Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism

Author(s): Ruth E. Groenhout

Source: Social Theory and Practice , January 2002, Vol. 28, No. 1 (January 2002), pp. 51-
75
Published by: Florida State University Department of Philosophy

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 Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism

Liberal political theory begins with rights, autonomy, and reason. Hu

mans have rights, and their freedom to exercise those rights is properly
limited by others' rights. This view of the basic shape of the political
terrain is based on certain assumptions about humans. The most basic is
the assumption that humans, whatever their other differences, share some
basic qualities that make them properly bearers of rights. In one strand of
the liberal tradition this quality was rationality. Sometimes autonomy is
the basic quality, and in the case of thinkers who trace their theoretical
heritage back to Immanuel Kant, autonomy and rationality become mu
tually implicative so that together they are the essential qualities for
membership in the moral community and ownership of rights.
Due to the important role rationality plays in liberal thought, the
question of the nature of rationality is a central one for liberal thinkers.
While there have been some who have argued for a minimalist notion of
rationality limited to means/ends calculations, the liberal tradition in
general has relied on a much richer notion of rationality, including the
capacity to reflect on the meaning of one's life, deliberate concerning
different conceptions of the good, and engage in public political delib
erations over these and other matters. This richer notion of rationality,
and of humans as capable of engaging in self-directed behavior based on
this conception of reason, provides the basic framework within which
liberal moral and political discussions are carried out.
Because liberal political thought bases rights on what would seem to
be a gender-neutral concept such as rationality, it has been a traditional
resource for feminist thinkers, from early thinkers such as Mary Wol
stonecraft and Harriet Taylor Mill, to contemporary thinkers such as Jean
Hampton and Amy Gutman. The logic of this is obvious: if the posses
sion of rights is based on a gender-neutral quality such as rationality, and
if women can be shown to possess this quality, then women are posses
sors of rights, and any infringements of those rights is morally unaccept
able. The argument is straightforward and intuitive, and has been fairly
powerful in bringing about legal and social change in the status of
women.

This easy and obvious association of liberal political tho

© Copyright 2002 by Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 28, No. 1 (January 2002)

51

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52 Ruth E. Groenhout

feminist theory has been challenged

hand, some feminist theorists have c
tween liberalism and feminism, becau
rationality on which liberal rights are
seems. So in her critique of objective
argues that traditional notions of obj
rationality are inherently tied to the
ality/objectivity is inherently connec
then the "rationality" of women be
women must either deny their nature
and objectify other women in order
their status as objectified (not objecti
ality. In either case, rationality canno
If this account of rationality is accept
that men and women equally share in
Feminist critiques have not posed
assumption that there is a single hum
human rights. In more recent years t
ciobiological accounts of human natur
eral skepticism about an account of h
autonomous, or gender-neutral. Hum
ponents of this new field of study, is
of genetic selection. Genetically deter
maximize the statistical chance of pr
nate in society. These patterns of beh
classical liberal sense) nor gender-n
autonomous. We humans are simply c
that, and all of our vaunted rationality
one more strategy for reproduction.
argues that the predisposition to rape
its success as a reproductive strategy
gue that humor, art, and musical abil
strategies.3
But the aspect of evolutionary ethics
distancing liberal thought from fem
deeply imbedded in evolutionary ethi
cally coded for different behavior du
productive process and the different

'Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist

Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 162-63.
2Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, A N
of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P
3Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New Y

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 Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism 53

require. What counts as "rational" from the perspective of genes that find
themselves in a male body is, we are told, profoundly different from
what counts as "rational" for genes that find themselves in a female
body. Strategies that lead to success in propagation for men are different
from strategies that lead to success in propagation for women. These dif
ferences, further, have been selected for over millennia of evolutionary
processes, and are now ineradicably a part of what it is to be a man or a
woman. It follows from this that even if one wanted to continue the lib
eral project of grounding rights in (say) rationality, one could no longer
assume that male rationality is the same as female rationality, and the
easy connection between liberalism and feminism is again severed.
For both sets of critics, the challenge to liberalism, particularly femi
nist liberalism, relies on a denial of a unified human nature that tran
scends gender and sexual differences. In both these cases, the difference
gender makes in rationality negates the possibility of a unified human
nature. Both accounts of gender make feminist liberalism incoherent.
This paper is an attempt to think through the challenge offered by both of
these accounts. Should feminism separate itself, theoretically, from lib
eral political thought? If not, how should feminism respond to the chal
lenges and criticisms raised by these two types of critics?
This paper has two aims. One is to reaffirm the connections between
feminism and liberalism, and to argue that there are good reasons for
feminist theorists to continue to see themselves as situated in the liberal
tradition. This is true in two senses, both that feminism is properly con
strued as a liberal theory, and that feminists have shaped and continue to
shape liberal thought in ways that have improved and strengthened it. In
order to make this argument, however, it is important to evaluate the
claim that liberal thought rests on a fundamentally mistaken notion that
there can be a suitably basic human nature. The challenges raised against
liberalism by the two accounts of gender I am concerned with here thus
require a response, and I argue that neither critique is sufficiently strong
to warrant a rejection of liberal accounts of human nature.

1. Liberalism and Feminism: A Natural Alliance?

It seems worthwhile to begin with a brief account of the connections

between liberal ethico-political theory and feminism. The connections
are historically important ones, and it is important to be clear on just
what they are (and aren't) before turning to the challenges raised by the
two accounts of gender I am concerned with here.
The first thing to note is that the term "liberal political thought" can
be used to cover an extremely broad range of thinkers, from Mill to
Rousseau, from Wollstonecraft to Hegel. In this paper I am concerned

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54 Ruth E. Groenhout

with one specific strand of the libera

associated with politically liberal mov
exemplified today in thinkers such a
Virginia Held, Seyla Benhabib, Ma
Okin. Clearly there is disagreement a
clearly, their disagreements occur w
ment that human life is best organized,
ability of humans to reflect on their
with some measure of autonomy. A
suming that the notion of rationality
extensive notion, including the abilit
conceptions of the good life. This a
make sense of the moral and political
Liberalism grounds its basic rights
terized by rationality and autonomy
pects to this claim. We might call th
the second the rights thesis. Both re
thing morally significant to human
The first notes that humans are prop
not as units in a larger whole. The re
is accorded prior to and independent
community or class. It is worth notin
recognition of the individual's status
of the familial, social, and cultural co
and form their identities. But liberal
ing here, refuses to wholly subsume
tity, and defends the liberty of the i
constraints as well as the capacity of
vidualism arises naturally out of the c
in liberal thought. Because each indiv
rational deliberation, each should be
as he or she decides what sort of life
ends.

