Women earn on average 79 cents for every dollar earned by men. Only 20 out of 100 senators are women. Underlying these inequalities, Susan Okin argues, is “the unequal distribution of the unpaid labor of the family”.
These practices depend on two assumptions –that women are primarily responsible for rearing children, and that serious members of the work force do not have such responsibilities. This expectation systematically marginalizes women in the working world. They advance more slowly, and are paid less. But since domestic labor is unpaid, the result is that women become makes women vulnerable and dependent.
The current typical practices of family life are not only ‘structured to a large extent by gender’, they are also unjust. Gender, for Okin, is a ‘deeply entrenched institutionalization of sexual difference’, which is constructed through social processes. Unfortunately, Okin argues, theorists of justice have neglected the relevance of gender injustice in the family. They tend to simply take the gender structure of the family, and then employ gender-neutral language in a hollow way to paper over this assumption. The result is that ‘to a large extent, contemporary theories of justice…are about men with wives at home’ (13).
Okin argues that this is unacceptable, for three reasons. First – most obviously –women must be fully included in any satisfactory theory of justice (we ought not to reject this assumption, moreover, by viewing justice as opposed to care and empathy).
Second, equality of opportunity is undermined by the current gender injustices of our society. This is so in two ways: (A) the family is a crucial determinate of what opportunities we have, and disparities between families are a major cause of inequality; (B) disparities within the family affect the opportunities available for women (and girls)
Third, Okin argues we must have just families in order to have a just society. Unless familial relations are founded on justice and reciprocity, children are unlikely to develop a sense of justice. Moreover, if men share in parenting more substantially, the experience of being a nurturer would increase the capacity for empathy. In short, the family is a place where individuals can ‘learn to be just’. In short, a just family is essential to the creation of a stable just society.
Developing these arguments in the task of Okin’s book. The book is certainly a must read for those interested in feminist philosophy, or in the theory of justice more generally. In this post, I summarize the major arguments of Okin’s fascinating and significant work.
The Family: Beyond Justice?
In chapter 2, Okin begins by countering two arguments which suggest that are commonly used to justice treating the family as beyond the scope of justice. Okin concurs with Rawls that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, and thus ought to govern the family
The first argument – put forward by Hume, and later Sandel as a critique of Rawls—holds that justice is an inappropriate virtue to regulate family life— love and solidarity are the nobler virtues that ought to govern the family—and, thus, that if the family were regulated by principles of justice, that would not necessarily spell improvement.
The argument, according to Okin, has three flaws. First, Okin argues that it misunderstands Rawls’ claim about the primacy of justice. For Rawls, justice is not the most important virtue, but the most essential. This is so because, without justice, we cannot secure other important virtues. Other virtues depend on justice, but it does not depend on them.
Second, Sandel’s argument relies on an idealized vision of the family, which ignores the contemporary realities of the family. In many –even most—families, goods such as paid work, leisure, physical security and financial resources are unevenly distributed. Contemporary families are not ‘better than just’; they are not even just.
Finally, Sandel is wrong to oppose justice to other virtues. At a minimum, the family needs to be just. But this does not also prevent it from expressing over virtues; it may even make such virtues possible.
Thus, Sandel is wrong to think that the family is beyond the reach of justice.
The second argument Okin addresses –that gender oppression is natural, as put forward by sexist Alan Bloom (but also held by many others in the tradition of political philosophy: Aristotle, for example—is obviously false and not worth considering in more detail.
In the next three chapters, Okin considers how three common views about justice –communitarianism, libertarianism, and liberalism—fail to adequately consider justice in the family. For the first two, Okin suggests the flaws are fatal; the third, liberalism, Okin argues, can be modified to accommodate concern about gender injustice.
Whose Traditions? Okin’s Critique of Communitarianism
In this chapter, Okin takes on the communitarian tradition in political philosophy, which claims that social justice must be based on ‘shared understandings’ and traditions that exist in social contexts. Okin offers a critique of two forms of this view: MacIntyre’s radical communitarianism and Walzer’s complex egalitarianism. While she thinks Walzer’s view fares better than MacIntyre’s, she argues that both are ‘incapable of dealing with the problem of the effects of social domination on [the] beliefs and understandings’ upon which the communitarian must draw.
