MANY THANKS to the respondents for their thoughtful and thought-provoking comments, many of which I agree with. Some of them extend my arguments in important ways, some of them I wish to argue against, and some of them I think indicate misperceptions of my position. Because of the last, I shall start by reiterating it briefly.
I argue that many cultures oppress some of their members, in particular women, and that they are often able to socialize these oppressed members so that they accept, without question, their designated cultural status.1 I argue, therefore, that in the context of liberal states, when cultural or religious groups claim special rights—whether to be exercised by them together as a group or individually as members of that group—attention should be paid to the status of women within the culture or religion. This means that it is not enough for those representing the liberal state simply to listen to the requests of the self-styled group leaders. They must inquire into the point of view of the women, and to take especially seriously the perspective of the younger women.
Thus I am not arguing against freedom of religious belief, as several respondents think. Nor am I opposed to forms of multiculturalism such as educational multiculturalism, which is aimed at cross-cultural understanding and does not involve collective rights. Neither do I conclude that “feminism demands that we get rid of the offending cultures,” or that we engage in “extinguishing cultures” (Bonnie Honig). I suggest, rather, that certain preconditions should obtain and discussions take place before groups are granted special rights designed to ensure the continuation of their cultures. There is a difference between urging caution about the extension of group rights and recommending the active extinction or wholesale condemnation of cultures. In most instances people exercising their individual rights will have the greatest impact on whether their culture stays the same, changes, or becomes extinct in a particular context because its members assimilate, more or less slowly, and wholly or partially, into one of the alternative cultures available, which is the kind of “becom[ing] extinct” I had in mind. As Joseph Raz, Yael Tamir, and Saskia Sassen aptly note, the potential for most cultures to change yet survive should never be underestimated. But granting group rights without paying attention to the multiple voices of members of a group may impede the kind of change from within that might otherwise occur.
Before I continue to discuss specific areas of agreement and disagreement, I want to point out that this debate is taking place only because its participants live in liberal societies, whatever the many defects of these societies. It is clear that what I have written has offended several of the respondents, but nonetheless all of our work can be published and discussed freely. In many countries, some of us would be in danger of being silenced, if not placed in physical peril, for expressing views such as we express here. And thus it seems to me somewhat odd that some respondents strike out at the liberal values that allow all of us to express ourselves on highly controversial subjects.
I shall organize my reply so as to address, in turn, two main lines of criticism, and then to engage three issues raised in some of the responses. First, some respondents are concerned that my feminism leads me to focus unnecessarily narrowly—on women and gender inequality—rather than to expand the argument to include a larger concern with human rights, socioeconomic justice, or groups other than women for whom claims to cultural group rights raise problems. The second line of criticism comes from a number of respondents who read my feminism as leading to intolerance. They think that I am hostile to or unwarrantedly critical of religions, fail to appreciate things from the perspective of “the Other,” or see the views of older women in some highly patriarchal cultures as “false consciousness.” Having done my best to reply to these critiques, I shall take up the discussion of religion and sex discrimination in a liberal society that Nussbaum and Sunstein initiate, engaging also the issue of religious education and the type and degree of autonomy of its citizens that I think liberalism should aim at. Finally, I shall briefly reply to Will Kymlicka, acknowledging that we share many of the same aims, though not necessarily in the same order of priority.
I have spent much of the past twenty-five years critiquing Western political thought and practice, including much of liberalism, past and present, from a feminist point of view.2 Thus it is surprising to find myself depicted as “willing to accept the degree of gender equality upheld by the majority culture” (Abdullahi An-Na‘im). It is not that I consider gender equality to have been achieved in liberal societies; far from it. Rather, I think that, in considering claims for group rights, liberal societies cannot reasonably expect minority cultures within them to surpass whatever level of equality between the sexes the majority culture has achieved.
Respondents such as Raz and An-Na’im ask, very reasonably, where I stand on issues such as socioeconomic inequality and social and economic human rights. As Raz suspects, I am indeed concerned about aspects of justice other than gender justice and deplore the increasing socioeconomic inequality both within and among most countries in the late twentieth century. I also agree in large part with An-Na’im on human rights, having argued that some basic social and economic rights are at least as important as many civil and political rights.3 However, whether group self-determination is a basic human right is, clearly, complicated for me by the issue of how each group treats its own members.
