Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

Chapter 6 Feminism and multiculturalism

In Western democracies today, debates about the position of women and minority cultural groups command a great deal of political attention. Feminists and multiculturalists often claim that the issues that concern them — issues about the nature of personal identity, about whether it is possible to draw a line between public and private life, about respect for cultural difference — have displaced the questions about authority, democracy, freedom, and justice that I have been examining in previous chapters. Indeed, the very nature of politics itself has changed: it now has less to do with what happens in the institutions of government, and more to do with what happens between individuals — men and women, whites and blacks, Christians and Muslims — in their everyday interactions. Political philosophy, therefore, needs to be rewritten with an entirely new focus.

I believe such claims are exaggerated, and in this chapter I shall try to explain why. The issues raised by feminists and multiculturalists are certainly very important, and should shift the way we think about politics. But they should not displace the older questions, which remain as urgent as they ever were. Instead they give these questions a new dimension. My aim here is to explore how far feminist and multiculturalist arguments should make us think differently about political authority, democracy, freedom and its limits, and justice.

One way to keep perspective is to ask about the circumstances under which feminism and multiculturalism have moved to the centre of political debate. Or, to turn the question round, why was it that for many centuries the relations between men and women, and the position of minority cultural groups, were routinely ignored in treatises of political thought? It is tempting to see this either as some kind of gigantic oversight, or else to argue that dominant groups in society kept such issues off the agenda. It is certainly true, to take the case of feminism, that political philosophy in the past was written by men who took it for granted that the subordination of women to men was a natural fact, that women had no active part to play in political life, and so on (there were occasional exceptions — John Stuart Mill was one — but these were few and far between). But they took it for granted mainly because nobody was arguing the opposite case. Although with hindsight we can take them to task for their chauvinism — and many books have been written in this vein — it is both more useful and in a way more honest to ask what it is about own society that makes us take feminist and multiculturalist arguments so seriously. How can we see things that our predecessors so notoriously failed to see — for instance, that there is absolutely no reason why women should not enjoy the same set of career opportunities as men?

The answer, I believe, is that we live in societies that are founded on commitments to freedom and equality, but that have failed so far to live up to these commitments in the case of women and people from minority cultures. It is one of our deepest beliefs that each person should be able to live life in the way that he or she chooses, subject to certain limits that we explored in Chapter 4; it is another deep belief that each person is entitled to be treated as an equal, either by being given equal rights, or by being given equal opportunities. Given these beliefs, it becomes a matter of great political concern if one section of society enjoys only a smaller area of personal freedom, or receives less than equal treatment at the hands of existing social and political institutions. So, for instance, when women are denied the option available to men of harmoniously combining a career with family life, or when members of ethnic minorities have fewer opportunities in the job market than others, this means that they are not being treated as fully free and equal members of their society. It is tempting sometimes to complain that feminists, especially, are arguing on behalf of the already privileged. We read about a woman employed in a top city institution bringing a court case because her share options are worth so many millions less than those of her male colleagues, and we think that by any reasonable comparative standards she is already doing extremely well. This reaction is right in one way but wrong in another. It ignores the experience of being discriminated against in a society that is committed to equal treatment, which entails being devalued as a person despite one’s comfortable lifestyle.

Feminists argue for ways of transforming society so that women enjoy full, not merely nominal or partial, freedom and equality. Multiculturalists advance similar claims on the part of ethnic, religious, and other groups whose members are discriminated against or whose culture is undervalued by the dominant majority. Each position comes in different versions, but rather than trawl mechanically through these I want to explore the general challenge that feminism and multiculturalism pose to the ideas laid out in earlier chapters.

Let us begin with the issue of political power and political authority. In Chapter 2 I treated this as a question about the authority of the state — in other words I assumed that at least in modern societies when we ask about the form that political authority should take, we are asking about how the state should be constituted. But many feminists have challenged this way of understanding politics. They have argued that it is problematic, if not impossible, to draw a line between the public sphere, where people engage in political relationships with one another, and the private sphere, where relationships are non-political. In other words they see politics as a much more pervasive phenomenon, one that touches every aspect of our lives. This challenge is summed up in the slogan ‘the personal is political’. And it follows that if we are going to talk about political authority, we have to talk not only about the authority wielded by states over their subjects, but also about the authority wielded by men over women.

