Abstract
Women face limitations within U.S. social, economic, and legal systems that have precluded their full involvement in the construction of instruments and institutions that directly affect their lives. The limitations that women experience are not a result of invidious manipulation of the institutions of the state system, but are a fundamental failure of the liberal democratic system in the United States to address the needs of those who are necessarily marginalized by the traditionally white male-privileging structure. As a direct result of this normative construction of civil society, opportunities to effect salutary change in these systems continue to be unavailable to women, as women.2
Domination arises out of an inability to recognize, appreciate and nurture differences, not out of a failure to see everyone as the same. Indeed, the need to see everyone the same in order to accord them dignity and respect is an expression of the problem, not a cure for it.1
—Jane Flax, 1992
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Notes
Jane Flax, “Beyond Equality: Gender, Justice and Difference,” in Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship; Feminist Politics; Female Subjectivity, eds. Gisela Bock and Susan James (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 193–210.
Dorothy McBride Stetson, Women’s Rights in the U.S.A.: Policy Debates and Gender Roles (Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1991).
See also, Ilka Tanya Payan, “Women’s Human Rights in the United States: An Immigrant’s Perspective,” in Women’s Rights Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives, eds. Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 82–88.
David Forsythe, Internationalization of Human Rights (Lexington, KY: Lexington Books, 1991), p. 121. In his chapter entitled “Human Rights and the United States: Exceptionalism and International Society” (pp. 119–142), Forsythe speaks to the issue of the United States and its history of exceptionalism. I argue here that the U.S. notion of human rights limits itself, virtually exclusively, to civil and political rights.
Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, Women Reshaping Human Rights: How Extraordinary Activists Are Changing the World (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996), p. 237.
Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Women in the Politics of Postcommunist Eastern Europe, ed. Marilyn Rueschemeyer (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1994).
See also, Women Transforming Politics: Worldwide Strategies for Empowerment, ed. Jill M. Bystydzienski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
Shelley Wright, “Economic Rights, Social Justice and the State: A Feminist Reappraisal,” in Reconceiving Reality: Women and International Law, ed. Dorinda G. Dallmeyer (Washington, DC: The American Society of International Law, 1993.
Zillah Eisenstein, The Color of Gender: Reimaging Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 16.
I argue in chapter 1 that unreserved ratification of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1981) and adherence to its intent would afford a “common language” for states party to begin to address this universal problem within their un-common cultural settings. The failure of mainstream human rights documents to address the harms of women is set forth very clearly by Hilary Charlesworth: “What Are ‘Women’s International Human Rights’?” in Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 58–84.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).
C. B. MacPherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p.7.
Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
David Campbell, “Foreign Policy and Identity: Japanese ‘Other’/American Self,” in The Global Economy as Political Space, eds. Stephen J. Rosow, Naeem Inayatullah and Mark Rupert (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994), pp. 147–169.
Robin West, Narrative, Authority, and Law (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 47.
John Gray, Liberalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
The distinctions are also made very clearly by Norberto Bobbio in Liberalism and Democracy (New York: Verso, 1990),
and by Isaiah Berlin in Four Essays on Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).
Barbara R. Bergmann, In Defense of Affirmative Action (New York: HarperCollins, 1996).
This argument is illustrated by, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).
Also see, David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: the Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: The Free Press, 1991).
See also, Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984).
Seyla Benhabib, in Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 214–218, says: “Surely we can criticize the ‘metaphysical suppositions of identity politics’ and challenge the supremacy of heterosexist positions in the women’s movement. Yet is such a challenge only thinkable via a complete debunking of any concepts of selfhood, agency and autonomy?” (Also, chapter 3 of this text discusses differing perspectives based on race and class.)
Andrea L. Bonnicksen, in Civil Rights and Liberties (Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield, 1982), p 143, cites Levy v. Louisiana (1968) as an illustration of the invisibility of private relationship: Upon her wrongful death, Levy’s children could not recover damages, because they were illegitimate. Only legitimate children could file for damages in a wrongful death case. What is at issue in the decision is the absence of the state-proscribed, public relationship of the children to their mother. The state proscription preempts, and thus fails to reveal, the private reliance of the children on their mother.