Liberalism’s central aim, in my view, should be to ensure that every human being has a reasonably equal chance of living a good life according to his or her unfolding views about what such a life consists in. This requires vastly more socioeconomic equality than exists in the world today. In particular, it requires that no child go without adequate food, housing, health care, or education, that no person who is sick or disabled, or who is prepared to work (including child care as work), be in need, and that governments aim at full employment, high minimum wages, and whatever redistribution of wealth is required to satisfy the needs I mention. It also requires that richer countries help poorer ones rather than, as they often now do, require of them that they cut social programs even while arming themselves expensively. I am by no means concerned only with gender equality, though I think, as do many of the respondents, that there is a particularly sharp tension between it and cultural group rights since, as I argue in my original essay, most cultures are highly gendered.
It is clear, also, in many parts of the world, including the United States, that the inequality of women and the devaluation of their unpaid work are closely linked to a great deal of poverty. Here, we can look at our own culture for a vivid example of patriarchy: a mother who is supported by a man is supposed to stay home with her young children and be economically dependent on him, but a woman without such support is excoriated for doing nothing socially useful if she takes care of her own children. In many of the world’s cultures, women’s substantial contributions to the maintenance of human life are so devalued that girls are often deprived of adequate food, health care, and education. Since it is by now widely known that the education of girls is the single most important factor that enables them as women to have only the number of children each wants, and that increases in mothers’ incomes are much more influential on children’s well-being than are increases in men’s, we also know that greater equality for women will help to alleviate the stresses of overpopulation and poverty. As An-Na’im says, the advancement of various human rights around the world is crucial. However, there are many reasons to think that greater equality for women is central to this advancement.
Janet Halley, Katha Pollitt, Raz, and Tamir all want to extend the argument I make about women to other less powerful subgroups and individuals within cultures, and I appreciate and applaud their ideas. I have by no means exhausted the subject of oppression within groups that is often justified in the name of cultural preservation or religious toleration. Children, gays and lesbians, persons of minority races, disabled persons, and dissenters are all liable to varying kinds and degrees of mistreatment within many societies, including our own, and we should work to eliminate this mistreatment, in part by paying attention to those aspects of the culture that reinforce them. For example, the general level of violence that is portrayed in films and other media in the United States undoubtedly affects the level of violence—often targeted toward vulnerable persons—that actually occurs, although violence is not formally reinforced, taught as a necessary part of, or justified by, our culture.4 (Violence against gays may be a partial exception to the last point, since homosexuality is explicitly named a sin or vice by many religious groups.)
When injustice toward or mistreatment of some people is explicitly sanctioned as necessary to a culture or religion, however, there is special cause for alarm. Raz, Honig, An-Na’im, and Bhikhu Parekh are absolutely right that no majority culture should pay less attention to its own failings than it pays to the failings of those of minorities living in its midst. But the majority has, I claim, a special responsibility to members of minority groups whose oppression it may promote or exacerbate by granting group rights without careful consideration of intragroup inequalities. As Tamir points out, the leaders of most groups are motivated to put forth their group’s interests as those of a unified agent, and therefore “to foster unanimity, or at least an appearance of unanimity, even at the cost of internal oppression.” Giving credence to such claims of unity by granting group rights to a nondemocratic community thus amounts to siding with those in power, the privileged against the marginalized, the traditionalists against the reformers, who often portray dissent as disloyalty to the group. When Parekh enjoins liberalism to “engage in an open-minded dialogue with other doctrines and cultures,” including illiberal ones, he does not confront the difficulty this poses when the self-proclaimed leaders of a cultural group are in no way representative of all or even most of its members.
While many respondents agree that almost all cultures and religions are more or less patriarchal, several claim that the few remarks I make about the founding myths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam portray them as more patriarchal than is warranted. To some of this critique, it is difficult even to begin to respond. Nussbaum presents the most sex-egalitarian aspects of Reform Judaism as “authentic,” even “orthodox” Judaism, with all the other past or present manifestations of Judaism relegated to the status of “defective historical practices.”5 Though she thinks I show contempt for religion by citing articles in the New York Times and founding myths as evidence about religious ideas and practices, for her extraordinary depiction of Judaism she cites very little evidence at all.
