Religion and women’s rights: Susan Moller Okin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the multiple feminist liberal traditions

ABSTRACT

We trace Susan Moller Okin’s reception of Mary Wollstonecraft with respect to the relationship between religion and feminist liberalism, by way of manuscripts housed at Somerville College, Oxford and Harvard University. These unpublished documents – dated from 1967 to 1998 – include her Somerville advising file, with papers dated from 1967 to 1979; her 1970 Oxford B.Phil. thesis on the feminist political theory of Wollstonecraft, William Thompson, and J.S. Mill; her teaching notes on Wollstonecraft originating in 1978, for her course ‘Gender and Political Theory’ held at Brandeis and Stanford in the 1980s and 1990s; and her correspondence with John Rawls, dated from 1985 to 1998. A consistently secular feminist liberal, Okin had a blind spot with regard to religion, which led her to misinterpret Wollstonecraft’s theology as contradictory to her consequentialist arguments for women’s rights. Wollstonecraft virtually disappeared from Okin’s published corpus, overshadowed by the secular utilitarian feminist liberal J.S. Mill. Wollstonecraft nevertheless remained a deep philosophical source for both the method and the principle behind Okin’s distinctive brand of feminist liberalism. Okin’s reception of Wollstonecraft suggests that the fissures caused by religious conflict in modern politics have not only generated multiple liberalisms, as Rawls argued, but also multiple feminist liberalisms.

KEYWORDS:

• Susan Moller Okin
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• feminism
• liberalism
• religion

Acknowledgements

We thank Anne Manuel and Kate O’Donnell of Somerville College, Oxford, as well as the librarians at Schlesinger Library and the Archives of Harvard University for enabling our study of manuscripts concerning Susan Moller Okin. Personal interviews (in person or by email) with Essaka Joshua, Lyndall Gordon, Elizabeth Frazer, Sophie Smith, Alan Coffee, S. Sara Monoson, Brooke Ackerly, Michael Walzer, Alan Ryan, Paul Weithman, and Steven B. Smith provided invaluable background for understanding Moller Okin’s life and work. With respect to our historical methodology for this project, we are grateful to David Armitage for his insights. Finally, we are indebted to Richard Whatmore, editor of HEI, for selecting such helpful referees.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Amy Baehr, ‘Toward a New Feminist Liberalism: Okin, Rawls, and Habermas’, Hypatia 11 (1996): 49–66; Ruth Abbey, The Return of Feminist Liberalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s, 2011), 22–119. We use the term ‘feminist liberalism’ to mean – most broadly – a feminist approach to theorizing liberalism that puts first feminism (or the critique of patriarchal cultures and institutions that privilege men over women) and puts second liberalism (or the idea that equality and liberty should be guaranteed to each and every member of a political community). The point of feminist liberalism is to apply feminist criticism to liberalism to (1) expose its failure to realize equality and liberty for each and all, and to (2) propose correctives to this historic failure. This definition is broad enough to resonate with both Wollstonecraft’s and Okin’s criticisms of patriarchy and the other shortcomings of liberal ideas and institutions, even given their different historical circumstances.

2 Sandrine Bergès, The Routledge Guidebook to Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (London: Routledge, 2013), 15.

3 Eileen Hunt Botting, Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 8.

4 Susan Moller, ‘The Feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Thompson and John Stuart Mill. An Account of Its Development and of Its Relations to the Progressive Political Theory of Its Time’, chapter two, pp. 18–45, Susan Moller Okin Papers, Box 2, Folder 8, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.

5 Punctuation and style of manuscripts have been preserved throughout. Susan Moller Okin, ‘Letter to Barbara Craig, November 9, 1979’. Susan Moller File, Somerville College Archives, Oxford, U.K.

6 Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, with a new introduction by Debra Satz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 341, n2.

7 Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 14, 61, 67.

