Choice and Freedom: Elusive Issues in the Search for Gender Justice

Abstract

Particularly among feminist scholars, it is hardly fashionable anymore to adhere to liberal feminism. Its goals are largely limited to achieving the same rights and privileges for women as those held by men, without seriously questioning the existing values and structures of male-defined institutions. Against this increasingly skeptical background, Gender Justicestands out as an ardent defense of conventional liberalism–not even liberalism as refined by current liberal feminists to take power, domination, and the social construction of gender into account, but a nineteenth century brand of liberal philosophy evocative of Kant and Mill. The book is also reminiscent of an earlier era because, in terms of the positions the authors espouse, the issues they examine, and the social arrangements they leave unchallenged, the work seems barely touched by the recent profusion of feminist writings on gender issues.