What gives bite to this challenge is the undoubted fact that men, not only in the past but also to some extent today, have exercised power over women. They have done so partly by keeping them economically dependent — in order to survive women have had to rely on male breadwinners — partly by promulgating ideas about women’s proper role in life that women themselves have come to accept, and partly by sheer physical force — the threat of violence if male commands are disobeyed. These are general claims about relations between the sexes, and it is not being suggested that every individual man has used all three means to keep women in check — for one thing women have often found ways to fight back — but they do none the less point to a kind of power that has usually remained invisible in political philosophy. When political philosophers like Hobbes write about power struggles and how to control them, they are thinking about relationships between men — it is as though the issue of relations between the sexes had already been resolved.

However, it does not necessarily follow that we should now begin thinking of these relations as political. Although politics is about power — about who should have it, how it should be controlled — not every power relationship is a political one. Take some familiar examples — the power of a teacher over his pupils, the power of an employer over her workers, the power of a general over his soldiers. In each case the first party can get the second party to behave in ways that he or she wants, partly through exercising authority that is voluntarily accepted, partly through being able to threaten certain consequences — detention, the sack, a court martial — if instructions are not obeyed. So why are these relationships not political ones? We need to think about what makes politics a distinctive part of human life. First, although it involves making and enforcing decisions, it involves making them in a certain way — giving different voices and different interests a chance to make themselves heard. It is not necessarily democratic — there can be politics in royal courts — and it is not necessarily morally pure — threats and bargaining come into it, as well as discussion and argument. But where a dictator can impose his will without needing to listen to any other voices or consult interested parties, there is no politics. Second, political authority potentially touches upon every aspect of human life. Although we can and should set limits to it — we ought to mark out spheres of personal freedom where political decisions cease to intrude, as we saw in Chapter 4 — the very act of marking out these spheres is a political act. And politics is also the means whereby we determine what powers individual people in different walks of life should be able to wield. It is a matter for political decision how far a teacher’s authority over her pupils should extend, what the respective rights and obligations of employers and workers should be, what generals should and should not be allowed to do in the course of managing an army.

_{13. The price of women’s liberation: the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst arrested outside Buckingham Palace, 1914.}

If politics has these distinctive features, then we can put the feminist challenge to political authority in a different form. What feminists are pointing out about relationships between men and women is not so much their inherently political nature as the failure of politics to address them. Political authority, in the form in which it has been constituted up to now, has not set adequate parameters for the peculiarly intimate relations that exist between the sexes. It has failed in a number of ways: it has not given women adequate physical security, especially protection against domestic violence, it has not ensured that women enjoy equal rights with men in a number of important areas of life, and it has not provided women with sufficient personal freedom (I shall be looking in a moment at what this means). It is these political failures that have allowed men to exercise power over women in their personal lives, and one obvious reason is that women have for centuries been almost entirely excluded from politics in the conventional sense.

This leads us directly to the feminist and multiculturalist critiques of democracy as it is currently practised, but before examining those I want to look more closely at the issue of freedom. As we saw in Chapter 4, freedom is usually understood in terms of a protected sphere of action in which each person has the opportunity and means to decide how to live his or her own life. Feminists — and similar arguments have been voiced by multiculturalists — have challenged this idea in two ways. First, they have argued that women are in reality much less free in the private sphere than political philosophers usually assume. Second, they have argued that behaviour that might appear to be purely ‘self-regarding’, to use Mill’s phrase, can in fact have damaging effects on women’s interests.

Freedom, we saw, involves having a range of options open to one, but also having the capacity to choose between them. In the past, the options open to the great majority of women were clearly very limited. They had little choice but to marry, rear children, and work either within the household or in a limited number of occupations closely connected to it. The 20th century saw a dramatic change in this external aspect of women’s freedom. Not only were almost all occupations at least formally opened up to women, but there were now genuine choices to be made in the sphere of personal relations — whether to marry, whether to engage in heterosexual relationships at all, whether to have children, and so forth. This is not to say that they enjoyed equal freedom with men in all these respects, because freedom, as again we saw, is also a matter of the costs that are attached to different courses of action, and very often women had to bear extra costs when, for example, they decided to combine a career with raising children. The harder issue, however, has to do with the internal aspect of freedom — the capacity to choose.

Feminists have argued that women remain in thrall to long-established cultural norms in their society even where they are no longer physically compelled to conform to them. These norms have to do especially with how women should look, how they should behave, what kind of relationship they should establish with men, and so on. These norms become embedded in a woman’s psyche at an early stage in life, and are very difficult to challenge later on. Women obviously do make real choices in many areas of life — in occupation, religion, lifestyle in a broad sense — but nearly always within bounds set by prevailing ideas of femininity. And this may lead to damaging outcomes — for instance an obsession with physical appearance may lead to anorexia among teenage girls, beliefs about the domestic roles of men and women may lead women to submit to a monstrously unfair division of domestic chores, and so forth.

What makes this issue so hard to tackle is that it becomes entangled with another question that feminists themselves disagree about: whether men and women have essentially a common nature, or whether there are deep differences between them which mean that there will always be contrasts in the way that men and women prefer to lead their lives. If the latter is true, then we should not be too quick to assume that when women choose to follow certain cultural norms, these choices are inauthentic. This does not mean that we have to accept the norms that lead teenage girls to starve themselves, for instance. But it is at least possible that it is ingrained in women’s nature to be more concerned about their physical appearance than men, in which case it is not detrimental to their freedom that the choices they make in this part of life display a different pattern from the choices made by men.

How can we decide whether observed male–female differences in choice are merely the result of cultural norms that could be changed, or whether they reflect differences that are hard-wired into the sexes? This is such a complex issue that the wisest course may be to follow John Stuart Mill and remain agnostic. As Mill wrote in The Subjection of Women (one of the very few examples of feminist political philosophy before the 20th century):

Since we lack this evidence, we have good reason to ensure that the external conditions of freedom are the same for men and women — that the options they have available to them, and the costs they will incur if they take them up, are the same. Whether beyond this we must also try to break the hold of prevailing cultural norms about how men and women, respectively, should behave, or whether instead we should try to ensure that traditionally female norms are valued as highly as traditionally male norms — this, as I say, remains a matter of intense dispute among feminists themselves.

Cultural minorities — groups whose religious or ethnic identity is different from that of the majority in their society — also face barriers to personal freedom. Even though, in modern liberal societies, they have the same formal set of educational and career opportunities as members of the majority, there are often special costs attached to pursuing these options. For instance, jobs may be specified in such a way that people from minority groups have difficulty in complying with the specifications — there may be dress requirements that conflict with religious or traditional dress codes, the working week may be organized in such a way as to be incompatible with religious practices, say if people are required to work on the day that is prescribed as the Sabbath, and so on. Multiculturalists argue that opportunities must be made equal in a more than formal sense. The problem here is that the costs themselves may appear to be matters of choice. If, for religious reasons, I choose not to eat pork, say, then clearly that is not a limitation on my freedom: the restriction is self-imposed. So how is it different if, because I insist on wearing a certain style of dress, many employers won’t offer me a job? I could choose not to dress in that way.

To tackle this problem, we need to decide whether a dress code, or indeed any other type of job specification, is one that is essential to the job we are considering. In some instances, dress requirements may be imposed for safety reasons. In other cases aesthetic questions may be involved — actors and dancers, for instance, have to be prepared to wear the gear that the production designer has chosen. But if the code is not much more than conventional, then cultural minorities can claim with justification that unless it is abandoned or relaxed their freedom of occupational choice has been limited. (Of course they must also demonstrate that their own dress requirement has deep cultural roots, so that breaching it would be costly for the individuals in question.)

We see, then, how feminist and multiculturalist challenges may force us to revise, not the idea of freedom itself, but our understanding of the conditions under which people are genuinely free to choose their path in life. The same applies when we look at the limits of that freedom. In Chapter 4 I gave examples of how behaviour that might appear to be merely offensive to other people, and therefore not ‘other-regarding’ according to Mill’s definition, might become more than that if the people affected by it were forced to change their own behaviour as a result. Feminists and multiculturalists may want to push this argument further. They would claim, for example, that the way women and cultural minorities are portrayed, especially in the popular media, can have major repercussions for the way they are treated generally. If women are represented as sex objects, for instance, or blacks are portrayed as criminals or drug-dealers, then this will affect, perhaps unconsciously, the behaviour of people who are hiring for jobs, or deciding promotions. The implication is that freedom of expression should be more limited than we had previously thought. Expression that is damaging to the interests of vulnerable groups should be prevented. Some feminists have for this reason called for pornography to be banned; representatives of religious minorities have argued for blasphemy laws that prohibit derogatory statements about their religions, as some Muslims did after Salman Rushdie published his book The Satanic Verses.

These claims pose problems for societies that are strongly committed to individual freedom. After all isn’t freedom valuable precisely because it allows people to challenge conventions, to shock and outrage, and in that way get other people to question their existing beliefs? How can we salute expression or behaviour that offends one group of people, and then turn round and try to ban expression or behaviour that offends another group? Because the line between forms of expression that are liberating despite being offensive to some and forms of expression that are merely offensive is difficult to draw, we may conclude that the law is a blunt instrument in this area — that in general people should be left to judge for themselves which expression is acceptable and which is not, with exceptions only for extreme cases, such as racist speech in public places. This does not exclude public debate about these issues, which can make people more aware about what others with different cultural backgrounds find offensive or insulting. In a multicultural society widespread respect for the cultural values of other groups is an important good. At the same time it is important not to succumb to debilitating political correctness. Where cultures contain elements that are hostile to freedom and equality — especially freedom and equality for women — we should not hesitate to say so forcefully, even if this means giving offence.

I now turn to the question of democracy. In societies with universal suffrage, a major issue for both feminists and multiculturalists has been the relative absence of women and representatives of cultural minorities from legislative assemblies. Why should this matter? It is argued on the other side that representatives are elected by all of their constituents, and are answerable to them, so even if there are few women and minority members actually present, their interests and concerns will still be channelled through the (white) men who represent them. It is mechanisms of accountability that matter, in other words, not who actually gets chosen to sit in Parliament or Congress.

_{14. Muslims burn The Satanic Verses in Bradford, UK, 1989.}

This reply overlooks the fact that, in democracies as they presently exist, elected representatives have a great deal of freedom to decide issues on which their constituents have never been given the chance to pronounce. In Chapter 3 I discussed ways of deepening democracy, of involving the people more fully in the making of decisions, and if that were to happen it might indeed matter less who was chosen to represent them. But now it matters a good deal, and the argument for increasing women’s and minority representation is that there are important issues on which it is very hard for those who do not belong to these groups to understand fully the perspectives and interests of those who do. So, for example, if a question about religious practice comes to Parliament or Congress, say in relation to a case of job discrimination, it is important that there should be people present who can explain the meaning of the practice, its centrality or otherwise to the life of the group in question, and so on. The same applies when an issue of specific concern to women arises, for instance an issue about maternity leave or childcare.

It is not essential that representation should be strictly proportional to numbers in the population. What is important is that each significant perspective be adequately represented in the legislative body. This follows from my earlier description of democracy as a system of reaching political decisions by open discussion among all those involved. Here it is assumed that the people involved are willing to listen to arguments on the other side, weigh them using standards of fairness, and change their own views accordingly. Of course democracies do not always work like this, but for minority groups especially it is important that they should, as far as possible. They are, after all, minorities. If everyone just votes according to their sectional interest, the minorities are bound to lose. The force of argument is their only weapon.

This view has been challenged by some feminists and multiculturalists, who claim that the very idea of deciding issues by reasoned argument biases the system in favour of those who are already adept at discussion of this kind. They argue that women and minority groups may need to make use of more impassioned forms of speech to make their case; they also suggest that certain issues should be reserved for the groups that have the greatest stake in them, so that questions about reproductive rights — abortion, contraception, etc. — should be left for women alone to decide. In Chapter 3 I argued in relation to the general problem of minorities that democracies ought to be willing to enshrine certain basic rights in a constitution, precisely so as to protect minorities against unfriendly majorities at any moment. I also suggested that creating separate constituencies to deal with different issues, as happens in a federal system, could be justified on democratic grounds. However, the problem here is that many of the issues that deeply concern women and cultural minorities are also of considerable concern to other groups. Abortion is an obvious case. However tempted one might be to think that this is a matter of concern only to women, it is plain that religious groups, in particular, are also deeply concerned, believing as they do that abortion involves the destruction of a human being with a soul. One cannot dismiss this concern as simply crazy, unless one is willing in the same way to dismiss all other cultural claims with a religious basis. So the only way forward is to attempt to work out, through debate and discussion, a position on abortion that is at least minimally acceptable to the opposing sides, and this again underlines the importance of having a full range of perspectives represented in the body that has to reach a decision.

Finally in this chapter, we come to the question of justice: how have feminists and multiculturalists challenged prevailing ideas of social justice, and how ought we to respond to these challenges? I want to focus here on two particular issues: domestic justice — justice between men and women in family life — and positive discrimination — measures designed to favour women and ethnic minorities in access to higher education and the job market.

Social justice, as I indicated in the last chapter, concerns the way in which social and political institutions produce a distribution of benefits and costs among individuals. The focus has traditionally been on the system of property and taxation, on the public provision of health care and education, and so forth. But can we restrict our attention to the distributive effects of these public institutions? Feminists argue that we also need to look at what happens inside the family unit, to see how that distributes benefits and costs, and also to see what impact it has on the wider distribution of jobs, income, and so forth. More specifically they argue that, without domestic justice, social justice is never going to be achieved for women.

Many people today would agree that historically the family gave women a raw deal — that it placed them more or less at the mercy of their men folk, who not only expected to do very little work in the home, but also controlled the family finances by virtue of their status as breadwinners. But it might seem that now that women have won their independence in the public sphere — have gained legal rights, political rights, and equal access to the labour market — relations between men and women in domestic contexts must also have changed profoundly: they now interact on terms of equality. In other words, once social justice (in the familiar sense) is achieved for women, domestic justice will follow. But this optimistic belief has not been borne out in practice: women’s position has undoubtedly improved in many respects, but there is still a great deal of inequality, especially in the way domestic labour is shared between men and women. Even when both partners work full time, women still carry out the lion’s share of household tasks. On the assumption that these tasks are burdensome (does anybody actually enjoy vacuuming or ironing?), this looks unfair.

Women are also disadvantaged by the fact that, when children are born, they almost invariably take longer career breaks than men, often coming back into the job market to take up part-time work, or in any case advancing up the promotion ladder less rapidly than their male counterparts. This, as much as overt sexual discrimination, seems to explain the often-observed fact that women systematically earn less than men, and are poorly represented at the top of the various professions (there are very few women chief executives, judges, professors, etc.).

But we should not be too quick to conclude that because men and women end up unequally placed in certain respects, this must be an injustice. After all some unequal outcomes are none the less fair — for instance when they reflect the different choices people have made. So one response that we need to consider to the evidence I have just presented is that women have agreed to the arrangements that appear to work to their disadvantage — that they have accepted as part of the family deal, so to speak, that they should do most of the housework, and that they should have less glittering careers than their male partners.

Why might they have agreed to this? Presumably because there still exist norms about the respective roles of men and women, norms which tell us that women have a special responsibility for home-making and child-rearing, while men have a special responsibility to earn income outside the home. So although in practice the vast majority of women of working age are employed in the labour market, there is a tendency for both sexes to regard their work as a kind of bonus, something added on to their primary responsibilities. But even if women share in this perspective, it is clearly one that works against them in terms of the balance of costs and benefits. The norm is a relic from an earlier age, and its being freely embraced is not sufficient to make it fair (even slaves have been known to accept norms that justify their slavery).

Showing that domestic justice has not been achieved in our society is one thing; saying more positively what fairness within the household requires is harder. Should we insist that equal sharing of costs and benefits must be the rule for all couples, or is there room for people to work out different arrangements according to their circumstances? Perhaps once the old norms about a woman’s proper place have disappeared, the principle of free agreement will come into its own. As we saw, some feminists insist that there are deep differences between men and women, especially is connection with their role in child-rearing, and see strict equality as forcing women to behave in ways that deny their maternal natures. To the extent this is true, fairness in domestic relations ought to be compatible with flexibility in family life, where partners can choose to divide up work inside and outside the home according to their individual preferences and abilities.

Finally in this chapter we need to look at the issues raised by affirmative action and positive discrimination policies. Both feminists and multiculturalists have challenged conventional ideas about equality of opportunity, which imply that when people are being selected for jobs or college places, this must be strictly on the grounds of merit. Instead, they argue, justice may require us to discriminate positively in favour of women and/or members of ethnic minorities — in other words selection committees should build in a weighting factor that takes account of whether an applicant belongs to one of these categories. Such policies have of course been implemented quite widely, both by universities and by employers, but they remain controversial.

We need to distinguish two justifications that might be given for positive discrimination policies. One is that standard ways of measuring ‘merit’ — for instance relying on examination grades or test results — tend to underestimate the true ability of women or minority members. This might be because the tests contain hidden cultural biases, or because people in these categories have had fewer opportunities to acquire the skills that the tests are designed to measure — as a result, say, of having a weaker educational background. Where this can be demonstrated — it is much more plausible in the case of deprived ethnic groups than in the case of women, given that girls now tend to outperform boys at school — positive discrimination policies are actually a better way of achieving equal opportunity. There is no dispute at the level of principle: the argument is simply about the best way to ensure that those who are selected for advantaged positions are the people who really deserve them.

However, there is a second justification that does raise issues of principle. This starts from the fact that women and ethnic minorities are currently very significantly underrepresented in the higher echelons of society, and presents positive discrimination as the best means to put this right. In other words, it should be an important aim of social policy to ensure that there are many women, blacks, Muslims, and so forth, holding high-level positions in business, the professions, the civil service, and so forth. From this perspective, social justice is not simply about the fair treatment of individuals; it also has an important group-based element. A just society would be one in which all major groups were represented in the various social spheres in rough proportion to their numbers.

Suppose it were true that individual opportunities were genuinely equal — that people were always chosen for jobs and other positions on the basis of merit, and had the same chance to develop the skills and abilities that count as merit — but nevertheless different groups in society turned out to be more or less successful overall, some occupying most of the top posts, others clustering at the bottom. Could we say that the less successful groups were the victims of group injustice? Not if their members had consciously chosen not to apply for the better jobs, say for cultural reasons. But this seems unlikely in general (there might be specific jobs that groups find uncongenial for cultural reasons). A more likely explanation is that groups whose members historically have tended to occupy low-status jobs have low expectations and a diminished sense of self-esteem, and therefore few of their members believe that they have any chance of climbing high up the career ladder — so they prefer not to try.

_{15. Multicultural harmony: the Notting Hill Carnival, 1980.}

This state of affairs should concern us. It is bad both for the groups in question and indeed for the whole society that their status is low and that individual members do not seize the opportunities that they might have taken. Positive discrimination policies may help, by showing what minority members are capable of once they are given an initial boost — say a place at a good university. Such people can act as role models encouraging others to follow their lead. So perhaps such policies can be justified, on balance, in terms of their overall effects (African-Americans probably provide the best example). But this does not mean that they are required as a matter of justice, or that groups with low aspirations and low levels of achievement can be described as victims of injustice on that count alone. Indeed there may be a real conflict of values here — between treating individuals fairly, and ensuring that ethnic and other groups are fully integrated into the life of the wider society. I said near the beginning of the book that political philosophers ought to resist the temptation, common to politicians, to assume that the policy they favour involves no sacrifice of other values. Here we ought to conclude that positive discrimination is just only when it is a matter of ensuring real fairness between individuals — unearthing genuine merit. If it goes beyond that, and becomes a means of raising the general standing of one group in relation to others, then however desirable that may be in general, it is no longer a matter of justice.

I suggested at the beginning of the chapter that we should not see feminism and multiculturalism as displacing longer standing questions of political philosophy, but as posing these questions in new ways. I hope now to have justified that remark. Feminists and multiculturalists teach us to think differently about political authority, freedom, democracy, and justice, and in particular challenge us to say how these values are to be realized in societies that are culturally diverse and in which women expect to be treated as the equals of men. Their writings enrich political philosophy and bring it directly into contact with some of the most hotly debated issues of the present day.