Feminist attraction to communitarianism is easily understandable. Having rejected the self-interested, autonomous individual of liberalism as both mythical and undesirable, feminists find that a more social view of the self and a more collective, interdependent, and cooperative model of social relations has an obvious and reasonable appeal. Further, given women’s history and continued practice of attachment to others through traditional female roles and networks, feminist visions might even be expected to be communitarian.

But feminist rejection of communitarianism would also be understandable. The misogynist history of communitarian theorizing about what the principles and who the members of communities should be...

The terms “harem” and “seclusion,” so intertwined with popular and scholarly conceptions of Arab women, are in most respects grossly misleading. Conjuring up provocative images of groups of idle women imprisoned in sumptuous quarters awaiting the attentions of their master, or submissive veiled shadows scurrying down alleys, confined behind high walls, and excluded from the bustle of the public male world, these terms suggest the nadir of women’s status and autonomy. They also suggest male initiative in the creation of separate worlds and direct male control over groups of women. Although these interpretations misrepresent reality, the images evoked by the...

A friend of rnine received the following letter after discussing wifebeating at a public meeting.

I am in my thirties and so is my husband. I have a high school diploma and am presently attending a local college, trying to obtain the additional education I need. My husband is a college graduate and a professional in his field. We are both attractive and, for the most part, respected and well-liked. We have four children and live in a middle-class home with all the comforts we could possibly want.

I have everything, except life without fear.

For most of my married...

Buzzers are big in New York City. Favored particularly by smaller stores and boutiques, merchants throughout the city have installed them as screening devices to reduce the incidence of robbery: if the face at the door looks desirable, the buzzer is pressed and the door is unlocked. If the face is that of an undesirable, the door stays locked. Predictably, the issue of undesirability has revealed itself to be a racial determination. While controversial enough at first, even civil-rights organizations backed down eventually in the face of arguments that the buzzer system is a “necessary evil,” that it is a...

During the thirty years between the end of World War I and Liberation in 1949, it was common for women who worked in the cotton mills of Shanghai to form sisterhood societies(jiemei hui).After working together for several years, six to ten women would formalize their relationship with one another by pledging sisterhood. Sometimes this simply involved going to a restaurant, eating a meal together, drinking a cup of “one-heart wine,” and toasting their loyalty to one another. Because large numbers of women workers were Buddhists, it was more common for those forming sisterhoods to go to a Buddhist...

The feminist scholarship of the past decade has often been concerned, either explicitly or implicitly, with two central political questions: the search for the origins of women's oppression and the formulation of effective strategies for combating patriarchy. Analysis of the former question helps us to answer the latter; or as anthropologist Gayle Rubin has wryly explained:

If innate male aggression and dominance are at the root of female oppression, then the feminist program would logically require either the extermination of the offending sex, or else a eugenics project to modify its character. If sexism is a by-product of capitalism's relentless...

The unique: female capacity for reproduction has always been regulated. In no society and in no era have all women had control of their reproductive capacity, been free to have children or not, to contracept or not, to abort or not. Yet, everywhere and in all times, women have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to obtain such control. The history of abortion furnishes us with one dramatic example of this basic social control of women.

Jane, or the Service, began in 1969 as an abortion counseling and referral service, a work group of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. Some...

Off the coast of Greece in the sixth century before Christ, feminism began as a response to patriarchy. Sappho, a revolutionary despite her wealth (or perhaps because of it), founded her school for women. We are all daughters of those distant mothers. The shrouds of centuries obscure our view. We know little of the school, nothing of its structure. We possess no portrait of its founder.

Through the upheavals, organized brutality, and stunning ignorance which has characterized male supremacy from 600 B.C. until today, there were always a few women and even fewer men, scattered across the globe, who kept...

Sisterhood and friendship have been proposed by feminists astherelationships that women need to foster or recognize among ourselves if our liberation from sexist oppression is to end. Sisterhood is thought of sometimes in feminist discourse as a metaphorical ideal and sometimes as a metaphor for the reality of relationships among women. In thinking of sisterhood as a metaphorical model, white feminists have not rethought or reconstructed the concept of sisterhood. They adopted it “as is” and extended it metaphorically to the relations among all women, not just to biological sisters. In contrast, friendship has only been thought of...

I got involved in women’s health in the 1970S around the issue of abortion. There were three of us at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, who just seemed to get picked out by women who needed abortions. They came to us. I didn’t know anything about abortions. In my life that word couldn’t even be mentioned without having somebody look at you crazy. Then someone’s talking to me about abortion. It seemed unreal. But as more women came (and at first they were mostly white women), we found out this New York number we could give them, and they...

I live in Lansing, Michigan. I have lived there for almost fifteen years. There’s a lesbian community there which I, along with many others, have worked to create, grow, and maintain. This community has been shaped in many ways by lesbians who are separatist — though being separatist does not mean the same thing to all of us. I’m proud of the lesbian community in the town I live in. I move in that community with a strong and satisfying sense of shared accomplishments. I want to talk a bit about that community tonight.

Two things have happened recently in my...