Azizah al-Hibri, far more credible on the issue of origins, points out that the earliest texts in Islam were considerably more woman-friendly than later interpretations of texts and laws have been. This leads to the possibility of the exciting types of reinterpretation of Islam that scholars such as she and An-Na’im pursue.6 But her attempt to present contemporary Islam as relatively sex-egalitarian and open-minded is unconvincing. Undoubtedly it is the task of Muslims to reinterpret Islamic jurisprudence, but surely it must have taken more than the “several jurists” she mentions to make Muslim law in so many parts of the world today so patriarchal—with polygamy for men only, unequal divorce laws, unfair laws about rape and adultery, and in some countries women and even young girls forced to cover themselves completely or be arrested or beaten. When al-Hibri writes that “each Muslim, male or female, is guaranteed his or her freedom of conscience,” this may indeed be the teaching of the Qur’an, but it is surely not practiced in the countries where apostasy is a crime for Muslims and converting a Muslim to some other religion is a capital offense.
Reading Nussbaum’s and al-Hibri’s criticisms of me for not paying sufficient attention to the ways in which Judaism and Islam are compatible with feminism, I cannot but wonder whose argument it really is that, as al-Hibri puts it, renders the “inessential Other . . . remarkably indistinguishable and voiceless,” drowning her out by the dominant “I”? I think of a Malaysian Muslim woman I met at a recent international conference who responded to my question about feminists in the West who defend polygamy by saying, amazed and heatedly: “No woman likes polygamy!”7 I recall an Indonesian Muslim woman at the same conference who said, in response to my discussion of ways in which Muslim women’s rights groups are working for change in the Muslim world: “How can they hope to succeed? There are more than twenty million illiterate Muslim women in Indonesia, and they know their rights: they know that if they do not obey their husbands, they will go to hell.” Am I the silencer of such voices, in taking into account that hundreds of millions of women are rendered voiceless or virtually so by the male-dominated religions with which they live? Or are the silencers those feminists who downplay the patriarchy of many variants of their religions, but who enjoy every moment of their own lives freedoms that are unthinkable to those “Others” whose voices they think I am drowning out? Of course it is good that pro-religion feminists are seeking out and trying to foster the most woman-friendly strands within their own religions. But to do this does not entail denying or even downplaying the dominant patriarchal strands that have so long prevailed within them.
Bonnie Honig presents five counterexamples to demonstrate that the three major Western religions are “less univocally patriarchal” than I suggest, but none of them helps to build her case. First, she points out that the religions’ control of women’s sexuality is “usually matched” by efforts to control men’s. However, this is not accurate. As an example, think of the far harsher punishments that women have received, under all three religions, for adultery, or the fact that Muslim polygamy is and Jewish polygamy was (and in isolated groups still is) for men only. (One of the suggestions put forth by Taslima Nasrin—the radical Bangladeshi Muslim feminist forced to flee her country—that was considered most outrageous was that Muslim women should be permitted to have several husbands.) Also, the control of men’s sexuality often affects women’s religious status more than men’s. For example, because of the prohibition against sexual arousal during worship, Orthodox Jews segregate by sex, and in some branches women may not pray aloud, for even their voices are “considered sexual organs” that might arouse men while they pray.8 A less patriarchal religion might have concluded that the solution to the problem was for women to play the central roles in worship. Honig finishes her first point by citing nuns as “a stunning exception” to my statement that traditions and cultures often make it virtually impossible for women to live independently of men. But she does not note that nuns live within the rule of an all-male hierarchy and cannot celebrate the most fundamental sacrament of their religion, the Eucharist, without a priest.
Second, countering my point that the three major Western religions place undue stress on the reproductive role of fathers, neglecting that of mothers by comparison, Honig notes that Judaism is passed on matrilineally. However, she neglects to mention that, within Orthodoxy, a woman’s ability to pass on her Judaism is substantially controlled by men. She must be married to an Orthodox Jew to be able to have children considered legitimate and Orthodox, and she can be divorced by him in a way that leaves her, though not him, unfree to remarry and have legitimate Orthodox children. Third, on the same issue, Honig cites the virgin birth of Jesus as “attenuat[ing] the role of the father in reproduction.” But why has Jesus been of such importance for two millennia? Because of who his mother was? Or because of who Christians believe his Father was? After all, only God the Father made the “virgin birth” possible.