8 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. with an introduction by Eileen Hunt Botting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 115. Eileen Hunt Botting, Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 155–75. For a classic study of Wollstonecraft’s religiosity in relation to her theory of women’s rights and the evolution of feminism more broadly, see Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially 93 ff. For a ground-breaking analysis of the place of reason in Wollstonecraft’s theologically-informed political theory, see Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 45–52. For an informative contrast of Wollstonecraft’s rational theology with Rousseau’s natural religion, see Martina Reuter, ‘“Like a Fanciful Kind of Half Being”: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Criticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, Hypatia 29 (2014): 925–41.

9 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 226. For a powerful reading of Wollstonecraft’s conception of rights as inseparable from duties, see Lena Halldenius, Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism: Independence, Rights, and the Experience of Unfreedom (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015), especially chapter three, ‘Rights’. While Halldenius locates Wollstonecraft at the beginning of a ‘feminist republican’ tradition, it is also apt to place her at the fore of the development of a ‘feminist liberal’ tradition, in part due to this deontological grounding for her rights theory. We follow Judith Shklar, one of Okin’s teachers at Harvard, in treating twentieth-century liberalisms as iterations of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century republicanisms, especially the influential American varieties. Liberalism, in its most general conceptual form, is not a ‘moral free-for-all’, according to Shklar, but ‘in fact, extremely difficult and constraining’ due to its commitment to a ‘self-restraining tolerance’ or duty to respect other people’s equal rights to different opinions on vital matters such as religion. See Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1984), especially 5, but also 67–71, 102, 173–9.

10 Botting, Family Feuds, 168; Ruth Abbey, ‘Are Women Human? Wollstonecraft’s Defense of Rights for Women’, in Rights of Woman (see note 8), 235; Botting, Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights, 46–57, 77–89.

11 Moller, ‘The Feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft’, 18.

12 Ibid., 44.

13 Rogers M. Smith, ‘Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America’, The American Political Science Review 87 (1993): 549–66; John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 199–200.

14 Eric Gregory, ‘Before the Original Position: The Neo-Orthodox Theology of the Young John Rawls’, The Journal of Religious Ethics 35 (2007): 179–206.

15 John Rawls, A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, with “On My Religion”, ed. Thomas Nagel, introduction by Joshua Cohen, and commentaries by Robert Merrihew Adams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

16 Samuel Moyn, ‘Shklar’s Critique of Cold War Liberalism’, in Between Utopia and Realism: Judith N. Shklar, ed. Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). Work remains to be done on the comparison of Okin with Shklar, who was on her dissertation committee at Harvard.

17 Sophie Smith, ‘Rawls and Liberal Feminism’ (paper presented at the 2017 American Political Science Association Meeting).

18 A classic example is Ellen Carol DuBois, ed., The Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992).

19 Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, 106–9.

20 Okin’s Justice, Gender, and the Family predated elements of the theory of implicit (or unconscious) gender bias developed by psychologists in the 1990s. Elizabeth Beaumont, ‘Gender Justice v. The “Invisible Hand” of Gender Bias in Law and Society’, Hypatia 31 (2016): 668–86, at 672.

21 Moller File, Somerville College Archives.

22 Moller, ‘The Feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft’, iii.

23 John Plamenatz, Man and Society, Volume II: Political and Social Theory, Bentham through Marx (New York: McGraw Hill, 1963); Anthony Quinton, Political Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1967); Alan Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (New York: Basingstroke, 1970); Anthony Quinton, Utilitarian Ethics (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 1973). Anthony Quinton, ‘Supervisory Progress Note on S. Moller, 7-12-69’, Moller File, Somerville College Archives.

24 Plamenatz, Man and Society, Volume II, 62–3, 65.

25 Barbara Craig, ‘Letter to P.E. Blaikley, Esq., The Association of Commonwealth Universities, 12-3-1968’, Moller File, Somerville College Archives.

26 Quinton, ‘Supervisory Progress Note on S. Moller, 13-7-68’ and ‘Supervisory Progress Note on S. Moller, 12-7-69’, Moller File, Somerville College Archives.

