The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

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Clare Chambers

For some feminists, liberalism is little more than patriarchy in disguise; for others, it is the framework for securing justice. Feminism, like all other positions in political philosophy, is a range of views rather than a single determinate viewpoint. One aspect of this range is that feminism includes both academics and activists, for whom the term “liberalism” can signify rather different things; after all, liberalism is not one single thing either.

In this chapter I start by considering feminist criticisms of liberalism. I discuss two aspects of feminist critique: first, academic feminist critiques of non-feminist liberal philosophy; second, activist feminist critiques of what is variously called “choice feminism,” “third-wave feminism,” or simply “liberal feminism.”

I then move to those feminists who endorse liberalism and argue that a suitably modified liberalism offers the best path to gender equality. This position, “feminist liberalism,” is mostly found in contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy. Feminist liberals understand liberalism as a commitment to substantive, demanding principles of justice based on freedom and equality. Included in this section are those feminist approaches that combine radical feminism’s insights about the limitations of individual choice with feminist liberalism’s commitment to autonomy, equality, and justice.

Feminist Critiques of Liberalism

To get a handle on feminist critiques of liberalism, we first need an account of what liberalism is. Landmark twentieth-century liberal John Rawls defines liberal accounts of justice as having “three main elements: a list of equal basic rights and liberties, a priority for these freedoms, and an assurance that all members of society have adequate all-purpose means to make use of these rights and liberties” (Rawls 2007: 12). A simplified version of Rawls’s account would describe contemporary liberalism as combining two key values: freedom and equality. Liberals want individuals to have a significant and protected domain of freedom, they believe that individuals are equally eligible for this freedom, and they believe that this freedom requires a certain amount of, and possibly even equal, economic resources.

Beyond these basic liberal premises there is much variation. For example, some but not all liberals base their understanding of justice and obligation on a contractarian view of relationships between individuals, and between individuals and the state. Liberals also differ in how they understand freedom—is it constituted by the mere absence of coercion, or does it require the presence of rationality? All liberals utilize some sort of distinction between the public or political sphere, considered to be the appropriate place for politics and power, and the private or non-political sphere, considered to be the appropriate place for non-interference. But, once again, there is significant variation in the detail.

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A detailed, critical account of liberalism is offered by radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon in her major work Toward A Feminist Theory of The State (1989). MacKinnon identifies five aspects of liberal theory: individualism, naturalism, voluntarism, idealism, and moralism (1989: 45). For MacKinnon, each of these is problematic and must be rejected. Feminism, she argues, must necessarily be radical rather than liberal.

Individualism means that liberalism sees people as individuals first and foremost, and assesses the political position of each individual separately. John Stuart Mill, for example, devotes much of his On Liberty to defending the rights and interests of the individual and the need for individuality in living; Rawls criticizes utilitarian theory for failing to respect the separateness of persons (Mill 1993 [1859]; Rawls 1971). Radical feminism, in contrast, sees people as necessarily socially constructed and analyses their freedom and equality as a structural aspect of the social group to which they belong (MacKinnon 1989; see also Jaggar 1983).

Naturalism means that liberalism assumes that there is such a thing as human nature. For classical liberals, accounts of human nature are often substantive and gendered. For example, John Locke connects political power and freedom to a rationality that is denied to women (Hirschmann 2008: 48), and Immanuel Kant “constructs women as unfree subjects” (Hirschmann 2008: 62). Some later liberals reject crude versions of essentialist gender roles: Mill argues at length that most differences between men and women are wrongly attributed to nature rather than culture (Mill 1996 [1868]). Nonetheless, liberals generally assume that there is some biological truth to sex difference, and may employ a sex/gender distinction to separate biological from cultural roles. So liberals might critically assess masculinity and femininity, but they tend to retain faith in male and female as natural, biological categories. For MacKinnon, feminism shows that even biological sex difference is social, since it is a social act to identify particular biological features as politically relevant and to create social hierarchy around them (MacKinnon 1989).