Take MacIntyre’s view first. He holds that ‘only by turning to and immersing ourselves in the knowledge of traditions—specifically, those that form the background to Western culture—can we achieve sound reasoning about justice’. These traditions (and especially the traditions MacIntyre identifies: Aristotle, St. Aquinas, Homer) are overwhelmingly patriarchal and were used historical to justify a patriarchal form of social organization. MacIntyre, however, papers over this problem by treating the traditions are if they were gender neutral, or as if all parties shared them historically.
On the other hand, MacIntyre argues that whatever answer one comes up with the question of justice will depend on ‘you yourself’ and how the tradition engages you. Okin then imagines how a young woman in the U.S. today, trying to deal with the balance of motherhood and career, might respond. She will first be told that her sex is ‘a deformity in nature’ (Aristotle), and then that she is to blame for the fall (Augustine). Not a helpful answer.
In short, MacIntyre’s theory fails to account for both the fact that the traditions he draws on are steeped with male domination and ideologies that justify it, and that as such they are largely silent or, worse, unhelpful, in helping understand women’s needs and situation. In short: women have to look elsewhere to answers to questions about justice.
Walzer’s view faces similar problems. He claims that ‘the principles of justice should be based on the shared understandings of each culture, and seeks to draw on our currently shared understanding to reach egalitarian conclusions about justice. But, Walzer’s relativist criterion faces similar problems.
Walzer ignores the way in which the contemporary gender system is relevantly like a caste system: it assigns privileges, duties and opportunities based on arbitrary characteristics assigned at birth and results in a system of domination. Whatever ‘shared understandings’ issue from this system will be either justify male domination, or not be objects of consensus. In our society, Okin notes, there is deep disagreement about gender and one cannot appeal to a shared understanding here. But given the different views in play, Walzer needs a theory of how to adjudicate between them. That he lacks.
In short,
The traditions of’ ‘our” patriarchal past have been of major significance in the perpetuation of the gendered social structures and practices that have resulted in continuing and serious injustices to women. Theories of justice that depend on traditions or on shared meanings—even if their intent is to be critical—cannot deal adequately with the problem of domination.
Nozick’s Libertarianism: Matriarchy, Slavery, and Dystopia
Okin then turns to examine libertarian theories of justice, and Robert Nozick’s theory in particular. She offers an extended reduction of the theory, which holds Nozick’s theory implies a sort of odd form of matriarchal dystopia. This is because, Okin argues, although, in order for a libertarian theory to function it must tacitly assume the family –‘a realm of private life in which the reproduction and nurturing needs of human beings are taken care of’—it cannot explicitly make sense of the family on its own terms. This is by far the most entertaining part of the book.
She begins by sketching Nozick’s theory. Nozick’s theory of justice depends on his entitlement theory, according to which a property right is generated if it is the result of the legitimate transfer of legitimately acquired holdings. They key part of this theory is the principle of acquisition, by which previously unowned things come to be held. The principle is only vaguely stated, and half-defended in Nozick. Nozick’s defense is Locekan (we will see this in a moment): it is premised on the belief that ‘each person owns himself’ and his labor, and, thus, one can thereby come to own the products of one’s labor.
This view, Okin argues, only works by neglecting two basic facts: (1) human beings are the products of human labor (specifically, reproductive labor), and (2) the natural ability to produce people is unequally distributed among persons (women hold a monopoly). Once these assumptions are acknowledged, ‘it renders Nozick’s entire theory contradictory to the point of absurdity at its pivotal point –the principle of just acquisition. Instead of a utopian minimal state, Nozick’s individuals are left in a condition of matriarchy, slavery, and dystopia.’
Why? In short, because Nozick’s theory cannot explain away the implication that people are owned at birth by those who make them.
Nozick allows that people can be owned by others: they can sell themselves into slavery. While Nozick tries to acknowledge this claim and reject the claim that people are owned by birth, his attempt to do so contradicts other parts of his theory.
For one, Nozick cannot ground the claim to original self ownership because: (A) he constituently prefers legitimately acquired property rights over all other claims, (B) he gives clear priority to those who affect others over those affected. Second, ‘there is nothing about a woman’s production of an infant that does not easily fulfill the conditions of the principle of acquisition’ –indeed, it is an ideal case. Thus, initial, it seems that Nozick’s theory implies that we are all the property of our mothers.
