While O h ' s feminist appropiation of Rawls's theory of justice requires that principles of justice be applied directly to the family, Rawls seems to require only that the family be m i n i d y just. Rawls's recent proposal dulls the critical edge of liberalism by capitulating too much to those holding sexist doctrines. Okin's proposal, howewer, is insuficiently flexible. An alternative account of the relation of the political and the nonpolitical is offered by Jiirgen Habermas.Susan Moller Okin, John Rawls's foremost feminist critic and advocate, defends his idea of the original position as a tool for criticizing social structures that, she argues, unjustly disadvantage women (Okin 1989(Okin ,1994Rawls 1971 Rawls , 1993). If Okin is right, this would establish a strong link between a liberalism grounded in justice as fairness and the central goals of the women's movement. As the possibility of a coherent liberal feminism rides on some such link, Okin's work is of central importance. I began this study perplexed by the fact that Okin is quite confident that justice as fairness requires that the family be structured according to principles of justice whereas Rawls, despite his silence on this issue, would seem to have to reject this claim. In large part what I do here is explain their disagreement and try to make it fruitful to constructive feminist thinking about liberalism.In this essay I argue that Okin raises a question central to liberal feminism:How liberal must the "background culture" of a society be to support a liberal "political culture"? Feminists will recognize this as one version of the question concerning the relation between the private and the public realms. After showing how this question is developed in Okin's work, I argue that both Rawls and Okin fail to offer acceptable ways to conceive of this relation. In conclusion I offer an alternative approach to the question, culled from Jurgen
This paper presents an account of liberal feminism as a capacious family of doctrines. The account is capacious in the sense that it sweeps in a wide variety of doctrines, including some thought to be challenges to liberal feminism, and allows us to refer to doctrines with more than one label—so we can identify, for example, care-ethical liberal feminism, socially conservative liberal feminism, and liberal socialist feminism. The capacious account also provides a conceptual framework to allow us to think with greater clarity about the scope of liberal feminist claims to justice, and about how that justice is to be secured and sustained. Since there is such variety within the liberal feminist family of doctrines, it makes little sense to criticize or defend liberal feminism simpliciter. The capacious account both requires and makes it possible for us to eschew such talk and focus instead on the particular doctrines we have in mind.
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