Women in Philosophy: Joan Callahan (1946-2019)

by Kate Norlock

We note with sadness the death of Joan Callahan (1946-2019). Joan was Emerita Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky. She specialized in ethical theory, feminism, and practical ethics, especially biomedical ethics and professional ethics. Her areas of competence and professional development included philosophy of law, critical race theory, and as she notes, an unlikely detour into filmmaking, a joint effort with Nancy Tuana to digitally film six-hour interviews of the first chronological cohort of North American feminist philosophers. Their co-produced oral history project, Feminist Philosophers: In Their Own Words, includes interviews with Nel Noddings, Alison Jaggar, Susan Bordo, Sandra Harding, and more.

Since it was important to Joan to feature feminist scholars in their own words, we thought it appropriate to share some of the tributes to her by feminists who wrote on social media after her death: Patricia Cooper, Alison Reiheld, Eva Kittay, and Susan Bordo.

Patricia Cooper, Emerita Professor and formerly Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies at University of Kentucky, writes:

Joan was a bold and serious scholar. She wrote scores of articles and wrote or edited four significant books, Ethical Issues in Professional Life; Reproduction, Ethics, and the Law; Menopause: A Midlife Passage; and Preventing Birth: Contemporary Methods and Related Moral Controversies. Her research often sparked discussion far beyond the discipline of philosophy. She relished every debate about her ideas. Joan loved to think. Her curiosity was off the charts.

Her professional achievements were many. Here are only a few: The Society for Women in Philosophy named her Distinguished Woman Philosopher in 2007. She served on the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association and held several positions in the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST). She sat on the editorial boards of several journals, including Hypatia and The Journal of Social Philosophy. [Eva Kittay adds:] In addition to the many national committees on which Joan served, she was also on the founding board of Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute (PIKSI).

Joan joined the UK Philosophy Department in 1986 and served as Director of the Women’s Studies Program (later renamed Gender and Women’s Studies Program) from 1998 to 2002 and from 2003 through 2007. She led the move to make GWS a Department with a major and celebrated the applause when both were established in 2009. She went on medical leave in early 2008 and retired in 2011.

In 2010 she was inducted into the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame, which especially thrilled her. Never one for dressy or conventional attire, she wore a tuxedo and bowtie to the posh event held at Keenland.

UK students loved Joan because she was so honest, direct, kind, brilliant, and funny. From the outset, she was “out” to her students and used her own life and experiences to spark their thinking. Joan, an unabashed feminist, always stood strong for what she felt was right. She was very instrumental in getting UK to create a partner benefits program. One former dean said that Joan Callahan was his “conscience.” She showed up at numerous demonstrations, testified before the Kentucky state legislature, wrote letters and articles related to feminism and justice, and refused to back down whenever patriarchal or racist behavior or speech reared its head on campus. So many colleagues and friends sought her counsel and support during rough times and her companionship in moments of triumph.

Joan had a wicked sense of humor. Many folks will still chuckle when remembering her rendition of Father Guido Sarducci or the get-ups she would wear to GWS parties complete with a mustache. She passionately loved animals including residents on her farm: horses, fish, dogs, cats, birds, and chickens. During a GWS summer seminar one year, Joan kept a rescued baby starling in her waist pack every day for two weeks, nurturing it back to health.

No description of Joan’s professional life is complete without Joan’s partner and wife, Jennifer Crossen. They each had their own accomplishments but also collaborated to make good things happen. Together they hosted the Pride picnic for many years, and their home was the site of more potlucks and parties (many for UK folks) than one could possibly count. They parented their dear son David Crossen and dearly loved being grandparents to his children. These two women made a remarkable and energetic pair.

Who was Joan Callahan? She was a groundbreaking feminist scholar, strong and wise leader, playful companion, devoted wife and mother, and steadfast loving friend. I can only imagine how many friends, colleagues, former students, and family members are now grieving the loss of this extraordinary woman.

Alison N.C. Reiheld, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Women’s Studies at SIUE, writes:

I don’t think I can express how much Joan meant to me, or why. I was never her student. She was never on my dissertation committee, never had any formal role in my schooling.