Okin considers and refutes two objections Nozick might make in response:
The Lockean Proviso Objection: One may acquire property only if there is enough remaining for others. Maternal monopoly over ownership thus violates the ownership of others.
Response: Nozick’s interpretation of the proviso rules this out: the rights of nonowners are only violated if they are left worse off than a baseline. But since without the mother’s labor (and ownership), the children wouldn’t exist. They (or anyone else denied ownership over them) couldn’t be made worse off.
The Reproductive Distinctiveness Objection: That reproductive labor is distinct from other kinds of production because it has a different goal.
Response: Nozick explicitly assumes that the producer alone is entitled to determine the purpose of the activity and reap its benefits. Thus, mothers could produce a child to ‘keep in a cage to amuse her’.
There is a further problem here as well. Nozick assume that infants and other vulnerable parties (the severely developmentally disabled, for example) lack rights because they lack the relevant capacities moral status (self-consciousness, a plan of life, etc.) that confer moral status. Infants thus have no rights to violate, and no complaint against her maternal owner.
Thus, Nozick’s theory degenerates into absurdity. It is difficult to even imagine the society it justifies. Therefore, we ought to reject the theory. Okin sums it up as follows:
Nozick can provide no reason that is consistent with the rest of his theory for distinguishing women’s reproductive abilities and labor from other kinds of abilities and labor; yet applying his principle of acquisition to this case leads into a morass of incoherence and self-contradiction. There would appear to be no alternative to rejecting the general principle that persons are entitled to whatever they produce, regardless of the needs of anybody else. Nozick has no recourse, then, other than to retreat from his entire entitlement theory of rights and the minimal state he builds on it, and to return to a more “patterned” derivation of justice that takes into account needs, deserts, and other human capacities as well as productivity.
Okin concludes by suggesting other forms of libertarianism—one’s not based on strong property rights but rather on egoistic views or the greater efficiency of a free market –don’t fare much better. They all ignore that much of human activity is direct, not towards self-gain in the market, but on the reproduction and nurturing of human beings.
Rawlsian Liberalism
So far, Okin has considered and rejected two kinds of theories –communitarian (but see Chapter 6 for a further discussion of Walzer) and libertarian as completely unhelpful for thinking about gender justice. In treating the next theory she considers—Liberalism, particularly Rawls’s conception of justice as fairness—Okin offers a much different take. While Rawls’s own account of his theory is inadequate, a consistent application ‘can lead us to challenge fundamentally the gender system of our society’.
Okin’s Critique of Rawls
Okin begins critically. Rawls theory is, again, like other theories of justice, largely fails to consider gender or the family. Parties in the original position are imagined as the heads of families and –while Rawls leaves open whether the head is a man or a woman, the discussion often is implicitly conducted as if men play this role. This assumption hinders Rawls’ theory from realizing justice within the family: with this assumption, those who are not the heads of households fail to be represented in the original position (Thus, although there are suggestions that the head of household assumption might be dropped, and that sexism is unjust, Rawls does not discuss these matters in depth).
What Rawls does do, positively, is include the family as ‘part of the subject matter of a theory of justice’. But, some of Rawls’ assumptions prevent him from realizing the radical potential of this inclusion and applying the principles he derives appropriately.
Rawls explicitly discusses the family in three parts of the book. It appears as (1) a link between generations, (2) an obstacle to fair equality of opportunity, and (3) the first school of moral development. In (3, Rawls assumes the family in some form, and assumes that that form of the family is just. Okin criticizes Rawls for this assumption. First, the contemporary family is not just. There are massive disparities in how income is distributed and how duties are assigned within the household. Second, while Rawls might respond that he does not assume ‘the family’ in its current form, he is ambiguous on this point: he does not specify in what form the family is assumed, or how the family becomes just.
Okin does think, though, that Rawls is correct in identifying the family as playing a crucial role in moral development. Rawls himself imagines a three-stage model: first, parents love their children, installing self-worth; second, as we grow, the family allows us to cultivate a sense of fairness, mutual thrust, and empathy, and serves as our first ‘association’ we participate it; third, we develop a sense of justice, which is founded in part on this empathy.
