Orr goes on to explain that women are stigmatized for choosing abortion (for rejecting their ‘destinies’ as mothers); at the same time, they face discrimination if they have children (via expensive childcare and work-based discrimination). Equally, Orr points out, women are told to work and have careers, yet are later condemned for having babies too late.
While there have been major gains in decriminalizing abortion in some areas (for example, in Ireland), access to abortion remains an issue for women on a global scale. In June 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a landmark piece of legislation that had, for fifty years, protected abortion as a federal right in the US. In October 2020, Poland made abortion illegal in almost all circumstances, prompting a wave of protests throughout the country. Feminists have highlighted that banning abortion does not end abortion but, in fact, only ends safe abortion.
Women in work
Another goal for liberal feminists is ensuring equality in the workplace in terms of treatment, pay, and opportunity. Though the Equality Act (2010) makes it illegal for an employer to discriminate on the basis of sex, indirect forms of discrimination continue to be a problem for women in the workplace. For example, feminists refer to “the glass ceiling” as a way to describe how women are faced with invisible barriers in their careers that stop them from reaching higher positions or progressing (see Cotter, “The Glass Ceiling Effect,” 2001).
Liberal feminists further draw attention to the gender pay gap. The gender pay gap is the difference in earnings between men and women (for more information see Abdel-Raouf and Buhler, The Gender Pay Gap, 2021). The disparity in wages between men and women remains a barrier for women wanting to advance their careers. Women who do persevere despite these financial barriers are often met with other forms of discrimination within the workplace, including sexual harassment. The #MeToo movement, emerging in 2017, drew attention to the everyday harassment women face, particularly in the workplace.
Criticisms of liberal feminism
Robin Morgan outlines liberal feminism’s incompatibility with the goals of radical feminism. Morgan’s main issues with liberal feminism are as follows:
- Liberal feminists want to settle for “a piece of the pie as currently and poisonously baked”; this means, according to Morgan, that liberal feminists focus on reform within an already contaminated patriarchal system.
- Liberal feminism views the sex industry as a form of “faux sexual liberation.” (Radical feminists like Morgan believe prostitution and pornography are oppressive to women; liberal feminists, however, often argue that women should be free to choose a career in sex work).
- Within this branch of feminism, “‘wonderfully supportive’ male spouses or lovers [...] ‘permit’ a woman to be a feminist.”
- Liberal feminism’s homogenizing of “women’s issues” ignores the “organic connections between sexism, racism, class and homophobic and ethnocentric bigotries, environmental degradation, and, well, everything else.”
- Liberal feminism plays by “the boys’ rules” and thinks that “imitating establishment men” could be good for women.
(‘Light Bulbs, Radishes, and the Politics of the 21st Century’ in Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, 1996)
Critics such as Catherine A. Mackinnon have echoed Morgan’s argument regarding women “imitating” men in their quest for equality. Mackinnon points out that “[u]nder the sameness rubric, women are measured according to correspondence with man, their equality judged by proximity to his measure” (Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, 1991). This, according to Mackinnon, positions maleness as the ideal that women should strive towards and fails to acknowledge the differences between men and women. For example, women demonstrating their value or skill by accessing typically male-dominated roles does nothing to question why we esteem these typically “male” roles as being inherently more valuable.
Carole Pateman furthers this argument, citing liberal feminism’s failure to acknowledge that these problems run deeper. According to Pateman,