Gender and Modernity

Gender and development is an interdisciplinary field of research and applied study that
implements a feminist approach to understanding and addressing the disparate impact
that economic development and globalization have on people based upon their location,
gender, class background, and other socio-political identities. A strictly economic approach to
development views a country's development in quantitative terms such as job creation,
inflation control, and high employment – all of which aim to improve the ‘economic
wellbeing’ of a country and the subsequent quality of life for its people. In terms of economic
development, quality of life is defined as access to necessary rights and resources including
but not limited to quality education, medical facilities, affordable housing, clean
environments, and low crime rate. Gender and development considers many of these same
factors; however, gender and development emphasizes efforts towards understanding how
multifaceted these issues are in the entangled context of culture, government, and
globalization. Accounting for this need, gender and development
implements ethnographic research, research that studies a specific culture or group of people
by physically immersing the researcher into the environment and daily routine of those being
studied, in order to comprehensively understand how development policy and practices affect
the everyday life of targeted groups or areas.
The history of this field dates back to the 1950s, when studies of economic development first
brought women into its discourse, focusing on women only as subjects of welfare policies –
notably those centered on food aid and family planning. The focus of women in development
increased throughout the decade, and by 1962, the United Nations General Assembly called
for the Commission on the Status of Women to collaborate with the Secretary General and a
number of other UN sectors to develop a longstanding program dedicated to women's
advancement in developing countries. A decade later, feminist economist ’s pioneering
book Women’s Role in Economic Development (1970) was published, radically shifting
perspectives of development and contributing to the birth of what eventually became the
gender and development field.
Since Boserup's consider that development affects men and women differently, the study of
gender's relation to development has gathered major interest amongst scholars and
international policymakers. The field has undergone major theoretical shifts, beginning
with Women in Development (WID), shifting to Women and Development (WAD), and
finally becoming the contemporary Gender and Development (GAD). Each of these
frameworks emerged as an evolution of its predecessor, aiming to encompass a broader range
of topics and social science perspectives. In addition to these frameworks, international
financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
have implemented policies, programs, and research regarding gender and development,
contributing a neoliberal and smart economics approach to the study. Examples of these
policies and programs include Structural Adjustment
Programs (SAPs), microfinance, outsourcing, and privatizing public enterprises, all of which
direct focus towards economic growth and suggest that advancement towards gender equality
will follow. These approaches have been challenged by alternative perspectives such
as Marxism and ecofeminism, which respectively reject international capitalism and the
gendered exploitation of the environment via science, technology, and capitalist
production. Marxist perspectives of development advocate for the redistribution of wealth
and power in efforts to reduce global labor exploitation and class inequalities, while
ecofeminist perspectives confront industrial practices that accompany development,
including deforestation, pollution, environmental degradation, and ecosystem destruction.
EARLY APPROACHES

Women in development

The term “women in development” was originally coined by a Washington-based network of

female development professionals in the early 1970s who sought to question trickle
down existing theories of development by contesting that economic development had
identical impacts on men and women. The Women in Development movement (WID) gained
momentum in the 1970s, driven by the resurgence of women's movements in developed
countries, and particularly through liberal feminists striving for equal rights and labour
opportunities in the United States. Liberal feminism, postulating that women's disadvantages
in society may be eliminated by breaking down customary expectations of women by
offering better education to women and introducing equal opportunity programmes, had a
notable influence on the formulation of the WID approaches.
The focus of the 1970s feminist movements and their repeated calls for employment
opportunities in the development agenda meant that particular attention was given to the
productive labour of women, leaving aside reproductive concerns and social welfare. This
approach was pushed forward by WID advocates, reacting to the general policy environment
maintained by early colonial authorities and post-war development authorities, wherein
inadequate reference to the work undertook by women as producers was made, as they were
almost solely identified as their roles as wives and mothers. The WID's opposition to this
“welfare approach” was in part motivated by the work of Danish economist Ester Boserup in
the early 1970s, who challenged the assumptions of the said approach and highlighted the
role women by women in the agricultural production and economy.
Reeves and Baden (2000) point out that the WID approach stresses the need for women to
play a greater role in the development process. According to this perspective, women's active
involvement in policymaking will lead to more successful policies overall. Thus, a dominant
strand of thinking within WID sought to link women's issues with development, highlighting
how such issues acted as impediments to economic growth; this “relevance” approach
stemmed from the experience of WID advocates which illustrated that it was more effective if
demands of equity and social justice for women were strategically linked to mainstream
development concerns, in an attempt to have WID policy goals taken up by development
agencies. The Women in Development approach was the first contemporary movement to
specifically integrate women in the broader development agenda and acted as the precursor to
later movements such as the Women and Development (WAD), and ultimately, the Gender
and Development approach, departing from some of the criticized aspects imputed to the
WID.
Criticism

