The Return of Feminist Liberalism 9780773594852

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THE RETURN OF FEMINIST LIBERALISM

THE RETURN OF FEMINIST LIBERALISM Ruth Abbey

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston lthaca

To the memory of the feminist liberals who died too young: Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, Jane English, Jean Hampton, Susan Okin

@ Ruth Abbey 2011

ISBN 978-0-7735-3914-3 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-3916-7 (paper) Legal deposit second quarter 2011 Biblioth6que nationale du Quebec This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. Published simultaneously outside North America by Acumen Publishing Limited McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Abbey, Ruth, 1961The return of feminist liberalism 1 Ruth Abbey. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7735-3914-3 (bound).--ISBN 978-0-7735-3916-7 (pbk.) 1. Liberalism. 2. Okin, Susan Moller. 3. Hampton, Jean. 4. Nussbaum, Martha Craven, 1947-. 5. Feminism--Political aspects. I. Title.

Printed in the UK by MPG Books Group.

CONTENTS

Ackno wledgernents Abbreviations Introduction: the return of feminist liberalism 1. The feminist critique of liberalism I The feminist liberalism of Susan Moller Okin

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Injustices, gender, families Defining Okin's liberalism He said, she said: the Okin-Rawls debate When liberal meanings are not shared Going global

II The feminist liberalism of Jean Hampton

7. Contracting for feminism 8. Kantian feminism Ill The feminist liberalism of Martha Nussbaum

9. An original position 10. What women want 11. Capabilities for care IV Contemporary feminist liberalism

12. In the company of critics: feminist liberalism meets feminist critics of liberalism

208

CONTENTS

13. Persuasive universalism and political liberalism 14. Transformative liberalisms

Conclusion Notes Bibliography mdex

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book took shape in four stages. It began as a proposal for research funding, and I am grateful to Eileen Hunt Botting, Ken Garcia and Rachel Zuckert for feedback at that embryonic stage. Leah Bradshaw, Fred Dallmayr and Mayo Moran were kind enough to write letters in support of my funding applications. Most of the book was written while I was a Faculty Fellow at the Centre for Ethics and Public Affairs at the Murphy Institute at Tulane University, New Orleans. I am grateful to Rick Teichgraber for inviting me to be a Fellow and Meg Keenan for her endless reserves of patience, assistance and kindness. I thank Jennifer Culbert, Doug Portmore and Oliver Sensen for their fellowship. Elizabeth Brake's remarks at an early stage of the project provided welcome encouragement. The first draft of the book was completed in Hyde Park, Chicago, I thank my neighbour Joan Allison for her kindness, and I benefited from the company of Pan Ando, Susan, Lucy and Ricky Alitto, Emma Rose Pollack and the homeless cats and dogs who came into my life for short periods through my involvement with Hyde Park Cats and PAWS. Revisions to the book were also made in Hyde Park, and I thank Bulk, a graduate of Hyde Park Cats, for his company at my desk. In this phase leading up to publication, I also owe gratitude to my husband, Clifford Ando, Eileen Hunt Botting, Steven Gerrard, Brad n a m e s , Sandy Thatcher, Kate Williams and my Notre Dame undergraduate research assistants, Ashley Satterlee and Jennifer Dahm. I am also grateful to Acumen's reviewers - Amy Baehr, Mary Lyndon Shanley and Anne Phillips - for their suggestions for improvement. The University of Notre Dame supported my fellowship at the Murphy Institute and granted me a semester of unpaid leave in fall 2009 to complete the first draft. I am also grateful to the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame for financial support. The homeless cats keep coming, and continue to inspire with their sweetness and spirit. The volunteers at Hyde Park Cats continue to inspire too, with their unstinting concern for vulnerable and abandoned animals.

ABBREVIATIONS

DWDR FC FJ HCA IPPR

JGF JFR MBW OP PL SLS SSJ TJ WHD WWPT

Hampton, "Defining Wrong and Defining Rape" (1999a) Hampton, "Feminist Contractarianism" (2007a) Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice:Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006) human capabilities approach Rawls, "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited" (1999) Okin, Justice, Gendel; and the Family (1989a) Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001) Okin, "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?" (1999a) original position Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993) Hampton, "Selflessness and the Loss of Self" (2007b) Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (1999a) Rawls, A neory of Justice (1971) Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: ?he Capabilities Approach (2000b) Okin, Women in Western Political nought (1980)