Okin thinks the description of the process is right, but
Actualizing this process of development depends on the assumption that families are just. Gendered families, however, are not just and indeed their injustice can work to undermine the development of moral persons with a sense of justice. Okin presses some difficult questions here:
Unless the households in which children are first nurtured, and see their first examples of human interaction, are based on equality and reciprocity rather than on dependence and domination—and the latter is too often the case—how can whatever love they receive from their parents make up for the injustice they see before them in the relationship between these same parents? How, in hierarchical families in which sex roles are rigidly assigned, are we to learn, as Rawls’s theory of moral development requires us, to “put ourselves into another’s place and find out what we would do in his position”? Unless they are parented equally by adults of both sexes, how will children of both sexes come to develop a sufficiently similar and well-rounded moral psychology to enable them to engage in the kind of deliberation about justice that is exemplified in the original position? If both parents do not share in nurturing activities, are they both likely to maintain in adult life the capacity for empathy that underlies a sense of justice? And finally, unless the household is connected by a continuum of just associations to the larger communities within which people are supposed to develop fellow feelings for each other, how will they grow up with the capacity for enlarged sympathies such as are clearly required for the practice of justice? Rawls’s neglect of justice within the family is clearly in tension with the requirements of his own theory of moral development. Family justice must be of central importance for social justice (99-100).
Justice as Fairness as a Tool for Feminist Criticism
Having developed her critique of Rawls, Okin shows how the theory can be useful for feminist causes. She begins by noting that a common feminist objection to the deployment of the original position –that it requires us to take an ‘outside’ perspective and, as a result, neglects difference—fails. The original position does not require us to take a perspective from nowhere but to force each person to take the good of all others into account. The veil of ignorance is a device to allow us to ‘think from the perspective of everybody, in the sense of each in turn’ because we do not know whose position we will in fact occupy. Thus, the original position allows us to avoid the problem of domination and the problem of partiality to the talented and fortunate that plague communitarian and libertarian views respectively.
What if, then, we drop the head of the household assumption, and read Rawls in such a way as to take seriously (a) the idea that behind the veil of ignorance parties do not know their sex, and (b) they decide on principles that govern the family?
Assume, first, that sex is a contingent and morally irrelevant feature that, like race, ought to be placed behind the veil of ignorance. If so, Rawls’ theory yields so important conclusions. For example, the second principle would recommend that, since offices and positions must be open to all, it is unjust to link particular roles or positions to sex. The gender system is thus illegitimate. Okin gives three illustrations of how Rawls’ principles specifically rule out the gender system
- The first principle guarantees ‘free choice of occupation’. But, women are often not free to choose their occupation. Rawls’ principles thus require ‘a radical rethinking’ of both the gendered division of labor in the family and also of the way this division is assumed by other institutions of society.
- The abolition of the gender system is essential for ensuring equal political liberties. Inequalities in the worth of these liberties must be to the benefit of the worst off, and inequalities in political representation are clearly not.
- Securing the social basis of self-respect requires establishing equality between the sexes, in order to ‘protect either sex from the need to pander to or servilely provide for the pleasures of the other’.
Having argues that ‘implicit in Rawls’ theory of justice [there is] a potential critique of gender-structured social institutions,’ Okin turns to question whether, in a gendered society, a person’s sex is ‘contingent and morally irrelevant’. She argues: (1) that it is not, given the way gender structures social reality, and (2) if that is right, ending gender is a prerequisite for achieving a just society.
Her argument begins by first noting that successfully reasoning from the original position requires that we adopt the viewpoint of a representative human being. But this requires the assumption that all parties have similar motivations and psychologies, which, in a gendered society, is not true. It is not true in such a society because our basic motivations, desires, points of view and relations to others are all shaped by gender. Thus, in a gendered society ‘there is such a thing as the distinct standpoint of women’. In order to take that standpoint into account adequately, in either politics or political philosophy, we need conditions in which ‘the full participation of both sexes’ becomes possible.
Creating such conditions requires, among other things, that men participate equally in child rearing and women be able to participate in society. This is essential for ensuring that children develop ‘complete personality’. Moreover, if a more feminist perspective were taken into account in the construction of the original position, the discussion of life plans would include more focus on relationships. Since basic respect is formed in early childhood, the parties in the original position would adopt principles which include ‘high quality, subsidized’ child care facilities’ as a fundamental requirement of justice.