Voluntarism occurs when liberalism conceptualizes people as autonomous, choosing, intentional individuals. According to voluntarism people have freedom before and unless they are constrained by others. This way of thinking about freedom is often referred to as negative liberty, and is a central tenet of much liberal thought. Negative liberty means the absence of coercion, understood as intentional interference by other humans (Hayek 1960; Berlin 1969). Liberals focus on minimizing coercion: a person is free just so long as there is no other human being deliberately interfering in her actions, and the way to maximize liberty is to minimize wrongful interference (Mill 1993 [1859]). MacKinnon argues that feminists reject voluntarism in favor of “a complex political determinism” (MacKinnon 1989: 46). Our actions and our identities are socially constructed: they respond to the social conditions in which we find ourselves. But our actions also act as conditions for other people: we both react to, and create, the social conditions in which we must all operate MacKinnon recognizes and praises Mill’s recognition that liberty is restricted by private oppression and social norms as well as formal coercive law, but for her his fundamentally voluntaristic instinct remains problematic (MacKinnon 1989: 41).

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Idealism means that liberalism tends to “treat thinking as a sphere unto itself and as the prime mover of social life” (MacKinnon 1989: 46). Rationality, on this view, exists independently of action and of social context. This tendency can be seen in the core tenets of Enlightenment liberalism, in contemporary liberal theories that focus on idealized accounts of justice, and indeed in early feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mill (Wollstonecraft 2003 [1792]; Mill 1993 [1859], 1996 [1868]). Radical feminism requires the rejection of idealism in favor of an account that sees consciousness as inseparable from the social conditions in which it is situated, and sees consciousness-raising as the method by which change can be effected (MacKinnon 1989).

Finally, moralism means that liberalism proceeds in terms of principles of behaviour that are right or wrong in themselves, viewed in the abstract. Contemporary liberal theory provides many examples of this approach, with Rawls’s principles of justice being the most prominent (Rawls 1971). Rawls also distinguishes political and comprehensive liberalism. Comprehensive liberalism is a controversial commitment to autonomy and equality as essential parts of a good or valuable life, but Rawls argues that political liberalism is neutral between conceptions of the good and thus acceptable to all reasonable people (Rawls 1993). Many feminists find political liberalism appealing as it offers a way of protecting equality while respecting diversity (Nussbaum 1999b; Hartley and Watson 2010), but others criticize it for failing to protect women adequately from cultural oppression (Okin 1999; Chambers 2008). A more general problem with moralism is that claims to neutrality and objectivity often conceal partiality and bias, specifically the bias of the dominant group (MacKinnon 1989; see also Young 1990). Radical feminism proceeds in terms of an analysis of power and powerlessness, and aims for a redistribution of power as a precondition of a theory of justice.

A recurring theme in MacKinnon’s account of liberal theory is thus liberalism’s failure to understand the existence and significance of power. A number of contemporary feminists take up that theme, often using the work of non-liberal theories of power such as those of Michel Foucault to explore the ways that power exists in all social interactions, and is thus both the cause and the effect of gender hierarchy (Butler 1989; McNay 1992; Ramazanoğlu 1993).

A failure to recognize the significance of power is one of the five feminist critiques of liberalism identified by Ruth Abbey. The others are: a critique of contract thinking, a critique of the public/private distinction, a critique of the gendered nature of liberalism as a tradition, and the significance of care (Abbey 2011).

Feminism’s critique of liberal contract theory is most significantly stated in Carole Pateman’s classic text The Sexual Contract (1988). Pateman argues that liberalism bases its ideas of freedom and equality on contract thinking, most prominently in liberal social contract theory. Social contract theory is the approach exemplified by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who justify political obligation (the obligation we have to obey the law) by reference to some sort of contractual agreement between people, or between citizens and the state (Hobbes 1994 [1651]; Locke 1994 [1689]; Rousseau 1987 [1762]). This contract may be explicit or tacit, actual or hypothetical. Social contract theorists argue that contract is a mechanism for preserving equality and freedom while justifying authority and constraint, solving the puzzle of how a liberal state could ever be legitimate. But Pateman asks how a social contract, supposedly based on free consent between equals, can justify the existing social order in which men and women are unequal. She concludes that women are excluded from the social contract both implicitly and explicitly. Instead of a social contract women are the subjects of a sexual contract, one that subordinates them to men in marriage and private life. Liberals continue to use contract thinking as a mechanism for securing freedom in areas such as economics, employment, and marriage. But, for Pateman, the sexual contract shows that contract thinking does not always secure freedom. If the parties are unequal, the contract entrenches inequality.

