Women's Voices, Women's Rights

Alison Jeffries

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000009378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Six key scholars present a feminist critique of the theory of human rights. The title of this volume, Womens' Voices, Womens' Rights, might be taken innocently to indicate its contents: a set of lectures given by women on the rights of women, on the failure to achieve those rights, and on the reasons and remedies for those failures. However, it also implies that womens' rights are not simply the extension to all members of the community of the agreed-upon rights of men. Is to speak in a woman's voice to speak in a different voice? Each lecture explores the values of Western societies, and the sources of the oppression of women within them, while many also provide a political contribution to the argument over the international context in which womens' status seems to be under constant threat. The lectures rest on a shared commitment to the dignity, humanity, and unique individuality of each human persona tenet that underpins the human rights movement, provides the moral impetus for feminism and, indeed, is the motivating force behind Amnesty International's campaigning on behalf of political prisoners world-wide. Ultimately, the contributors show us that to speak from the perspective of women, to adopt a woman's voice, is to enrich our understanding of the rights of all.

1The Feminist Critique of Liberalism

DOI: 10.4324/9780429268663-2

Martha Nussbaum

Women around the world are using the language of liberalism. Consider some representative examples from recent publications:

• Roop Rekha Verma, philosopher and grassroots activist from Luckrtow, India, speaks about the many ways in which Indian religious traditions have devalued women. She concludes that the largest problem with these traditions is that they deprive women of "full personhood." "What is personhood?" Verma asks. "To me three things seem essential for [full personhood]: autonomy, self-respect, and a sense of fulfillment and achievement."¹
• Nahid Toubia, the first woman surgeon in the Sudan and a woman's health activist, writes of the urgent need to mobilize international opposition to the practice of female genital mutilation, especially when it is performed on young girls without their consent. "International human rights bodies and organizations," she concludes, "must declare FGM to be violence against women and children and a violation of their rights.... If women are to be considered as equal and responsible members of society, no aspect of their physical, psychological, or sexual integrity can be compromised."²
• The Hindu magazine, describing a meeting at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore that brought together widows from all over India for a discussion of their living conditions, reports as follows:

Throughout the week they came to realise many things about themselves and their lives—especially how much they had internalised society's perceptions of them as daughters, wives, mothers and widows (their identity invariably defined in terms of their relationship to men). ... They were encouraged to see themselves as persons who had a right to exist even if their husbands were dead, and as citizens who had a right to resources—such as land, housing, employment, credit and ration cards—which would enable them to live and bring up their children (if any) with dignity and self-respect.³

Personhood, autonomy, rights, dignity, self-respect: These are the terms of the liberal Enlightenment. Women are using them, and teaching other women to use them when they did not use them before. They treat these terms as though they matter, as though they are the best terms in which to conduct a radical critique of society, as though using them is crucial to women's quality of life.

This situation looks in some respects deeply paradoxical, since liberalism has been thought by many feminists to be a political approach that is totally inadequate to the needs and aims of women, and in some ways profoundly subversive of those aims. Over the past twenty years feminist political thinkers have put forward many reasons to reject liberalism and to define feminism to some extent in opposition to liberalism. In 1983, in one of the most influential works of feminist political theory, Alison Jaggar concluded that "the liberal conception of human nature and of political philosophy cannot constitute the philosophical foundation for an adequate theory of women's liberation."⁴ Many influential feminist thinkers have tended to agree with Jaggar, and to treat liberalism as at best negligent of women's concerns and at worst an active enemy of women's progress.

But liberalism has not died in feminist politics; if anything, with the dramatic growth of the movement to recognize various women's rights as central human rights under international law, its radical feminist potential is just beginning to be realized. So it is time to reassess the charges most commonly made in the feminist critique of liberalism to see whether they really give us good reasons to view the continued ascendancy of feminist liberalism with skepticism.

