This article examines the attempts by John Rawls in the works published after Political Liberalism to engage with some of the feminist responses to his work. Rawls goes a long way toward addressing some of the major feministliberal concerns. Yet this has the unintended consequence of pushing justice as fairness in the direction of a more comprehensive, rather than a strictly political, form of liberalism. This does not seem to be a problem peculiar to Rawls: rather, any form of liberalism hospitable to feminist concerns must be, at the very least, a partly comprehensive, rather than a strictly political, doctrine.
See, for example, Kate Nash,Universal Difference: Feminism and the Undecidability of “Women” (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1998); Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Denise Schaeffer, “Feminism and Liberalism Reconsidered: The Case of Catharine MacKinnon,” American Political Science Review 95, no. 3 (2001): 699-708; Anne Phillips, “Feminism and Liberalism Revisited: Has Martha Nussbaum Got It Right?” Constellations 8, no. 2 (2001): 249-66; and Anthony Simon Laden, “Radical Liberals, Reasonable Feminists: Reason, Power and Objectivity in MacKinnon and Rawls,” Journal of Political Philosophy 11, no. 2 (2003): 133-52. This is not to suggest that all feminists who find liberalism hospitable agree with one another—as is well illustrated in Varieties of Feminist Liberalism, ed. Amy R. Baehr (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). And there are, of course, many brands of feminism that do not look with favor upon liberalism. Due to constraints of space, the focus throughout this discussion is feminist-liberalism.
2.
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 11-15.
3.
“Commonweal Interview with John Rawls,” in John Rawls: Collected Papers,ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 617-617, emphasis added.
4.
PL, 78, 145, 159, 199. See also John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement,ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 33-191.
5.
See, for example, Susan Moller Okin, “Political Liberalism, Justice and Gender,” Ethics105, no. 1 (1994): 23-43; Susan Moller Okin, “Justice and Gender: An Unfinished Debate,” Fordham Law Review 72 (2004): 1538; Martha Nussbaum, “Rawls and Feminism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 515; and Baehr, Varieties of Feminist Liberalism, 7. Victor Muñiz-Fraticelli, however, sees the potential for a slippage into comprehensive liberalism by Rawls's views on the family: This egalitarian vision [of the family] is no doubt the appropriate baseline for those who hold a comprehensive liberal vision of the good life, but it creates problems for a strictly political liberalism, which should avoid promoting any comprehensive doctrine about the good life—including a comprehensive liberal doctrine—over another. (“Taking Families out of the Basic Structure,” unpublished paper, cited with the author's permission)
6.
“Commonweal Interview,”617-617.
7.
Deborah Kearns, “A Theory of Justice—and Love; Rawls on the Family,”Politics(Journal of the Australasian Political Studies Association) 18, no. 2 (1983): 36-42; and Karen Green, “Rawls, Women and the Priority of Liberty,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, suppl. 64 (June 1986): 26-36.
8.
Susan Moller Okin, “Justice and Gender,”Philosophy and Public Affairs16 (1987): 3-46; Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family (New York, Basic Books, 1989); and Susan Moller Okin, “Humanist Liberalism,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1989), 39-53.
9.
As Okin points out, Rawls did not specify gender as one of the things of which those behind the veil were ignorant in TJ. See Okin, “Political Liberalism, Justice and Gender,” 24 n. 5. However, his addition of this a few years later is in keeping with his earlier depiction of what is unknown behind the veil, such as class position, social status, natural assets and abilities, intelligence, and strength.
10.
J. S. Russell argues that Okin's feminist concerns cannot be encompassed within a Rawlsian framework in “Okin's Rawlsian Feminism? Justice in the Family and Another Liberalism,”Social Theory and Practice21, no. 3 (1995): 397-426.
11.
John Rawls, The Law of Peoples(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 179-179.
12.