Thus, Okin concludes:
The feminist potential of Rawls’s method of thinking and his conclusions is considerable. The original position, with the veil of ignorance hiding from its participants their sex as well as their other particular characteristics, talents, circumstances, and aims, is a powerful concept for challenging the gender structure. Once we dispense with the traditional liberal assumptions about public versus domestic, political versus nonpolitical spheres of life, we can use Rawls’s theory as a tool with which to think about how to achieve justice between the sexes both within the family and in society at large.
Looking at this issue – the public private distinction and the distinction between personal and political—is the subject of Okin’s next chapter.
Spheres of Justice and the Public/Private Distinction
In order to fully grasp the potential in liberal thought, Okin argues, “we must expose and elucidate the problems of a dichotomy that has been accepted as fundamental to liberal thought so far: that between the “public” world of political life and the marketplace and the “private” domestic world of family life and personal relations. That dichotomy obscures both the patterns of inequality between men and women, and thus the fact that the personal is the political.
Okin’s critique builds of arguments by Walzer and Unger. Although neither fully appreciates the feminist potential of their contribution, engaging with their thought forms a helpful starting point.
Walzer’s Theory
Walzer’s insistence that the family is a significant sphere of justice, and its explicit concern with the sexes and discrimination, Okin argues, set Walzer’s theory apart from other contemporary theories of justice. The theory has both strength and witnesses for feminist theory (one weakness – its reliance on shared meanings—was already discussed above). Okin begins with its strengths.
According to Walzer’s theory,
justice does not require the equal distribution of each social good within its respective sphere. What is just within each sphere depends on what that particular sphere is all about. In addition, the “complex equality” that he advocates requires that these spheres of justice be kept autonomous, in the sense that the inequality that exists within each must not be allowed to translate itself into inequalities within the others, creating what he calls “dominance.” (112).
Walzer takes this conception of justice as a radical and critical one. Walzer argues, for example, the gender structure violates his requirements for a society that is just according to the standard of separate spheres or complex equality, though Walzer is not always aware of this implication and how it stands in tension with his remarks about shared meanings discussed above.
To illustrate, in his explicit discussion of women, Walzer suggests that “the real domination of women has less to do with their familial place than with their exclusion from all other places.” But, Walzer pays little attention to how the continued operation of the gender structure within the family, and how this unequal distribution affects and creates unequal distributions outside the family
Some specific consequences of his view include: (1) wanting a society just enough to end paid domestic labor, (2) a distaste for public daycare, (3) a claim that housework should be partially shared. Not all of these claims are radical enough –for example, in (3), partial should be complete:
Sharing is necessary if Walzer’s separate spheres criterion for justice is to be fully met: if a society of equal men and women is to distribute its social goods in such a way that what happens within the family is not to dominate over and invade all the other spheres. The family can be perceived as a separate sphere only insofar as equality between the sexes reigns within it.
This follows from Walzer’s separate sphere criteria: the family and personal life can be regarded as just only if and insofar as it contains no inequalities, at least among its adult members, that translate into inequalities in other spheres.
On other issues, such as (2), Walzer remarks are completely backwards. About the latter, Okin writes:
Good day care, besides being a positive experience for the child, also helps to solve two other problems. Without it, the shared parenting solution is of no help to single parents; and good, subsidized day care can help to alleviate the obstacle that the inequality of family circumstances poses for equality of opportunity.
But, in spite of these short comings, Walzer’s views imply ‘a challenge to the public/domestic dichotomy, according to which marriage and the family are supposedly self-regulating, beyond the range of state intervention.’ And that is its important contribution.
(I will only mention two lessons Okin draws from Unger’s work: the need to conceptualize marriage as a kind of contract, and rethink that contract and its terms).
The Personal Is Political
Okin then links her critique of the public/domestic dichotomy to the slogan ‘the personal is political’. Okin traces the slogan to ‘anti-family’ feminism of the 60s, which argued the family must be ‘smashed’. But, Okin argues, the flaw in that argument is that the family is in no way inevitably tied to its gender structure. The current gender structure must, however, clearly be smashed.
The idea behind personal = political is that spaces often conceptualized as paradigmatically nonpolitical–sexuality, of housework, of child care and family life –are in fact deeply political. Okin’s argument has given one kind of support to this thesis: when theories of justice assume but ignore the family, they cannot successful develop a theory that accounts for gender oppression.