Who is this "us," and why should "our" conclusions matter? It is obvious that the activists from whom I have quoted have gone about their business undaunted by the feminist critique, and they will not be daunted now, if feminists once again tell them that autonomy and personhood are bad notions for feminists to use. In that sense a philosophical reassessment could be seen as beside the point. But the international political situation is volatile, and the liberal discourse of personhood and rights has come under attack from many directions, some of them practical and influential.⁵ Looking at the case for the defense is therefore not simply a scholarly exercise, but also a contribution to practical politics.

I shall examine the feminist critique under three headings: (1) individualism and community, (2) abstraction and concrete reality, and (3) reason and emotion. In general, I shall argue, liberalism of a kind can be defended against the charges that have been made. The deepest and most central ideas of the liberal tradition are ideas of radical force and great theoretical and practical value. These ideas can be formulated in ways that incorporate what is most valuable in the feminist critique, although liberalism needs to learn from feminism if it is to formulate its own central insights in a fully adequate manner. Taking on board the insights of feminism will not leave liberalism unchanged, and liberalism needs to change to respond adequately to those insights. But it will be changed in ways that make it more deeply consistent with its own most foundational ideas. Another way of expressing this point is to say that there have been many varieties of liberalism and many strands within liberalism; thinking about the feminist critique proves important in choosing among these varieties because feminism does show real weaknesses in some forms of liberalism that continue to be influential, though not, I shall argue, in the most basic ideas of liberalism itself. Some feminist proposals do resist incorporation even into a reformulated feminist liberalism; but I shall argue that these are proposals that should be resisted as we attempt to promote justice for the world's women.

There is danger in speaking so generally about "liberalism," a danger that has often plagued feminist debates. "Liberalism" is not a single position, but a family of positions; it is obvious that Kantian liberalism is profoundly different from classical utilitarian liberalism, and both of these from the utilitarianism currently dominant in neoclassical economics. Many critiques of liberalism are really critiques of economic utilitarianism, and would not hold against the views of Kant, or Mill. Some feminist attacks oversimplify the tradition, and in responding to them I run a grave risk of oversimplification myself. When I speak of "liberalism," then, I shall have in mind, above all, the tradition of Kantian liberalism represented today in the political thought of John Rawls, and also the classical utilitarian liberal tradition, especially as exemplified in the work of John Stuart Mill. I shall also refer frequently to some major precursors, namely, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Adam Smith, who made enormously important contributions to the development of liberal ideas of equality and choice. It seems reasonable to assess the feminist critique by holding it up against the best examples of liberal political thought; any critique of liberalism that cannot be taken seriously as a criticism of Kant or Mill probably is not worth discussing.

The thinkers I have chosen are not in agreement on many important matters; but there is a core of common commitments that can be scrutinized with the interests of feminism in mind. At the heart of this tradition is a twofold intuition about human beings: namely, that all, just by being human, are of equal dignity and worth, no matter where they are situated in society; and that the primary source of this worth is a power of moral choice within them, a power that consists in the ability to plan a life in accordance with one's own evaluations of ends.⁶ To these two intuitions—which link liberalism at its core to the thought of the Greek and Roman Stoics⁷—the liberal tradition adds one more, which the Stoics did not emphasize: The moral equality of persons gives them a fair claim to certain types of treatment at the hands of society and politics. What this treatment is will be a subject of debate within the tradition, but the shared starting point is that this treatment must do two closely related things. It must respect and promote the liberty of choice, and it must respect and promote the equal worth of persons as choosers.⁸

To what is liberalism, so conceived, opposed? Here again we must begin crudely, with some rough intuitions that we will try to render more precise as we go on. Liberalism is opposed, first of all, to any approach to politics that turns morally irrelevant differences into systematic sources of social hierarchy.⁹ It is opposed, then, to the naturalizing of hierarchies—to the caste system characteristic of traditional Indian society; to related caste hierarchies created in many times and places by differences of race and class and power and religion.¹⁰ It is opposed, second, to forms of political organization that are corporatist or organically organized— that seek a good for the group as a whole without focusing above all on the well-being and agency of individual group members.¹¹ Finally, it is opposed to a politics that is ideologically based, in the sense that it turns one particular conception of value—whether Utopian or religious or traditional—into a mandatory standard imposed by authority on all citizens. Religious intolerance, the establishment of a single church, or the establishment of a single Utopian political vision of the good—all of these strike the liberal as embodying unequal respect for persons, who ought to be free to follow their conscience in the most important matters. Liberalism is thus opposed to Marxism, to theocratic social orders, and to many forms of authoritarian or tradition-based conservatism.¹²

