Liberalism versus Feminism

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that feminism and liberalism often have been intertwined epistemologically because, in a liberal view, the basic task of government is to protect the equal liberty of citizens and equal rights in the total system of basic liberties. The author points out that feminism, as a liberal philosophy of social rights, really only emerged in the United States in the 1970s, a decade behind the rise of the American women's movement in the 1960s. The paper stresses that, liberal Western philosophy is derived from the experience of predominantly white and heterosexual men; therefore, feminist philosophical forms, unlike past forms of liberalism, first have had to critique established views of the "self," rather than to accept the existence of the "self" as a given, and then define the best ways to protect these rights.

From the Paper:

"A politician of a centrist bent may be called a liberal if he or she allows that gays and lesbians should be permitted to legally wed. A woman who runs her own business may be called a feminist. However, these individual's real political convictions may bear little resemblance to such great liberal thinkers as John Rawls and John Stuart Mill and to such self-identified feminists as Naomi Wolf and Luce Irigaray. Rawls and Mill, Wolf and Irigaray themselves span quite different areas of the political spectrum, not in terms of its continuum of liberal versus conservative, but the fact that Irigaray might deny that such a creation of a continuum of liberal v. conservative, feminist v. anti-feminist is itself a male creation, part of the polarizing, dual discourse of patriarchy."

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