ABSTRACT
In 1994 Okin began to project her feminist liberalism onto the international plane. Many of the themes from her work on women in Western societies resonate when she does this: the functional view of women and its threat to women’s equal moral personhood; the danger of treating families as a unit, when individual members might have some divergent interests and needs; the importance of extending considerations of justice to the domestic realm; the emphasis on gender formation within the family. Because Okin’s initial conclusion that the injustices faced by women in less developed countries replicate in some important ways those of women in Western countries received a hostile response from Jane Flax, some of the issues at stake in their exchange are investigated. One implication of my claim that Okin’s feminist liberalism is a liberalism of shared meanings is that it does not begin as a universalist liberalism: nowhere in WWPT or JGF does she broach the question of whether liberal values are applicable to all women everywhere. Indeed, Okin and Mansbridge expected that “feminism, as it spreads across the globe, [will] take forms not easily predictable from Western experience” (Okin & Mansbridge 1993: 285). ese considerations would seem to pose a problem for Okin’s attempts to extend her feminist liberalism internationally: on what basis could liberal values be relevant for women in contexts where they are not part of the wider culture and politics?1 Okin develops an (at least tacit) answer to this question, for as she deepens her engagement with contexts where shared liberal meanings cannot be presupposed, she becomes more explicitly attentive to women’s self-interpretations. is chapter goes on to tender some refl ections on Okin’s view about the relationship
between self-interpretations, solidarity and social criticism. It returns briefl y to her last remarks on the group-rights debate, for it seems that the attention to women’s self-interpretations, which grows as she encounters non-liberal contexts, comes to inform her approach to that question too. is chapter concludes with some speculation about how the global aspect of Okin’s feminism might have developed had it not been for her premature death.