The personal is the political claim does not, however, entail either (a) a denial that privacy is important, or (b) that there are some reasonable distinctions between a public and a private sphere. Instead, they aim to challenge a particular conceptualization of the personal/political divide. Okin gives four reasons in support of that challenge:
- Power is central in family life. Okin discusses domestic violence as one example of how this is so.
- The domestic sphere is itself created by political decisions. The states is not ‘kept out’ of family life. Rather, they promote a specific kind of family by allowing for certain kinds of marriage and not others, by bestowing power and privilege upon men as heads of the household, or by creating special statutes for how crimes in the family should be prosecuted. In short, The issue is not whether, but how the state intervenes.
- The family is the place wherein we become gendered selves: Once we admit the idea that significant differences between women and men are created by the existing division of labor within the family, it becomes increasingly obvious just how political an institution the family is.
- The gender division of the family creates barriers against women in all the other spheres of life. Okin gives the example of how women’s voices are marginalized in the law because of conceptions that exist about women’s roles and authority being only properly exercised in the private sphere.
Having developed these arguments, Okin turns to a particular example that illustrates them in the next chapter: the case of marriage.
Vulnerability by Marriage
Okin then argues that marriage and the family form the pivot of a societal system of gender that renders women vulnerable to dependency, exploitation and abuse. To make that argument, she begins by introducing the work of Robert Goodin and Albert Hirchman.
According to Goodin, we have special obligations to protect parties who are vulnerable to us, and one of the criteria for determining which vulnerabilities are unacceptable is that one party finds it difficult to withdraw from the relationship. Hirchman builds on this insight, arguing that when a person has limited capacity to withdraw from a relationship or institution, their voice in that relationship tends to undercut the parties ability to exercise ‘voice’ and power in the relationship. Okin applies these insights to the case of marriage, arguing that marriage systematically makes women vulnerable:
crucial respects gender-structured marriage involves women in a cycle of socially caused and distinctly asymmetric vulnerability. The division of labor within marriage (except in rare cases) makes wives far more likely than husbands to be exploited both within the marital relationship and in the world of work outside the home. To a great extent and in numerous ways, contemporary women in our society are made vulnerable by marriage itself (138)
Okin’s describes this cycle as follows
They are first set up for vulnerability during their developing years by their personal (and socially reinforced) expectations that they will be the primary caretakers of children, and that in fulfilling this role they will need to try to attract and to keep the economic support of a man, to whose work life they will be expected to give priority. They are rendered vulnerable by the actual division of labor within almost all current marriages. They are disadvantaged at work by the fact that the world of wage work, including the professions, is still largely structured around the assumption that “workers” have wives at home. They are rendered far more vulnerable if they become the primary caretakers of children, and their vulnerability peaks if their marriages dissolve and they become single parents (138-9).
Let’s illustrate each stage with just a few brief examples:
- Vulnerability by Anticipation of Marriage:
Socialization and the culture in general place more emphasis on marriage for girls than for boys…This fact, together with their expectation of being the parent primarily responsible for children, clearly affects women’s decisions about the extent and field of education and training they will pursue, and their degree of purposiveness about careers….women’s choices about work are significantly affected from an early age by their expectations about the effects of family life on their work and of work on their family life….although a small minority of women are rapidly increasing the previously tiny percentages of women in the elite professions, the vast majority of women who work outside the home are still in low-paying jobs with little or no prospect of advancement. This fact is clearly related to girls’ awareness of the complexity they are likely to face in combining work with family life…[as a result] most women are, even before marriage, in an economic position that sets them up to become more vulnerable during marriage, and most vulnerable of all if their marriage ends.
- Vulnerability within Marriage
Women not only do more work (paid + unpaid), but there are also a great variety of distributions of both quantity and type of work within marriages. Okin devides her discussion into two cases:
- Predominantly houseworking wives: many housewives find basic chores unfulfilling. In addition, the work tends to be unscheduled, with no regular vacation. Moreover, women lack the opportunity to change jobs, for the family depends on them. Finally, the work is unpaid. This matters a great deal: being a paid laborer brings power and prestige in the relationship, meaning men tend to make more of the decisions and making women dependent. In the worst cases, this dependence effects a woman’s physical security, and it also makes it harder for her to exit.
