ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that from a feminist perspective well-being is most productively defined in relation to freedom, and it is with regard to questions of freedom that well-being should be pursued. Pursuing well-being from a starting point of oppression and working towards an ideal of freedom involves two things: a reconception of the self as fundamentally relational and an emphasis on the importance of self-understanding for well-being. Ruth Ginzberg argues that canonical accounts of well-being are organised around a hierarchy of needs, where the lower levels must be satisfied in order for the higher levels of need to arise. The former is something that has been widely acknowledged in the feminist literature, where relational conceptions of the self figure centrally, and the notion of a socially situated self has been identified as one of the key contributions to living well from a feminist perspective.
