Women's Ways of Knowing by Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Jill Mattuck Tarule, Mary Field Belenky, Nancy Rule Goldberger (1997, Paperback, Anniversary)

Women's Ways of Knowing was born out of a bold new methodology that sought to remedy the absence of a diversity of women's voices in pedagogy scholarship. Drawing on extensive interviews with 135 women from different ages, ethnicities, social classes, geographic locations and levels of education, Women's Ways of Knowing categorized the different ways that people (not just women) learn to respond to and interact with teachers and other authorities and sources of knowledge.

The book has been justly criticized for suggesting that the different ways of knowing constitute levels of development, as well as for failing to fully take into account the factors of race and class on knowledge responses, or to see the "ways of knowing" as situational rather than developmental. A terrific companion to this book would be Knowledge, Difference, and Power: Essays Inspired by Women's Ways of Knowing, edited by Nancy Rule Goldberger (New York: Basic Books, 1996), which addresses all of the criticisms leveled at Women's Ways of Knowing, often in creative and inspiring ways.

I would recommend this book to anyone involved or interested in pedagogy and the construction of self; but with the caveat that it is not without its blind spots.