Why, when there is so much interest in community among feminists, is there so little interest in feminism among communitarians? In terms of their philosophical assumptions and political ideals, there exists enough common ground between feminism and communitarianism that the cool relationship between them is somewhat curious. Both emphasize context, care, and community, and both reject central features of liberalism. Yet from Plato to Sandel communitarians display, at best, an aloofness from the issues that inform feminism, and today some feminists explicitly warn against alliances with communitarians. It seems that whatever the extent to which communitarian theorists might be said...

A predominant theme of much recent feminist thought is the criticism of the abstract individualism that underlies some important versions of liberal political theory.¹ Abstract individualism considers individual human beings as social atoms, abstracted from their social contexts, and disregards the role of social relationships and human community in constituting the very identity and nature of individual human beings. Sometimes the individuals of abstract individualism are posited as rationally self-interested utility-maximizers.² Sometimes, also, they are theorized to forrn communities based fundamentally on competition and conflict among persons vying for scarce resources, communities that represent no deeper social bond than that...

Contemporary society is in the grip of contractual thinking. Realities are interpreted in contractual terms, and goals are formulated in terms of rational contracts. The leading current conceptions of rationality begin with assumptions that human beings are independent, selfinterested or mutually disinterested, individuals; they then typically argue that it is often rational for human beings to enter into contractual relationships with each other.

On the side of description, assumptions characteristic of a contractual view of human relations underlie the dominant attempts to view social realities through the lenses of the social sciences.¹ They also underlie the principles upon which most...

Radical theorists and activists often appeal to an ideal of community as an alternative to the oppression and exploitation they argue characterize capitalist patriarchal society. Such appeals often do not explicitly articulate the meaning of the concept of community, but rather tend to evoke an affective value. Even more rarely do those who invoke an ideal of community as an alternative to capitalist patriarchal society ask what it presupposes or implies, or what it means concretely to institute a society that embodies community. I raise a number of critical questions about the meaning, presuppositions, implications and practical import of the...

I must write a piece on feminism, family, and community. I write as someone who has been involved in the politics of the feminist movement since the early I960s, someone who characterizes her own work as made possible in part by the intellectual ferment feminism has generated. But, as I begin, I find that the image of a strong woman, my grandmother, supplants all other visions, wipes out abstract ideologies and theoretical models. I see her instructing her grandchildren it) the crafts that create things of beauty and utility to provide envelopes for our bodies, warmth for our beds, and...

Significantly, just as traditional ethics does not recognize moral revolution, so it does not acknowledge separation as an option for moral agents. Withdrawal or separation is not perceived as an option when the game played appears to be the only game in town and so is taken for reality. In a sense the game is reality, but its continued existence is not a matter of fact so much as a matter of agreement. The game is an agreement in value which players breathe life into. And this suggests that participation in the system at some level — support, reform, rebellion —must...

Women are the group most victimized by sexist oppression. As with other forms of group oppression, sexism is perpetuated by institutional and social structures; by the individuals who dominate, exploit, or oppress; and by the victims themselves who are socialized to behave in ways that make them act in complicity with the status quo. Male supremacist ideology encourages women to believe we are valueless and obtain value only by relating to or bonding with men. We are taught that our relationships with one another diminish rather than enrich our experience. We are taught that women are “natural” enemies, that solidarity...

Even a cursory look at studies about the Holocaust would indicate that the experiences and perceptions of Jewish women have been obscured or absorbed into descriptions of men’s lives. The similarity among Jewish victims of the Nazi policy of destruction has been considered more important than any differentiation, including or especially that of gender. It is not surprising, then, that until quite recently there has been no feminist perspective in Holocaust scholarship.¹

Although the research on women and the Holocaust is only just beginning, it already has taken a problematic and troubling direction. Since my own work has been instrumental...

Advocates of individualism tend to assume a zero-sum game, in which any advance in community entails a retreat in protecting individuality. Advocates of greater community tend to assume no tradeoff between these goods, ignoring the ways community ties undermine individual freedom, This essay proposes advancing selectively on both fronts. Democracies need community to help develop their citizens’ faculties, solve collective action problems, and legitimate democratic decisions. But community is in tension with individualism. The challenge for most polities is to find ways of strengthening community ties while developing institutions to protect individuals from community oppression. Women’s experiences, traditionally neglected in...

Traditional Western approaches to ethical theory have attempted to provide some general methodological principle or set of criteria for determining in individual cases what is right and wrong. They have usually been ahistorically grounded in a priori thought experiments, that is, thinking what “we” (the philosopher andhispresumed audience) would say about hypothetical situations “we” can imagine. For example, is this type of action what we would agree to be good, right, obligatory, or permitted, or wrong or forbidden? Except for Marx and Nietzsche, classical ethical thinkers did not ask themselves what the purpose of formulating ethical theory was....

I have been reflecting on what feels so familiar about all this: to identify actively as a woman and ask what that means; to identify actively as a Jew and ask what that means. It is feminist politics — the efforts of women trying to work together as women across sexual, class, racial, ethnic, and other lines — that have pushed me to look at the starved Jew in myself; finally, to seek a path to that Jewishness still unsatisfied, still trying to define its true homeland, still untamed and unsuburbanized, still wandering in the wilderness. Over and over, the work of...