Feminist critique of liberalism

As radical democratic critics of liberalism have focused on its alleged tendencies to limit the political sphere, they have strong appeal to feminist thought, because one of the central features on which the explicit as well as implicit exclusions of conventional liberalism are claimed to be based is gender. As liberalism has been criticized for implicitly favoring the most privileged class of the historical context in which it emerged – European, white, middle-class, heterosexual men; feminists in their quest for gender and sexual equality have taken issue with the allegedly male-biased construction of the liberal citizen and self, the hidden mechanisms that perpetuate the exclusion of the originally disadvantaged groups such as women and the failure of the formal equality of contemporary liberal democracies to eliminate those ways of reproducing inequality. Therefore it is not surprising that there are many feminist writers among the most vocal critics of liberalism; especially within the “social progressivist” section among those critics as opposed to communitarians and conservatives who reject the theory and practice of liberalism on different grounds and who often defend more traditional gender roles and “family values”

than liberalism. Interestingly, feminist critics do not often compare liberal thought to its conservative alternatives; rather, the “patriarchy” of liberalism is pictured as a shortcoming in comparison to utopian theoretical visions of less hierarchical and more inclusive societal patterns. In a way, those visions can be described as more liberal than conventional liberalism, if considered in traditional terms of “social liberalism” as opposed to “social conservatism”, a position supporting strict gender roles, traditional family values and established social hierarchies¹⁰.

10 The relationship of feminist critique to communitarian thought is also complicated: they present some similar arguments critical of liberalism, like the critique of the alleged individualist egoism of the liberal “sovereign” citizen; but for feminists, that exemplary free person is specifically male, while communitarians are wary of women turning out “egoist” as well. Also, both feminists and communitarians criticize the allegedly abstract nature of liberal rights, lacking attention to the importance of social and familial bonds and excessive emphasis on the rights of individual persons at the expense of the relational values of duty and care. As a solution, though, communitarians often search for the lost communal values in a return to nostalgic traditionalism, while feminists question the traditional communal values as well as the allegedly male and individualist premises of liberal freedom. Some feminist writers blame liberals for not questioning traditionalism strongly enough; for promising emancipation to all, but delivering it to men only. Others form “unholy alliances” with

It is not my purpose here to present a comprehensive review of all feminist criticism of conventional liberalism. I focus on the criticism that is most relevant for liberalism as democratic theory, the criticism that claims to reveal the implicitly gender-biased character of the apparently universal thought experiment of the liberal legitimation model and consequently of the universal principles that it generates, as well as the politics of rights that follows from those principles. In addition to the views presented in the previous section, some of which serve as feminist arguments as well as general calls for a more inclusive conception of democracy, I introduce here some specifically feminist critical arguments about liberalism’s alleged gender bias that are relevant for the discussion at hand:

Pateman’s argument against liberalism’s allegedly gendered contract theory, MacKinnon’s radical feminist argument about the hidden male bias of its apparent neutrality and Brown’s “poststructural” feminist argument about liberalism’s inherent and incurable sexism. As part II is focused on the relation between rights and democratic participation; I will return to the feminist discussion in part III to compare some feminist positions to each other and point out some problems with their critical arguments that have relevance for the central question of this thesis.

In addition to the general arguments about the insufficient inclusiveness of the conventional liberal conception of democratic politics, some feminist critics claim that the liberal conception of citizenship is premised on the exclusion and subjugation of women. Although sharing many such critical assumptions, feminists of different streams of thought differ in their conclusions and suggested remedies:

summarily, Pateman argues for giving up the liberal notion of contract as a gesture expressing consent, in order to include women as fully equal citizens in a free society; MacKinnon suggests reconsidering the politics of rights through a feminist lens so that the male bias of the apparently neutral liberal state be revealed and repaired; and Brown prefers a profound skepticism toward liberal politics as such, including its political institutions as well as its language of individual rights. Brown rejects liberal as well as radical feminist remedies as either just cosmetic (leaving the original male-biased liberal ideology and practice intact) or essentialist

communitarians, especially in connection within recent debates on “multiculturalism”, because representatives of “non-Western” cultures are increasingly seen by feminists as fellow victims of the

“white male” hegemony of liberal universalism; thus support to “cultural claims”, even if they are explicitly gender hierarchical, is perceived as a positive policy of “diversity” in defiance of the allegedly homogenizing universalist tendencies of conventional liberalism. Thus, the relationship of feminism to liberalism is also bound to be ambivalent: while its universalist policies of liberalism are conceived implicitly gender hierarchical, many of its alternatives are explicitly so. See e.g. Young 1990 and 2000; Brown 2001 and 2004.

(reconstituting the vulnerable category of “women” through a politics of “women’s rights”); and prefers a genealogical approach as described in part I, to thoroughly subvert and deconstruct its normative foundations and its mechanisms of producing and reproducing social injury. (Pateman 1988, MacKinnon 1989, Brown 1995.)