INTRODUCTION: THE RETURN OF FEMINIST LIBERALISM

[Tlhere was an uneasiness about women born in the founding moments of the liberal tradition, a suppressed anxiety about whether it meant you had to regard men and women as equals. (Phillips 2001: 249) Modern Western feminism grew up as a sister doctrine to liberalism. Early feminist liberals include Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, John Stuart Mill, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, among others.' There is nothing especially controversial in this claim about the liberal roots of feminism: even the radical feminist Zillah Eisenstein agrees that feminism has its source in liberalism, and in particular the liberal critique of patriarchalism dating back to John Locke (Eisenstein 1981: 4-13; cf. Jaggar 1983: 47). These pioneers of feminist theory2were basically applying liberal commitments to women. This required them to extend LockeS critique of patriarchal power into the private realm,3by which I mean here the domestic realm, the household or the family (I use these last three terms synonymously). The term "liberal commitments" includes such values as: individual freedom; equality before the law; equal opportunity; moral equality; personal autonomy; being rewarded (or punished) on the basis of merit rather than birth; the rejection of arbitrary and unearned power and hierarchy and its replacement with the idea that the exercise of power by one individual over another must be rationally defended; consent to rule by those ruled; and freedom of conscience. Early feminists took this extension of liberal commitments to women to be a matter of justice, holding their exclusion from higher education, voting rights, property rights in many cases and entry to the professions to be intrinsically unfair. They also believed that society as a whole would benefit from women's contributions in these areas. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, liberalism fell into disrepute among many, and probably most, feminist theorists in the

THE RETURN OF FEMINIST LIBERALISM

English-speaking world. It did not lose all defenders: Betty Friedan, for examBut among many, if not ple, is usually considered to be a liberal femini~t.~ most, feminist theorists, liberalism became a suspect doctrine. Thus while it is uncontroversial to point to the liberal roots of feminism, a major issue in English-language feminist political thought over the past few decades has been whether feminism's association with liberalism should be relegated to the past. This book examines the positions of three contemporary feminists who, notwithstanding decades of feminist critique, are unwilling to give up on liberalism. The late Susan Moller Okin (1946-2004), the late Jean Hampton (1954-96) and Martha Nussbaum (1947- ) situate themselves within the liberal tradition and outline well-developed positions on the compatibility of feminism and liberalism. This study examines why each believes that liberalism offers the normative and political resources for the improvement of women's situations. It also tries to explain and evaluate the differences among these three theorists, notwithstanding their shared allegiance to liberalism. Through a combination of explication, reconstruction and critical analysis, Chapters 2-11 bring out the main contours of each thinker's work. They indicate what is distinctive and original in the thought of each while also showing what they share as feminist liberals. Okin receives the first and most detailed treatment because she entered the field of feminist thought earlier than Hampton and Nussbaum and because the vast bulk of her oeuvre has explicitly feminist focin5Her writings were also known to Hampton and Nussbaum, who cite them (mostly)appreciatively. I present Nussbaum's feminist liberalism last because it is still evolving, partly in response to criticisms from feminists and others. Although Okin, Hampton and Nussbaum engage a number of the same topics, the thinker-by-thinker approach adopted here conveys that these are systematic thinkers whose views on one issue connect with those on anotherq6It is also illuminating to lay out each thinker's position in its own terms because, notwithstanding their shared allegiance to liberalism, their ideas are expressed in slightly different idioms.

1. ITINERARY

Chapter 1 explores the feminist critique of liberalism, outlining its major threads over the past thirty years of English-languagescholarship. It identifies five major strands of criticism: (i) the sexual contract that accompanies the liberal social contract; (ii) the public-private separation; (iii) liberalism as a gendered tradition; (iv) liberalism's neglect of structures of power; and (v) the ethic and practice of care debate. Chapter 2 adduces the key features of OkinS feminist liberalism as they appear in Women in Western Political nought (WWPT)and Justice, Gendet;