On Rawls's failure to engage with the feminist responses to his work, see Linda R. Hirshman, “Is the Original Position Inherently Male-Superior?”Columbia Law Review94 (1994): 1860-1860; John Exdell, “Feminism, Fundamentalism, and Liberal Legitimacy,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24, no. 3 (1994): 441-63; and Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Lacey, “Politics and the Public in Rawls' Political Liberalism,” Political Studies 43 (1995): 234-35. One exception to this is Rawls's acknowledgement of Jane English's work. In “Justice between Generations,” Philosophical Studies 31 (1977): 95, English stipulates, “By making the parties in the original position heads of families rather than individuals, Rawls makes the family opaque to claims of justice.” Yet in each of the three cases where Rawls mentions her work, he focuses on the just savings principle and duties to future generations. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, xlviii n. 20, 20 n. 22, 274 n. 12.
13.
Okin, “Political Liberalism, Justice and Gender,”24-24.
14.
Ibid., 39-43.
15.
Ibid., 27; cf. 34-35, 38-39.
16.
Ibid., 31. Exdell also highlights the ambiguities in PL when read with feminist concerns in mind; see Exdell, “Feminism, Fundamentalism, and Liberal Legitimacy.” For a more detailed discussion of Okin's extended engagement with Rawls's work, see Susan Moller Okin, “‘Forty Acres and a Mule’ for Women: Rawls and Feminism,” Politics, Philosophy and Economics 4, no. 2 (2005): 233-48.
17.
Cf. Martha Nussbaum, “The Future of Feminist Liberalism,”Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association74, no. 2 (2000): 59-59. Okin's untimely death precluded her from extensive engagement with these writings. Her first reaction found them “either puzzling or unsatisfactory.” See Susan Moller Okin, “Justice and Gender: An Unfinished Debate,” 1565-67.
18.
IPRR, 156-57 n. 58. Rawls nominates Okin, Nussbaum, Sharon Lloyd, and Linda C. McClain.
19.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 99. Cf. JFR, 67-67.
20.
Laden's distinction between a theory being shortsighted and being blind is useful here. If shortsighted, it “fails to attend to a form of oppression,” but this can be corrected. If blind, “it is not theoretically equipped to respond to such a point.... [T]here is nothing within its theoretical machinery that will allow it to see the oppression it is shown as oppression”; Laden, “Radical Liberals, Reasonable Feminists,” 134. Rawls clearly thinks, and Laden agrees, that justice as fairness was shortsighted but not blind when it comes to issues of gender (and, for Rawls, race.)
21.
Ibid., 152.
22.
See also IPRR, 159. More surprisingly, perhaps, Will Kymlicka detects a similar movement in Okin's Justice, Gender and the Family: while some passages refer to nontraditional forms of the family, others specify or presuppose a heterosexual nuclear family. See Will Kymlicka, “Rethinking the Family,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 20, no. 1 (1991): 77-97, 87. Joshua Cohen observes this tension, too, in Joshua Cohen, “Okin on Justice, Gender and the Family,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22, no. 2 (1992): 281. He points out that it would be more consistent for Okin to refer to families rather than the family (263 n. 2). As my subtitle suggests, I believe that the same applies to Rawls.
23.
This is redolent of Cynthia Enloe's observation that in patriarchal discourse, women and children easily merge into the single term “womenandchildren.” Cynthia Enloe, “‘Womenandchildren’: Propaganda Tools of Patriarchy,” in Mobilizing Democracy: Changing the US Role in the Middle East, ed. Greg Bates (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1991).
24.
And indeed Rawls does sometimes talk about children belonging to “us”—when “we” are their parents (IPRR, 160).
25.
Nussbaum, “Rawls and Feminism,”499-499. Elsewhere, she widens this to claim that the family poses the most difficult challenge to women's equality for liberal political theory; Nussbaum, “The Future of Feminist Liberalism,” 59. For a discussion of some of the other feminist concerns raised with regard to Rawls's work, see Nussbaum, “Rawls and Feminism,” 489-99; Okin, “Justice and Gender: An Unfinished Debate”; and Marion Smiley, “Democratic Citizenship v. Patriarchy: A Feminist Perspective on Rawls,” Fordham Law Review 72 (2004): 1599-627.
26.