The rights thesis entails that the

corded is best articulated in terms of
or entitlements. Classical liberal theo
that each individual should have a sp
from other individuals and from stat
the notion of rights or protected liber
for the individual's rational capacities
is, of course, a contested issue in libe
rather minimalist notion of protecti
negative rights such as the right to

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 Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism 55

others defend a more expansive notion of rights, including rights to edu

cation and welfare, because these provide the basic necessities for exer
cising one's rational capacities. But in either case, the rights being pro
tected are justified on the basis of the individual's capacity to exercise
rational judgment and so act freely and be held responsible for his or her
choices. This notion of rights naturally leads to a third thesis of liberal
thought, that of a necessary, but limited state.
Individual rights cannot be protected without some form of govern
mental structures that protect them against both other individuals and
governmental structures themselves. The liberal political theorist is
committed to the notion that one cannot dispense with the state. Liberal
ism operates with a view of human nature that assumes that some politi
cal structures are needed to prevent humans from mistreating each other.
This is not the only role the state can play, but it is a fundamental one.
Liberalism thus must reject anarchic theories and Utopian Marxist theo
ries that advocate an overthrowing or withering away of the state. Liber
als instead operate with a firm conviction that some political structure is
a necessity in any well-ordered society.
So the state is necessary, but the state must also be limited. Just as
humans, left unrestricted by the state, choose on occasion to mistreat
others, so the state, left unchecked, will mistreat its citizens. The power
of the state must be limited to protect a sphere of liberty for its citizens
and for the non-governmental social structures that they create. In taking
this stance, liberals find themselves in opposition to certain varieties of
communitarianism4 and any sort of traditional aristocracy or theocracy.
Given the general account of social and political justice offered by
this strand of liberal theory, are there reasons for feminists to be com
mitted to liberalism? Four reasons come to mind. The first combines a
historically grounded pragmatism with a basic philosophical concern.
The notion of individual rights has been a politically powerful tool in the
fight against sexual subordination. The history of the struggle against
women's oppression has shown that women need to be able to make de
cisions for and about their lives as individuals. The right to make deci
sions that determine the course of one's life, in fact, has been a central
right in the fight for women's liberation. There is a deep disagreement
between feminism and certain versions of communitarianism, both be
cause women know too well the dangers of being treated as a member of
the class or social role of Woman5 and because traditional values have

4Charles Taylor offers a relatively weak version of communitarianism that is com

patible with a moderate liberalism, for example. Alasdair Maclntyre's communitarianism
may be compatible with liberalism, while Amitai Etzioni's is clearly incompatible with a
strong defense of individual rights.
'Elizabeth Frazer and Nicola Laçey, The Politics of Community: A Feminist Critique

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56 Ruth E. Groenhout

frequently been the source of women

recognized as an individual in one's ow
that individuality in law and in societ
up lightly. Further, the individual is
cause of a specific role that she or he
instead is valued as an autonomous, th
cause the self-determination of the i
and because the state is justified inso
determination, liberalism also require
and potentially modifiable by the ind
theorist to the re-definition and re-e
structures, and to the protection of
criticize, and work to change those st
values as well; feminism's goal is a w
determine the course of their own li
political and social decision-making
feminist values, feminists have reaso
tradition.
The second reason feminists should
is that rights have been and continue
for understanding the wrongness of
other moral frameworks for concept
women when they are denied their right
so clearly, so straightforwardly, or s
consider the arguments by Islamic fem
by Christians for Biblical Equality. In
given for new interpretations of both
support women's autonomy and ind
faces an uphill battle to convince con
tion to change their minds. In contra
relatively straightforward. No new int
is needed to recognize that if rational
to autonomy, women must deserve th
stonecraft's case is to convince others
sistent with their own stated principl
lical feminist, one must change other
others must be convinced first to cha
consistently with those changes.
A third reason why feminism has g
itself in the liberal tradition is that
central to feminism finds its histori

of the Liberal-Communitarian Debate (New Y

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 Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism 57

analyses are central to feminist theory, and a basic understanding of how

power affects human interactions has been a staple of feminist analyses
for as long as there have been feminists. In some contemporary circles,
feminist attention to power is presented as deriving from the thought of
Foucault, from whom feminists have certainly learned.6 But feminists
were offering analyses of power differentials in society well before Fou
cault appeared on the scene, and some of the more perspicuous analyses
were offered by Harriet Taylor Mill and John Stuart Mill in the nine
teenth century. It is no accident that one finds a careful analysis of how
power affects relationships between men and women in these thinkers;
their liberal commitments provided a natural location from which to
analyze the ways in which power affects individual relationships.
Finally, liberal political thought is based on a respect for the rational
capacity of the individual. On this view, humans are more than stimulus
response machines. They are capable of making decisions that are the
result of critical reflection, and critical self-reflection, and are not purely
determined in their actions by the biological and social forces that act on
them. Both biological and social determinism truncate moral analysis in
ways that make the wrongs done to women by sexism too limited. Both
types of determinism rule out concern for wrongs that are not analyzable
in terms of either biological harm or social value.
The liberal picture of human nature, as more than either biologically
or socially determined, is a crucial aspect of the feminist analysis of the
wrongness of sexist oppression. Sexual oppression, and social systems
that perpetuate sexual oppression, are morally evil because they limit or
deny women's capacity to reflect on and determine their own lives. Sex
ism also causes immeasurable harm to people, and its consequences are a
part of the evil it causes, but it would be wrong even if it were practiced
in ways that did not result in either impoverishment or sexualized vio
lence against women. It is wrong, ultimately, because it treats some hu
mans as less than human, and limits their freedom to take responsibility
for their own lives.
In making these arguments for a feminist liberalism I am not unaware
of the many important criticisms feminists have leveled against liberal
ism.7 An unthinking account of individualism can become isolating and

