ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that a feminist theory of freedom is necessary not only to understand the relationship of women's experience to existing notions of liberty but also to the construction of a new conception of liberty that can accommodate as well as contest or criticize such experiences. In His FAMOUS essay "Two Concepts of Liberty", Isaiah Berlin articulates two theoretical orientations to liberty, namely "negative" and "positive" liberty, According to Berlin, negative liberty consists in an absence of external constraints. Some would suggest that difference is at the heart of negative liberty's conceptualization of equality as strictly formal and procedural. That is, social constructionism suggests that we may be able to adapt a negative liberty model to feminist purposes by expanding the notion of what counts as a "barrier" to freedom. The idea of social construction is particularly important to feminism, for it is key to rejecting patriarchal arguments about men's and women's "nature".
