ABSTRACT
When a woman first identifies as a feminist in western culture, it is most often as a liberal feminist, ‘asserting her claim to the equal rights and freedoms guaranteed to each individual in democratic society’.1 Twentiethcentury liberal feminism has absorbed strands from the liberal tradition defined by male philosophers such as John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, and the contemporary liberal John Rawls, who argue that all men (sic) are equal before the law, and should enjoy the same rights. Historically, the liberal feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, and John Stuart Mill has argued that in a democratic society women must be similarly endowed, expressed in the campaigns for Suffrage they endorsed. Hence the liberal feminist campaigns of the 1970s were typically around equal pay for equal work, access to abortion on demand, childcare provision for working mothers, and an end to sexual discrimination in the form of the adoption of equal opportunities policies. Implicit within liberal theory is an optimistic belief in reform, a strategy seen as extendable to all areas of social life, including cultural forms such as crime fiction, commonsensically held to be a masculine genre.
