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 re- ceive 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 con- temporary societies. Okin sought to identify and understand the complex sources of this subordination. She directed partic- ular 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 politi- cal 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 the- ory 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 “wom- en 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 theo- rists. 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 con- dition 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 philoso- phy 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 fam- ily, 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 politi- cal 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 natu- ral 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 partici- patory 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 wom- en 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 phi- losophy 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 ar- gues 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 tradi- tion” 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 childrear- ing 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 tra- ditional 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. This disadvantage is present whether or not women choose to enter the paid workforce. On the one hand, women who do not work outside the home perform unpaid labor and are com- pletely dependent on their husbands for income and become thereby asymmetrically vulnerable in the event of divorce. The fact that divorce can be financially devastating for many women makes it harder for them to leave marriages and also influences their bargaining position within marriage.8 On the other hand, women who do manage to combine work outside the home with a “second shift” within it typically have less time to devote to their paid work.9 At the same time, continued discrimination and stereotyping still mean that women earn less than men, xiv INTRODUCTION TO THE 2013 EDITION even in cases where their jobs are relevantly equivalent. In the United States, women earn about eighty cents for every dollar earned by a man. There is, in addition, a body of evidence that suggests that many occupations are devalued when women are in the majority.10 Given women’s lower wages, if someone has to take time off to raise the kids, then economic rationality dic- tates that women and not men should make this move. The system of gender inequality in the family thus reinforces and is reinforced by inequalities in the economic realm. The argument from the cycle of vulnerability provides a re- sponse to those who argue that women’s inequality is simply the result of women’s choices to forgo high-paying and high- prestige jobs in order to spend time with their children. Okin shows how women’s choices with respect to family and children interact with unjust social structures outside the family, includ- ing not only unequal pay but also the lack of quality affordable day care, and job structures with little flexibility. We can add to that the widespread cultural expectation that women will be primary caretakers of children. This argument also supports Okin’s second thesis, that the family is the central piece of an institutionalized system of gender subordination. As long as the gendered family contin- ues to exist, women will remain in a second-class status, de- spite the fact that men and women have equal rights in the public sphere. To change the status quo we must change the gendered family—and if we pull this thread then we will have to reimagine the nature of the workplace, currently still orga- nized on the assumption that workers do not have primary responsibility for care of their children. Our ideas about the institutions and practices of a just society will have to change. Indeed, Okin aspired to a world where gender itself plays no role, where a person’s sex would be no more relevant for social practices and institutions than “one’s eye color or the length of one’s toes.”11 This leads to the third thesis taken up in Women in Western Po- litical Thought: the family cannot be viewed as a purely private realm, but is a part of the political realm to which the prin- xv INTRODUCTION TO THE 2013 EDITION ciples of justice apply. This feminist idea, that the personal is also political, figures prominently in Okin’s corpus. It remains an important subject of discussion and debate. Okin was both an egalitarian and a liberal. She was com- mitted to the premise of the full equality of men and women and aimed to show that following out that simple premise has radical conclusions. She was also a liberal, committed to wide- ranging individual freedoms. But she never fully defined her liberalism. This leads to a certain ambiguity in interpreting her thesis that the family is a political institution. On the one hand, some of the inequalities generated by the family seem to be created through individual choices and decisions, which liber- als generally respect. On the other hand, leaving those choices intact is compatible with the gendered family and the resulting subordination of women. How we reconcile the potential conflict between these will depend on whether we treat choices in the supposedly private realm of the family as entirely on par with choices in other public institutions, such as the market. If we think that “the concept of privacy and the existence of a personal sphere of life in which the state’s authority is very limited is essential,”12 then we will give people the right to form the kinds of fami- lies they want, so long as children’s interests are protected. This will include not only traditionally gendered families, but also nontraditional groupings, including gay families, single-parent families, and perhaps polygamy and contractual relationships, including surrogacy. If we are less persuaded of the sanctity of a wholly private sphere, then perhaps Plato’s mandated abolition of the exis- tence of separate families and advocacy of the raising of chil- dren in common will seem attractive, or at the very least, we might wish to regulate families to ensure that tasks are truly shared among men and women. Okin, of course, would have rejected Plato’s solution and measures such as an invasive gov- ernment oversight of household chores—but the reasons for this rejection suggest that the family has a somewhat different character than other many public institutions.13 xvi INTRODUCTION TO THE 2013 EDITION