6For a discussion of feminist concerns about Foucault's analysis of power, see Nancy
Hartsock, "Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?" in Linda J. Nicholson (ed.),
Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 157-75.
7Penny A. Weiss offers a clear and helpful summary of feminist critiques of liberal
ism in "Feminism and Communitarianism: Comparing Critiques of Liberalism," in her
book Conversations with Feminism: Political Theory and Practice (Lanham, Md.: Row
man & Littlefield, 1998), pp. 137-64. For other feminist critiques of liberalism, past and
present, see Teresa Brennan and Carole Pateman, '"Mere Auxiliaries to the Common
wealth': Women and the Origins of Liberalism," Philosophical Quarterly 27 (1979): 183

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 58 Ruth E. Groenhout

destructive, and an unreflective applic

dehumanizing and disempowering. Bu
are better seen as reasons to be cautio
and development of liberal theory, th
theory all together. They suggest that
words, a limited liberalism, one th
modifications and changes to better m
self-limiting, self-correcting liberalis
perhaps a liberalism that is more true
cratic liberalism that resists change.
Further, most criticisms of this type a
to the inadequacy of a liberal concept
full human life. But if what liberal theorists advocate is instead under
stood as the bare minimum necessary for a decent human life, and if lib
eral theory also offers the individual an opportunity to decide for herself
the further components of a full human life, these criticisms lose some of
their force.

As I mentioned earlier, however, the basic assumption on which a

feminist liberalism is based is the notion of a common human nature.
Critics who reject such a conception of human nature offer a critique that
is, if correct, devastating to feminist liberalism. I would like to begin by
presenting the critique, then argue that, carefully examined, it is not cor
rect, and does not provide grounds for a rejection of feminist liberalism.

2. Against Liberalism: The Challenge from Feminism

Potentially the most devastating feminist critique of liberal thought arises

from a denial of the most basic claim in liberalism: the claim that there is
some essential human nature that is the source of moral rights. One
feminist challenge to this claim arises from the belief that there is no
neutral human nature, but rather there are men's natures and women's
natures, and the two are radically different. (Some postmodern critics
have rejected any essentialism with respect to human nature. In this pa
per I am concerned to examine only the critics whose rejection of a uni
fied human nature is based in sexual differences.) On some versions of
this challenge, liberal thought accurately depicts men's nature, but fails
to be either descriptively or prescriptively accurate for women's nature.

200; Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York; Basic Books,
1989); and Andrea Nye, "Liberté, Égalité, et Fraternité: Nineteenth-century Liberalism
and Women's Rights," in her Feminist Theories and the Philosophies of Man (New York:
Routledge, 1988), chap. 2. This is not an exhaustive list.
8Virginia Held, "Liberalism and the Ethics of Care," in Claudia Card (ed.), On Femi
nist Ethics and Politics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), pp. 288-309.

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 Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism 59

On other versions of this challenge, liberal theory is inaccurate for both

men and women, and serves instead as a smokescreen to mystify, justify,
and protect men's exploitation of women. In both cases a sharp dichot
omy is assumed to exist between men and women, such that no single
account of human nature can describe both.
One theoretical vantage point from which such an attack on liberalism
has been made is that of Catharine MacKinnon's account of rationality,
objectivity, and legal structures. I should state at the outset that MacKin
non does not consider herself a gender essentialist, since she believes that
"man" and "woman" are socially constructed categories. That said, how
ever, she offers no alternative account of what it would be like to be male
or female in any other way than as they are currently constructed in
terms of men and women. Since she also believes that an oppressive
gender hierarchy is a universal feature of human societies,9 what she de
scribes seems very close to an essentialist picture of men's and women's
natures. Men and women are radically different in nature, they are
shaped that way by their culture and cannot simply choose to be other
wise, and the very nature of our perceived reality is determined by these
differences. While MacKinnon does offer the very tenuous hope that
perhaps sometime in the future there will be no men and women (she
does not mean no males or females), this hope remains Utopian and un
described. Since there are currently no alternatives to being men and
women, MacKinnon's view does, effectively, offer us an essentialist
picture of women's and men's realities.10
On MacKinnon's view, women's and men's natures are determined
by, respectively, their objectification as objects of sexualized violence or
their objectification of others as objects of sexualized violence. What it is
to be a woman is to be turned into an object that is an appropriate locus
for sex and for sexualized violence; to be a woman is to be sexually vul
nerable. What it is to be a man is to be one who can sexually objectify
another, either through words or actions, and to be capable of sexual pré
dation. Not all men are sexual predators, of course. Some see themselves
as protectors of women rather than predators on women. But both of
these roles, protector and predator, assume the same things about
women—that women are weak and incapable of self-protection, that
women are appropriate objects of sexual violence, and that it is men who
control sexual access to women, not the women themselves.
On this view, then, women's nature is essentially one of sexual prey.

'MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, p. 94.

l0This definition of the term "essentialist" is used by Mary Crawford and Roger
Chaffin in "The Meaning of Difference: Cognition in Social and Cultural Context," in
Paula J. Caplan et al., Gender Differences in Human Cognition (New York: Oxford Uni
versity Press, 1997), pp. 81-130; see esp. p. 86.

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 60 Ruth E. Groenhout

Women are defined in terms of the

Likewise the essence of being a
tor/objectifier. While neither of thes
cally or genetically essential, both ar
man or a woman—the only way to be
or a woman, and become we know not
MacKinnon offers one version of a
other feminists have offered other v
Kinnon's does, on a sexualized predator
a sharp dichotomy between male and
hierarchies. Females, on this view, a
giving, cooperative, nurturing activit
ented toward death-dealing, aggressiv
these different orientations are simp
explanation," sometimes they are exp
imaginary,12 or as a result of women
envy of that ability.13 In any case, w
fundamentally different in their pers
and their very conceptions of rational
however, I would like to focus on Ma
concerned directly with the issue of
society, and so she addresses precise
cerned.