27 Quinton, ‘Supervisory Progress Note on S. Moller, 17-12-67’, Moller File, Somerville College Archives.

28 Craig, ‘Letter of Recommendation for Susan Moller to the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 6-1-71’, Moller File, Somerville College Archives.

29 Brenda Ayres, Betwixt and Between: The Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Anthem, 2017), 65–116.

30 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, ed. and tr. H.M. Parshley (London: Picador, 1988), 152, 159.

31 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1983), 83–5.

32 Charles W. Hagelman, ‘Introduction’, in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Charles W. Hagelman (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967), 21.

33 Quinton, ‘Supervisory Progress Note on S. Moller, 11-7-70’, Moller File, Somerville College Archives.

34 Quinton, ‘Supervisory Progress Note on S. Moller, 29-3-69’, Moller File, Somerville College Archives.

35 Plamenatz, Man and Society, Volume II, 62–3.

36 Ibid.

37 Moller, ‘The Feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft’, 38.

38 Ibid.

39 Plamenatz, Man and Society, Volume II, 65–6.

40 Moller, ‘Letter to Mrs. Craig, October 4, 1970’, Moller File, Somerville College Archives.

41 Ibid.

42 Moller, ‘The Feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft’, 17.

43 Ibid., 31.

44 Ibid., 18.

45 Ibid., 19.

46 Ibid., 26.

47 Ibid., 26–7.

48 Ibid., 20.

49 Ibid., 21.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid., 43.

52 Ibid., 44.

53 Ibid., 43.

54 Ibid., 23.

55 Botting, Family Feuds, 168; Abbey, ‘Are Women Human?’, 235.

56 Moller, ‘The Feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft’, 44.

57 Lesley Brown, ‘Note to Barbara Craig’ (c. 1979), Moller File, Somerville College Archives.

58 Okin, ‘Letter to Barbara Craig, November 9, 1979’, Moller File, Somerville College Archives.

59 Susan Moller Okin, ‘John Stuart Mill’s Feminism: “The Subjection of Women” and the Improvement of Mankind’, New Zealand Journal of History 7 (1973): 105–27; Susan Moller Okin, ‘Philosopher Queens and Private Wives: Plato on Women and the Family’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 6 (1977): 345–69; Susan Moller Okin, ‘Rousseau’s Natural Woman’, The Journal of Politics 41 (1979): 393–416.

60 Okin, ‘Wollstonecraft 11/78’ in file, ‘WOLLSTONECRAFT (+Paine) for G. and P.T.’, Okin Papers, Box 20, Folder 3, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.

61 Ibid.

62 Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, 5.

63 Ibid., 341.

64 Okin, ‘Wollstonecraft 11/78’.

65 Miriam Brody Kramnick, ‘Introduction’, in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody Kramnick (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1975), 51.

66 Okin, ‘Wollstonecraft 11/78’.

67 Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, 77.

68 Ibid., 95–9.

69 Ibid., 99.

70 Ibid., 197, 230.

71 Ibid., 217.

72 Ibid., 208–9.

73 Ibid., 216.

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid., 230.

76 Okin, ‘Wollstonecraft 11/78’.

77 Ibid.

78 Ibid.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid.

82 Ibid.

83 Kramnick, ‘Introduction’, 72.

84 At the top of the page, she scribbled her intention to add the following item to the list in a future year: ‘do away with dist[inctio]ns of sex except when love animates the behavior’. Okin, ‘Import. pts. about M.W.’s V.’, in file, ‘WOLLSTONECRAFT (+Paine) for G. and P.T.’, Okin Papers, Box 20, Folder 3, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.

85 Okin, ‘Re-reading of Wollstonecraft, 2/81’, in file, ‘WOLLSTONECRAFT (+Paine) for G. and P.T.’, Okin Papers, Box 20, Folder 3, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.

86 Prior to this point, she had taught a course titled ‘Women in Western Political Thought’. See General Catalogue, Brandeis University, vol. 1981–82, p. 125.

