Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | S | Social Theory and Practice

Lisa H. Schwartzman, Challenging Liberalism: Feminism as Political Critique.

Article Excerpt
Lisa H. Schwartzman, Challenging Liberalism: Feminism as Political Critique (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), viii + 210 pp.

Feminists are divided over the question of the value of liberalism. Feminists such as Susan Moller Okin and Martha Nussbaum argue that liberal theory has great potential as a foundation for feminist demands. On liberal principles, women ought to be treated on equal terms with men and have the same opportunities and rights. Therefore, whatever is required to achieve that social equality is justified by those principles. Other feminists argue that the abstract nature of liberal theorizing and the individualism that is essential to liberal political theory makes it inappropriate as a basis for feminism. Alison Jaggar and Iris Marion Young argue that liberal conceptions of the individual as a bare rational autonomous self ignore the ways sexual difference structures specific identities and power relations. So liberals fail to notice ways women are oppressed, even where they appear to have rights equal to men's. Lisa Schwartzman's book makes a useful contribution to these ongoing debates. Her nuanced position maintains a critical perspective on many of the uses made of liberal concepts while avoiding total rejection of liberal theory.

The uses of liberal concepts

A problem complicating feminist disputes about the value of liberalism is that it seems that its central concepts may be made to serve conflicting political purposes. From the beginning of the modern movement, feminists have made use of the concepts of equality, autonomy, and the rights of the individual to attack entrenched sexism and to argue for women's full participation in social life. But talk of rights has also been used to uphold the privileges of the powerful. Principles of equality have been employed to argue against pregnancy leave for women (since men do not have these rights) and rights to privacy have been used to prevent state interference when women are victims of domestic violence. Rights to freedom of speech have been used to silence feminists objecting to violent pornography, seen by them as oppressing women.

There might be several explanations of this flexible use of liberal concepts to argue both against sexism and to support some of the social structures that reinforce it. One possibility is that liberals' theorizing about concepts like freedom and equality remains at a high level of abstraction, and this allows these concepts to be interpreted in divergent ways. Another explanation is that liberals' commitment to individualism may be useful in some contexts in articulating feminist demands, and making them heard, but in other contexts liberals' focus on the individual obscures the effects on women of entrenched structures of social power.

Schwartzman considers these explanations but argues that neither has correctly understood the issues. Abstraction and individualism should be seen as part of the methodology that liberals...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!