Barbara Hobson, in “Childcare and Types of Welfare States,” in Gendering Welfare States (London: Sage, 1994), pp. 45–61, discusses “solo mothers” in the United States. She claims that “seldom did black families receive benefits” and “there were usually restrictions on benefits to never married women.”
Virginia Sapiro, “The Gender Basis of American Social Policy,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 36–54.
Linda Gordon, “Family Violence, Feminism, and Social Control,” in Women, the State and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 178–198.
Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, “Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 29.
See also, Diane Sainsbury, “Women’s and Men’s Social Rights: Gendering Dimensions of Welfare States,” in Gendering Welfare States (London: Sage, 1994), pp. 150–169.
Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Not by Law Alone: From a Debate with Phyllis Schlafly,” in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Robin West, “Women’s Hedonic Lives,” in Narrative, Authority, and the Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 179–249.
C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 144. “These economic rights, like the civil and religious rights, were demanded for everyone. In practice, of course, the rights to produce, trade &c.,[sic] could be enjoyed only by those who had the disposal of their own labor.”
Beyond Equality & Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics, and Female Subjectivity, ed. Gisela Bock and Susan James (New York: Routledge, 1992). In her article, “Beyond Equality: Gender, Justice and Difference,” Flax poses the problem of justice and its meaninglessness in an unjust context. In this case, “unlikes” competing for (just) acquisition in a system arranged to privilege “likes.”
C. B. MacPherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 88.
Tanya Melich, “Creation of the Republican party,” in The Republican War Against Women (New York: Bantam Books. 1996).
Second Treatise of Government, ed. Thomas P. Peardon (New York: Macmillan, 1952), pp. 96–99.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, The Color of Gender: Reimaging Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 40.
Joseph Raz offers a comprehensive explication of the forms and structural facilitations of autonomy in his text, Morality of Freedom (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1986).
Jane Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986).
Frederick Thayer, An End to Hierarchy! An End to Competition!: Organizing the Politics and Economics of Survival (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973).
In this context “constitutionally” refers to the legal document, and is a response, albeit indirect, to the text of Robert A. Goldwin, Why Blacks, Women and Jews Are Not Mentioned in the Constitution, and Other Unorthodox Views (Lanham, MD: AEI Press, 1990).
Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Science and Gender (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Keller argues that the “masculinization of science” has served (1) to exclude women from participation in scientific endeavor and (2) to circumscribe, very particularly, the focus of the endeavor itself.
Christine Sylvester, “Feminists and Realists View Autonomy and Obligation in International Relations,” in Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations, ed. V. Spike Peterson (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992), pp. 155–178.
Susan James, “The Good-Enough Citizen,” Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics, Female Subjectivity, eds. Gisela Bock and Susan James (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 48–65.
Women’s Rights in the United States: A Documentary History, eds. Winston E. Langley and Vivian C. Fox (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994).
Jyl Josephson, Gender, Families and the State: Child Support Policy in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1997).
Nancy Hartsock, “Foucault on Power,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990). In this article, Hartsock questions what a “theory of power” for women might look like. She is particularly sensitive to the reductive nature of previous theorizing about “women’s” oppression. Robin West, in Narrative, Authority, and Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), seems to argue for a situation-specific altruism in communal acts of power. Jyl Josephson investigates the U.S. system and is critical of the ways positive action by the state to alleviate women’s oppression entails increased social and economic control over their (otherwise private) decisions.
Robin West, Narrative, Authority and Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 175–76.
Natalie Hevener, International law and the Status of Women (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1983).
Jyl J. Josephson, Gender Families and the State: Child Support Policy in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997).
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© 2000 Diana Zoelle
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Zoelle, D.G. (2000). The Injustice of Equality. In: Globalizing Concern for Women’s Human Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299699_6
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