87 It is for this reason that we believe that the Schlesinger Library’s cataloguing of this file ‘WOLLSTONECRAFT (+ Paine) for G. and P.T.’ as part of her Stanford years is only partly correct.

88 See the inventory for the Okin Papers at the Schlesinger Library: http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~sch01405.

89 Okin, ‘Import. pts. about M.W.’s V.’

90 Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, 125, 153–5, 170.

91 Ibid., 35.

92 Okin, ‘Re-reading of Wollstonecraft, 2/81’.

93 Okin, ‘Wollstonecraft: Courage!’ in file, ‘WOLLSTONECRAFT (+Paine) for G. and P.T.’, Okin Papers, Box 20, Folder 3, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.

94 Okin, ‘Wollstonecraft: Courage!’ Because Okin engaged Genevieve Lloyd’s The Man of Reason (1984) in these seminar notes, and subsequently in Justice, Gender, and the Family (57) we date them to 1984–89.

95 Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, 35.

96 Moller, ‘The Feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft’, 17.

97 Ibid., 17, 37.

98 Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, 14, 61, 67.

99 Ibid., 90–3. See also Susan Moller Okin, ‘Justice and Gender’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 16 (1987): 42–72. In this article, as in Justice, Gender, and the Family, she briefly referenced Wollstonecraft among the ‘bold feminists’ who had challenged ‘the justice of gender’ and ‘the gender system’ in ‘Western political thought’ (43).

100 Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, 89–109, 170–86.

101 Ibid., 93.

102 Ibid., 90.

103 Ibid., 174–5.

104 Ibid., 186.

105 John Rawls, ‘Letter to Susan Moller Okin, 13 April 1985’, Okin Papers, Box 1, Folder 14, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.

106 Susan Moller Okin, ‘Letter to John Rawls, July 28, 1993’, 3, The Papers of John Rawls, Box 40, Folder 23, Harvard University Archives.

107 Okin, ‘Letter to John Rawls, December 24, 1991’, Okin Papers, Box 1, Folder 14, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.

108 Rawls, ‘Letter to Susan Moller Okin, 20 January 1992’, Okin Papers, Box 1, Folder 14, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.

109 Ibid. Rawls ultimately published only an extended footnote on abortion in Political Liberalism, 243–4, n32. More work remains to be done on the Okin-Rawls correspondence and its impact on their respective views on abortion.

110 Susan Moller Okin, ‘Review of John Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993)’, The American Political Science Review 87 (1993): 1010–11, at 1011.

111 Alison Jaggar, ‘Okin and the Challenge of Essentialism’, in Toward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin, ed. Debra Satz and Rob Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 11 [Oxford scholarship online].

112 Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, 176–8.

113 Joseph Raz, ‘How Perfect Should One Be? And Whose Culture Is?’ in Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 98.

114 Moller, ‘The Feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft’, 27; Okin, ‘Re-reading of Wollstonecraft, 2/81’.

115 Okin, ‘Letter to Mrs. Barbara Craig, November 9, 1979’.

116 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1.

117 Susan Moller Okin, ‘Gender Inequality and Cultural Differences’, Political Theory 22 (1994): 5–24; Susan Moller Okin, ‘Feminism, Women’s Human Rights, and Cultural Differences’, Hypatia 13 (1998): 32–52.

118 Martha Nussbaum, ‘A Plea for Difficulty’, in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (see note 113), 108–9.

119 Okin, ‘Reply’, in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (see note 113), 129.

120 Ibid., 130.

121 Ibid. See also the work of her former doctoral advisee from Stanford, Brooke Ackerly, such as ‘Girls Rising for Human Rights: Not Magic, Politics’, Journal of International Political Theory 12 (2016): 26–41.

122 Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, 60–1.

123 Bonnie Honig, ‘My Culture Made Me Do It’, in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (see note 113), 39.

124 Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxii–xxv, 471.