ABSTRACT
Okin’s fi rst major work, which began as her doctoral dissertation under Walzer’s supervision, is primarily a study of the depiction of women in the work of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau and Mill. Part V examines how traditional views of women pervade the work of some twentieth-century thinkers and some American legal decisions.1 It is striking, three decades later, to consider
WWPT’s introductory claim that “No one … has yet examined systematically the treatment of women in the classic works of political philosophy” (WWPT: 3). Several pages later, Okin laments that “the unequal treatment of women has remained for too long shamefully neglected by students of political thought” (WWPT: 11). Since she made those remarks, feminist re-readings of canonical Western texts have exploded into a fruitful area of scholarship. But WWPT pre-dates Eisenstein’s Th e Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (1981); Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Public Man, Private Women: Women in Social and Political Th ought (1981); Hannah Pitkin’s Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Th ought of Niccolo Machiavelli (1984);2 Genevieve Lloyd’s Th e Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (1984) and Pateman’s Th e Sexual Contract (1988).3 So Okin was a pioneer in this soonto-burgeon fi eld of scholarship.