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Pateman’s account leads to the feminist criticism of liberalism’s public/private distinction. This distinction takes different forms in different versions of liberalism. In some versions of liberalism the public/private distinction separates a public sphere of government, law, economics, and civil society from a private sphere of family and intimate relationships. The public sphere, on this account, is the proper concern of politics and also of men, whereas the private sphere lies outside the purview of justice and is the proper location for women (Elshtain 1981). More recent versions of this idea include the Rawlsian notion that justice should apply only to the basic structure of society (Rawls 1971; for discussion see Okin 1989; Abbey 2011; Chambers 2013). In other versions of liberalism, the distinction concerns the appropriate scope of interference from others: interference may be legitimate in the public sphere but not in the private sphere. For Hayek the private sphere is an area of state non-interference, a necessary protection from coercion (Hayek 1960); for Mill the public/private distinction is best understood as the distinction between other-regarding and self-regarding actions and should not be understood as corresponding to the distinction between public life and family life (Mill 1993 [1859]). But many feminists point out that the public/private distinction, in whatever form, generally serves to exclude women’s lives and activities from consideration as matters of politics, as relevant for justice, as areas of freedom or unfreedom, power and subordination, when in fact they are all of these things (Hochschild 1989; Okin 1989; Fineman 1995; Card 1996; Kittay 1999; Williams 2000). “The personal is political” is a feminist slogan that insists that the distinction is untenable.

Much liberal theory pays no special attention to sex. Feminists argue that liberalism is a gendered tradition, sometimes explicitly and sometimes not. Susan Moller Okin identifies what she calls “false gender neutrality” in philosophers of all kinds, from Aristotle to the present day. Even if they abandon the use of “man” and “he” as generics in favor of gender-neutral terms, liberals and other non-feminists err by “ignoring the irreducible biological differences between the sexes, and/or by ignoring their different assigned social roles and consequent power differentials, and the ideologies that have supported them” (Okin 1989: 11). A prominent example of false gender neutrality is the fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1868), which declares “No state shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” but goes on to guarantee the vote only to “male citizens.” It seems that, at the time of writing, the only “persons” were men. As MacKinnon puts it:

Men’s physiology defines most sports, their health needs largely define insurance coverage, their socially designed biographies define 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 inability to get along with each other—their wars and rulerships—defines history, their image defines god, and their genitals define sex. These are the standards that are presented as gender neutral.

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(MacKinnon 1989: 229)

Finally, a strand of feminist philosophy known as the ethics of care criticizes liberalism for focusing on justice and abstract reasoning at the expense of care and relationships. Many feminists argue that liberalism fetishizes abstract principles of impartial justice between isolated independent individuals (Gilligan 1982; Jaggar 1983; Tronto 1993; Kittay 1999; Held 2007; Nedelsky 2012). This fetish is problematic for several reasons. First, it is based on distortion: all human beings are dependent on others. No human being reaches adulthood without extensive care from parents or guardians, and we all need care throughout our lives when ill or frail. Moreover, the sort of care that is required for human flourishing and even basic well-being goes beyond the provision of basic survival needs: we are fundamentally social beings who cannot do well without intimate, reciprocal relationships. It follows, according to advocates of the ethics of care, that a liberal approach to morality and justice that relies on abstract principles of impartial rights and obligations misses the most salient and valuable forms of human interaction and normative thinking.

The criticisms of liberalism discussed so far come from academic feminism. Contemporary radical feminist activists extend this critique to include what they sometimes call “liberal feminism.” In the activist context, and sometimes elsewhere, “liberal feminism” refers to a version of feminism that prioritizes the individual above the social, and choice above social construction. Liberal feminism of this kind is mostly located in popular culture and media, associated with terms like “girl power,” “choice feminism,” and “third-wave feminism.” It involves the claim that feminism means allowing individual women to make their own choices free from judgment, even if those choices involve participating in activities that other feminists criticize, such as pornography, prostitution, or cosmetic surgery (Wolf 1993; Walker 1995; Walter 1998; Baumgardner and Richards 2000; Snyder-Hall 2010; for discussion see Levy 2006; Snyder 2008; Ferguson 2010; Hirschmann 2010; Kirkpatrick 2010).

Radical feminists criticize this focus on choice. Miranda Kiraly and Meagan Tyler argue:

Individualism lies at the heart of liberal feminism, championing the benefits of “choice” and the possibility that freedom is within reach . . . Liberal feminism has helped recast women’s liberation as an individual and private struggle, rather than one which acknowledges the systemic shortcomings of existing systems of power and privilege that continue to hold women back, as a class.

