ABSTRACT
The low number of women in the institutionalized political process is of course not a Greek peculiarity. On the contrary, comparative data suggest that the reduced presence of women in the structures of political decision-making has an international character.1 At the same time, they document the primary assertion of the feminist movement, namely the co-existence of legal equality between the sexes with the social subordination, marginalization and exploitation of women. An indication as well as an expression of the inferiority in their social position, this reduced presence is in tandem with the overall “underrepresentation” of women in all leadership groups, and is due to the multiple structural and ideological exclusions of women and the differentiated lifestyles according to gender, which are legitimated by the idea of the separation of the private and public spheres.2 The rejection of the traditional divide between the public and the private, as well as the well-known motto of the second feminist wave, “the personal is political”3 refer to this substantial contradiction in contemporary democracy, while they enrich the critique of social inequality with a dimension beyond the one generally accepted, that is class. This assertion affects the formation of a critical viewpoint with respect to the dominant conceptualization of citizenship and of the notions of universality and “neutrality” of basic concepts and values of western thought. It is very significant that the discourse on equality and rights, which refers to the legacy of the Enlightenment and which undoubtedly constituted the key stepping stone of feminist contestation, is now disapproved of as hypocritical and one-sided because it is androcentric. Obviously humanity is not venturing with a steady pace towards rationality and freedom for all, men and women alike. This critical feminist standpoint in combination with poststructuralist perspectives and psychoanalytical hypotheses contributed to the challenging of basic tenets of western thought,4 while the feminist along with other “new social movements” stressed with their action that social class is not the only factor of social inequality, nor the sole point of reference for a substantial social democratization. At the same time, under conditions of a crisis of politics (which largely refers to an ideological crisis and reflects the failure of the Left to inspire hope and to offer visible ways out5), these movements suggest alternative ways of social coexistence that involve all, men and women, in all their particularities. They thus
widen the theoretical and political field in which it is possible to construct an authentically democratic and, for this reason, radical “we”.6