Cf. Nussbaum, “The Future of Feminist Liberalism,”59-59.
27.
Sharon A. Lloyd, “Situating a Feminist Criticism of John Rawls's Political Liberalism,”Loyola LA Law Review28 (1995): 1328-1328.
28.
Indeed, it was clear from the start that the principles of justice do not extend beyond the basic structure (TJ, 8).
29.
Thanks to Clare Chambers for this last point.
30.
Nussbaum also notes that children's participation in the family is nonvoluntary. See Nussbaum, “The Future of Feminist Liberalism,”60-66; and Nussbaum, “Rawls and Feminism,” 504, 507. Cf. Okin, “‘Forty Acres and a Mule,’” 241; and Okin, “Justice and Gender: An Unfinished Debate,” 1566, where Okin uses the term “family of origin.”
31.
Muñiz-Fraticelli gives a nice account of Rawls's ambiguity about the family in “Taking Families out of the Basic Structure.” He argues that the extent to which a family resembles an association cannot be decided in the abstract: it all depends on the social functions assigned to the family. Another difference between families and associations is that the former expect a greater degree of the person's commitment and involvement than the latter (24). A further difference appears in Nussbaum's observation that the state plays a much more formative role in the very definition of a family than it does in an association. See Nussbaum, “The Future of Feminist Liberalism,” 61-62; and Nussbaum, “Rawls and Feminism,” 505.
32.
For Okin's most recent statement of this view, see Okin, “Justice and Gender: An Unfinished Debate,” 1563-64.
33.
Sharon A. Lloyd, “Family Justice and Social Justice,”Pacific Philosophical Quarterly75, nos. 3/4 (September/December 1994): 358-359. See also Lloyd, “Situating a Feminist Criticism,” 1327. Cf. Nussbaum, “The Future of Feminist Liberalism,” 60.
34.
See, for example, PL11, 258.
35.
Lloyd, “Situating a Feminist Criticism,” 1327.
36.
Rawls slips in these passages from attributing these basic rights, liberties, and freedoms of opportunity to all family members (and thus, by implication, children; 159) to attributing them to the family's adult members (husbands and wives; 159). Shortly after, he distinguishes between women as bearers of equal rights and children as bearers of basic rights. These movements indicate again that the status of children in justice as fairness deserves its own careful consideration.
37.
Okin, “Political Liberalism, Justice and Gender,” 27. Cf. Frazer and Lacey, “Politics and the Public in Rawls' Political Liberalism,” 241-42. This likewise means that Hirshman's charges that Rawls amputates the public sphere from the rest of life and contracts justice to apply to the state alone require revision; Hirshman, “Is the Original Position Inherently Male-Superior?” 1861-63. Nussbaum reads Rawls as rejecting the public/private distinction, but in a halfhearted way; Nussbaum, “The Future of Feminist Liberalism,” 67. When we actually lay out the consequences of what he says about citizens transporting their rights across all areas of life, what might seem to be formally weak or underspecified rejection reveals itself as much more robust.
38.
More recently, Iris Marion Young has claimed that “Rawls assumes a distinction between public institutions and private institutions, and political liberties apply only to the former.” Iris Marion Young, “Taking the Basic Structure Seriously,” in “John Rawls and the Study of Politics Symposium,”Perspectives on Politics4, no. 1 (2006): 94-94.
39.
Lloyd, “Family Justice and Social Justice,”361-362; and Lloyd, “Situating a Feminist Criticism,” 1331-2. However, Rawls modifies his views on abortion in IPRR, 169 n. 80.
40.
Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family, ch. 8. Smiley, by contrast, finds his concessions to Okin “not very extensive”; Smiley, “Democratic Citizenship v. Patriarchy,” 1608.
41.
In contrast to what Clare Chambers says about Nussbaum, for Rawls the mere presence of choice does not operate as a normative transformer. For Rawls, the circumstances, and the consequences, of the choice matter too. Clare Chambers, “Are Breast Implants Better than Female Genital Mutilation? Autonomy, Gender Equality and Nussbaum's Political Liberalism,”Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy7, no. 3 (2004): 8-8.