If men and women are fundamentally, essentially, different in the

ways MacKinnon argues, then the liberal project of identifying basic
human rights is misguided. If gender essentialism is correct, then there is
no basic human nature, shared rationality, or fundamental similarity
among people. There are two different sorts of beings that are lumped
together under the rubric "human," but these two sorts of beings think
differently, see the world differently, and have completely opposed value
systems.
Liberal rights, from this perspective, are rights that are valued by
men, generated by masculine reason, and appropriate (if at all) only for
relationships among men. MacKinnon writes:

The rule of law and the rule of men are one thing, indivisible, at once official and unoffi
cial. ... State power, embodied in law, exists throughout society as male power at the

11 As seems to be the case in, for example, Rianne Eisler's discussion in The Chalice
and the Blade (New York: HarperCollins, 1987).
12See, for example, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths
and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997).
13There is some aspect of this in both Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transform
ing Culture, Society, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), and Sara
Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).

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 Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism 61

same time as the power of men over women throughout society is organized as the power
of the state.14

This might seem an extreme claim. But when one looks at the history of
women's straggle for legal rights it gains some plausibility. As a matter
of historical fact, basic rights have been considered the prerogative of
men, not women. Legal understandings of rights have, for centuries, been
different for men and women.15
But MacKinnon's critique does not end with the historical record. In
addition to noting that rights have, as a matter of historical fact, been the
prerogative of men, she also charges that the very notion of rights is an
intrinsically masculine construction. Freedom of speech, for example,
has functioned, MacKinnon argues, to protect male "speech" in the form
of the violent pornographic portrayal of women. Such speech, as she sees
it, makes true freedom of speech for women inaccessible, since anything
a woman says in the public sphere is undercut by the definition of
women as sexual objects in pornographic portrayals. So the legal notion
of freedom of speech functions, she claims, to protect male speech and
prohibit female speech.16 In similar manner, abortion rights, framed as
privacy rights, function to protect male sexual access to women. Laws
against sexual harassment, likewise, have not served to protect working
women adequately because of their reliance on the "reasonable man"
standard for judging harassment. And the most egregious case, as she
sees it, is the construction of rape law, where the state of mind of the
rapist becomes determinative of whether or not a given case of forced
sex was rape. In all of these domains, the male perspective is the per
spective from which reality is defined, so that, for example, rape does not
even count as rape unless a penis is involved, regardless of how little
difference that makes to a woman raped with a coat hanger.17
This perspectival bias indicates, according to MacKinnon, that these
rights really are "basic" only from a male perspective. From the perspec
tive of lived female experience, she argues, rights are the legal structures
that both maintain and hide from view male dominance. This offers a
serious challenge to any attempt to maintain a feminist liberalism. If lib

14MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, p. 170.

15An often cited case: Justice Joseph Bradley's decision in Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 US
(16 Wall) 130 (1873) rested on the claim that women were not entitled to the same rights
as men. If the rights mentioned in the Constitution had been intended to refer to women,
Bradley opined, the writers of the Constitution would have said so. So much for the no
tion that Man refers to both men and women.
16MacKinnon's extended argument for this is given in Only Words (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
"Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cam
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 87.

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62 Ruth E. Groenhout

eralism, viewed accurately, is simply

nist liberalism is an oxymoron, which
just morons.

3. Gender and Genes: The Challeng

A similarly serious challenge to femi

different group of theorists. Like M
men and women are essentially differ
certain parallels to those feminists ha
draw from their essentialist claims ar
liberal feminism is an important one.
First, the picture of gender differe
two sexes are shaped by a long his
evolutionary change is driven by suc
lead to reproductive success are gene
tions. Men and women play differen
Men's reproductive role is one tha
quickly and does not involve a great
ductive role, on the other hand, invo
terms of time and energy, first in th
sequently in the two to five years of
Given these differing reproducti
strategies are likely to be more effect
is argued, it makes more (genetic) sen
mates, to limit sexual access to men
help with the labor intensive aspects
other hand, it makes more sense (in
women pregnant as possible while in
nancy as possible. The assumption in s
success of these two different strate
ferences in men and women's behavio
then, between men and women are n
social roles and expectations as they
ferences between men and women.19

18The picture outlined here is widely accept

Blum, Sex on the Brain: The Biological Dif
York: Penguin Books, 1998); David Geary, M
Differences (Washington, D.C.: American Ps
any textbook on sex differences.
19Douglas Kenrick and Melanie Trost, "The
and Robert Sternberg (eds.), The Psycholog
1993), pp. 148-172; seep. 168.

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 Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism 63

Men, on this view, are genetically programmed for promiscuity and

minimal investment in their children. Some have even argued that men
are predisposed to rape as a part of their impulse to procreate. Women
are programmed for monogamy and heavy investment in their children.
These traits are a part, according to this view, of our genetic heritage, and
behavioral standards that do not reflect these differences between the
sexes will face an uphill battle. But the differences do not stop with mere
procreative differences. Sociobiologists have argued that male and fe
male tendencies to exhibit traits such as aggression and empathy are
likewise tied to reproductive success, and so men are, by nature, more
prone to aggression in all areas of life while women are more prone to
docility and empathetic nurturing.
As I mentioned above, the picture sociobiologists have drawn is not
wildly different from the view of masculine and feminine nature offered
by feminists such as MacKinnon. On both views, men are inherently
more aggressive, sexually promiscuous, prone to violence, and oriented
toward dominating women sexually. Women are inherently more nur
turing, more submissive, (particularly to men), sexually less promiscu
ous, and less driven by sexual urges, while more concerned about care
for children and infants. While there is disagreement as to the causes of
these differences, there is a remarkable level of agreement on the differ
ences themselves.20
Where differences become more significant is in the interpretation of
these differences for social policy. In contrast to MacKinnon, whose
writing is motivated by political concerns, sociobiologists see their work
as having bearing on, but not directly dictating, social policy. They do,
generally, imply that the differences between men and women will have
social effects. Men's natural aggression and sexual dominance will natu
rally make men the dominant sex in social settings. Women's natural
deference and nurturance will generally prevent them from acquiring
social power, but will serve the continuance of the human race quite effi
ciently. Further, women will, as a matter of genetic course, be more in
clined to seek successful mates than to seek success for themselves.
Rather than offering social criticism, then, there is a tendency in this lit
erature to offer explanations for why the status quo is what it is. Under
lying this explanatory technique, however, there is sometimes the as
sumption that since the way things are is dictated by the differing natures
of men and women, social policy that attempts to change or modify the
91

existing situation is fighting an uphill battle. This is problematic be

20So we find, for example, Steven Pinker quoting Andrea Dworkin's description of
male sexuality approvingly (How the Mind Works, p. 494). Pinker, however, does not
seem to share Dworkin's moral evaluation of this picture of male sexuality.
21See, for example, Robert Pool, Eve's Rib: The Biological Roots of Sex Differences