We first met at a conference and struck up a collegial interaction. Joan and I got to know each other well when I applied for a job at the University of Kentucky. When I interviewed there in spring of 2008, she was extremely collegial both leading up to the interview and during the process. We struck up what would become an influential-for-me relationship, two feminist philosophers with no particular reason to have a relationship at all, generations apart. I must not have done too badly at that interview for the Kentucky position: Joan offered to write me letters of recommendation the following year when I went on the market. I am convinced, perhaps without evidence but convinced nonetheless, that her generosity in doing so played a role in me having two competing tenure-track offers while I was ABD in 2009, and one visiting assistant professorship offer. This was entirely consistent with what I heard when I attended the Distinguished Woman’s Philosopher award panel honoring Joan in 2007, where person after person stood up and said “I wouldn’t be in philosophy if it weren’t for Joan’s support and intellectual rigor and the kind of philosophy that she modeled.” I should not have been surprised when, a year later, she turned out to have more confidence in me than I did.

Would I have ever gotten over the worst of my imposter syndrome without Joan’s support? Probably. I had many other people in my corner. But they knew me well and from my early years in graduate school. They’d seen me develop over time. They knew what I was capable of from many different sources of evidence and long acquaintance. It mattered that Joan had only come to know me as I was coming into my own and thought of me as a peer, a junior peer, but a peer nonetheless. Nothing about my success or failure would reflect upon her. And yet there she was. There were literally days where I said to myself “I can’t do this” and then I said back to myself “But all those people think you can. And Joan Callahan did!”

We stayed in touch on Facebook for the last decade, and I have watched her retirement with her Beloved and her horses from afar. I have watched her continue to be an activist for same-sex marriage and, after that was accomplished, still and always for women’s rights and gay rights and those who lack power and opportunity. I have watched her continue to contribute to the discipline in innumerable ways including the superb Feminist Philosophers: In Their Own Words video series, born of campervan travels to meet with folks across North America. I have watched her live the kind of post-academia life I now know I would love to have, myself.  I have watched her live through cancer, and continue to flourish for many years.

Well, there’s now one less star in the firmament. Or perhaps one more. She’s lost to us as a person, but her body of work remains as does the model she has left for us of a life well and thoughtfully and kindly lived.

Eva Kittay, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University/SUNY, writes:

Joan, many years prior to her fatal illness, received a devastating diagnosis which prognosticated that only 1% survive. Joan maintained her brightness and optimism. She said, “Well, someone has to occupy that 1%,” and she did, and I thought she would never die. It’s so very sad to lose someone like her. She gave the world a bit of sparkle and warmth and wisdom that is irretrievable.

Susan Bordo, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky, writes:

After Joan received that diagnosis, she and I went on a road trip together, thinking it was our last time to do so. We got lost in a cornfield and laughed our way out of it, chastising “Flo” (our name for the navigation system.) Amazingly, Joan recovered and lived many years since. Her ability to gather up her spirit in the face of so much trauma–a devastating car accident (she was trying to save a turtle–and did!) more illness, the death of a beloved sister–was extraordinary. She had so much life force that even in the past month I somehow imagined she might turn it around. It’s hard to look outside my window, hear the birds chirping, and realize that she no longer gazes upon this world that she loved so much.

It seems fitting to end with Joan, in her own words, writing about the goodness and the importance of interviewing feminist philosophical leaders. I considered choosing one of her more scholarly peer-reviewed pieces, but excellent as they are, they did not capture, as the following does, the warm and celebratory support that so many of us received from Joan. So I close instead with this excerpt of Joan Callahan’s “Greetings from an Unlikely Filmmaker,” (Hypatia 25.1, Winter 2010) which starts with the challenges of producing digitally filmed interviews and ends with typical Callahanian attention to women in philosophy.

This is labor‐intensive work, requiring that Nancy and I do the interviews, meet to decide what will go into a first directors’ cut, meet again to go over that cut and make second and sometimes third directors’ cuts, and ultimately decide what will go into a final cut of these shortened versions of the interviews. And making all those cuts, of course, falls to me, who continues to stumble along, learning this film‐editing business the hard way. Much to my own delighted surprise, however, I never, ever tire of this work—the more I see and hear these women, the more deeply I respect and care about them, and the more fully I understand the complexities of their stories and thinking. And no matter how well we knew these women and their work before their interviews, Nancy and I have always walked away with a much greater appreciation of the intelligence and insight of their work as well as of who they are as people. Our friendships have been more enriched than we can even begin to say. And this has become not just a labor of love for us, but a labor in love. These women are magnificent.

Kate Norlock is the Kenneth Mark Drain Chair in Ethics at Trent University. She is the incoming chair of the Committee on the Status of Women for the APA.