ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the capabilities approach offers a powerful means of specifying the preconditions for women's exercise of autonomy within the liberal state. Liberalism's core idea is a simultaneous commitment to equal citizenship in the public realm and the accommodation of competing conceptions of the good in the private realm. Yet the feminist critique of liberalism can also be understood not as a rejection of individualism as a normative commitment but rather as a challenge to it as a descriptive claim. Professor Martha Nussbaum concedes that the criticism may be valid but suggests that it should be understood not as a critique of liberal individualism, but rather as an argument that, with respect to the family, liberalism has not been individualistic enough. Professor Nussbaum also takes seriously feminist arguments that socially constructed preferences are shaped by and reinforce gender subordination, calling into question liberal definitions of freedom as the individual realization of such preferences.