Fourth, Honig suggests that veiling can be an “empowering practice” for many Muslim feminists, who are able to move from country to city and go out to work as a result of it. I do not doubt that this is so. But surely to be unable to go out and practice one’s profession without being enshrouded from head to toe is not, on the whole, an empowering situation in which to live, unless it is a temporary transition to greater freedom. Finally, against my point that polygamy often makes women more vulnerable within marriage, Honig cites a case where the first three wives of a French immigrant were placed, by being co-wives, in “a situation of solidarity.” But she does not explain why, if polygamy is so empowering to wives, the issue about which they banded together was precisely . . . more polygamy! Their collective resistance to their husband’s adding yet another, younger wife to the household may have been one of the only interests they had in common.
Another issue on which a couple of the commentators find me unduly intolerant of the practices of others is clitoridectomy. But both Sander Gilman and Parekh—though the latter clearly condemns its being performed on children—seem not to realize that clitoridectomy has devastating consequences for women’s sexuality. The male equivalent, from the point of view of sexual (as opposed to reproductive) functioning, would be “penidectomy”—that is to say the removal of all, or at least most, of the penis.9 Thus Gilman’s lengthy preoccupation with the lessening of male sexual pleasure that might possibly result from circumcision is completely beside the point. He takes “[t]he question of pleasure” to be entirely culturally relative, asking rhetorically, “Is it not clear that even sexual pleasure is as much a reflex of the mind as of the body!” But if had consulted just a few women, he could easily have found out that there are limits to the power of the mind. Without a clitoris, a woman cannot experience orgasm, any more than a man could without a penis. Moreover, it is clear from a number of the statements I quote from African women that the purpose of clitoridectomy is to take the pleasure out of sex for women, in order to preserve their virginity before marriage and their fidelity within it. Thus, to Parekh’s question about sane, adult women who wish to freely undergo clitoridectomy after the birth of their last children, as a way of regulating their sexuality, to be mothers foremost and wives only secondarily, or as a form of religious sacrifice, I suggest: respond to her just as one would to a father who wanted his penis amputated for any of these reasons. Before heading off to the surgeon, go and talk to a psychiatrist or a marriage counselor.
To conclude this section, I wish to respond to several commentators who raise the thorny issue, mentioned only briefly in my essay, of how a feminist outsider should respond when women—especially older women—subordinated within a culture have no complaints about their circumstances and even help to reproduce them. Robert Post, for example, suggests that Orthodox Ashkenazi Jewish women might well not view themselves as disadvantaged within their religion—rather, despite their very distinct roles, seeing themselves as having equal dignity with men. (Something like “separate but equal”?) But isn’t this the type of Judaism that not only “disqualifies women from important religious rituals” (as Post notes), but in which the birth and coming-of-age of boys (but not girls) are celebrated with important rituals, women have to be ritually cleansed after each menstrual period before they and their husbands can have sexual intercourse, and men thank God every morning that they are not women? (Imagine for a moment a religious group whose lighter-skinned members thanked God every morning for not giving them darker skin.) My view is that, however certain such women are of the rightness of their role within such a context, surely they would be seriously deluded in viewing themselves as having “equal dignity” with men.
Addressing the same issue, Parekh regards it as “patronizing, even impertinent” to regard some of the women who do not “share the feminist view” as “victims of a culturally generated false consciousness.” But he goes on to say that “sometimes they are [brainwashed],” which seems a rather more blunt expression of the same point. One need not rely on the Marxist theory of false consciousness to recognize that persons subjected to unjust conditions often adapt their preferences so as to conceal the injustice of their situation from themselves. Liberals from John Stuart Mill to Jon Elster, Amartya Sen, Cass Sunstein, Uma Narayan, and Martha Nussbaum have written of such adaptation.10 It is largely the importance of this issue that leads to my conviction that any proposal for cultural group rights should both include the younger women of the group and explore carefully claims that certain practices are crucial to “being a woman” within the culture. As the debate over head scarves in France showed, not only do young women tend to be the focus of intercultural disputes and to have most at stake in the outcomes, but they are often at odds with each other—some viewing their cultural practices or insignia as positive statements of their identity, others seeing such things as imposed on them by their families or cultural leaders.