(Kiraly and Tyler 2015: xi; see also Jeffreys 1997 and 2005; MacKinnon 2001)

For radical feminists, gender inequality is explained by structural patterns of male dominance, particularly centered around sex. Women are a sex class, subordinated by virtue of their sex and by the eroticization of male dominance and female submission. Practices such as pornography, prostitution, BDSM, and beauty practices are thus not neutral choices but structural requirements, part and parcel of women’s subordination.

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Feminist Liberalism

In this section I discuss those feminists who recognize or even endorse the strong critiques of liberalism just described, yet who still think that liberalism is the best path towards women’s equality. The feminists discussed in this section do not support the simplistic choice-based liberal feminism that has just been considered. I refer to them as “feminist liberals” to distinguish them from that approach. This section also discusses how feminist liberals respond to some of the critiques of liberalism raised earlier in this chapter.

For feminist liberals writing within contemporary political philosophy, “liberalism” signals the strongly egalitarian school of thought that is exemplified, in its non-feminist form, by the work of theorists such as John Rawls (1971) and Ronald Dworkin (2000). Feminist liberalism focuses on the implications of that work for women, and on the question of whether the extremely demanding egalitarianism of this sort of liberalism is, or can be, enough to satisfy the feminist demand for gender equality. For feminist liberals a version of contemporary liberal egalitarianism is the correct approach, perhaps after modification in response to the criticisms described earlier.

Martha Nussbaum is a feminist liberal who argues that three liberal insights are crucial to women. These are that all humans are “of equal dignity and worth,” that “the primary source of this worth is a power of moral choice within them,” and that “the moral equality of persons gives them a fair claim to certain types of treatment at the hands of society and politics” (Nussbaum 1999a: 57). Nussbaum endorses some of the feminist critiques of liberalism that have been discussed so far: she rejects the public/private distinction in favor of paying close attention to inequality within families and relationships; she rejects simple voluntarism and idealism in favor of recognizing the social construction of choices, emotions, and desires—although choice retains a prominent role in her account (see Chambers 2008 for discussion). In these respects, then, Nussbaum endorses the general feminist critique of liberalism. But she argues that liberalism should not be abandoned. On the contrary, she argues that the liberal values of individualism and moralism both require liberalism to become more feminist, and provide reasons for feminism to be liberal.

For Nussbaum, the individualism of liberalism is not a problematic egoism or a denial of the significance of groups. Instead

it just asks us to concern ourselves with the distribution of resources and opportunities in a certain way, namely, with concern to see how well each and every one of them is doing, seeing each and every one as an end, worthy of concern.

(Nussbaum 1999a: 63; emphasis in original)

This concern is vital for feminism, Nussbaum argues, since “women have too rarely been treated as ends in themselves, and too frequently been treated as means to the ends of others . . . where women and the family are concerned, liberal political thought has not been nearly individualist enough” (Nussbaum 1999a: 63). In making this claim Nussbaum endorses the feminist critique of the liberal public/private distinction. It is necessary to apply liberal principles within the family, and to the care work that is an essential part of human life, because both care and family have been a source of gender injustice. Liberals have largely failed to take that into account (Nussbaum 2004). But Nussbaum believes that liberalism is up to the challenge: its commitment to individualism provides the conceptual tools and the conceptual necessity to do so, particularly if complemented by a focus on capabilities (Nussbaum 1999a; 2004).

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Nussbaum also sees moralism and one version of idealism as strengths rather than weaknesses of liberalism. Moralism, recall, is the idea that there can be abstract principles of right and wrong or, as contemporary liberals would put it, principles of justice. Idealism is the related idea that reason is at least some of the way to get there. While it is true that reason and justice are historically associated with men, and tradition and emotion are associated with women, Nussbaum argues that reason and justice actually serve women’s interests. As she puts it,

wherever you most mistrust habit, there you have the most need for reason. Women have lots of grounds to mistrust most habits people have had through the centuries, just as poor people have had reasons to distrust the moral emotions of kings. This means that women have an especially great need for reason.

(Nussbaum 1999a: 79; see also Laden 2013)

In a similar vein, Jean Hampton argues that contractarianism can actually help the feminist concern to secure justice in all relationships, including intimate ones (Hampton 2004: 172; for discussion see Richardson 2013). Hampton’s idea is that relationships can be subjected to a “contractarian test” that asks:

Given the fact that we are in this relationship, could both of us reasonably accept the distribution of costs and benefits (that is, the costs and benefits that are not themselves side effects of any affective or duty-based tie between us) if it were the subject of an informed, unforced agreement in which we think of ourselves as motivated solely by self-interest?