The WID movement faced a number of criticisms; such an approach had in some cases the
unwanted consequence of depicting women as a unit whose claims are conditional on its
productive value, associating increased female status with the value of cash income in
women's lives. The WID view and similar classifications based on Western feminism,
applied a general definition to the status, experiences and contributions of women and the
solutions for women in Third World countries. Furthermore, the WID, although it advocated
for greater gender equality, did not tackle the unequal gender relations and roles at the basis
of women's exclusion and gender subordination rather than addressing the stereotyped
expectations entertained by men. Moreover, the underlying assumption behind the call for the
integration of the Third World women with their national economy was that women were not
already participating in development, thus downplaying women's roles in household
production and informal economic and political activities. The WID was also criticized for its
views on the fact that women's status will improve by moving into “productive employment”,
implying that the move to the “modern sector” need to be made from the “traditional” sector
to achieve self-advancement, further implying that “traditional” work roles often occupied by
women in the developing world were inhibiting to self-development.

WOMEN IN DEVELOPMENT

Women and development (WAD) is an theoretical and practical approach to development. It

was introduced into gender studies scholarship in the second half of the 1970s, following its
origins, which can be traced to the First World Conference on Women in Mexico City in
1975, organized by the UN. It is a departure from the previously predominant theory, WID
(Women in Development) and is often mistaken for WID, but has many distinct
characteristics.
Theoretical approach
WAD arose out of a shift in thinking about women's role in development, and concerns about
the explanatory limitations of modernization theory. While previous thinking held that
development was a vehicle to advance women, new ideas suggested that development was
only made possible by the involvement of women, and rather than being simply passive
recipients of development aid, they should be actively involved in development projects.
WAD took this thinking a step further and suggested that women have always been an
integral part of development, and did not suddenly appear in the 1970s as a result of
exogenous development efforts. The WAD approach suggests that there be women-only
development projects that were theorized to remove women from the patriarchal hegemony
that would exist if women participated in development alongside men in a patriarchal culture,
though this concept has been heavily debated by theorists in the field. In this sense, WAD is
differentiated from WID by way of the theoretical framework upon which it was built. Rather
than focus specifically on women's relationship to development, WAD focuses on the
relationship between patriarchy and capitalism. This theory seeks to understand women's
issues from the perspectives of neo-Marxism and dependency theory, though much of the
theorizing about WAD remains undocumented due to the persistent and pressing nature of
development work in which many WAD theorists engage.
Practical approach
The WAD paradigm stresses the relationship between women, and the work that they
perform in their societies as economic agents in both the public and domestic spheres. It also
emphasizes the distinctive nature of the roles women play in the maintenance and
development of their societies, with the understanding that purely the integration of women
into development efforts would serve to reinforce the existing structures of inequality present
in societies overrun by patriarchal interests. In general, WAD is thought to offer a more
critical conceptualization of women's position compared to WID.
The WAD approach emphasizes the distinctive nature of women's knowledge, work, goals,
and responsibilities, as well as advocating for the recognition of their distinctiveness. This
fact, combined with a recognized tendency for development agencies to be dominated by
patriarchal interests, is at the root of the women-only initiatives introduced by WAD
subscribers.
Criticism

Some of the common critiques of the WAD approach include concerns that the women-only
development projects would struggle, or ultimately fail, due to their scale, and the
marginalized status of these women. Furthermore, the WAD perspective suffers from a
tendency to view women as a class, and pay little attention to the differences among women
(such as feminist concept of intersectionality), including race and ethnicity, and prescribe
development endeavors that may only serve to address the needs of a particular group. While
an improvement on WID, WAD fails to fully consider the relationships between patriarchy,
modes of production, and the marginalization of women. It also presumes that the position of
women around the world will improve when international conditions become more equitable.
Additionally, WAD has been criticized for its singular preoccupation with the productive side
of women's work, while it ignores the reproductive aspect of women's work and lives.
Therefore, WID/WAD intervention strategies have tended to concentrate on the development
of income-generating activities without taking into account the time burdens that such
strategies place on women. Value is placed on income-generating activities, and none is
ascribed to social and cultural reproduction.

GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT

Theoretical approach
The Gender and Development (GAD) approach focuses on the socially
constructed differences between men and women, the need to challenge existing gender roles
and relations, and the creation and effects of class differences on development. This approach
was majorly influenced by the writings of academic scholars such as Oakley (1972) and
Rubin (1975), who argue the social relationship between men and women have
systematically subordinated women, along with economist scholars Lourdes Benería and
Amartya Sen (1981), who assess the impact of colonialism on development and gender
inequality. They state that colonialism imposed more than a 'value system' upon developing
nations, it introduced a system of economics 'designed to promote capital accumulation
which caused class differentiation'.
GAD departs from WID, which discussed women's subordination and lack of inclusion in
discussions of international development without examining broader systems of gender
relations. Influenced by this work, by the late 1970s, some practitioners working in the
development field questioned focusing on women in isolation. GAD challenged the WID
focus on women as an important ‘target group’ and ‘untapped resources’ for
development. GAD marked a shift in thinking about the need to understand how women and
men are socially constructed and how ‘those constructions are powerfully reinforced by the
social activities that both define and are defined by them.’ GAD focuses primarily on the
gendered division of labor and gender as a relation of power embedded in
institutions. Consequently, two major frameworks, ‘Gender roles’ and ‘social relations
analysis’, are used in this approach. 'Gender roles' focuses on the social construction of
identities within the household; it also reveals the expectations from ‘maleness and
femaleness’ in their relative access to resources. 'Social relations analysis' exposes the social
dimensions of hierarchical power relations embedded in social institutions, as well as its
determining influence on ‘the relative position of men and women in society.’ This relative
positioning tends to discriminate against women.
Unlike WID, the GAD approach is not concerned specifically with women, but with the way
in which a society assigns roles, responsibilities and expectations to both women and men.
GAD applies gender analysis to uncover the ways in which men and women work together,
presenting results in neutral terms of economics and efficiency. In an attempt to create gender
equality (denoting women having the same opportunities as men, including ability to
participate in the public sphere), GAD policies aim to redefine traditional gender role
expectations. Women are expected to fulfill household management tasks, home-based
production as well as bearing and raising children and caring for family members. The role of
a wife is largely interpreted as 'the responsibilities of motherhood.' Men, however, are
expected to be breadwinners, associated with paid work and market production. In the labor
market, women tend to earn less than men. For instance, 'a study by the Equality and Human
Rights Commission found massive pay inequities in some United Kingdom's top finance
companies, women received around 80 percent less performance-related pay than their male
colleagues.' In response to pervasive gender inequalities, Beijing Platform for
Action established gender mainstreaming in 1995 as a strategy across all policy areas at all
levels of governance for achieving gender equality.
GAD has been largely utilized in debates regarding development but this trend is not seen in
the actual practice of developmental agencies and plans for development. Caroline
Moser claims WID persists due to the challenging nature of GAD, but Shirin M. Rai counters
this claim noting that the real issue lies in the tendency to overlap WID and GAD in policy.
Therefore, it would only be possible if development agencies fully adopted GAD language
exclusively. Caroline Moser developed the Moser Gender Planning Framework for GAD-
oriented development planning in the 1980s while working at the Development Planning Unit
of the University of London. Working with Caren Levy, she expanded it into a methodology
for gender policy and planning. The Moser framework follows the Gender and Development
approach in emphasizing the importance of gender relations. As with the WID-based Harvard
Analytical Framework, it includes a collection of quantitative empirical facts. Going further,
it investigates the reasons and processes that lead to conventions of access and control. The
Moser Framework includes gender roles identification, gender needs assessment,
disaggregating control of resources and decision making within the household, planning for
balancing work and household responsibilities, distinguishing between different aims in
interventions and involving women and gender-aware organizations in planning.
Criticism
GAD has been criticized for emphasizing the social differences between men and women
while neglecting the bonds between them and also the potential for changes in roles. Another
criticism is that GAD does not dig deeply enough into social relations and so may not explain
how these relations can undermine programs directed at women. It also does not uncover the
types of trade-offs that women are prepared to make for the sake of achieving their ideals of
marriage or motherhood. Another criticism is that the GAD perspective is theoretically
distinct from WID, but in practice, programs seem to have elements of both. Whilst many