The average older woman raised in any patriarchal culture is less likely to want change, for several reasons. It is not easy to question cultural constraints that have had a major impact on one’s whole life. If one has had to adapt one’s preferences and conceptions of self to please men and accept one’s social role as subordinate to them, such adaptation is not easily changed. Moreover, the experience of such constraints may produce a psychological need to enforce them on the younger generation. Furthermore, an older woman’s relatively high status within the group (as Parekh suggests) results in part from her leading a virtuous life, which includes successful enculturation of her children and grandchildren into their prescribed gender roles. Also, in some cultures the main experience of power a woman ever gains, as she ages, is power over her daughters-in-law.11 So I emphasize the importance of listening to the young women of a minority culture regulated by patriarchal norms not out of an impulse to “divide and rule,” as Homi Bhabha suggests, but rather because I recognize the importance of hearing the very “ ‘local’ leavenings of liberty” and indigenous feminist voices that he thinks I want to obscure.
Not only do various respondents object that I portray the major Western as well as other religions too patriarchally. Some more reasonably demand that I subject domestic practices within liberal states to the same degree of scrutiny to which I am subjecting “foreign” or imported practices. Nussbaum and Sunstein make challenging arguments about the specific issue of whether religious freedom should trump sex discrimination or vice versa. Thus it is important that I address group rights issues that have developed from the seemingly individual rights inscribed in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The free exercise clause, in particular, has been interpreted as a group right, enabling religious institutions to be exempt from certain generally applicable laws, including laws against sex discrimination. Nussbaum is absolutely right that this is a difficult issue. It is difficult because freedom of religion is clearly inscribed in the Constitution, because sex discrimination now conflicts with many laws and has been recognized as in many cases unconstitutional, and because, as I have argued, so much of the practice and belief of some religions commonly practiced in the United States runs counter to gender equality. Nussbaum argues that the protection of religion has not extended far enough, especially since the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision prohibiting the use of peyote, an illegal drug, for religious purposes.12 Because of the special emphasis that she thinks should be placed on religious freedom, she favors the approach taken in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (subsequently ruled unconstitutional). This would require that any law placing a substantial burden on a religious group be dictated by a “compelling government interest.” Though at first concluding that this would disallow religiously based sex discrimination, she then appeals to the voluntary nature of religious membership in our society, to conclude that, so long as the liberties and opportunities of children are ensured by their education, society should then respect the rights of adult citizens to join or remain in religious bodies that exclude women from certain religious functions, such as the Catholic priesthood.
Cass Sunstein too sees the issue as potentially very controversial yet concludes differently. He doubts strongly that the option of exit is sufficient to justify sex discriminatory religious practices, because the kinds of internalized subordination that girls and women experience in many religions are likely to render them “unable to scrutinize the practices with which they have grown up,” and because of the effects of such toleration of female exclusion or subordination on other women. Sunstein points out that frequently the interest in getting rid of sex discrimination can be far stronger than our interest in any particular crime or tort, for which a religious group can be held responsible; thus the current asymmetry that treats the conflict between the two types of law and religion differently is invalid. Fully aware that the requirement of sex equality “would go toward the heart of religious convictions,” he notes that some other aspects of criminal and civil law do so also. Moreover, to the extent that sex equality conflicts with religion, “it is a contingent, time-bound, highly empirical fact, one that bears little on the question of principle from the liberal point of view.” He concludes that no line should be drawn between other aspects of law and the laws against sex discrimination. Rather, the liberal state should assess, in the case of each relevant law, how great an intrusion or heavy a burden the law would place on religious institutions, and how legitimate or strong the justification for imposing it.
I am generally very sympathetic to Sunstein’s conclusion, yet I have three comments to make on it. First, if a religious group wished to continue its sex discriminatory practices, under the Sunstein ruling it would have a vested interest in showing that sex discrimination was at the very heart of its beliefs. This, on the one hand, may entrench sex discrimination within certain religious groups. On the other hand, its being spelled out loud and clear would make existing and potential members well aware of it. Second, Sunstein’s solution requires that courts rule on the centrality or peripheral nature of various doctrinal matters—which they have generally tried to avoid doing.13 Third, agreeing more with Sunstein than with Nussbaum about the voluntariness of religious beliefs, I think that there is an even clearer case for prohibiting sex discrimination in the educational practices of religious groups than in practices opted into by adults who are aware of alternative ways of life.
