Liberal Feminism

Rooted in the humanism of the Renaissance and the person-centered, rights-oriented liberalism that emerged in Western thought during the Enlightenment, liberal feminism first found widespread expression during the nine-teenth century in Western societies. Liberal feminism is that strand of women-centered ideas and practices focusing on achieving equal rights between female and male citizens as well as equal opportunities and outcomes for similarly situated females and males while deemphasizing the cognitive and psychological differences between females and males. This strand of feminist theory is the most widely known. Neither separatist nor radical, liberal feminism is fundamentally and sometimes passionately reformist. Liberal feminists work within the system. To what extent they identify with the institutional order and in what ways they work for social change within it are matters that differentiate one grouping of liberal feminists from another.

What puts them together on the same broad part of the political spectrum is their feminist articulation of classically liberal notions. Over the past several centuries, liberalism, with its emphasis on political freedom and citizens' rights, became politically foundational in as well as an antecedent condition of modern Western democracies. Becoming hegemonic during the nineteenth century as a centrist ideology, with socialism to its left and conservativism to its right (Wallerstein 1995:1), liberalism was likely a necessary condition for the first-wave feminism that eventually gained Western women the franchise. Among the latent functions of that first wave of feminism was that it made liberal feminism a more or less given ingredient of modern society (Frazer 1998:52).

Characteristically, even in its liberal versions, feminism has consistently criticized the Enlightenment values giving rise to it. Liberalism may have been a necessary condition for the emergence of a viable women's movement, but it was far from sufficient. The very values that liberals propounded were able to gain popular support in part by ignoring issues of gender injustice as well as racial and other forms of institutionalized inequality. The various rights guaranteed to white male citizens were monolithically withheld from their female counterparts as well as their male nonwhite counterparts. From the start, then, feminism was both enabled and constrained by liberal discourses. [Page 447]Even today, liberal feminism continues to exhibit an ambivalent relationship with the liberalism that helped to spawn it.

All the while, its core assumptions do remain discernibly liberal. Foremost among them are assumptions about the primacy of the individual, generally articulated in one version or another of individualism; the separation (and thus the separability) of the public and private spheres and of the political and social spheres; the rationality of the selfinterested, free-willed citizen; and rights protected impartially under the law and legal processes. From a liberal feminist perspective, what these assumptions amount to are male-centered, male-advantaging precepts that need to be reformed in egalitarian directions so as to have really fair systems. The notion of the individual cannot fairly be bereft of the possibility of pregnancy and birthing any more than it can be bereft of some notion of the common good or the person as a community member; the notion of a private sphere reliably and clearly separable from the public sphere must be chastened so as to enable governments to redress the kinds of violence and abuse that occur in intimate relationships, whether family-and household-based or not; the notion of rationality cannot be gender-inclusive without leaving some room for an ethic of care and practices of caregiving alongside concepts of self-interest and personal autonomy; to a substantial extent the law must be seen as a social institution with historically and culturally specific flaws that have to be remediated in order to promote gender equality and justice.

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