Dahl’s feminism?

Abstract

This tribute to the life work of Robert A. Dahl briefly analyzes the place of women, and issues raised by the status and treatment of women, in the sweep of his iconic contributions to democratic theory. The article traces his inclusion of women from the beginning to the end of his writings on politics in democracies and, in a more critical vein, casts light on some central concepts in his work that the insights and information of feminist scholarship would deepen, modify, or question.

Keywords:

• Dahl
• democracy
• women
• feminism
• power

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. My PhD. thesis became Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (MacKinnon 1989).

2. This locution is pervasive in his work but well-illustrated in Toward Democracy (Dahl 1997, p. 175) and ‘Political Equality, Then and Now’ (Dahl 2006b, p. 465).

3. One of his most engaging descriptions of this theme appears in After The Revolution? (Dahl 1970, p. 46).

4. See also After the Revolution? (Dahl 1970, pp. 64–65).

5. For his whole initial discussion, see pp. 5–15.

6. Rosaldo and Lamphere (1974), Draper (1975) and Leacock (1978) with the later Lee (1992) and the subsequent Guenther (2007) to the current McCall and Widerquist (2015).

7. For the systematic inadequacies of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to women’s unequal status and treatment, see Sex Equality (MacKinnon 2001/2007).

8. Literature from mainly the mid-1990s on gaining steam after 2000 is reviewed and discussed, e.g. Galligan (2006), Rodriguez-Ruiz and Rubio-Marin (2009) ‘Gender parity is justified … as a democratic requirement’, at p. 1195, Crook and Messing-Mathie (2013).

9. One example is Democracy and Its Critics (Dahl 1989a, p. 115).

10. For further exploration, see ‘Women’s Status, Men’s States’ (MacKinnon 2007).