In this respect, it is unfortunate that Okin never returned to her original plan to examine the treatment of the family by socialist writers such as Marx, Engels, Bebel, Zetkin, and Fourier.14 Writers in the socialist tradition did not hesitate to criticize the natural family along with private property. Indeed, they postulated a link between the privatization of the family— where women were the property of their husbands—and the privatization of the economy. Examining the writings of those in the socialist tradition might have helped Okin to clarify the nature and extent of a “personal sphere of life in which the state’s authority is very limited,” which she insisted was valu- able. It would have forced her to confront a group of thinkers whose egalitarianism was stronger than their commitment to liberalism. Women in Western Political Thought laid down the agenda for Okin’s subsequent work. In later writings, she not only deep- ened its central claims, but also showed how political theo- ries continued to do a disservice to women and thereby to the project of a humanist justice. Her last writings extended her criticisms of the great tradition of Western thought to contem- porary theories that, despite their acceptance of the equality of men and women in the political sphere and their rejection of “natural” gender roles, continued to assume the existence of the gendered family;15 to multicultural theories that either gave a free pass to cultures that oppress women or remained oblivious to the tensions between respecting cultural diversity and respecting women’s equality;16 and to the literature on eco- nomic globalization and development that continued to mar- ginalize women.17 Susan Okin died young, with the potential for many years of productive scholarly work still ahead of her. I would have loved to hear (what I can only imagine would be) her caustic but carefully reasoned response to the recent claims that we live in a postfeminist world where women can choose to have it all. Fortunately, she left us with an extensive body of work through which her voice—with its uncompromising opposition xvii INTRODUCTION TO THE 2013 EDITION to the continuation of gender as a caste system—still speaks to us: presses us to imagine new ways of organizing the domestic division of labor and the workplace; insists that women and men must have equal opportunities to flourish in our world; and provides reasons that should embolden us to act to achieve this.18

NOTES 1. See UNICEF report on The State of the World’s Children(2007): http://www.unicef.org/sowc07/docs/sowc07_rosa.pdf. 2. Women in Western Political Thought, p. 5. 3. WWPT, p. 12. 4. Rob Reich, in his comments on Nancy Rosenblum’s paper at a 2005 conference at Stanford University assessing Okin’s work. The papers for that conference were published in Satz and Reich, eds., Toward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 5. WWPT, p. 286. 6. WWPT, p. 279. 7. Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), p. 8. 8. JGF, p. 152. 9. See Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift (New York: Viking, 1989). 10. See, for example, Paula England, Lori Reid, and Barbara Stanek Kilbourne, “The Effect of the Sex Composition of Jobs on Starting Wages in an Organization: Findings from the NLSY.” Demography 33(4): 511−521, 1996. 11. JGF, 171. See Mary Lynn Shanley’s paper, “‘No More Rel- evance than One’s Eye Color’: Justice and A Society Without Gen- der,” in Satz and Reich, op. cit., for discussion of Okin’s views on the possibility of eliminating gender as a basis of social differentia- tion. 12. JGF, p. 128. 13. See the paper by Joshua Cohen, “A Matter of Demolition? Susan Okin on Justice and Gender,” in Satz and Reich, op. cit., for further discussion of these issues. 14. WWPT, pp. 7−9. xviii INTRODUCTION TO THE 2013 EDITION

15. JGF. 16. “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” In Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha Nussbaum, eds., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). 17. “Poverty, Well Being and Gender: What Counts? Who’s Heard?” Philosophy and Public Affairs 32(3): 280−316, 2003. 18. Thanks to Donald Barr, Margo Horn, and Rob Reich for their editorial comments on this introduction.