Introduction to the 2013 Edition Debra Satz

Introduction to the 2013 Edition Debra Satz In every country of the world, women fare worse than men on a number of important indi- ces: income and wealth, political participation, vulnerability to sexual assault, and degree of access to the most prestigious social positions. In many developing countries the inequalities based on gender are especially stark: girls are less likely to be educated, receive health care, or even to be fed than their male siblings. In India, for example, girls are 40 percent more likely to die before the age of five than boys.1 Despite our globalizing and democratizing twenty-first century, women continue to receive the short end of the stick. Why is this? Susan Moller Okin (1946−2004) was a political theorist whose work issues a sharp challenge to the long-standing, deeply rooted, and continuing subordination of women in contemporary societies. Okin sought to identify and understand the complex sources of this subordination. She directed particular attention to the views of those political philosophers who either justified the subordination of women or complacently neglected to call it out. The “great tradition” of western political philosophy, she pointed out, consists “of writings by men, for men and about men.”2 While these thinkers appear to be talking about individuals, they are in fact talking about men. Women are only minor characters in their magisterial works, playing merely supporting roles that tend to occur off-stage. Okin compared the place of women in Western political theory to that of the peripheral Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet: if, as in Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, they are transformed into principals, everything looks completely different.3 Okin argued that even contemporary theories of justice are in need of major reform. While she believed that liberal theo- x INTRODUCTION TO THE 2013 EDITION ries of justice had the potential to be tools in the fight against women’s oppression, she argued that liberalism’s philosophical proponents betrayed their own principles through their failure to explicitly question the traditional division of labor in which the majority of childrearing and housework falls to women, and by failing to regard the family as itself a schoolhouse for citizenship. Women in Western Political Thought is based on Okin’s doctoral dissertation. Although an advisor admonished her that “women are not a topic,” it is our good fortune that she proceeded to work on this topic anyway. The result was a groundbreaking manuscript that systematically examines and critically dissects what canonical political theorists have said about women and their role in a just society. This is a book that should be read by anyone interested in the history of political philosophy in the Western world. More than thirty years have passed since this book’s first publication in 1979, and some of its main insights are now in- corporated into the discipline of political philosophy, in theory if not always in practice. Consider Okin’s claim that no plau- sible theory of justice can simply constrict women’s role to the family. Few contemporary thinkers would dissent from that conclusion. Or consider her claim that women are largely and wrongly missing from the discussion of earlier political theorists. As soon as this is pointed out, the omission seems glaring. In fact, a recurrent feature of Okin’s work is that many of her ideas and arguments seem “ex post facto obvious.”4 As soon as she makes them, they seem absolutely apparent, even though just before reading her writings, these insights were invisible to us. Many theorists now explicitly work on the issues of justice and gender that their predecessors ignored. But if political philosophy is different today, this is in no small part due to works like Women in Western Political Thought. Okin was part of a pioneering generation of feminist scholars who helped rework the traditional intellectual landscape by insisting that the condition of women, along with the family that so profoundly xi INTRODUCTION TO THE 2013 EDITION shapes that condition, is a central concern of justice. Her work changed the field. Okin’s work had larger ambitions than criticizing such obvi- ously unsupportable assumptions as Aristotle’s assertion that women are “by nature” unsuited to the public political realm. She wanted Women in Western Political Thought to accomplish a complete rethinking of political philosophy. In particular, she aimed to establish three theses: 1. While most of the tradition of political philosophy has either ignored or justified the subordination of women, we cannot simply add women as full moral and political equals into these earlier theories without demolishing them; 2. The linchpin of women’s inequality is the family, and without altering the family women will never be the full moral and political equals of men; and that accordingly: 3. The view of the family as part of a personal realm outside of, and wholly separate from, the political realm cannot be sustained. Okin seeks to defend these three claims by examining the place of women in the theories of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Mill. With the exception of Plato, to whom I will return, each of these thinkers’ theories is distorted in important re- spects by their views of the family and the division of labor within it. Women were assumed to have the primary responsi- bility for raising children and managing the household; while men were assumed to be free individuals who were ends in themselves, women were more or less defined by their “func- tions.” None of these theories, she argued, would be able to consistently sustain the inclusion of women as the moral equals of men without “challenging basic and age-old assumptions about the family, its traditional sex roles, and its relation to the wider world of political society.”5 xii INTRODUCTION TO THE 2013 EDITION Consider Aristotle. Aristotle held that women have a natural function: their purpose is reproduction and childrearing, so that men can be left free to pursue politics. If he denied the natural inferiority of women, then his argument for the natural inferiority of slaves would also be in jeopardy. Pull on this one thread, and Aristotle’s case for natural hierarchy is unraveled. Likewise, Okin claims, with Rousseau. Rousseau’s participatory democracy requires the existence of citizens who can devote considerable time to meetings and civic matters. “If all the adults of both sexes were to be as much preoccupied with civic activity as citizenship in a direct democracy requires, who would maintain the private sphere of life which Rousseau perceives as crucially important?”6 Since children cannot raise themselves, something has to give way: direct, participatory democracy or women’s equality. In each of these cases, other aspects of these thinker’s theories require the assumption that the family is a natural sphere where women perform most of the work. Even Mill’s work cannot sustain, according to Okin, the full equality of women. While Mill writes a major work of feminist theory, The Subjection of Women, nonetheless he cannot imagine that married women would not assume their traditional re- sponsibility for the unpaid labor of the family. He thus con- doned, despite his liberal egalitarian aims, the continuation of differences in power and opportunity between men and women with children. Okin amplifies her thesis with a brilliant discussion of Pla- to’s political thought. In Plato’s Republic, she argues, we find the only example in the entire canon of Western political philosophy where women are regarded as the equals of men. Plato allows that women as well as men can be members of the ruling group of guardians. But in order to arrive at this conclusion, Plato had first to abolish the family. Plato advocates the aboli- tion of private property and the family among the guardians to secure their undivided loyalty to the city-state, and Okin argues that the equality of women follows from their no longer hav- ing a functionally defined role. By contrast, when the family is xiii INTRODUCTION TO THE 2013 EDITION reintroduced in the Laws, women’s role in public life winds up being curtailed, despite Plato’s explicit intention in that work to treat men and women as equal citizens. The conclusion of Okin’s examination of the “great tradition” is that in order for a theory of justice to include women on equal terms with men, the so-called natural family, with its traditional division of labor that assigns the work of childrearing and housekeeping to women, has to be dismantled. The family cannot be seen to lie “beyond” the scope of justice, but must be included within it. To be sure, Women in Western Political Thought does not fully de- velop Okin’s thesis that the assumption of the natural family necessarily leads to the subjection of women, nor does it establish that the inequality produced in the family cannot be counter- acted by social policies outside of it. She deepens and extends this argument in Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989), where she explains the mechanism by which the family comes to influ- ence women’s overall position in society. In that work, Okin argues that there is a pervasive “cycle of vulnerability” that is established by the traditional, gendered family. She defines gender as the “deeply entrenched institu- tionalization of sexual difference,” and she argues that the traditional family has a gender structure.7 Women who assume the primary responsibilities of parenting and housework are systematically disadvantaged within the home and outside it.

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