Liberalism so conceived is centrally about the protection of spheres of choice—not, I claim, in a purely negative way, maximizing the sheer number of choices people get to make for themselves, but rather in a way closely tied to the norm of equal respect for personhood. The choices that get protection will be those deemed to be of crucial importance to the protection and expression of personhood. Thus it would be perfectly consistent for a liberal, beginning from these intuitions, to support certain forms of interference with choice if it could be successfully argued that such interference promotes equal respect rather than undermining it, or, even, that the interference makes no difference to personhood one way or another. All liberal views accept some interference with choice, whether to promote more choice, or to constrain force and fraud, or to produce greater overall prosperity, or greater fairness. Starting from the same basic intuitions, then, liberals can end up in very different positions about many matters, such as the justice of various types of economic redistribution, or the appropriateness of various types of paternalistic legislation. They will differ about these policies because they differ about what is crucial in order to respect the equal worth of persons and to give the power of choice the support that is its due. On this account, both John Rawls and Robert Nozick are liberals because both share a central commitment to liberty and equal respect, although they disagree profoundly about the permissibility of economic redistribution—Rawls holding that it is required in order to show equal respect for persons and Nozick holding that it is incompatible with such equal respect.¹³ Many such disagreements arise within liberalism. They involve, often, not only disagreement about means to shared ends, but also different concrete specifications of some highly general ends.¹⁴ On the other hand, it would be hard to conceive of a form of liberalism in which religious toleration was not a central tenet, or one that did not protect certain basic freedoms associated with personal choice, such as freedoms of expression, press, and assembly.¹⁵

Feminists have made three salient charges against this liberal tradition as a philosophy that might be used to promote women's goals. They have charged, first, that it is too "individualistic": that its focus on the dignity and worth of the individual slights and unfairly subordinates the value to be attached to community and to collective social entities such as families, groups, and classes. They have charged, second, that its ideal of equality is too abstract and formal, that it errs through lack of immersion in the concrete realities of power in different social situations. Finally, they have charged that liberalism errs through its focus on reason, unfairly slighting the role we should give to emotion and care in the moral and political life. All these alleged failings in liberalism are linked to specific failings in the tradition's handling of women's issues. It has frequently been claimed that liberalism cannot atone for these defects without changing utterly and that feminists interested in progress beyond the status quo would be better off choosing a different political philosophy— whether a form of socialism or Marxism, or a form of communitarian or care-based political theory. Let us examine these charges.

Individual and Community

The most common feminist charge against liberalism is that it is too "individualistic." By taking the individual to be the basic unit for political thought, it treats the individual as prior to society, as capable (in theory if not in fact) of existing outside of all social ties. "Logically if not empirically," writes Jaggar of the liberal view, "human individuals could exist outside a social context; their essential characteristics, their needs and interests, their capacities and desires, are given independently of their social context and are not created or even fundamentally altered by that context."¹⁶ Jaggar later restates this liberal "metaphysical assumption" in an even stronger form: "Each human individual has desires, interests, etc. that in principle can be fulfilled quite separately from the desires and interests of other people."^17...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• Preface to the Oxford Amnesty Lectures Page
• Acknowledgments Page
• Introduction
• 1 The Feminist Critique of Liberalism
• 2 Women's Rights: Whose Obligations?
• 3 Are Women Human?
• 4 "Women Are Like Cold Mutton": Power, Humiliation, and a New Definition of Human Rights
• 5 Each Man in His Cave
• 6 Women's Rights in Today's Political Climate
• About the Editor and Contributors