42.
Lloyd, “Situating a Feminist Criticism,”1332-1332.
43.
Compare Nussbaum's remarks about the consequences of Rawls's requirement that reasonable comprehensive doctrines affirm political liberalism. Whatever religions might once have taught, to enjoy toleration under justice as fairness, they must affirm women's full equality as citizens and within the family. Retaining “any sort of hierarchy, even in the spiritual sphere, will impose some strain, if the religion really does affirm the full justice of the principles underlying the basic structure.” Martha Nussbaum, “Women and the Law of Peoples,”Politics, Philosophy and Economics74, no. 2 (2002): 290-291. On her reading of Rawls, any religiously inspired doctrine of sex hierarchy becomes very attenuated, if it can survive at all.
44.
For a reference to civic friendship, see PL, 253.
45.
See, for example, Ruth Abbey, “Back to the Future: Marriage as Friendship in the Thought of Mary Wollstonecraft,”Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy14, no. 3 (1999): 78-95; and Eileen Hunt Botting, Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).
46.
So while I am suggesting that all feminist-liberals must, in effect, advance some variant of comprehensive liberalism—full or partial—it does not follow that all comprehensive liberals must be feminist-liberals. Nor, of course, does it follow that liberalism offers the only way of addressing feminist concerns.
47.
Friedman's content-neutral/substantive distinction seems to map directly onto Chambers's second-order/first-order autonomy distinction. Chambers, “Are Breast Implants Better,” 4-7.
48.
Marilyn Friedman, Autonomy, Gender, Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 190-190.
49.
Ibid., 189-90.
50.
Lloyd, “Situating a Feminist Criticism,”1326-1326. This problem seems to arise from Lloyd's failure to distinguish among different types of feminism.
51.
Nussbaum, “The Future of Feminist Liberalism,”65-65.
52.
Okin, “‘Forty Acres and a Mule,’”246-246; and Okin, “Justice and Gender: An Unfinished Debate,” 1566.
53.
Cohen, “Okin on Justice, Gender and the Family,”269-269; Cf. Russell, “Okin's Rawlsian Feminism?” 407.
54.
Samantha Brennan, “The Liberal Rights of Feminist Liberalism,” in Baehr, Varieties of Feminist Liberalism, 87-87. Cf. Brian Barry, Culture and Equality(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 119-23.
55.
Okin, “Humanist Liberalism,”40-40.
56.
Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family, 128-128.
57.
Susan Moller Okin, “Reply,” in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha Nussbaum (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 129-129.
58.
Martha Nussbaum, “A Plea for Difficulty,” in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?107-111. Russell suggests that a comprehensive view of the good informs Okin's thought in Russell, “Okin's Rawlsian Feminism?” Celia Wolf-Devine calls Okin's liberalism hegemonic. However, there ultimately seems to be little difference between hegemonic and her understanding of comprehensive, except perhaps that the former has more ominous connotations. Celia Wolf-Devine, “The Hegemonic Liberalism of Susan Moller Okin,” in Liberalism at the Crossroads, 2nd ed., ed. Christopher Wolfe (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 41-59.
59.
Nussbaum, “A Plea for Difficulty,”108-108. See also Nussbaum, “Rawls and Feminism,” 511.
60.
Here Nussbaum doesn't even seem to allow for the possibility of a reasonable comprehensive doctrine.
61.
Okin, “Reply,”129-130.
62.
Indeed, Okin says that she does not fit neatly into either the political or the comprehensive category of liberalism: she subscribes “to a position in between.” Ibid., 129.
63.
Jean Hampton (1994) and Lief Wenar (1995) both argue that PL offers a partly comprehensive, rather than a strictly political, doctrine of liberalism. See Jean Hampton, “The Common Faith of Liberalism,”Pacific Philosophic Quarterly75, nos. 3/4 (September/December 1994): 186-216; and Lief Wenar, “Political Liberalism: An Internal Critique,” Ethics 106, no. 1 (1995): 32-62.
