ABSTRACT
Gender is a significant aspect of the cultural, social, economic, and political construction of reality. When theory is put forth in general categorical language, as “gender blind,” it denies that the analysis is most often based on the experience of white, middle-or upper-class men in Western societies (Forsyth 1990). Humankind is not a generic mass of undifferentiated people. While gender is not the only possible category of analysis (certainly class and race are highly significant), it is a category that has been virtually invisible in planning theory and practice. As Susan Moller Okin sums up in her book on women in Western political thought, “It is by no means a simple matter to integrate the female half of the human race into a tradition of political theory
which has defined them and intra familial relationships as outside the scope of the political” (Okin 1979, p. 286).
