The Critique of Liberalism as Masculinist

Abstract

We begin, then, with the feminist critique of liberalism as masculinist. This provides the initial problem of this project; in the rest of the study we shall be assessing the extent to which liberalism can reasonably be characterised in this way. It also, however, provides the framework for a substantive model of gendered social and political institutions. Although we shall be taking issue with the rigidity of the model feminist critiques propose, they nevertheless provide invaluable insights into forms of social life, historical and contemporary, without which the analysis of liberalism as gendered that will be made in following chapters, different as it is in certain important respects from the model outlined in this one, would not have been possible.¹