Pateman, analyzing the history of liberal contractualism from feminist perspective, argues that the liberal contract of “free and equal citizens” is implicitly founded on another contract, the unspoken “sexual contract” quietly concluded in the private sphere that liberal contractualists declared apolitical. In Pateman’s view, while the early liberal contract was a contract of freedom in the sense that it freed the “sons”

from the patriarchal power of their fathers, it was also a contract of “subjection” in the sense that it established (or re-established) men’s political and sexual right over women. In accord with many other feminist critics of liberalism, she regards the liberal contract not contingently, but essentially patriarchal: “Contract is far from being opposed to patriarchy; contract is the means through which modern patriarchy is constituted” (Pateman 1988, 2, my emphasis). She presents a critique of the traditional liberal division between public and private spheres and the subsequent view that the private sphere is politically irrelevant; and argues that the very concept of “individual” as the subject of liberal rights is constructed as male; not only because women were not considered individuals, equipped with the necessary capacities for entering social-political contracts, by most original contract theorists;

but also because the “individual” was constructed from the “male body” and “men alone have the attributes of free and equal ‘individuals’”, while women “represent everything that the individual is not” and “are born into subjection” (Ibid. 221; 41).

In Pateman’s view, women are not parties to, but subjects of the liberal social contract. She argues that the rhetoric of freedom puts women in an ambiguous position: it appeals to women through extending the message of civil freedom to them too, while they lack the capacity to enjoy that freedom. Excluding women from the category of the “individual” is still reflected, in spite of the formal equality of liberties, in the social and legal arrangements that deny women the equal civil standing with men: as an example Pateman quotes the difficulties to criminalize rape within marriage; thus exemplifying the non-individual status of women in contemporary marriage contracts. She considers marriage the prime example of the sexual contract, through which the woman “voluntarily” trades her autonomy for the safety of the economic and social position that marriage offers. In return she is

bound to unpaid reproductive work and obligation of sexual availability. Thus Pateman argues that the freedom of the (male) individual in fact depends on the sexual contract and the subjugation of women. (Pateman 1988, 3-7; 221-223.)

Pateman defines “contract” theories broadly, meaning all modern liberal theories that reject all other justifications of subordination except for those based on voluntary consent: thus, the term covers the ideological and political development of liberal democracy as such, not necessarily only the theories called “contractualist” or

“contractarian” within liberal theory. She makes a strong and controversial claim about those “contract theories”; arguing that the originally revolutionary liberal idea that declared all humans naturally free and equal and thus de-legitimized all

“divine”, “natural” and traditional sources as justifications of authority and hierarchy, turned that “subversive proposition into a defense of civil subjection” and thus had no genuine emancipatory effect, at least not for women (Pateman 1988, 39). Pateman argues: “Rather than undermining subordination, contract theorists justified modern civil subjection,” (Ibid. 40). In her view, the theoretical non-recognition of women’s historical inability to be “individual” at the dawn of liberalism has contributed to the perpetuation of her subordination in practice through the evolution of different “contract theories”; so that the subjugation is constantly recreated by renewed versions of the “sexual contract” (like marriage, prostitution, sexual division of wage labor etc.), in which the alleged voluntariness of women’s consent to the demeaning conditions of those contracts makes their subjugation just look like freedom.

Pateman’s strong rejection of the notion of the “individual” as an essentially masculine construct that is not neutralized by extending the status of rights-bearing individuals formally to women, leads necessarily to a skeptical attitude toward the conventional liberal notion of individual rights and their constitutional protection, an attitude dominant in much of the feminist theory at the end of the 20^th century.

Her critique of the concept of an “individual” can be disputed, not only by appealing to the practical development in many existing liberal democracies in which the recognition of women as individuals have resulted in policies improving women’s position within family as well as in public life. She seems to essentialize the

“masculinism” of liberal individualism, deducing from the historical fact of women’s subordinate status at the dawn of liberal thought and the misrecognition of women as individuals by many early liberal thinkers (with the notable exceptions of Hobbes and Mill) an assumption that women necessarily and naturally cannot be individuals

in the traditional liberal sense. The political implications of this assumption, also from a feminist perspective (which can only be fully recognized when compared to the politics that explicitly fail to recognize women’s equal individual personhood), will be discussed further in part III. Pateman’s recipe for a more just and genuinely free society is to give up any notion of “contract” that in her view necessarily perpetuates the relations of subjugation and subordination under the guise of imagined freedom; and also to be ready to restrict freedom in the name of “real”

autonomy. That would imply that the constitutionalist “contract” regulating democratic decision-making would have to give way to more extensive collective decision-making, also (or especially) on the limits of “individual” freedoms and rights. (Pateman 1988, 153-188; 232.)

MacKinnon also rejects the conventional liberal universalist and impartial conception of equal rights, on the basis that it is in fact neither universal nor impartial, but constructed by a certain social formation – a male dominant one; and representing a particular point of view – that of the privileged group of white males.

