Abstract

Despite the achievement of formal equality, women as a group continue to be politically, socially and economically disadvantaged relative to men as a group. Feminists overwhelmingly concur that liberal equality, understood as equal political and civil rights, is incapable of realizing substantive equality for women and that liberalism's core theoretical commitments are incompatible with a commitment to gender equality. ;My view, and the motivation for this inquiry, is that there is in fact a deep philosophical issue between feminism liberalism which warrants the attention of anyone doing equality theory. Liberal theory cannot be saved from these feminist criticisms by invoking a bright line distinction between theory and practice, and gesturing to the inevitable imperfection of humans and their institutions. The concern is deeper than the apparent inability of liberal regimes to recognize and address significant injustice. The feminist emphasis on women's equality may have overshadowed the truly subversive potential of the charges to call into serious question liberalism's adequacy as a theory of justice. At the deepest level, the concern is that liberalism may not only be inappropriate or inadequate as a theory for women, but somehow inimical to achieving the kind of substantive equality to which women are entitled and to which liberalism itself traditionally has been thought to aspire. ;My aim in this work is to examine the claim that feminism and liberalism are fundamentally incompatible. As the title suggests, this is a work of feminist philosophy, but in the broadest sense. It utilizes the standard tools of analytic philosophy, but it proceeds from an understanding of the significance of gender in the organization of social life and the distribution of power and resources in our society. It analyzes a certain claim about the theoretical and political adequacy of philosophical liberalism as a theory of justice for women, but it is ultimately concerned with analyzing a kind of injustice that is not exclusive to women-subordination. ;In the course of my analysis, I reconstruct dominant liberal conceptions of liberty, equality and neutrality that have been antithetical to the realization of liberalism's egalitarian promise for women. While my work breaks with the most well known versions of contemporary liberalism at a number of points, I intend the result to be "a philosophically better kind of liberalism" as well as a better theory for women