Abstract

This dissertation explores the social dimensions of moral agency by analyzing the experiences of women in a battered women's shelter. I describe some of the changes battered women make in their patterns of interaction with other people and with social, political, and economic institutions when they leave their abuser, and name some of the impediments and sources of support women encounter as they try to stay away. I describe women's search for housing, police and legal protection, income, child care, and medical and emotional support, and give a preliminary definition of client's moral agency. Then I describe Beverly Harrison's, Ruth Smith's, and Bell Hooks's understandings of women's experience, the socially constituted self, and moral agency. Their analyses are too general to account for the particular experiences of this group of women. So I analyze some specific ways social expectations of marriage and the family, employment opportunities and public assistance, and some aspect of law enforcement constitute women's lives. Feminist ethicists argue that in racist, patriarchal, and economically exploitative societies women have been deprived of the social conditions that enable them to be effective moral agents. My thesis is that social, economic, and political institutions are not just a context in which women with an a priori self act, but that selves are developed in the patterns of interaction women have with these institutions. Women become one sort of self in relations with abusive partners and institutions which deny their humanity. The shelter provides different interpretations of their experience and suggests enabling relations which contribute to women's self-esteem, self-respect, and self-assertion, even in the face of exploitative persons and institutions. Physical safety, the ability to obtain basic material necessities, and a minimal sense of self-esteem are prerequisites to the development of full moral agency. Various people and institutions have positive moral obligations to ensure that women have access to these prerequisites, obligations determined by their social location. Definitions of moral agency and women's experience must reflect careful attention to the particular circumstances which constitute women's lives