INTRODUCTION

and the Family (JGF).The injustices contained within and consequent upon the domestic division of labour are explored, as is the idea of the family as the first school of moral development. In both works we see Okin's insistence that the family cannot be reformed in isolation: other institutions need to change too before women's full equality with men can be realized. While Okin's adherence to liberalism remained largely latent in her first book, it became more obvious in JGF. But even then she was never very explicit about the shape of her liberalism. Chapter 3 contends that despite her criticism of Michael Walzer's notion of shared meanings, the best way of understanding Okin's feminist liberalism is as a liberalism of shared meanings. It goes on to examine what form the key concepts of her liberalism take and how they relate to one another, explicating her views on equal personhood, equality of opportunity, free choice, privacy and pluralism. Chapter 4 maps the RawlsOkin debate, beginning with Okin's critical but enthusiastic reception of A 'Iheory of Justice ( T J ) In . writings published after Political Liberalism (PL), John Rawls spells out how justice as fairness deals with questions of women and the family in a way that ultimately vindicates Okin's original assessment of the feminist potential of his liberalism. Just as Chapter 3 proposes that Okin's liberalism is best understood as a liberalism of shared meanings, so Chapters 5 and 6 survey some of her encounters with situations where liberal meanings might not be shared. Chapter 5 focuses on her most controversial writing, "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?" (MBW). Here Okin can also be seen as engaging the intersectionality debate, with its emphasis on differences among women and their significance for feminist theorizing. This chapter concludes with reflections on whether Okin's liberalism fosters or hampers her ability to incorporate the insights of intersectionality. If Okin's feminist liberalism is a liberalism of shared meanings, it does not begin as a universalist liberalism. As Chapter 6 demonstrates, this poses a problem for her attempts to extend feminist liberalism onto the international stage: on what basis could liberal values be relevant for women in contexts where they are not part of the wider culture and politics? Okin develops an (at least tacit) answer to this question, for as she projects her feminist liberalism onto the international plane she becomes more attentive to women's self-interpretations. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the feminist writings of Jean Hampton. Chapter 7 considers her relationship to the ethic of care, portraying Hampton's use of the contract device as a way of making this ethic more consistently and robustly caring. 1 argue, however, that Hampton is best understood as an accidental contractarian because the contract apparatus ultimately proves to be inessential for her purposes. The real normative and theoretical work is done by her Kantian belief in the intrinsic worth of each person that should be respected in most human association. Chapter 8 applies this belief to a

THE RETURN OF FEMINIST LIBERALISM

number of issues that have long been of concern to feminists. It poses questions about what the abstraction and individualism of Hampton's liberalism mean for her feminism and asks whether she pays any attention to the problem of generalizing about women in the face of salient differences among them. The feminist liberalism of Martha Nussbaum occupies Chapters 9 through 11. They outline her human capabilities approach (HCA) to international feminism and consider her work in light of the claim that a revived feminist liberalism must engage the challenge of intersectionality. Chapter 10 examines in detail the problem that adaptive preferences pose for Nussbaum's feminist liberalism while Chapter 11reveals how seriously she, like Okin and Hampton, takes some of the issues to arise from the debate about the ethic and practice of care. Chapter 12 brings these three feminist liberals into conversation with the feminist critics of liberalism outlined in Chapter 1. It demonstrates that Okin, Hampton and Nussbaum are not blind to, but actually endorse, many of the criticisms levelled at the liberal tradition by feminist scholars over the past three decades. However, as feminist liberals they aim to show that the liberal tradition contains the resources for answering these challenges: that the best response is to reconfigure, rather than reject, liberalism. Chapters 13 and 14 situate each of these three thinkers in relation to the Rawlsian distinction between comprehensive and political liberalism. Many doubts are raised about Nussbaum's claim to be offering a form of political liberalism, while Okin and Hampton are presented as offering partially comprehensive forms of liberalism. Yet whatever the differences among them from the standpoint of this Rawlsian framework, Chapter 14 goes on to argue that all three adduce a type of "transformative liberalism': to borrow Mark Button's felicitous coinage (2008). The book's conclusion identifies some continuing questions and challenges for contemporary feminist liberalism. Many revolve around the constitution of the category of women, which is, of course, a central issue for feminist theory.

2. THE RAWLSIAN RENAISSANCE

With the 1971 publication of TJ, Rawls is widely credited with fostering a renaissance in English-language political philosophy. As Anne Phillips (2001: 249-50) points out, Rawls also made liberalism more palatable to (some) feminists in the process. In the 1960s and 1970s liberalism had stood for a doctrine that defended the status quo and tolerated vast differences of wealth and income in the name of market freedom. Liberal political rights and freedoms were assumed to be inseparable from laissez-faire economics. As Rawlsian

INTRODUCTION

ideas pervaded political theory, these perceptions gradually changed. As Phillips observes, in recent years: Liberalism has ... redefined itself so as to make an initially rather descriptive egalitarianism more central; it has lent an ear to the opposition and incorporated some of its best ideas. In the process, it has given the lie to some of the older feminist complaints (Ibid.: 259) against liberalism. Rawls turns out to be a key ingredient in understanding why some feminists have been willing to consider the uses, rather than simply the disadvantages, of liberalism for feminism. Well before his own discussion of his theoryJs implications for women, the three thinkers studied here identified feminist potential in Rawls's work. Yet while all have been powerfully influenced by Rawls, each appropriates different elements of his thinking. Okin was initially attracted by TJ's location of the family among the institutions of the basic structure; the heuristic device of the original position (OP);and its two principles of justice. Hampton seeks to redeem a contractarian approach to personal relationships for feminist consideration, modelled along KantianRawlsian lines, while Nussbaum weds the Rawlsian idea of a purely political liberalism to her capabilities approach to forge an international feminist liberal theory of justice.' Rather than simply echoing one another, these three thinkers appropriate Rawls in quite different ways from one another and in so doing offer a variety of feminist liberal positions. This is not to suggest, however, that all forms of feminist liberalism take their cues from Rawls. Amy BaehrJsanthology, Varieties of Feminist Liberalism (2004), testifies to feminist liberalism's return while underscoring its diversity. As Baehr remarks elsewhere, "feminist liberalism is not a monolith, but admits of varieties: Millian feminist liberalisms, Rawlsian feminist liberalisms, Aristotelian feminist liberalisms, and others" (2002: 150). Baehr (1996) points to some of the ways in which Habermasian thought can be more useful for feminist liberalism than can Rawlsian. Two decades ago, Susan Wendell, while not a proponent of feminist liberalism, urged feminists to reconsider some of the claims they had levelled against liberalism. Contending that liberalism was not always guilty as charged, she pointed out that its commitment to equal opportunity could require major economic reorganization and wealth redistribution (Wendell 1987: 65-6). And rather than requiring women to imitate men, Wendell sees liberal feminists as insisting on women's equal value to men on the grounds that all humans are ends in themselves. She rejects any idea that liberal feminism advocates change in the public sphere alone, arguing that it has always sought public and private recognition of women's equal value to men (ibid.: 66).

THE RETURN OF FEMINIST LIBERALISM

Wendell's challenge to the standard depiction of liberal feminism did not rely on Rawls. Loretta Kensinger also identifies a need to rethink the value of liberal feminism as a category, again without reference to Rawls. She bases this on the relation between theory and practice in recent American history, suggesting that the way liberal feminism has been portrayed as a theoretical approach ignores liberal feminist activism. Many of the social and political reforms credited to liberal feminism were, moreover, achieved by a motley collection of activists, including socialist and radical feminists (Kensinger 1997: 188-9). The way liberal feminism has been constructed also neglects the contributions and challenges by women of colour. Reading liberal feminism as a practical, as well as a theoretical, tradition reveals that its demands "such as affirmative action, educational access, active government involvement in funding and support for abortion, and welfare rights have all been important issues for women of color" (ibid.: 190; cf. 181-3,191). This implies that the common criticism of liberal feminism as a discourse created by white, middle-class, heterosexual women that erroneously purports to be about all women is something of a circular charge, legitimated by construing liberal feminism in a narrow and overly theoretical way in the first place. Denise Schaeffer also urges feminist theory to "recognize the contribution of liberal theory to its own enterprise, beyond liberalism's historical role" (2001: 707). Basing her recommendations on a reading of Catharine MacKinnon's work that brings out its tacit liberal elements, no reference to Rawls is needed. Contending that "liberal normative arguments are crucial to the feminist critique of patriarchy': Clare Chambers (2008: 4) outlines a form of liberalism that takes the social construction of desires and identities seriously without placing Rawls front and centre. As even this cursory survey illustrates, some re-examinations of the liberalism-feminism relationship have been instigated without reference to R a w l ~It. ~would therefore be wrong to suggest that engagement with Rawls is essential to feminist liberalism's reinvigoration. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that the three thinkers providing the most fully developed forms of feminist liberalism do take many cues from Rawls and apply key aspects of justice as fairness to women.9 The pivotal role Rawls plays in the thought of these three feminist liberals also dooms to incompletion any assessment of his legacy that fails to take account of this. Yet many feminists remain critical of Rawls's work and a number of questions persist. It has, for example, been argued that feminist liberalism must be a comprehensive doctrine of some sort - full or partial - and that a purely political liberalism cannot accommodate women's interests, needs and concerns (Brake 2004: 300-301; Abbey 2007: 20-24). Rawls's own remarks about gender also seem impervious to the debates about intersectionality, failing to ask to what extent we can assume a commonality among women despite

INTRODUCTION

differences of class, race, ethnicity and so on (Abbey 2007: 11). Yet this is not an issue that contemporary feminist theory can ignore, so an important question to be examined throughout this book is whether a feminist liberalism inspired by Rawls can incorporate the ways in which recent feminist thought has problematized the very concept of "women': While Hampton's work pays minimal attention to the constitution of this category, Nussbaum and Okin are more attuned to these questions, seeking to provide a feminist liberalism that is attentive to the variety of forces shaping women's lives.

3. THEORY AND PRACTICE

Feminist theory has typically eschewed abstruse and rarefied approaches, preferring more engaged modes of theorizing. In order to contribute to improvements in women's lives, it has to stay in touch with those lives, which no doubt helps to explain some of the criticisms of liberalism's abstraction and many feminists' preference for context and concreteness. According to Alison Jeffries, "In all feminist approaches ... what is constant is the engagement of political theory with empirical reality. The political project of feminism requires that theoretical reflection on status and rights be tested in observations of the lives of women" (1999: 3; cf. 5). In this same vein, Nancy Hirschmann reports that: important insights emerge when we explore the particularity and detail of women's experiences, when we look at those experiences from the perspectives of those having them ...What women think they need from social relations, institutions, practices, customs, laws and public policy to establish and maintain their freedom ... is a necessary starting point for theoretical consideration of the practical requirements of freedom. (2003: 222; cf. Jaggar 1989: 92; MacKinnon 1991; Brennan 1999; Enloe 2 0 M 30P; Schwartzman 2006: 167) Yet in being so critical of liberalism, much feminist theory of the past few decades has failed to comply with its remit to engage the experiences and perspectives of women. Both the recession of feminist liberalism and rumours of its return apply to feminist theory only: in practice, in Westernized societies at least, feminist liberalism has never gone away. Liberal values, practices, institutions and discourses form a large part of many women's 1ives.l" And whenever women have had the opportunity to pursue liberty, equality, rights and autonomy, many have seized it with both hands: consider their increasing participation in higher education, in the professions, in the paid

THE RETURN O F FEMINIST LIBERALISM

workplace, in social and political institutions; their advocacy of legal reforms promoting women's equality, liberty and privacy; the quest for reproductive rights and freedoms; their pursuit of laws against domestic violence; their support for equal pay guarantees; and so on. Even Eisenstein acknowledged this gap between theory and practice when it comes to feminist criticisms of liberalism, admitting that "One does not have to be white or middle class to aspire to these values [equality of opportunity and independence] and therefore the ideas of liberal feminism are accepted by more women than is commonly thought" (1981: 178). This is not to suggest that all women in Western societies have benefited equally from these developments, nor that liberalism provides a panacea. Nor is it to deny that serious problems and inequalities persist. Deborah Rhode (2005) is right to warn that emphasizing the improvements in women's positions can obscure the many problems that remain, such as domestic violence, sexual violence, employment inequalities, limitations on reproductive freedom, the unequal division of domestic labour, inadequate childcare provision and women's absence from the leadership of society's major institutions. MacKinnon (2010: 505-7) insists that even as some things have improved for some women, the problems posed by prostitution and pornography have worsened over the past few decades. As the coming chapters illustrate, the feminist liberals surveyed in this book care deeply about these problems, showing that one can champion liberalism while remaining alert to these troubles. However, the persistence of such problems does not detract from the fact that, on the ground, many women have responded with enthusiasm to the opportunities and possibilities that the liberal tradition has made available. In so far as feminist critics of liberalism have failed to give due consideration to this practical embrace by many women of liberalism, they have created a rupture between theory and practice.ll

4. A WORD ON TERMINOLOGY

Although "liberal feminism'' is a more familiar term than "feminist liberalism'; there are at least three advantages to talking about feminist liberalism. The first is that "liberal feminism* implies that thinkers are feminists first who qualify their feminism with liberalism, as opposed to Marxist or socialist or radical qualification^.'^ This standard typology has expanded since the 1970s to include categories such as difference feminism, postmodern feminism and so on.13For the three figures focused on in this book, however, the term "feminist liberalism" is more apposite because their feminism is an extension of their liberalism: indeed, for them, feminist liberalism should be a tautology. As Nussbaum insists:

