Toward a New Feminist Liberalism: Okin, Rawls, and Habermas

Abstract

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

Women’s Human Rights, Then and Now: Symposium on Eileen Hunt Botting’s Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016)

“…Though I continue to read Wollstonecraft as a revolutionary republican in her 1790s context, I also interpret her legacies for the evolution of what Amy P. Baeher and others have called "feminist liberalism." 35 In the end, debates over whether Wollstonecraft should be called a feminist republican or a feminist liberal, a religious feminist or a radical feminist, miss the real point: she was in fact all of these things and more, so her political theory (and the politics it yields) allows for a variety of creative transgressions in how we conceptualize and implement complex, evolving ideas like women's human rights.…”

Civic Education: Political or Comprehensive?

“…6 Third, some argue that a politically liberal civic education is indeed distinctive-but not defensible because the reasonableness requirement is too permissive of different comprehensive conceptions of the good. Some feminists have objected that by tolerating a wide variety of comprehensive doctrines as reasonable, political liberalism erodes tools for securing equality between the sexes (Okin 1994(Okin , 2004Exdell 1994;Baehr 1996;Yurako 1995Yurako , 2003. 7 A central concern of these feminists is the basic structure restriction.…”

“…As long as citizens are reasonable when engaged in public political debate, their nonpublic views are of no concern to political liberals. As Okin, Exdell, Baehr, and Yurako argue, many traditional religious practices in the private sphere undermine women's equality, and thus including such religions as reasonable shows that political liberalism is indefensible without significant revision (Okin 1994(Okin , 2004Exdell 1994;Baehr 1996). 8 Following a similar argument, that reasonableness is too permissive of different comprehensive doctrines to be defensible, Fowler has argued that because reasonableness is a lax criterion, political liberalism cannot protect children from certain damaging forms of upbringing (Fowler 2010, 368).…”

Whaling, Bullfighting, and the Conditional Value of Tradition

“… 67 Poulter ( 1998 ), Poulter ( 1986 ). See also Baehr ( 2013 ), 198; Mason ( 2000 ), 91ff; and Okin ( 1999 ), 17. …”