development agencies are now committed to a gender approach, in practice, the primary
institutional perspective remain focused on a WID approach. Specifically, the language of
GAD has been incorporated into WID programs. There is a slippage in reality where gender
mainstreaming is often based in a single normative perspective as synonymous to
women. Development agencies still advance gender transformation to mean economic
betterment for women. Further criticisms of GAD is its insufficient attention to culture, with
a new framework being offered instead: Women, Culture and Development (WCD). This
framework, unlike GAD, wouldn't look at women as victims but would rather evaluate the
Third World life of women through the context of the language and practice of gender, the
Global South, and culture.
Many feminists have been arguing that women are kept out of politics due to a great
number of powerful beliefs and practices that distinguish sharply between public and
private. Their proposal is to wipe out the gendered characteristic of the distinction
between the two spheres. At that point, participation in political life emerges as a
problem since feminists propose that both should be equally involved in political life.
Their argument is that the secondary role of women in the political arena or even their
exclusion was perpetuated by the modern thinkers. Early political theorists developed a
variety of arguments to justify their male-stream theory, so, now, many feminists see
sexual inequality and sex segregation as something built into the original foundations of
classical thought and they claim that the segregation remained persistent in modernity.
The issue discussed in this study is the relationship between modernity and feminist
perspectives stating that it is not accidental that women were so long expelled from the
public sphere. Furthermore, the approach of modernity is criticized by underlining the
stress on the liberal individual who is male.
During the medieval church state, there was not one body of men who formed the state
but there was only a Christian society and it covered the whole world. The society had
two administrators under God, the pope and the emperor. Later,
with the tradition of Augustine, Europe saw for the first time something unique in the
history of the world: a secular power into the service of divine truth. During the twelfth and
thirteenth century a new scholarly activity depending on institutions, the new universities
such as Paris and Oxford, prepared an amazingly active intellectual life. They attracted great
numbers of students who studied systematically sciences, philosophy and theology. They
were the agencies through which the new enlightenment spread. The works of Aristotle,
which had not been known at all in the earlier Middle Ages, began to be known early in the
thirteenth century. Conception framed by Aristotle concerning the city-state had no literal
application to medieval society but its revision could be useful for the purposes of the
period. In the thirteenth century, the main attention of the new scholarship was given rather
to theology and metaphysics than to political theory. The writing of political treatises
was much more frequent in the fourteenth century.
After the fifteenth century, there was a tremendous growth of monarchical power in
almost every part of Western Europe. There was great change both
in government and in ideas about government. Political power, which had been largely
dispersed among feudatories and corporations was rapidly gathered into the hands of the
king, who was the main beneficiary of increasing national unity. The conception of a
sovereign, who is the head of all political power, was strong in the sixteenth century as a
common form of political thought.
By the early years of the sixteenth century, therefore, absolute monarchy had become the
prevailing type of government in the Western Europe. Absolute monarchy overturned
feudal constitutionalism and the free city-states, on which medieval civilization had
largely depended. Ecclesiastical rulers were everywhere subjected to more and more
3royal control, and finally, the church's legal authority disappeared.
The growth of absolute monarchy, like that of the feudal constitutional monarchy, took
place in almost every part of Western Europe.
The opening decades of the seventeenth century began with a moderate process of
releasing political philosophy from the association with theology which had been
characteristic of its earlier history throughout the Christian era. As a result of a political
theory based on natural law, two necessary elements are necessary to be underlined: the
contract by which a society or a government came into being and the state of nature
which existed apart from the contract. The relations of private
individuals to one another and the relations between sovereign states were the two
important cases. The idea of a government depending upon a pact between the ruler and
people was much older than the modern theories of natural law. In the older conception,
the people or the community figured as a corporate body. As the
theory of natural law was developed, the capacity of people to contract needed
explanation. There were two contracts, one by which the community itself was produced
and bound its members to one another and one between the community formed and its
governing officials. The idea of contract was made into a universal theory covering all
forms of obligation and all forms of social grouping. English writers did not develop the
theory. Hobbes curbed the contract of government for his own purposes and Locke used
both forms of contract without taking the trouble to distinguish them clearly

