ABSTRACT
Modern Western feminism grew up as a sister doctrine to liberalism. Early feminist liberals include Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, John Stuart Mill, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, among others.1 ere is nothing especially controversial in this claim about the liberal roots of feminism: even the radical feminist Zillah Eisenstein agrees that feminism has its source in liberalism, and in particular the liberal critique of patriarchalism dating back to John Locke (Eisenstein 1981: 4-13; cf. Jaggar 1983: 47). ese pioneers of feminist theory2 were basically applying liberal commitments to women. is required them to extend Locke’s critique of patriarchal power into the private realm,3 by which I mean here the domestic realm, the household or the family (I use these last three terms synonymously). e term “liberal commitments” includes such values as: individual freedom; equality before the law; equal opportunity; moral equality; personal autonomy; being rewarded (or punished) on the basis of merit rather than birth; the rejection of arbitrary and unearned power and hierarchy and its replacement with the idea that the exercise of power by one individual over another must be rationally defended; consent to rule by those ruled; and freedom of conscience. Early feminists took this extension of liberal commitments to women to be a matter of justice, holding their exclusion from higher education, voting rights, property rights in many cases and entry to the professions to be intrinsically unfair. ey also believed that society as a whole would benefi t from women’s contributions in these areas.