(Hampton 2004: 173)

For Hampton, this test enables us to take full account of a person’s human worth and legitimate interests, and avoids making women into martyrs to others as the ethics of care threatens to do.

More specifically, various feminists find the work of paradigmatic contemporary liberal Rawls useful for feminism. Prominent among them is Okin, who criticizes Rawls for failing adequately to take gender inequality to account in his actual writing, while at the same time praising his theory for having the potential to be profoundly feminist. Okin joins the chorus of feminists who have no time for liberalism’s public/private distinction: justice must apply to the family, she argues, since the personal is political in four different ways. First, the private sphere is a sphere of power: “what happens in domestic and personal life is not immune from the dynamics of power, which has typically been seen as the distinguishing feature of the political” (Okin 1989: 128). Second, the private sphere is a political creation: it is law that defines what counts as a family or a marriage or a legitimate sexual relationship. Third, the private sphere creates psychological conditions that govern public life: it is an important school of justice and injustice (see also Mill 1996 [1868]). Fourth, the gendered division of labor within the family affects women everywhere: it creates barriers in public life, as women are not represented in positions of power or when their words are not taken seriously in the workplace, in civil society, or in personal relationships.

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Justice must apply within the family, then, and Okin is highly critical of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice for considering only heads of households and for failing adequately to consider whether sex should be concealed behind the veil of ignorance (Okin 1989; Rawls 1971). “On the other hand,” she argues,

the feminist potential of Rawls’s method of thinking and his conclusions is considerable. The original position, with the veil of ignorance hiding from its participants their sex as well as their other particular characteristics, talents, circumstances, and aims, is a powerful concept for challenging the gender structure.

(Okin 1989: 109)

Justice, including as Rawls conceives it, is incompatible with gender difference and requires significant changes to all aspects of society. In his later work, Rawls directly addresses Okin’s critique and concludes “I should like to think that Okin is right” (Rawls 2001: 176; for discussion see Baehr 1996; Abbey 2011; Chambers 2013). Moreover, whereas Okin sees feminist potential mainly in Rawls’s earlier work, other feminists argue that his later political liberalism best meets women’s interests (Cornell 1995; Nussbaum 1999b; Lloyd 2004; Hartley and Watson 2010; Brake 2012; Baehr 2013; Laden 2013).

Some feminist liberals argue that liberalism can—and should—take proper account of care. Eva Kittay argues that care and caring relationships count as primary goods in the Rawlsian sense, even though Rawls himself fails to recognize this, so that care is a crucial part of liberal justice (Kittay 1999; see also Brake 2012). Jennifer Nedelsky develops an account of relational autonomy that, she argues, speaks to both feminist and liberal concerns (Nedelsky 2012). And Elizabeth Anderson develops a version of democratic equality that is both fundamentally relational and appeals to liberal egalitarianism (Anderson 1999).

Finally, a number of contemporary feminists argue that it is possible to develop feminist approaches that combine a deep understanding of power of the sort that is found in radical feminism, critical theory, or postmodern/poststructural theory with a commitment to liberal values such as autonomy, equality, democracy, and universalism. For Nancy Hirschmann feminism requires both a detailed understanding of the processes of social construction and a liberal-like commitment to freedom as a fundamentally important political value (Hirschmann 2003). The problem with liberalism, Hirschmann argues, is that its conception of freedom is inadequate. What is needed is a “feminist freedom” with a “political analysis of patriarchal power” (Hirschmann 2003, 217) and an understanding of how the very subject of freedom is shaped. Marilyn Friedman (2003) argues that the liberal conception of autonomy is vital for women, and that understanding it requires deep analysis of the limiting conditions of systematic injustice, subordination, and oppression; oppression is also the focus of the work of feminist liberal Ann Cudd (2006).

Seyla Benhabib argues that there is a “powerful kernel of truth” in many feminist criticisms of liberalism. Nonetheless, she argues in favor of what she calls a “post-Enlightenment defence of universalism,” one that is “interactive not legislative, cognizant of gender difference not gender-blind, contextually sensitive and not situation indifferent” (Benhabib 1992: 3). In later work Benhabib develops “discourse ethics,” a version of deliberative democracy that draws on both liberal principles of freedom and equality and feminist/postmodern theories of power (Benhabib 2002; see also Benhabib et al. 1995).

