ABSTRACT
Liberal feminist theory has enjoyed a long history, originally promulgated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by such thinkers as Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, John Stuart Mill and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The values of liberalism, including the core belief in the importance and autonomy of the individual, developed in the seventeenth century. In fact, liberal political theory began as a rejection of patriarchal political theory: the view that certain people—the monarchs—were inherently superior to others—the subjects—who were to be their subordinates. Liberal political theory goes hand in hand with a theory of rights. Liberal feminists adopted the liberal concern with protection of individual rights, arguing that it should be applied equally to both women and men. Many feminist theorists have criticized the liberal emphasis on rights, arguing that liberal rights analyses set up a dichotomy and, thus, an antagonism between autonomy and nurturance, between individual freedom and relations with others, and between independence and community.