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 64 Ruth E. Groenhout

cause of the implicit approval it offer

cases where thinkers are careful to re
ought, reports of their research in t
cautiousness.
But there is a more disturbing implication of certain versions of the
sociobiological view, one that follows from a reductionist account of ra
tionality that some sociobiologists offer. Sociobiologists fall into two
camps on this question, determined by whether they think evolutionary
theory is an important part of the truth about human nature, or whether
they think it is the whole truth about human nature. Several influential
sociobiologists have distanced themselves from a reductionist account of
human nature, arguing that evolutionary studies give us important in
sights into human nature and experience, but they are not the only field
of study that can offer such insights.22 But the more problematic version
of sociobiology denies that there are any truths about humans not cap
tured by evolutionary science. Humans, on this view, are nothing more
than the sum of their evolutionary heritage, and so all accounts of human
nature, human rationality, and human morality must be based in evolu
tionary studies.
This latter version of sociobiology presumes that human evolutionary
development determines every feature of human life. An adequate ac
count of rationality, then, must be grounded in (and completely deter
mined by) an evolutionary account of human nature.23 What this means
in the case of most theorists who hold this view is that rationality comes
to be defined in terms of evolutionary fitness. What is (or should) count
as rational is a matter of biological fitness, in terms of both individual
survival (to a lesser degree) and in terms of propagation of one's genes
(to a greater degree). Rationality, then, is fundamentally a matter of suc
cessful survival techniques. This reduces rationality to the ability to
choose actions that have the long-term effect of maximizing genetic sur
vival. Such a reductionist account of rationality seems problematic when
stated so baldly, but it plays a key role in the arguments of a number of
sociobiologists. For example, when we are told that individuals who
choose a celibate life for religious reasons are "acting irrationally," the
only account of rationality that would support the charge of irrationality
seems to be something like what I have just sketched. Otherwise the
charge would be that such individuals are acting against their own ge

(New York: Crown Publishers, 1994), pp. 248-59.

22Steven Pinker, for example, explicitly distances ethics from science. Evolutionary
studies can tell us what humans are like, he thinks, but not what they ought to be (How
the Mind Works, pp. 55-56).
23My thanks to Simona Goi and Amy Baehr for helping me clarify my arguments in
this section.

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 Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism 65

netic interests (though perhaps still rationally, given other commitments

they may have). The stronger charge of irrationality requires the defini
tion of rationality in terms of genetic success.
If one accepts this view of rationality, then one is forced to reject the
notion that men and women share a common rational nature. The strate
gies that lead to successful biological propagation for men and women
are essentially different, hence what it is to be rational for each must be
different. There may be a fundamental rational principle ("Propagate ef
fectively!") but at the level of evaluation of actions or of social policy
there is no shared conception of rationality. What is rational for men is
irrational for women, and vice versa.
On this view, liberal rights are merely a thin veneer of illusion over
the biological reality of genetics. We may like to think that all humans
have certain basic rights, but the reality is that those with the good for
tune to be bom with good genes into a hospitable environment will do
well, those born into an environment that is a poor genetic fit will do
badly, and the language of rights is unlikely to change that. This being
said, it is not necessarily a bad thing to have social structures that rely on
such things as rights language or laws that protect human rights. Such
structures may have reproductive efficacy in the long run. (Consider the
chances of passing on one's genetic material in the conditions that hold
in Eritrea or the Sudan, for example, as opposed to Japan or Canada.) But
we should not confuse reproductive efficacy with truth. From the (hypo
thetical) fact that the social structures that go along with a liberal account
of rights are, under current conditions, conducive to reproductive effi
cacy we cannot conclude that rights "really exist" in any sense, nor can
we argue that rights are an essential part of morality.24
The best that such a sociobiological account of human nature can of
fer is an acknowledgment that perhaps rights are serviceable under cur
rent conditions. But if future conditions made it reproductively effica
cious to deny women basic human rights, then that would become the
rational course of action to take at that time. And, further, there is a deep
and abiding conviction that hierarchies, particularly hierarchies of gen
der, are ineluctably written into the human genetic code. So E.O. Wilson
famously comments that "... a schedule of sex- and age-dependent ethics
can impart higher genetic fitness than a single moral code which is ap
plied uniformly to all sex-age groups."25 And, more recently, Matt Ridley
describes the sexual division of labor as "an economic institution that is a

24See, for example, Michael Ruse, Evolutionary Naturalism: Selected Essays (New
York: Routledge, 1995), p. 257.
25E.O. Wilson, "The Morality of the Gene," excerpts from Sociobiology: The New
Synthesis, in Paul Thompson (ed.), Issues in Evolutionary Ethics (Albany: State Univer
sity of New York Press, 1995), pp. 153-64; see p. 163.

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 66 Ruth E. Groenhout

vital part of all human societies."26 R

individuals are all very nice in philoso
but in the real world it is reproductiv

4. Problems with Gender Essentialisms

If either feminist gender essentialism or sociobiological gender essential

ism is correct, then feminist liberalism is incoherent. Feminist liberalism
assumes that one can speak of a common human nature, but both sorts of
gender essentialists hold that men and women have different natures.
Further, both argue, these differences are not minor cosmetic differences.
Women's and men's natures differ with respect to basic characteristics
such as rationality. The effectiveness of these critiques, then, depends on
the accuracy with which their account of gender essentialism describes
human life and experience.
There are problems with both forms of gender essentialism, however,
that defuse part of their challenge to liberal thought. The first problem is
a matter of over-emphasis on difference. The second problem is an over
statement of determinism, in the one case cultural, in the second case
genetic. I would like to deal with each of these in turn.
First, the over-emphasis on difference. Both gender-essentialist femi
nists and sociobiologists focus so heavily on gender difference that they
lose sight of the huge areas of similarity between men and women. Two
areas where this is particularly obvious are those of aggression and sex
ual promiscuity. According to both sorts of gender essentialists, men are
more aggressive than women. In both cases theorists move from the
statement that men are more aggressive than women to the assumption
that aggression is a masculine trait. But the second claim is not entailed
by the first. Both men and women are aggressive, though their aggres
sion may show itself in different ways and be elicited by different occa
sions. The more careful theorists acknowledge this. Frans de Waal, for
example, emphasizes the fact that aggression is a necessary component
of human life, for both males and females.27 But such careful distinctions
are often overlooked, and it is common to find men described, simply, as

26Matt Ridley, On the Origins of Virtue (New York: Viking, 1996), p. 92. As is frus
tratingly often the case, Ridley here ignores primate evidence that the human sexual divi
sion of labor is far more extreme than any such division among closely related primates.
This would seem relevant to an evolutionary ethics, as it suggests that human practices
are not "hard wired" in a strong sense. For discussion of this point, see Sarah Blaffer
Hrdy, The Woman That Never Evolved (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1991), pp. 8-9.
27Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and
Other Animals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 183.

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 Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism 67

aggressive.
Moreover, sweeping generalizations about the aggressiveness of men
frequently ignore the complexity of the notion of aggression itself. It
often is used as a synonym for violence, and there are innumerable sta
tistics that show that men engage in more violence against both men and
women than do women. But aggression involves more than just "com
mitting murders and making weapons"—the research definition used in
one study.28 Aggression is a complex set of behavioral patterns, ranging
from engaging in rough play, to taking food away from another, to rape,
to killing another. In humans, the range of aggression becomes even
larger due to our ability to engage in symbolic behavior. Human aggres
sion can be evinced by giving a quiet verbal order as easily as by physi
cally attacking another. Given this complexity, research on aggression
becomes necessarily reliant on interpretation—one needs to interpret be
havior as aggressive or as non-aggressive. Primate studies, in fact, have
been shown to be extremely dependent on observer interpretation, and in
ways that are problematic from the standpoint of research on gender dif
ferences. If those studying aggression begin with the assumption that
aggression is a masculine trait, they will interpret behavior by males as
aggressive. Research bias is a well documented problem, and a glance at
contemporary discussions of primate research indicates that it is not eas
ily overcome.
But, setting aside for the moment the question of research bias and the
difficulty of defining aggression, let us imagine that males can be dem
onstrated, as a class, to have a tendency to exhibit aggression at a higher
level than women. What follows from that with respect to men's and
women's natures? It certainly does not follow that women are not ag
gressive. The fact that men are taller than women does not entail the
claim that women don't have height, and the same absurdity occurs when
a higher level of aggression in males is equated with a female lack of
aggression. Women are aggressive; aggression is a necessary attribute for
survival in human life. So from the fact that, as a class, men are more
aggressive than women, one surely cannot conclude that women are not
aggressive. Nor can one conclude that all men are more aggressive than
all women—the statistics would clearly not bear that claim out either.
Given standard bell-curve distributions that overlap to some extent but
are shifted to reflect the different average tendencies, one finds that many
women are more aggressive than some men, and some women are more
aggressive than nearly all men.
It seems to be a natural feature of our thinking that when we divide
people into two distinct groups and then measure differences between

Cited in Kenrick and Trost, "The Evolutionary Perspective," p. 152.

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 68 Ruth E. Groenhout

those groups, we naturally slide into

soning is flawed when we do so. The
men are more aggressive than wome
sive and women passive is an impo
enormous difference for theorizing a
If both men and women share aggres
if to somewhat different degrees, th
ble to speak of shared human qualitie
find writers in this field giving lip s
variations among men and women
nore them when drawing substantive
who begins his discussion with the cl
mendous variety of individual behav
goes on to state that "[psychologica
arena. ... Man thus appears as the a
tionism that is manifestly inherited
mammalian ancestors."29 Lip service i
the conclusions drawn ignore those d
dichotomies.
The second criticism of gender-essentialist thought involves a rejec
tion of the deterministic assumptions such essentialism rests on. One can
recognize that sex differences matter in life without moving to the further
assumption that they entirely determine every aspect of one's life. It is
clearly true that our choices and decisions occur in contexts that are not
completely under our control. We are constrained by the social setting
within which we are born and socialized, and we are constrained by our
physical nature. (It could not really be otherwise, of course. Both a
physical body and a social context are necessary for the possibility of
freely chosen action.) But nothing warrants the move from constraint to
determinism.
On MacKinnon's account, one cannot be a man without being an ob
jectifier, and one cannot be a woman without being objectified. Further,
one cannot choose to opt out of being a man or a woman. Similarly,
some sociobiological accounts of human nature assume that being male
or female is absolutely determinative of personality. Primate studies gain
a large portion of their interest from the implicit claim that as male
chimpanzees are, so must male humans be. And claims to this effect
abound in such studies. As Natalie Angier has pointed out, however,
what traits are taken as determinative vary wildly depending on which

29Yves Christen, Sex Differences: Modern Biology and the Unisex Fallacy, trans.
Nicholas Davidson (New Brunswick; Transaction Publishers, 1991); quotes taken from
pp. 95 and 96, respectively.

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 Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism 69

primates researchers choose to study (chimpanzees, for example, are

much more aggressive and less sexually active as a species than bono
bos) and on what behavior is assumed to be natural.30 Further, research
ers themselves have demonstrated the fact that primate behavior can be
changed by learning and socialization.31 If this is true of primates, it is
most certainly true of humans. Whatever our tendencies may be, geneti
cally, we can certainly modify and direct those tendencies through edu
cation, socialization, and individual choice. In some cases, in fact, bio
logically based behavior is more amenable to change than is culturally
constructed behavior. Medication can diminish the symptoms of obses
sive compulsive disorder, but no medication is likely to change a West
erner's deeply ingrained food taboos against, say, eating grubs. Asserting
the "naturalness" of certain sorts of behavior, however implies the oppo
site. It implies that biological features of our characters and personalities
are fixed and determined in ways that are clearly false when we consider
the issue carefully.
MacKinnon's own commitment to making legal changes in the way
U.S. law deals with pornography suggests, in fact, that she herself has no
trouble seeing herself as an agent rather than a sexualized object. Her
legal successes suggest that the judicial system is capable of seeing
women as more than sexualized objects. Likewise, the dedication to their
research that scientists may display suggests that any account of human
rationality as determined by the drive to procreate is seriously defective.
The human drive to understand and engage in rational activity is very
poorly explained as a reproductive mechanism. In both feminist and so
ciobiological essentialism an over-emphasis on dichotomy and an unwar
ranted determinism drive the gender essentialism, and in both cases the
theorists' own choices and lives suggest that both the assumption of de
terminism and the excessively dichotomous picture are false.

5. Liberalism and Critics

While I think that the essentialist case is overstated, I also think that there
are valuable lessons to be learned from the critics of liberalism. MacKin
non's arguments, for example, suggest areas in which contemporary lib
eral thought needs to engage in some self-reflection. The first area con
cerns autonomy. MacKinnon rightly pushes us to recognize that auton
omy is not something one either has or does not have. Autonomy occurs
along a continuum, and one of the things that makes one more or less

^Natalie Angier, Woman: An Intimate Geography (New York: Houghton Mifflin,

1999), pp. 272-74.
31de Waal, Good Natured, p. 180.

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 70 Ruth E. Groenhout

autonomous is one's enculturation a

that may enhance or diminish one's c
MacKinnon is right to point out that
when the culture they grow up in def
sexualized violence. She is less concer
likewise, are diminished when they r
as requiring mindless aggression and t
These definitions create a culture that is destructive of human lives and
human autonomy. One doesn't need to think that this culture is equally
destructive of men's and women's lives, of course, to say that it is dam
aging to both.
So MacKinnon challenges liberal thinkers to broaden their perspec
tive from a narrow focus on legal protection of autonomy to a cultural
critique of the practices we engage in that perpetuate destructive patterns
of thinking and perceiving the world. Legal redress may not always be
the most appropriate response to this recognition—debate over MacKin
non's legal challenges to pornography is ongoing both inside and outside
feminist circles—but recognition of the problem allows for a variety of
responses to be proposed and attempted.
Likewise, criticisms from sociobiology are healthy for liberal political
thought as well. Humans are not disembodied rational intellects. We are
embodied, physical beings, whose lives and choices occur always in the
context of our physical needs, our evolutionary heritage, and our hormo
nal present. This does not, in and of itself, negate our freedom and re
sponsibility, but it does situate it in important ways. Careful thinkers
have always realized that human freedom and responsibility do not
merely occur in an embodied context: they require an embodied context
for their exercise. Without a physical existence, it is hard to know what
respect for another's needs or rights would even be.
Sociobiologists also help us to avoid the tendency to Utopian thinking
that can be tempting for moral and political theorists. Humans will al
ways need some form of social safeguards, to prevent them from ex
ploiting others and from being exploited in turn. While the grounds of
the exploitation may change (we have seen racial, sexual, religious,
class-based, and ethnic exploitation in recent history, but I see no reason
to think that exhausts the fount of human ingenuity), the temptation to
engage in it will doubtless be with us into the foreseeable future. Our
moral and political thinking, then, cannot operate on the assumption that
if we could just find the magic principle (proper socialization, genetic
manipulation, or the right religion) we could produce a completely fair
and exploitation-free world. As long as we are dealing with humans, our
theories must take both good and evil into account.
And a more accurate understanding of human lives and human psy

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 Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism 71

chology can enhance our ability to work together constructively to pro

tect the moral values and the individual rights that we value. Framing
sociobiology as antithetical to moral reasoning falsifies the nature of both
types of intellectual exploration. As Sarah Hrdy comments:

[I]t will be well to keep in mind a central paradox of the human condition—that our spe
cies possesses the capacity to carry sexual inequality to its greatest known extremes, but
we also possess the potential to realize an unusual social equality between the sexes
should we choose to exercise that potential. However, if social inequality based on sex is
a serious problem, and if we really want to do something constructive about it, we are
going to need a comprehensive understanding of its cause.

Knowing that humans may have natural predispositions to act in certain

ways is valuable information for moral reasoning. But it can never sub
stitute for moral reasoning, since from the fact that humans naturally do
something we cannot conclude that they ought to do that.
Further, both the feminist and the sociobiological critiques keep liber
alism more honest about what it can and cannot do. Liberalism may pro
vide a political framework within which individuals are freed to search
for their own conception of the good, but it cannot itself be wholly de
terminative of that good. When liberalism is framed as the only arbiter of
meaningful lives, it makes claims it cannot fulfill. But an emphasis on
rights as the necessary prerequisite to lives that can achieve fullness and
the achievement of one's chosen goals is an emphasis worth maintaining.
While both views encourage liberalism to remain humble about its limi
tations, however, a similar caution is needed in each of their respective
cases as well. Sociobiology cannot tell us what the good human life must
be, and MacKinnon is quite frank about her own inability to offer a de
terminate picture of a non-sexually objectified woman. Ultimately, each
individual needs to be the one who decides what sort of life she will pur
sue, but in stating this I find myself back on familiar, liberal, terrain.

6. Conclusion

I have argued that there are two fundamental problems with gender es
sentialism. The first is a problem of over-emphasis on difference that
destroys any ability to articulate important moral concerns about shared
responsibility and shared moral concerns. That the differences so empha
sized are insufficiently distinctive to support the excessive claims made
by proponents of gender difference is also a telling reason against ac
cepting these accounts in lieu of a liberal conception of human nature.

32Sarah Hrdy, The Woman That Never Evolved, revised ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Har
vard University Press, 1999), pp. 14-15.

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 72 Ruth E. Groenhout

The second problem is the assumpti

ism. Both types of determinism are
guably false, as well. Given these pr
feminist liberalism fail, though both
feminists to consider.
It is, I think, one of the important strengths of liberalism, and a reason
for feminists to remain liberals, that the criticisms levied against it can
and should be heard and responded to. Liberalism incorporates difference
and respect for alternative viewpoints into its very account of an accept
able public space. In so doing it makes more work for itself, since it is
now charged with the task of responding to views that other political
theories can simply dismiss out of hand. But in responding to critics, and
in taking their criticisms seriously, liberalism gains a measure of self
reflexivity and the ability to change and improve.
There is, however, a more important issue for theorists to deal with,
and that is the question of what vision of human interactions we begin
theorizing from. And at this level, I think there are strong reasons for
feminists to resist the pressure to accept either a sociobiological or a
MacKinnon-esque view of human nature. On both views, humans are
fundamentally acted upon by outside forces. On a sociobiological view,
humans are, at their most basic, simply "vehicles for the transmission of
genes." All human interactions ultimately must be understood in terms of
seeing others as either competitors for reproductive efficacy or potential
cooperators in reproduction. Since reproduction is the only deity in the
evolutionary pantheon of gods, no other value can serve as an ultimate
explanandum or as an "evolutionary stable stratagem"—the catch-phrase
used to pick out practices that can endure in human society.
On MacKinnon's view, sex is constructed of power relationships, and
our definitions of ourselves as sexed beings are a basic aspect of our ex
perience of the world and our sense of self. But the picture of radical op
pression and subordination on the part of women, and radical domination
and objectification that makes men what they are does not ring true. Men
like John Stuart Mill, living in a day and age when male entitlement was
legally enforced to a degree unimaginable today, have been capable of
"seeing otherwise" and arguing that the subjection of women is deeply
evil. It is unclear how we could account for the existence of such a phe
nomenon; given MacKinnon's account of human identity, Mill should
not have been able to see women as human. And a similar point can be
made about women's own experiences of moral agency and selfhood.
MacKinnon recognizes the theoretical difficulties her position produces
for understanding women's consciousness-raising in the context of a

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 Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism 73

sexually objectifying culture,33 but her account seems weak in its ability
to capture the "aha!" moment of consciousness-raising. Part of the power
of women speaking together is that experience of suddenly seeing things
differently and knowing that they can be other than what they are. But on
MacKinnon's account of women's identity formation, there is no self,
separate from the objectified one, to whom such objectification can sud
denly become apparent. Women are defined in terms of their sexual ob
jectification, and there is nothing apart from that identity. So her analysis
is able to go no further than to argue that women whose consciousness
has changed are still damaged, but now they can see the damage as dam
age.
But liberalism holds out another vision, one of humans as more than
the sum of their parts, so to speak. Yes, our evolutionary heritage is rele
vant in understanding human nature, and yes, MacKinnon is correct to
point out the damage sexual objectification can cause and to notice and
fight against the entrenchment of male privilege in legal and social
structures. But that does not change the fact that we can and do envision
an alternative reality in which the law more closely approaches justice.
Nor does it change the fact that many women and men have been capable
of understanding themselves and others as more than the sum of their
sexual natures.
An example here is helpful. In Toward a Feminist Theory of the State,
MacKinnon analyzes the political battle for abortion rights. She argues
that the legal use of the privacy doctrine to ground a right to abortion
shows that abortion rights are more a matter of removing an impediment
to men's sexual access to women than a matter of the protection of
women's right to bodily integrity and autonomy.34 She then goes on to
draw from this the conclusion that framing abortion as a privacy matter is
in keeping with the general liberal approach to privacy. Her comments
here are worth quoting:

The liberal ideal of the private holds that, so long as the public does not interfere,
autonomous individuals interact freely and equally. Privacy is the ultimate value of the
negative state ... To complain in public of inequality within the private contradicts the
liberal definition of the private. In the liberal view, no act of the state contributes to
shaping its internal alignments or distributing its internal forces, so no act of the state
should participate in changing it.35

There is an important grain of truth to MacKinnon's claim here, but it is

a one-sided truth.
It is true that liberalism does have an ideal of the private, a realm

33MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, p. 103.

34Ibi<±, pp. 102-3.
35Ibid., p. 103.

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 74 Ruth E. Groenhout

where state intrusion into the lives of individuals is limited. But it is not
true that liberals have assumed that such an ideal is already a reality, nor
that liberals have thought that inequality in the private is not a matter for
state intervention. John Stuart Mill's rejection of the marriage exemption
from charges of rape in The Subjection of Women stands as an obvious
counterexample to the second claim.36 MacKinnon is correct in noting
that the notion of the private has frequently functioned in ways that al
lowed women to suffer violations and attacks with no recourse. But she
is wrong to attribute this to liberal theory itself. And while the abuses
that happen in private do need to be addressed, addressing them by abol
ishing the private may not be in women's best interests, nor does it seem
to be what MacKinnon is advocating.
An additional point needs to be made about MacKinnon's account of
the fight for abortion rights. Her analysis is not one that does justice to
the intentions or the bravery of the women who fought the legal battles to
secure that right. She probably is correct in noting that for some men the
fight was seen as important in order to remove one impediment to sexual
access to women. But it is not correct to say that this was the motive that
drove all the men involved in the fight. And it is certainly not true that
this description captures the experiences of those women who fought to
make abortion legal. While I don't think MacKinnon would endorse this
reading, her description suggests that these women were dupes of a male
power establishment. Tricked into thinking they were fighting for
women's rights, they were instead simply pawns maneuvered by sexist
men. We need, instead, an account of women's political action that can
see such women as morally responsible, politically powerful agents.
The belief that women, as women, can fight and win legal battles is
one worth holding on to. It seems to be one that MacKinnon herself
holds. But it is in rather serious tension with the notion that women are
defined, as women, in terms of their sexual violability. The two ideas do
not sit well together. A liberal notion that women, oppressed though they
may be, are still more than the sum of that oppression is, I think, exactly
what is needed to make sense of the many ways in which women have
exercised their agency to bring about political change. And it is a belief
that is situated squarely in liberal theory.
Liberalism does have its weaknesses. Among them are the tendencies
to erase differences among people and to overlook how culture and
physical circumstances affect the very meaning of terms such as rights
and autonomy. But having recognized these tendencies, is liberalism to
be rejected? Not until a better alternative comes along, and that is what

36John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 148.

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 Essentialist Challenges to Liberal Feminism 75

often seems missing from the critics of liberalism. MacKinnon may

charge that the legal system is a masculine protection racket, but her
work in legal theory also suggests a deep and abiding respect for basic
liberal assumptions, such as the need to treat all individuals, male or fe
male, weak or powerful, with respect. If we are not willing to give up the
protection of basic rights, and if we think that individual autonomy is
worth defending, then what is called for is a new and improved liberal
ism, not the rejection of liberal theory.

Ruth E. Groenhout
Department of Philosophy
Calvin College
[email protected]

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