149 - Okin, Susan Moller
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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
Summary
Susan Moller Okin (1946–2004) was a feminist political philosopher and political theorist. Her Justice, Gender and the Family (1989) sought both to critique Rawls’s theory of justice, and to demonstrate that this theory might provide a valuable critical stance from which to criticize contemporary gender norms, especially as those norms affected equality within the family. Okin critiqued Rawls’s construction of his theory; his assumption that the parties to the original position were the heads of households, for example, was criticized as concealing relationships of power within the household that should be taken as relevant from the standpoint of justice. Rawls’s tools, though, were taken to have tremendous feminist potential. In particular, his recognition that the family was itself an important part of the basic structure of society, and that it had a role to play in socializing children with an appropriate sense of social justice, were both important insights that could be the starting point for feminist analyses of family life. Okin argued that feminist political philosophy could apply the methods and concepts introduced by Rawls – including the concepts of the original position and the veil of ignorance – to produce a radical argument for the injustice of our gender norms.
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- The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon , pp. 577 - 578Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014