al study also does not differentiate women by class and race. We need to recognise the differences among women learners, and also to consider the context of power (or lack of power) within which women form their knowledge. Luttrell (1989) carried out a study which did explore these differences among women, and examined black and white working-class women's ways of knowing. She interviewed and carried out participant observation of women attending adult basic education programmes, and draws attention to differences in how women the two groups of women thought about learning and knowing. She observed that the white women found it much easier to claim that their husbands, brothers or fathers had common sense and were really smart than that they themselves were. The black women, in contrast, did claim 'real intelligence' for their own experiences and skill.

She concludes:

The differences between white and black working-class women's claims to knowledge reveal that women do not have a common understanding of their gender identities and knowledge. But what they do have in common is the organization of knowledge as a social relation that ultimately is successful in diminishing their power as they experience the world. To understand women's exclusion requires an examination of the similarities and differences in the objective conditions of women's lives, as well as an analysis of how ideologies of knowledge shape women's perceptions and claims to knowledge.(1989:44)

Luttrell's study shows a respect for the women's own knowledge and a recognition of differences between women, but in the process seems to claim real 'truth' for the women's knowledge; ignoring the ways in which it too, like the 'ideological' knowledge the women seek, is socially constructed.

If we ask whether women learn differently from men, and what conditions will help women in particular to learn, we are faced with a variety of answers. But there is a dimension missing from much of this work on women's ways of knowing. The study by Belenky et al. has been used not to help us to recognise the violence of many women's situations, but to support claims that women learn in different ways than men, and so require a different type of education. Safe spaces are certainly one thing needed for women's learning, but the suggestion of a simple division between men's and women's ways of learning may simplify a far more complex picture of both women's and men's learning needs. It is crucial for us to examine the power dimensions of men's and women's experience in a raced, classed, society in general and in classrooms in particular. The need for women's safety and for women to learn in settings which increase rather than diminish their power needs to be recognised as a political problem, not just an educational problem.

Are women only wives and mothers?

The simple divide between men and women as learners can also lead us to see women as 'naturally' carers and nurturers, and lead to a focus on women's roles as mothers and care givers. We saw an echo of this in Kazemak's suggestion that literacy programmes for women should reflect these contextual relationships. Several writers, however, have objected that when women are considered as the recipients of literacy, it is only their roles of wife and mother that are focused on. No-one speaks of men needing literacy because they are fathers, and so need to be literate for the sake of the next generation, but many writers observe that this argument is frequently used for women. Thompson (1983), for example, says: