The Return of Feminist Liberalism

Ruth Abbey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317547945
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

While it is uncontroversial to point to the liberal roots of feminism, a major issue in English-language feminist political thought over the last few decades has been whether feminism's association with liberalism should be relegated to the past. Can liberalism continue to serve feminist purposes? This book examines the positions of three contemporary feminists - Martha Nussbaum, Susan Moller Okin and Jean Hampton - who, notwithstanding decades of feminist critique, are unwilling to give up on liberalism. This book examines why, and in what ways, each of these theorists believes that liberalism offers the normative and political resources for the improvement of women's situations. It also brings out and tries to explain and evaluate the differences among them, notwithstanding their shared allegiance to liberalism. In so doing, the books goes to the heart of recent debates in feminist and political theory.

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 2004: 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-speaking world 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.¹ Eisenstein’s 1981 The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism offers a slightly earlier starting-point,² while Simone de Beauvoir’s The 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 century.³

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 decades:⁴ (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.

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 sources,⁶ 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 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).⁷ More expansive conceptions of families, comprising those who live together, pool resources 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 Mill⁹ have 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 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.¹⁰

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.¹¹ 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 emphasizing these 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 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 design” (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

MacKinnon’s insistence 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. Eisenstein’s (1981: 190–91) claim that liberalism is blind to structural forces and the existence of collectivities was echoed before the decade’s end by MacKinnon¹² who accuses liberalism, and liberal feminism, of taking the individual, rather than the group, as “the proper unit of analysis” (1989: 40). This makes its category “women” simply aggregative. Liberal feminism takes improvement in women’s conditions to require a levelling out of differences and inequalities among individuals. Focusing only on individuals and prescribing merely reformist remedies, it is unable to see that women as a group are subordinated to men as a group. Unable to see it, it is powerless to remediate it. Radical feminism, by contrast, sees women as an oppressed group, oppressed simply by virtue of membership in that group (ibid.: 228; cf. MacKinnon 2001: 709; Chambers 2008: 104). Demanding deeper and more thoroughgoing change, it depicts sexism as “a system of subordination to be overthrown” (MacKinnon 1989: 40).

Both Eisenstein’s and MacKinnon’s critiques of liberalism on this score are indebted to Marxism: their identification of systematic and structured power relations where others see only freely acting individuals is of a piece with Marx’s critique of capitalism. For Marx, traditional political economy looks at capitalism and sees only free exchanges between individual buyers and sellers of goods and labour whereas Marxism exposes the deep-seated exploitation of one class by another. MacKinnon’s depiction of the liberal state as male also parallels Marx’s presentation of it as bourgeois. Yet MacKinnon (1989: 9) insists that feminism needs more than Marxism, for class analysis divides women and misses what they share qua women.

Iris Marion Young reiterates this point about liberalism’s individualism rendering it unable to see people as members of collectives, and as being subject to domination and disadvantage on the basis of such membership. “The discourse of liberal individualism denies the reality of groups … This individualist ideology … obscures opp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: the return of feminist liberalism
• 1. The feminist critique of liberalism
• I The feminist liberalism of Susan Moller Okin
• II The feminist liberalism of Jean Hampton
• III The feminist liberalism of Martha Nussbaum
• IV Contemporary feminist liberalism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index