Level Five Constructed Knowledge: Integrating the Voices Pages 131-152
The purpose of these notes is to elaborate and extend the discussion of the fifth level of Women's Way of Knowing.
1.	These women were all articulate and reflective people. They noticed what was going on with others and cared about the lives of people around them. They were intensely self-conscious, in the best sense of the word--aware of their own thought, their judgments, their moods, and desires. Each concerned herself with issues of inclusion and exclusion, separation and connection; each struggled to find a balance of extremes in her life. Each was ambitious and fighting to find her own voice--her own way of expressing what she knew and cared about. Each wanted her voice and actions to make a difference to other people and in the world. All three women in the example from Chapter 7 of Belenky et. al (1986) had learned the profound lesson that even the most ordinary human being is engaged in the construction of knowledge. "To understand," as Jean Piaget (1973) said, "is to invent."
2.	Belenky et al. have emphasized thus far that quest for self and voice plays a central role in transformations in women's ways of knowing.
3.	Silent women have little awareness of their intellectual abilities.
4.	At the positions of received knowledge and procedural knowledge, other voices and external truths prevail. Sense of self is embedded either in external definitions and roles or in identifications with institutions, disciplines, and methods. For women in our society, this typically means adherence to sex-role stereotypes or second-rung status as women with a man's mind, but a woman nevertheless. These women seek gratification in pleasing others or in measuring up to external standards.
5.	At the position of subjective knowledge, quest for self, or at least protection of a space for growth of self, is primary. For women, this often means a turning away from others and a denial of external authority.
6.	To learn to speak in a unique and authentic voice, women must "jump outside" the frames and systems authorities provide and create their own frame. Kay, Erica, and Adele have realized this. They told Belenky et. al that their current way of knowing and viewing the world--a way of knowing we call constructed knowledge--began as an effort to reclaim the self by attempting to integrate knowledge that they felt intuitively was personally important with knowledge they had learned from others. They told of weaving together the strands of rational and emotive thought and of integrating objective and subjective knowing.