INTRODUCTION

Liberalism needs to learn from feminism if it is to formulate its own central insights in a fully adequate manner. Taking on board the insights of feminism will not leave liberalism unchanged ... But it will be changed in ways that make it more deeply consistent with its most foundational ideas. (SSJ: 56-7; cf. Schaeffer 2001: 699; Baehr 2002: 150)14 The second advantage of talking about feminist liberalism is that it sidesteps some of the misunderstandings surrounding liberal feminism, which is typically accused of seeking women's equality with men, but assuming that equality means sameness. Holding that any liberalism worthy of its name should treat men and women as moral equals, feminist liberalism wants women to enjoy liberalismlspromise of equal dignity as persons. But it makes no a priori commitment to masculine standards of judgement and achievement and provides, moreover, normative grounds for criticizing their wholesale application to women. In connection with the charge that it adopts a masculine model of the subject, liberal feminism is also often understood to seek equality for women with men in the public realm only, whereas feminist liberalism applies liberal values across the public-private divide and is, for that reason, profoundly sceptical of the way in which this distinction has traditionally been drawn. The third benefit to talking about feminist liberalism is to intensify awareness of the variety of forms contemporary liberalism takes (see Abbey 2005).15 The term "liberal feminism': by contrast, incurs the danger of this being construed as (and probably reduced to) a debate among feminists, rather than a debate among liberals. Talking about feminist liberalism catapults the discussion, in principle if not always in practice, into more mainstream debates within English-language scholarship about the meanings and implications of liberalism. Feminist liberalism has a long history and the evidence suggests that it is not going away soon. Theorists of liberalism might be less likely to simply ignore feminist liberalism when it is shown to be not only a durable, but also a valuable, part of their tradition. Along with encouraging mainstream liberal theorists to pay attention to feminist liberalism, I hope that this book will spur feminist theorists to reconsider their all-too-ready dismissals of liberalism. In Baehr's estimation, the advantages to feminists from such reconsideration are twofold: correcting "inaccurate portraits of liberalism" and raising awareness of "the unacknowledged role that liberal principles already play in their thinking" (2002: 150). Liberalism will not, of course, be rendered immune from feminist (or other) criticism on the basis of the ideas surveyed here, but the debate will become more productive if feminists target future critiques more precisely and more fairly.

1. THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM

That liberalism and feminism are incompatible has been arguably the dominant view among feminist scholars over the past thirty years. (Baehr 20W 1;cf. Cornell 1998: 16; Schaeffer 2001: 699) Although it played a pivotal role in the development of Western feminism, liberalism fell out of favour among many, and probably most, feminist theorists in the English-speakingworld in the second half of the twentieth century. Hirschmann (1999: 28) sees the feminist critique of liberalism as emerging from second wave feminism in the 1970s, while many track it to Alison Jaggar's 1983 work Feminist Politics and Human Nature.' Eisenstein's 1981 Ihe Radical Future of Liberal Feminism offers a slightly earlier starting-point,2 while Simone de Beauvoir's 7he Second Sex, first published in English in the early 1950s, is an even earlier contender for initiating feminist criticism of liberalism in the second half of the twentieth centurye3 Drawing primarily from the work of Eisenstein, Carole Pateman, MacKinnon, Carol Gilligan, Eva Kittay, Jaggar, Hirschmann, Frances Olsen and Lisa Schwartzman, this chapter identifies five major threads of feminist critique of liberalism in the English-language literature from the past three decade^:^ (i) the sexual contract that accompanies the liberal social contract; (ii) the public-private separation; (iii) liberalism as a gendered tradition; (iv) liberalism's neglect of structures of power; and (v) the ethic and practice of care debate.5 But as the section "With or without it" below points out, few of liberalism's feminist critics repudiate it altogether. They typically gesture towards a revised liberalism that would become more reflective of women's experiences and more responsive to their needs and interests.

T H E FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM

1. THE SEXUAL CONTRACT

A good place to start any exposition of the feminist critique of liberalism is at the beginning: at liberalism's beginnings in the social contract tradition. The key figure here is Pateman, who argues that a sexual contract underpins the liberal social contract. Based primarily on her reading of canonical texts, Pateman reveals women's exclusion from the creation of the social contract that legitimated the liberal state. This contract about the purposes and limits of state power was made by male individuals, who were assumed to be heads of households. Although bound by its terms and conditions, women did not participate in the contract's creation, but nor were they left behind in the state of nature. Women were patients, rather than agents, of the social contract. Incorporated as subordinates rather than equals, they were members of society but not citizens. Women were consigned to the private realm, where relations were seen as natural rather than political (Pateman 1992: 181;2007: 203-4). In this arena of sex and of reproduction (both of bodies on a daily basis and of the species), relations were supposed to be regulated by love, care and benevolence rather than justice and rights. The family is thus placed beyond the purview of liberalism as a theory of politics. As Pateman puts it:

