ABSTRACT
If feminists have criticized the double standards by which men and women are privileged in relation to the power of the law, Smart suggests that the criticism deploys double standards itself-bringing the richness and diversity of knowledge about women’s experience to bear on what is construed as monolithic orthodoxy. The charge is not so dissimilar from that often brought against anthropologists who pit their nuanced understandings of local knowledge against monolithic readings of Euro-American conventions. I would only add that double standards may serve political purposes. Depicting the law as operating according to its claim to neutrality affords a single position that can be attacked from another single position-feminist jurisprudence can rally round a common target. The kind of complexity to which Smart refers makes the task of social criticism much more diffuse. If this is true of the fleld of jurisprudence, no doubt it is also true of questions about morality.
