our intent in this article is not to deny the political or material reality of patriarchy, nor to ignore the negative consequences of those institutional structures. Indeed, our aim is the opposite: to listen to the voices of women is to affirm their agency, and to affirm their agency is to begin to dismantle one of the intellectual underpinnings of oppression, that is, the philosophy that the "expert" can impose her or his view of reality on the person he or she studies. (449)