The story of the social contract is treated as an account of the creation of the public sphere of civil freedom. The other, private, sphere is not seen as politically relevant. Marriage and the marriage contract are, therefore, also deemed politically irrelevant. [Yet] To ignore the marriage contract is to ignore half the original contract. (1988: 3) In creating this "public sphere of civil freedom': liberalism removed patriarchal power from the public realm. Yet by ignoring the institution of marriage, liberalism silently reaffirmed patriarchal power in the family. Developing one of Eisenstein's claims that Locke was a "patriarchal anti-patriarchalist",Pateman explains that although liberalism defeated patriarchy in the sense of rule by fathers over sons, patriarchy in the sense of men's control over women remains alive and well (ibid.:22). But men's power over women went largely unchecked because of the family's designation as private, non-political, natural (cf. MacKinnon 2006: 4,6,39). Although Pateman develops her argument about the social and sexual contracts from her reading of canonical source^,^ she believes that it is of more than historical interest, for many Western societies continue to think about their governments in social contract terms (1988: 4-6, 18). Contemporary institutions such as marriage and employment can also be treated as contracts. Exposing the patriarchal foundations of the social contract casts

THE RETURN OF FEMINIST LIBERALISM

doubt on women's seamless absorption into these institutions and practices. And the attainment by women of public identities - the ability to vote, run for office, bear rights, participate in the economy beyond the household does not fundamentally alter the structure of subordination in the domestic realm. Yet being ignorant of the sexual contract that accompanied the social contract, liberal feminists have remained oblivious to this problem: The history of liberal feminism is the history of attempts to generalize liberal liberties and rights to the whole adult population; but liberal feminism does not, and cannot, come to grips with the deeper problems of how women are to take an equal place in the patriarchal civil order. (Pateman 1989: 51; cf. 214; 1992: 181; Hirschmann 1999: 29) Exposing the sexual contract that accompanies the social contract also sheds light on something as basic as the salience of gender in politics, for narrating its history in this way shows "how sexual difference, what it is to be a 'man' or 'woman: and the construction of sexual difference as political difference, is central to civil society" (Pateman 1989: 16).

2. THE PUBLIC-PRIVATE SEPARATION

In the interests of personal freedom, liberalism is committed to the analytical and normative separation of the public and private realms. Yet the term "private" is inherently ambiguous. As a contrast concept to "public: the designation can refer to (i) civil society (voluntary organizations and associations that exist between the family and the state); (ii) the economy; and (iii) the household or domestic realm. These three spheres are very different from one another in terms of functions and dynamics. The "private" seems to serve as a residual category, containing anything that does not, in principle, call for state regulation. (Of course in practice the state is involved in all these areas.) So instead of relying on a binary distinction between public and private, we need to distinguish the public from civil society, from the economy, and from the household, all the while acknowledging that none of these separations are neat, clean or complete. For the purposes of feminist analysis, the category "private" refers to the household. But feminist theorists insist that no neat separation between the public and private in this sense is possible: in myriad ways the family intersects with the public realm. As Olsen has pointed out, who and what counts as a family is itself a political and legal decision (1985: 837,842 ;cf. Stevens 2005: 77,83; Schwarzenbach 2009: 221).7More expansive conceptions of families, comprising those who live together, pool resources

THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM

and care for one another, are available and increasingly popular, yet these domestic units often do not enjoy many of the benefits attributed to families in tax policy and other areas of law.8 Not only have liberals been purblind to the law dictating what counts as a family, but they have been highly selective, not to say hypocritical, in their attempts to keep the government out of the domestic realm. The state routinely intervenes there in many ways: regulations about abortion, laws mandating education of children to a certain age, and public policies promoting maternity are just some examples. So liberal respect for the supposed privacy of the family has been partial: active intervention in the family on some issues has been coupled with reticence or neglect on others, such as the formation and enforcement of laws against marital rape and domestic violence (cf. Minow & Shanley 1996: 17). Another way in which the family and the public realm are connected is that what happens to individuals in the domestic sphere shapes their opportunities in other areas. If one or some people earn and control the household income, while everyone depends on this, this can differentially affect the ability of those members to satisfy their needs or pursue their interests. Many feminists also echo Pateman's claim that "the spheres are integrally related and ... women's full and equal membership in public life is impossible without changes in the domestic sphere" (1989: 129). If one or some family members carry an undue burden of unpaid domestic work, this limits their ability to participate in politics or other activities that matter to them (Baehr 2002: 151; Rhode 2005: 178). Calling these "spillover effects': Kimberley Yuracko contends that "private domestic gender inequality spills over into the public sphere, thereby denying women meaningful participation in the public sphere" (1995: 7-8). Because the family is categorized as private and non-political, liberal political thought leaves it, as we have seen, largely unscrutinized. Yet, as feminist theorists insist, whether deemed political or not, the family is a locus of power relations. Power is exercised among its members, and can be done so in ways that are more or less in accordance with liberal desiderata. If liberalism is genuinely committed to values such as minimizing arbitrary power and respecting the equal moral worth of persons, there is no a priori reason to exclude the family from its purview. Finally, as Wollstonecraft and Mill9have underlined, the family is the first school of social relations, for there most people learn (or fail to learn) how to treat others with respect and consideration (Yuracko 1995: 20; Minow & Shanley 1996: 24-5). The liberal polity requires a range of virtues and values from its citizens such as respect, tolerance, law abidingness and willingness to sacrifice one's own resources for others (military service, taxation, jury service), and it is important that citizens accustom themselves to these virtues and values as early and often as possible. When family members are

THE RETURN OF FEMINIST LIBERALISM

treated as moral equals, worthy of respect and so forth, it becomes easier for them to grow up to behave as good liberal citizens in the public realm.''

