In Alison Jaggar’s essay “Saving Amina,” she attempts to detail the inadequacies with which Western feminists often approach foreign women’s rights issues. A large portion of her essay is a crusade against essentialism, which she defines as a characteristically Western view of women’s rights which is “crucially incomplete” due to a lack of cultural relativism (Rosenthal 207). The problem is that Jaggar denies this cross cultural accountability to feminist philosophers and then later makes claims of women’s rights violations as if those rights were universal. This subtle hypocrisy underlies many of her arguments. Even more confusingly, Jaggar introduces several additional theses as the paper drags on and ends up dedicating most of her time and
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Starting on page 213 of the reprint, she says that “70 percent of the world’s farmers were said to be women,” and then shortly after writes that “The United States and the European Union currently spend far more on farm subsidies than they spend on aid” (213-214). Toward the end of this paragraph she lists a superscript “39” to indicate the source of this information, but the use of these statistics would be far more powerful if she had revealed their source with words in the paragraph. Later in the essay while describing US and Afghani relations, Jaggar claims that “President Reagan described the mujahedeen as the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers of the United States” (216). This is the type of bomb shell quote which can truly strengthen an argument, but she mismanages its implication on two levels; not only does she fail to set up the quote with proper contextualization, but there is absolutely no citation provided. It’s as if Jaggar vaguely remembers Reagan saying this and decides to insert it in her paper. These may or may not be accurate facts, but this is beside the point when the goal of an essay is persuasion. Argument strengthening quotations and statistics require a greater amount of explanation than Jaggar allows, and such neglect may significantly reduce reader trust over
Starting on page 213 of the reprint, she says that “70 percent of the world’s farmers were said to be women,” and then shortly after writes that “The United States and the European Union currently spend far more on farm subsidies than they spend on aid” (213-214). Toward the end of this paragraph she lists a superscript “39” to indicate the source of this information, but the use of these statistics would be far more powerful if she had revealed their source with words in the paragraph. Later in the essay while describing US and Afghani relations, Jaggar claims that “President Reagan described the mujahedeen as the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers of the United States” (216). This is the type of bomb shell quote which can truly strengthen an argument, but she mismanages its implication on two levels; not only does she fail to set up the quote with proper contextualization, but there is absolutely no citation provided. It’s as if Jaggar vaguely remembers Reagan saying this and decides to insert it in her paper. These may or may not be accurate facts, but this is beside the point when the goal of an essay is persuasion. Argument strengthening quotations and statistics require a greater amount of explanation than Jaggar allows, and such neglect may significantly reduce reader trust over