Nussbaum asks whether I am a political liberal—like Rawls—or a comprehensive liberal (some would say “autonomy liberal”)—like Mill and Raz. The liberalism I subscribe to requires that children’s education not leave them with knowledge only of their parents’ culture or religion, much less that it give them the impression that that is the only “right” way to live. But this does not place me neatly within either category. As I shall explain, I subscribe to a position in between. Even the most prominent “political liberal” of all, John Rawls, who rejects the imposition on religious sects that “oppose the modern world” of the requirement that their children be educated so as to value autonomy and individuality, also argues that the liberal state should require that all children be educated so as to be self-supporting and be informed of their rights as citizens, including freedom of conscience. He argues this even though he recognizes that the effect of this may in some cases lead to comprehensive liberalism.14 Nussbaum, who also endorses political liberalism, says that, while it respects nonautonomous lives, it “insists that every citizen have a wide range of liberties and opportunities; so it agrees . . . that a nonautonomous life should not be thrust upon someone by the luck of birth.” This leads her to require that children’s education ensure such liberties and opportunities. As I understand her, despite her claim to being a political liberal, Nussbaum thus places herself between the camps of comprehensive and political liberals. Many parents belonging to religions or cultures that do not respect autonomy would (and do) very strongly resist their children’s being exposed to any religious or cultural views but their own. But, like Nussbaum (and to a lesser extent Rawls) I do not think that liberal states should allow this to happen. I believe that a certain degree of nonautonomy should be available as an option to a mature adult with extensive knowledge of other options, but not thrust on a person by his or her parents or group, through indoctrination—including sexist socialization—and lack of exposure to alternatives. But such hybrid liberalism puts strict limits on the extent to which children’s education can be confined within the framework of any single religion, and prohibits it from being sex discriminatory in any way.
The question that remains is what must education be like, for religious affiliations to be as voluntary as possible? Given that it is central to most religions that their members try to pass on their beliefs to their children, it would strike an intolerable blow at religion not to allow this to take place. But it seems not at all unreasonable, within the context of a liberal state that values its citizens’ capacity to make informed decisions about whether to lead autonomous or nonautonomous lives as adults, to require both that children’s education—including their religious education—be nonsexist, and that all children be thoroughly exposed to and taught about other religious as well as secular beliefs held by people around the world. Indeed, without this, it would be difficult to claim that their adhering to their parents’ religion was voluntary at all. In the United States, the establishment clause has led to such a separation of church and state that, constitutionally at any rate, no religion is supposed to be taught in the public schools. Yet at the same time, parents are permitted to send their children to private schools that teach one religion as the only truth, or to home school them in such beliefs. However, surely there is a distinction between “teaching religion” and “teaching about religion.” The latter takes place in the public schools in a number of liberal nation-states that do not have established churches. Here in the United States, the study of comparative religion could, and I argue should, be taught to all young people. It is, after all, an important part of history, a subject about which most of our high school (and even many of our college) graduates are now pitifully ignorant, and that, if well taught, is inevitably controversial, even without a significant component on the history of religions.15 This innovation may well be resisted by parents who believe strongly that their own faiths are the whole and the only truth, as well perhaps as by parents who do not want their children taught about religion at all. But without some knowledge of various religious beliefs and practices, as well as secular ones, children’s basic liberties to think about their own lives and decide what is best for them seem unduly truncated.
Finally, I agree with Will Kymlicka’s important observation that multiculturalism and feminism are, in some ways, related struggles. Both seek the recognition of difference in the context of norms that are universal in theory, but not in practice. Still, an essential difference remains. The few special rights that women claim qua women do not give more powerful women the right to control less powerful women. In contrast, cultural group rights do often (in not-so-obvious ways) reinforce existing hierarchies. As Kymlicka indicates, he and I share this concern, though he tends to prioritize cultural group rights and I, as is by now obvious, prioritize women’s equality. What we need to strive toward is a form of multiculturalism that gives the issues of gender and other intragroup inequalities their due—that is to say, a multiculturalism that effectively treats all persons as each other’s moral equals.