3. LIBERALISM AS A GENDERED TRADITION

Another major feminist critique of liberalism has been that, despite its claims about neutrality and impartiality, liberalism is a theory developed for, by and about men. Despite the abstract language in which it is usually couched, the liberal subject is masculine.ll Masculine perspectives and experiences pervade this tradition in more and less subtle ways. Liberalism has, for example, traditionally protected the citizen's civil and political rights: in defending such things as freedom of speech, the press and assembly, and the principle of habeas corpus, liberalism makes citizens as free from government interference as is compatible with public order and the equal freedom of other citizens. Feminist critics of liberalism do not say that these rights and freedoms are irrelevant to women, nor that they would be better off without them (Smart 2005: 138-41). They claim instead that emphasizingthese rights and freedoms neglects freedom and equality in the domestic sphere, which is where many of the abuses and much of the oppression that happens to women on the basis of gender occurs. As MacKinnon writes, "To be a person, an abstract individual with abstract rights, may be a bourgeois concept, but its content is male ... Abstract equality has never included those rights that women as women most need and never have had" (1989: 229). Hirschmann likewise finds that "rights have been inadequate in tackling sexist barriers, because the framework in which they exist often cannot even see harm to women as harm, such as pornography, rape, or even sexual harassment" (1999: 39). Such exposure of the liberal paradigm as male-biased (Jaggar 1983: 46-7; Schwarzenbach 2009: 17) means that simply extending its rights and freedoms to women cannot qualify as treating them equally. Required to become like men to attain equality, women must try to squeeze their experiences into categories designed by and for (some) men. Any differences in women's perspectives, needs, life cycles and choices are judged from a masculine perspective as special at best, deviant at worst (Hirschmann 2003: 223; Bryson 2007: 44). MacKinnon has been the most forceful exponent of the argument that women's equality with men requires women to resemble men. The liberal concept of sex equality "has not traditionally been theorized to encompass issues of sexual assault or reproduction because equality theory has been written out of men's practice, not women's" (1991).She points repeatedly to the standing dilemma women face with regard to equality law. Women who invoke equality to challenge discrimination typically have to show that they were treated differently from a similarly situated man (1989: 216-34). But, from MacKinnon's point of

THE FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM

view, women and men are never similarly situated because what masquerades as gender difference is really masculine domination and feminine subordination. There is no such thing as "equal but different": equality means sameness to men while difference means domination by them (ibid.: 51). MacKinnon paints the whole liberal state apparatus as masculine, insisting that "the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women. The liberal state coercively and authoritatively constitutes the social order in the interest of men as a gender ... [its] formal norms recapitulate the male point of view on the level of designJJ(ibid.: 161-2; cf. 215-16; 2006: 4). Underpinning all this is the (usually) invisible masculine norm that animates liberalism, concealing what is masculine under the guise of the human. In one of her most succinct and compelling statements of this, which has become a widely-cited passage in feminist work, MacKinnon rails that: every quality that distinguishes men from women is already affirmatively compensated in society's organization and values, so that it implicitly defines the standards it neutrally applies. Men's physiology defines most sports, their health needs largely define insurance coverage, their socially designed biographies defined [sic] workplace expectations and successful career patterns, their perspectives and concerns define quality in scholarship, their experiences and obsessions define merit, their military service defines citizenship, their presence defines family ... their wars and rulership define history, their image defines god, and their genitals define sex. These are the standards that are presented as gender neutral. (1989: 224)

4. LIBERALISM IGNORES STRUCTURES OF POWER

MacKinnonJsinsistence that gender differences mask relations of domination leads to another line of feminist critique according to which liberalism is incapable of seeing such domination. Because of its individualism, liberalism can take no account of structures of power and thus is impervious to the very possibility of systematic domination and oppression. Viewing people primarily as autonomous individuals, liberalism is incapable of analyzing oppression in class or group terms. EisensteinJs(1981: 190-91) claim that liberalism is blind to structural forces and the existence of collectivities was echoed before the decade's end by MacI