ABSTRACT
The introductory chapter sets out the motivating query of the volume: why, despite the removal of political and legal obstacles and the loosening of traditional social conventions, has equality continued to elude women? Many feminist scholars and activists have maintained that the problem lies with an aspiration to equality takes men as the benchmark. The chapter discusses three prevalent approaches: the difference critique, the dominance critique, and the diversity critique. I introduce a fourth critique, one that emphasizes women’s traditional role as those who take care of dependents. The thesis which the book will propound and defend is that women cannot achieve an equality that was fashioned on men’s lives and which has ignored the importance of inevitable human dependency in its understanding of equality and justice. Men and women will only share the world in equality when there is an acknowledgement of dependency and its profound place in human society. I propose a conception of equality that is better suited to humans who go through periods of inevitable dependence—in that we are all “some mother’s child.”
