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Liberal Feminism – an introduction
• Liberal feminists argue that the problem is simply one of prejudice – the system
needs to be corrected, not overturned. What are needed are more equal rights
legislation, and more positive role models. They have tended to concentrate on
lobbying governments for pro-women reforms and trying to influence the
decision-makers. However, it is argued that they have been sidelined with
declarations and resolutions that mean nothing in practice.
• Liberal feminism developed from the political tradition of liberalism.
Traditional liberalism and human nature
• Liberal political theory is grounded on the conception of human beings as
essentially rational agents. Liberals assume that rationality is a ‘mental’ capacity.
All persons, at all times and in all places, have a common essence or nature.
Human beings are defined in the abstract by their universal and ‘essential’
capacity for reason.
• Individuals who fail to develop their capacity for reason are not just different from
those who succeed; instead, they are regarded as deficient because they have
failed to fulfil their uniquely human potential.
Liberal political theory
• The good society must protect the dignity of each individual and promote
individual autonomy self-fulfilment. In trying to determine the limits of legitimate
state intervention in the life of an individual, liberal theory distinguishes between
what it call the public and private realms. Those aspects of life that may be
regulated by the state constitute the public realm; the private realm being those
aspects where the state has no legitimate right to intervene.
• The state is supposed to refrain from intervention in the ‘private lives’ of
individuals and from imposing moral values that would threaten individual
autonomy.
Liberal feminism and women’s nature
• The overriding goal of liberal feminism has always been the application of liberal
principles to women as well as men. Most obviously, this means that laws should
not grant to women fewer rights than they should allow to men.
• Early feminists had to argue for women’s rights by showing that women were
indeed capable of reason. The fact that women did not always realise this
potentiality was the fact that they were deprived of education and confined to the
domestic sphere.
• Male and female natures are identical – there is no such thing as male and
female nature; there is only human nature and that has no sex.
Liberal feminist analysis of women’s oppression
• Liberal feminists believe that the treatment of women in modern society violates,
in one way or another, all of liberalism’s political values of equality, justice and
liberty.
• Their most frequent complaint is that women in contemporary society suffer
discrimination on the basis of sex. Certain restrictions are placed on women as a
group, disregarding their individual wishes, interests, abilities or merits.

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• Liberal feminists believe that sex discrimination is unjust because it deprives
women of equal rights to pursue their own self-interest.
• Liberal feminists assume that the sexual division of labour is not freely chosen,
that women congregate in certain occupations because discrimination denies
them access to the prestigious, powerful, and well-paying positions that are held
predominantly by men. The work that women typically perform is not well paying
and has little conventional prestige and liberal feminists show little inclination to
challenge the conventional valuation of that work.
• Liberal feminists often state that their goal is to incorporate women into the
‘mainstream of contemporary society’, by ‘mainstream’ they mean the so-called
public life of industry, commerce, education and political life.
Problems with liberal feminist politics
• Somatophobia and human fulfilment
The word ‘somatophobia’ refers to the hostility that is displayed throughout the
western philosophical tradition, and which liberalism expresses by identifying the
human essence with the ‘mental’ capacity for reason.
Liberal feminists accept conventional definitions and valuations of existing job
categories and seek opportunities for women to enter intellectual, ‘professional’ or
supervisory occupation. Liberal feminist assumptions rest on a devaluation of
women’s traditional work and indeed of the labour of most working people.
• Justice and preferential treatment
One of the most controversial proposals of liberal feminism in the USA has been
its advocacy of programmes of ‘affirmative action’ (often referred to in the UK as
‘positive discrimination’). It is argued that women’s paper credentials may not
accurately reflect their real qualifications and the preferential treatment of women
may be necessary to select the candidate who has the most real ability or merit.
• Equality of opportunity and meritocracy
It is not clear whether contemporary interpretations of equality are compatible
either with liberty or indeed with the liberal theory of human nature. The
interpretation of equality advocated by contemporary liberal feminists is therefore
equality of opportunity, an interpretation designed to respect individuals’ rights to
liberty while providing maximum incentive to compete.
• Privacy
Within the liberal tradition, the most serious challenge to the notion of private life
comes from the liberal feminist interpretation that ‘the personal is political’.
Although liberal feminism has focused primarily on what it calls public life, it has
not ignored the family.
• The state
There is an absence in liberal feminism of any direct challenge to the capitalist
system. It is argued that genuine equality of women and men cannot simply be
achieved through limited legal reforms.
Liberal feminism and research studies
• Academic feminism was initially conceived of as a branch of sociology in which
literary texts could be used as evidence of what kind of role models for women
they supplied. Content analyses of the presence or absence of stereotyping and
the devaluation of women stress the liberal ideal of increasing women’s public
visibility and criticise traditional stereotypes.

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• However, these studies do not generally elaborate theoretically on what is meant
by a ‘stereotype’ but simple classify character traits that are assumed to reinforce
over-generalisations in the minds of individual audience members.
• Historical studies of women in mass media rest on implicit liberal assumptions
revealed in praising notable achievements by women with little of no attention to
differences by class, race, or sexual preference that might have affected these
achievements.
• The focus of some research on current inequalities in terms of number and
opportunity for women in media professions are characterised by lack of in-depth
theoretical analyses.
• There has been comparatively little research from a liberal perspective on the
effects of media imagery on audiences.
• Most feminist studies utilising socialisation theory have examined media effects
on children, with most focused on television. However, the results cannot, by
themselves, account for the gendered behaviour and the ideology of women’s
secondary status in society; they do little more than note its occurrence.
Summary
• The socialist feminists predominated in the women’s movement to begin with, as
it emerged out of the social protests and anti-Vietnam war movement of the late
1960s. By the end of the 1970s, the radical feminists had grown more influential.
• In the more conservative 1990s, there has been a growing together of the
different positions into a synthesis that recognises some of the strengths and
weaknesses in all three tendencies – and sees feminism as an ally all human
rights’ movements against militarism, authoritarianism and tyranny.
• Feminist social theory has had a general impact on sociology in terms of the
conceptualisation of sex and gender, the analysis of patriarchal power and social
class. Gender, along with age, ethnicity and class is regarded as one of the major
dimensions of social inequality in human societies. Feminist social theory has
also had a significant impact in recent years on methodology. Reinharz argues
that there is no single feminist methodology, but feminist methods prefer research
which is qualitative, reflexive, client-focused and interactive. Although feminist
theory has been influential in sociology, feminist critics claim that a feminist
perspective has yet to be fully incorporated into mainstream sociology where the
‘founding fathers’ remain dominant.