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Nancy Fraser argues in favor of a feminism that combines both an awareness of inequalities of power and recognition with a commitment to egalitarian redistribution (Fraser 1997; 2013). Fraser identifies redistribution and recognition as “two analytically distinct paradigms of justice” (Fraser 1997: 13), the former allied with liberalism and the latter with communitarianism and postmodernism. But women, she argues, face both distributive and recognitional injustice, requiring “socialism in the economy plus deconstruction in the culture” (Fraser 1997, 31). Realising this sort of justice requires the sort of universal standpoint that liberals advocate: “all people [must] be weaned from their attachment to current cultural constructions of their interests and identities” (Fraser 1997: 31).

Finally, in my own work I argue that the liberal reliance on choice is deeply problematic since it makes it difficult for liberalism to explain or criticize what is going on when people make choices that harm them (Chambers 2008). For liberals, choices that harm only the choosing individual are normatively unproblematic; and yet social norms mean that many such choices are gendered. That is, women are strongly encouraged to choose or accept many harmful practices ranging from gendered appearance norms and sexual objectification to the gendered division of labor and explicit political and legal inequality. Liberals tend to argue that these inequalities are unproblematic if they are chosen, as in this example from Brian Barry:

Suppose . . . that women were as highly qualified as men but disproportionately chose to devote their lives to activities incompatible with reaching the top of a large corporation. An egalitarian liberal could not then complain of injustice if, as a result, women were underrepresented in “top corporate jobs.”

(Barry 2001: 95)

In this example Barry is using choice as what I call a “normative transformer,” something that transforms an inequality from unjust to just by its mere presence. This is a common move in liberalism just as it was in liberal or choice feminism. But it is deeply problematic to consider choice as a normative transformer.

The reason that choice is problematic is that we choose in a context of social construction. There are two main aspects of social construction: the construction of options and the construction of preferences. The social construction of options means that our social context affects which options are available to us and which options are cast as appropriate for us. The choice to be a rocket scientist, for example, is only available in a society that contains rocket science; and it will be available to women only if it is not set up an exclusively male role. The social construction of preferences means that we often want precisely those things that our society presents as appropriate for us. Extensive gendered socialisation means that women are more likely to want careers, activities, and products that are gendered as female and men are more likely to want things that are gendered as male.

But if our options and our preferences are socially constructed, it does not make sense to use those choices to legitimate the social context on which they depend. We choose things because our society makes those things available to us and, in large part, because it casts them as appropriate for us. Women are more likely than men are to choose family over career because gendered societies construct working life around the assumption that someone else will be looking after children, and social norms dictate that that person should almost always be a woman.

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Liberal values still have a place, though. If social construction is not to lead to relativism (a situation in which we may as well rely on choice since we have no standards of judgement) then we need normative standards and a commitment to at least some universal values. Liberalism offers both. It offers the twin values of freedom and equality, so crucial to women’s liberation, and it offers a variety of philosophical mechanisms for theorizing those values as universal, crucial to ensuring that liberation is not the preserve of the privileged. What we need is an uncompromisingly feminist liberalism that takes social construction seriously.

Conclusion

It is possible, then, to combine feminist and liberal insights, and many contemporary feminist liberals do just that. But why should feminists want to be liberals? As MacKinnon points out, liberalism has

yet to face either the facts or implications of women’s material inequality as a group, has not controlled male violence societywide, and has not equalized the status of women relative to men. . . . if liberalism “inherently” can meet feminism’s challenges, having had the chance for some time, why hasn’t it?

(MacKinnon 2001: 709)

Some feminists thus abandon the language and traditions of liberalism, arguing for, as MacKinnon puts it in the title of one of her books, Feminism Unmodified.

For other feminists, the language and “radical vision” of liberalism still resonate (Nussbaum 1999a: 79). Liberalism has certainly failed fully to realise its commitments to universal freedom and equality, both philosophically and politically, but few if any liberals claim that the project is complete. The political and philosophical dominance of liberalism makes constructive engagement with it essential. Feminists cannot ignore liberalism, and liberalism certainly cannot ignore feminism. The question is how to realise both liberal and feminist commitments to genuine equality and liberation for all.