Amy Baehr

A society satisfying Rawls’s principles would satisfy its dependency needs better than our society does today, but justice as fairness fails to appreciate the full array of issues of justice dependency raises. It does not recognize failure of noncooperating members of society to receive caregiving as an injustice; it does not recognize systematic disadvantage to caregivers as unjust; and it does not recognize as unjust when society’s basic arrangements render some unable to provide or procure the caregiving their dependents require. A just society is compliant with principles of justice in caregiving. Such principles can be presented in a Rawlsian way—as those chosen in a suitably designed initial situation, and as part of a political conception of justice in Rawls’s terms. This feminist political constructivism concedes as much to the dependency critique as it defends in Rawls, and is responsive to antiracist criticism of Rawlsian ideal theory.

Caring for Liberalism brings together chapters that explore how liberal political theory, in its many guises, might be modified or transformed to take the fact of dependency on board. In addressing the place of care in liberalism, this collection advances the idea that care ethics can help respond to legitimate criticisms from feminists who argue that liberalism ignores issues of race, class, and ethnicity. The chapters do not simply add care to existing liberal political frameworks; rather, they explore how integrating dependency might leave core components of the traditional liberal philosophical apparatus intact, while transforming other aspects of it. Additionally, the contributors address the design of social and political institutions through which care is given and received, with special attention paid to non-Western care practices. This book will appeal to scholars working on liberalism in philosophy, political science, law, and public policy, and it is a must-read for feminist political philosophers.

In Part 1, I argue that Watson and Hartley’s relational feminist political liberal approach – grounded in the idea of equal citizenship – produces a rather elusive liberal feminist agenda (because of its reliance on intuitions) and that it may lose track of the importance of goods whose value stems from the role they play in an individual woman’s or girl’s life rather than from the role they play in securing equal citizenship. I suggest that a distributive principle approach – like that of Susan Okin – might do better on both scores. In Part 2, I argue that Watson and Hartley may have overpromised what the state can and may do. Discussion includes focus on policy questions concerning, for example, prostitution and the gendered division of labor.

Contributing to the debate on the compatibility of feminism and liberalism, I argue that much feminist rejection of liberalism rests on associating the latter with a number of unattractive theses that are not necessary to liberal theory. I develop a feminist liberalism and make the case that Habermas', rather than Rawls', recent work in political theory provides a theoretical basis for such a liberalism. This liberalism is sensitive in the right way to the moral-political relevance of gender difference, especially in the way it places relationships of human dependency characteristic of women's lives in the center of a conception of justice.

This paper is a philosophical reconstruction of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's thinking about women and feminism, and an inquiry into whether there is a conservative form of feminism. The paper argues that Fox-Genovese's endorsement of conventional social forms (like traditional marriage, motherhood, and sexual morality) contrasts strongly with feminism's criticism of these forms, and feminism's claim that they should be transformed. The paper concludes, however, that one need not call Fox-Genovese's thought "feminist" to recognize it as serious advocacy on behalf of women and to include it in discussions about what is good for women.