ABSTRACT

How should we think about and respond to cultural disagreements over women’s status, roles and arrangements in liberal democratic states? Recently, this question has informed many debates in western political theory and practice and has become a primary focus of feminist theory. Susan Okin sparked the debate in a provocative essay entitled, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” (1999). Okin’s essay was provocative less because of its cautious affirmative answer to the question than because of the way in which it presented the problem as a dilemma between the liberal right to sexual equality and the multiculturalist arguments for cultural accommodation or protection. According to Okin’s analysis, some women might be better off if their cultural communities became extinct or were made to change. As subsequent essays on the topic described it, liberalism forced women and other vulnerable members of minority groups to choose between “your culture or your rights”.1 Legal and political decisions that favour cultural accommodation seemed on a collision course with projects to advance gender equality. But this was only part of the problem. Okin’s essay led to the realization that the characteristically liberal way of structuring the problem as a clash between fundamental values and basic ideals is not particularly helpful. The tendency of liberals to frame the tension as a clash between fundamental rights could produce nothing other than a dilemma forcing theorists, political practitioners, and women within minority communities to make choices between the “rights” of women or “protection” of minority culture without, in any systematic way, addressing the question of dominant culture, taken to be a largely universal or invisible background against which such questions could be posed.