ABSTRACT
Feminist theory has lurched between consideration of women’s specificity or dif-
ference, usually with regard to biologically based attributes and capacities, and
women’s ‘sameness’ with men in terms of demands for gender equity. This ambi-
guity is exemplified in the area of work, and the constitution of women’s economic
citizenship. The global movement for protection of women workers in the second
half of the nineteenth century exemplified the concern with women’s specific dif-
ference while ensuring women’s rights to be part of the paid labour force. The con-
trary positions were reflected in the division between women’s groups that wanted
the state to protect women from excessive exploitation and those that felt that pro-
tective legislation was a form of discrimination against women workers. Much of
the protection debate was bogged down by the equation of equality with sameness:
an inability to recognize equality under conditions of difference, as is now at the
core of Equal Employment Opportunity legislation. In her landmark essay on gen-
der difference and equality, Joan Scott enjoins us to:
... reconcile theories of equal rights with cultural concepts of sex difference, to
question the validity of normative constructions of gender in the light of the
existence of behaviours and qualities that contradict the rules, to point up
rather than resolve conditions of contradiction, to articulate a political identity
for women without conforming to existing stereotypes about them.
