Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory

This volume brings together exciting and provocative new feminist readings of famous classic and contemporary texts from Plato to Rawls. The feminist scholars focus on neglected arguments and silences in the texts and raise fundamentally important questions about the significance of sexual difference in the great works of political theory. A wide diversity of feminist approaches and theoretical frameworks are represented, forming a rich variety of interpretations and argument about such questions as the patriarchal construction of central political categories, the relation between public and private life, and the problem of equality and difference, including differences among women.

Introduction 1. Philosopher Queens and Private Wives: Plato on Women and the Family / Susan Moller Okin 2. Aristotle: Defective Males, Hierarchy, and the Limits of Politics / Arlene Saxonhouse 3. God Hath Ordained to Man a Helper: Hobbes, Patriarchy and Conjugal Right / Carole Pateman 4. Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke and the Attack on Patriarchy / Melissa A. Butler 5. Rousseau and Modern Feminism / Lynda Lange 6. The Oppressed State of My Sex: Wollstonecraft on Reason, Feeling and Equality / Moira Gaten 7. On Hegel, Women and Irony / Seyla Benhabib 8. Masculine Marx / Christine Di Stefano 9. Marital Slavery and Friendship: John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women / Mary Lyndon Shanley 10. John Rawls: Justice as Fairness For Whom? / Susan Moller Okin 11. Simone de Beauvoir and Women: Just Who Does She Think 'We' Is? / Elizabeth V. Spelman 12. Foucault and Feminism: Toward a Politics of Difference / Jana Sawicki 13. Hannah Arendt and Feminist Politics / Mary G. Dietz 14. What's Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender / Nancy Fraser