Justice, Gender, and the Family

Today is International Woman’s Day, so I thought it would be a good opportunity offer a random book recommendation of Susan Moller Okin’s short masterpiece Justice, Gender, And The Family mercifully published at a time before serious books were deemed to require long subtitles. It’s a book about justice and gender and the family. Specifically it’s a far-reaching feminist critique of classic works in political theory. But it’s genius is in finding radical conclusions in rather modest premises. Most of these classics were written during a period that would count as unacceptably patriarcal by the standards of basically everyone around today, including people who would by no means self-identify as feminist. That means these works tend to embed various unacceptably patriarchal assumptions. Okin argues that this is generally resolved by sort of taking the conclusion of a work you like, and then tacking on “but, yeah, women should also be equal.” The correct procedure, however, is to start with women’s equality back at the beginning of the process at which point you often find radical consequences.

The two main specifics I recall, philosophically speaking, have to do with Rawls’ construction of the “original position” and with Lockean theories of acquisition. The latter account has to do with the idea that property can be justly acquired by mixing your labor with unclaimed natural resources to produce new wealth and an ownership claim. This has, as Okin notes, very real implications for the relationship between a mother and a child that tend to be sharply at odds with what we would consider acceptable practice. The solution here is to reject the Lockean entitlement claim, though I suppose it’s open to libertarians to instead say that, yes, children should be the absolute property of their parents. On Rawls the point is simply that if we start with the assumption that the agents in the original position are “heads of households” (i.e., men) then of course they’ll say family structure should be excluded from considerations of justice but it’s not clear what normative force this would have vis-a-vis the other adults (i.e., women) thereby excluded from the construction of the principles.

The broader point is that people shouldn’t go around glibly saying things like “women are in such-and-such situation on average because of their choices, not discrimination.” What you need to ask yourself is “if women had had equal voice to men over the course of the previous 500 years of constructing our social and political institutions, would they have been set up so as to punish women’s ‘choices’ in this way?” The implications here are much deeper than tacking non-discrimination clauses onto this or that bill. In current disputes about public sector workers, for example, it’s clear that cops, soldiers, and firefighters have a kind of elevated status in our political culture. And it’s not, I think, entirely coincidental that these are the male-dominated branches of the public sector. I think in a world where women had consistently equal voice you’d find either that these are not male-dominated fields or else (more plausibly, I think) that macho public sector endeavors wouldn’t have a privileged position of public esteem.