Women's rights are, then, best conceived as multicultural claims. The idea behind this proposition is not simply the evident point that human beings are diverse, but that there is a crucial interplay to be revealed between the interests of women in their lived social contexts and universal ideals of gender justice. In recognising this interplay, attention to the particular in an interest theory of rights should be taken as a means to reconfigure taken-for-granted assumptions of universal justice at any given historical time. Moreover, attending to a back-and-forth interplay between the universal an the particular (Benhabib 2002) helps to defuse the assumption of a fundamental conflict between rights to sex equality and cultural autonomy in liberal theory, and its concomitant assumption that the goods pursued by members of non-liberal cultures are, in some sense, exceptionally sexist, irrational, unreasonable or exceptionally discriminatory. While it is undoubtedly true that few liberals would deny that rights must be interpreted in the light of actual human beings' experiences, emphasising the complexities involved in doing so enables us to respond to charges within feminism concerning substitutionalism, as well as to the now pervasive question of whether multiculturalism is bad for women. By exploring issues arising in liberal states around the world, each of which appears to exemplify the ‘dilemma’ that liberal philosophers perceive at the intersection of commitments to gender equality and cultural diversity, I presented women's rights as inherently multicultural by building upon Young's account of the ‘serialised’ condition of women's existence. From that conceptual starting point, I defended an interest theory of rights that integrates feminist and multicultural discourses in a world of imperfectly reconcilable values and uneven relations of power.