Classical Liberalism sees the person as possessing natural rights, including the right to property as well as liberty and equality. The free choice of the person with respect to these rights cannot be infringed on by the State, which possesses only the power expressly ceded to it by the group of people contracting with each other for the protection of their natural rights. Liberal feminists accept this paradigm.
There's only one problem. Women in classical liberal theory were not considered to be persons, as Carole Pateman thoroughly explains in her book The Sexual Contract. The solution for liberal feminists is to establish formal legal equality, extending "personhood" by fiat and expecting custom, history, and male bias to fall in behind the laws. This equality is defined as "equal opportunity" and appears fair on the surface. Women have the same chance to compete with men for jobs, education, and power.
Essentially, liberal feminists hold that "procedural" equality will be followed by "substantive" equality. Procedural equality is achievable, they hold, by bringing women into the male-constructed paradigm. This is adequate and fair, they insist, because men and women are not different, so what's good for the gander will be fine for the goose. Whatever men have will be sufficient also for women.
However, liberal feminism's faith in the efficacy of formal legal equality ignores the centuries of establishing a system and structure of male domination built on the old paradigm that women are not persons. Their acceptance of "equal opportunity" within an unequal paradigm forever limits the progress of women toward true substantive equal status.
Under classical liberalism, women are excluded from the marketplace and culture generally, maintained in a state of economic dependence, funneled into male-supervised institutions requiring sexual access such as marriage and prostitution, coerced into further male-controlled sexual access through tolerated war, the pornography industry and other forms of rape, excluded from political power, and ideologically dehumanized and marginalized. In short, they are bound and integrated into the system in an exploitive, oppressive way.
In insisting on full formal access, women may achieve equal opportunity and treatment with men within this male-constructed paradigm, and gradually, probably over centuries, change the systems and structures from within to remove the special obstacles they face. But these systems are tenacious, with deep roots in history and evolution. They are integral, constitutive, of western society. Is it enough that women achieve full access to this male paradigm? Is the solution really to treat women just like men?
Radical feminism analyzes women's situation from the viewpoint that "difference" between the sexes is immutable and conflictual. Biological "sameness" is unachievable and undesirable, and equality must accommodate difference.
Women will never be substantively equal under a "sameness" definition of equality. Substantive equality requires that the dominant paradigm no longer be male. It must be both female and male, while maintaining those distinctions and continually rebalancing the conflict.
For women, freedom has a special role, inextricably intertwined with equality.
Women's natural rights must be re-established, but they are seen by radical feminists to be different from men's in some respects. Women's first and foremost natural right is to free mate-choice. Re-establishing women's free mate-choice requires a complete paradigm change.
Society at base is built on two drives, for food and sex (reproduction). Men currently control the societal expression of both these drives. When women control their own reproduction and sexuality, they challenge society at base-level. Their freedom to freely, from an independent position, choose their mates results in the unbinding, the unraveling, of the whole paradigm, not only women's oppression.
Radical feminists, then, see the work of dismantling as reaching far more deeply into the underpinnings than equal opportunity statutes can remedy. They also see that the paradigms of atomism and individuality are irrelevant to the lives of women, who do not engage in male intrasexual competition and do not need to accept the standard of human isolation men have developed.
Therefore they insist on the need for stronger methods, and equality that emphasizes independence and liberation, including access to the tools of resistance against male sexual aggression.
Why do liberal feminists accept ta much more ineffective definition of equality? One reason is purely political -- they don't believe the male-dominated legislative bodies in their countries will permit the necessary quotas or the goal of parity. Quotas in employment for instance discriminate against men and therefore instate injustice in another form, they say.
However, it is both logical and effective to establish quotas in the short-term as a remedy for prior discrimination. The political objection that some individual men may suffer injustice during this term is only a way of resisting any diminution of the systemic advantages of men. It ignores the class nature of the required remediation.
True and complete equality is true and complete sharing of power to make the large decisions about how to maintain a thriving society. Therefore, a 50% parity requirement in all positions of power in the long term should be the goal of feminism. The rest will follow this massive shift in the paradigm.
Equality of outcome is the only kind of equality that will establish the equal existential value of women with men. It very likely means the end of the capitalist system, which is not life-affirming and is a demonstration of what happens when the female side of humanity is silenced. It means abortion, contraception, divorce, maternity leave, on demand. It means a profound change in our legitimizing ideologies such as religion.
Most importantly, it means families no longer choose their daughters' husbands and men with money no longer buy impoverished women for sexual or other services. Further, it means women are no longer pressured to enter into heterosexual relationships at all, or to reproduce. Social cohesion must no longer depend on the male exchange of women and a system built to prevent women from resisting.
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