In MacKinnon’s view, liberal politics constructs gender difference as gender hierarchy, while equality is conceived as sameness: therefore, the inequality of the

“different” is naturalized and made acceptable under the conditions of apparent impartiality. She argues that the liberal dynamics of sameness and difference, and the liberal politics of equality, in practice turn out to be able to treat women equally only in situations where they already have achieved a socially equal position by following male standards of behavior. At the same time, real inequality (occurring in the sphere of family and sexuality and in educational and professional gender differentiation) is treated as "difference" and seen as “natural”, acceptable or even inevitable. According to MacKinnon, gender inequality is aggravated by the epistemological construction of gender difference as both essential and sexual: as the mainstream sexual culture constructs male and female identities as dominant and submissive through practices that glorify and naturalize male domination over women, those identities become generally seen as essential and "natural". Thus male dominance becomes a matter of natural difference, not political inequality, and is ignored by neutral, universalist equality laws. (MacKinnon 1989, 125-234.)

As a lawyer and legal scholar, MacKinnon nevertheless does not reject the notion of rights and liberal law as willingly as many other feminist critics of liberalism. She does not argue against the idea of impartiality as such but against a

biased interpretation of it; nor against the rhetoric of rights as such, but against a specific construction of rights that allows too many violations of women’s rights in the name of “natural” gender difference. She suggests that only a change in the legal system can make a difference about gender equality. Instead of equal rights within the existing political framework where equality is allegedly constructed as sameness (with a model individual constructed as male), MacKinnon calls for a feminist jurisprudence to balance “male dominance” as a social system that constructs

“maleness” and “femaleness” as domination and submission. She argues that as long as the legal system assumes equality as the existent norm and sees inequality as exception; and does not recognize the existence of structural inequality, it will treat systematic inequality as "just a question of difference” and thus preserve the status quo. MacKinnon’s argument, although presented as a critique of the “liberal state”, is not so much an argument against liberal constitutionalism as such or its conception of individual rights; but rather it can be read as a call to question the prevailing ways of constructing universality and equality; and to direct feminist political action toward the legal system and its interpretation of equality and difference, in order to change it toward substantive equality rather than ignore it or denounce it as irrelevant or reactionary per se.

Brown, like Pateman, denounces liberalism, along with many of its central concepts like “individual” and “rights”, as inherently and incurably “masculinist”. She also traces this fact to the historical context of classical liberalism: the shrinking economic role of the family in the emerging industrialism of early modern times; the Hobbesian-Lockean visions of “the state of nature” and the “original contract” in which men are assumed to have neither attachments nor obligations and are thus free, while women are attached to men and obliged to children and thus essentially unfree. But contra Pateman, who sees the notion of “contract” as the central means to perpetuate women’s subordination, Brown argues that now both liberalism and women’s subordination are sustained without contract: liberalism no longer needs a contract to perpetuate women’s subordination, because it has been so effectively incorporated in liberal theory and practice. Brown claims that liberalism as the contemporary hegemonic discourse is premised on gender subordination while perpetuating it; gender hierarchy thus being an essential, not just contingent feature of the liberal discourse. She describes liberalism as so essentially sexist that its gendered nature survives not just the achievement of legal equality for women, but

also the changes in the sexual division of labor and in patterns of family life, as well as the occasional success of individual women. With the liberal subject constructed as male, equality for women means just sameness, a license to participate in the male public culture:

“the masculinism of liberal discourse […] supersedes […] express subordination, that is contained in the masculinism of the civil subject cut loose from the family, that constructs and positions women in socially male terms […]” (Brown 1995, 139).

In Brown’s view, liberalism is the discourse of male dominance. (Ibid. 137-139; 152.)

Summarily, the feminist skepticism toward conventional liberal, universalist politics of rights persists, although women in existing liberal democracies have been included in the range of legally equal rights-bearing citizens. The central grounds for this skepticism are the claim that the “free individual” that liberal rights are supposed to protect is constructed as male; and that the supposedly impartial and neutral policies of liberal universalism are based on not real inclusiveness of the perspectives and experiences of all citizens, but on attempts to universalize the experience of men as if it were equally valid for all, while it in practice is not. From the democratic perspective, liberal universalism is blamed for naturalizing the power of a particular group (male, middle-class, white) and representing the discourses initiated by that group as “universal” and “neutral”, while particularizing different points of view as pretentious claims of “special interest”. Feminists do not regard the universalist politics of rights, particularly the one established through the doctrine of constitutionalism, as sufficiently democratic. But while many of them agree about the critique, their remedies differ. I will return to discussions on feminist political strategies in part III. I will also present a critique of the political implications of the rejection of universalism and “individualism” by feminism; and question the benefits of such rejection for democratic inclusion. Below, in section 2.4., I will introduce the ideal of inclusiveness as a political norm, presented as an alternative to the politics of rights that constrains democracy while enabling it within a limited framework.