- Predominantly wage working wives: This group tends to still be tasked with doing the majority of the housework. Not because they want to, but because men have the ability to enforce their wills. This fact significantly affect their prospects. First, they are more constrained in their choice and pursuit of occupation. Second, in part because they tend to work lower paying jobs, they have a smaller share of the power in the family. As a result, couples tend to privilege the career of the male partner.
- Vulnerability by Divorce:
After divorce, the average economic standing of men improves, and those of women tend to deteriorate. This is because: (1) women are usually tasked with child care after separation; (2) they have decreased earning capacity; (3) legal institutions tend to ignore the vulnerability of women and the fact that they have less human capital their partners (because of the situation described above), and as a result child support is often not awarded, too little or goes unpaid.
Okin concludes by summing up her findings about how marriage creates vulnerability. In the last chapter, she suggests some ways forward.
Towards Humanist Justice
Okin begins by summing up her findings:
The family is the linchpin of gender, reproducing it from one generation to the next. As we have seen, family life as typically practiced in our society is not just, either to women or to children. Moreover, it is not conducive to the rearing of citizens with a strong sense of justice. In spite of all the rhetoric about equality between the sexes, the traditional or quasi-traditional division of family labor still prevails. Women are made vulnerable by constructing their lives around the expectation that they will be primary parents; they become more vulnerable within marriages in which they fulfill this expectation, whether or not they also work for wages; and they are most vulnerable in the event of separation or divorce, when they usually take over responsibility for children without adequate support from their ex-husbands. Since approximately half of all marriages end in divorce, about half of our children are likely to experience its dislocations, often made far more traumatic by the socioeconomic consequences of both gender-structured marriage and divorce settlements that fail to take account of it. I have suggested that, for very important reasons, the family needs to be a just institution, and have shown that contemporary theories of justice neglect women and ignore gender (170-1).
She then turns to the question of how this injustice might be addressed. She argues that the issue is made difficult by two facts: (a) that there is widespread disagreement about the role of gender and the family and, (b) any solution must respect personal freedom.
Okin agrees that public policy must respect freedom. But, (1) our democratic ideal require the abolition of the gender system, and (2) we must only respect freedom insofar as it does not create systematic vulnerabilities.
In arguing for particular conclusions, she draws in particular on Rawls and Walzer. She frames the question this way:
Let us begin by asking what kind of arrangements persons in a Rawlsian original position would agree to regarding marriage, parental and other domestic responsibilities, and divorce. What kinds of policies would they agree to for other aspects of social life, such as the workplace and schools, that affect men, women, and children and relations among them? And let us consider whether these arrangements would satisfy Walzer’s separate spheres test—that inequalities in one sphere of life not be allowed to overflow into another. Will they foster equality within the sphere of family life?
Let’s look at the veil of ignorance first. Under this condition, suppose we do not know our conception of the good: we could be either feminists or traditionalists, or even children. This would already rule out certain traditional notion of marriage and women’s inferiority. But what substantive conclusions would the parties draw?
Okin thinks the central conclusion would be our endorsement of a basic model that would minimize gender. It would be so in certain specific ways.
First, Okin supposes that, in a just society, public policies and laws should generally assume no social differentiation between the sexes. Child and domestic labor responsibilities should be shared. She then asked what it would take to achieve such a society, or, to put it differently, what institutions would be in place to make such a society possible. She lists the following (1) high-quality- day care equally available to all provided by the state and mandatorily provided by large employers, with subsidized day care to make up the cost for poorer families; (2) parental leave for both parents; (3) a more just gender curriculum in schools, (4) an application of a strict egalitarian principle to child support. She also argues that such changes would change the gender norms of society more broadly, and help single mothers as well.
Second, Okin argues that such a society could be acceptable to those with traditional beliefs about marriage. A just society could allow that labor be divided in the household in the traditional way, so long as the vulnerable are protected. If it is just to allow this division of labor, then it is just to require that both partners have an equal entitlement to all the earnings in the household. Moreover this same principle should apply to cases of divorce.
Okin argues, however, that a genderless family would be more just than one that allowed the traditional labor division, for three reasons: (1) it is more just to women, (2) it better secures equality of opportunity, and (3) it would better facilitate a sense of justice and a just society more generally.
Okin concludes by arguing that her program would not be costly, at least in the long-term, and that whatever costs incurred would be by far offset by the moral progress of creating a more just world.
Political Not Metaphysical 