Modernity after the Seventeenth Century

Modern agencies form and reform, produce and reproduce, incorporate and
reincorporate, industrialize and reindustrialize. In modernity, modernization is always
under way. The ambiguous legacy of the term 'modern' supports the perpetual process of
self-critique and absorption. William Connolly declares modernity as an epoch in which a
set of contending understandings of self, responsibility, knowledge, rationality, nature,
freedom and legitimacy have established sufficient presence to shuffle other possible
perspectives out of active consideration. Individualism and
community, realism and idealism, the public interest and the common good, technocracy
and humanism, positive and negative freedom, utility and rights, empiricism and
rationalism, liberalism and collectivism, capitalism and socialism, democracy and
totalitarianism, all grow up together within the confines of modernity. To comprehend
modernity, points of contrast and comparison of some generality are needed. In this
study, medieval society and the ancient world are the vital contrasts.
Liberalism emerged out of an empiricist philosophy which took experience as the source
of all knowledge and abandoned previous beliefs in innate ideas. This was exciting for
the natural sciences but it had dubious effect for political theorists. The individual was on
the stage as the source of all knowledge. Modern philosophy was solidly and definitely
related to individual human nature. The individual human being, with his interests, his
enterprise, his desire for happiness and advancement and with his reason, which seemed
the condition for a successful use of all his other faculties, appeared to be the foundation
on which a stable society must be built. Man as a priest, as a soldier or as a member of
an estate did not matter but man as a bare human being, a man with no master appeared
to be the solid fact.
There was the discovery of an unchangeable core in human nature. Therefore, there must
surely be some minimal conditions required to make possible man's stable combination in
social groups. For the theories of natural law, especially after Hobbes, it was
membership that required explanation. Society is made for man, not man for society. The
individual is both logically and ethically prior. For Hobbes the laws of nature meant a set
of rules according to which an ideally reasonable being would pursue his own advantage
. If he were perfectly conscious of all circumstances in which he
was acting and was quite aware of momentary impulse and prejudice, man would act
rationally. Since all human behavior is motivated by individual self-interest, society must
be regarded merely as a means to this end.
In Hobbes, the power of the state and the authority of the law are justified only because
they contribute to the security of individual human beings. Social well-being as such
disappears entirely and is replaced by a sum of separate self-interests. Society is merely
an artificial body, a collective term for the fact that human beings find it individually
advantageous to exchange goods and services. It is this individualism which makes
Hobbes's philosophy the most revolutionary theory of the age.
When Hobbes's modernity is discussed, the question to be raised is the meaning of
church and God for him. For him, church is merely a corporation. Like any corporation
it must have a head and this is the sovereign. It is a company of men united in the person
of one sovereign. Hobbes holds that it is the duty of the church to teach but he adds that
no teaching is lawful unless the sovereign authorizes it.
Hobbes's political thought conforms to the realm of scholarship or science. Although it
seems to intend to influence the course of events in favour of the royalists, it had little or
no effect of that kind. It contributed in the long run to a more radical liberalism than any
that was within the bounds of practical politics in the seventeenth century as a solvent of
traditional loyalties and a presentation of enlightened egoism. The dissolution of
traditional institutions and the economic pressure were facts not theories.
The belief that social and political institutions are justified only because they protect
individual interests and maintain individual rights emerged under the pressure of
circumstances of the seventeenth century and it became more effective during the two
following centuries. As stated by Flathman, Hobbes held that we must make or devise
for ourselves our principles and laws, our rules of justice and injustice, our obligations
and rights. As with other 'modern' natural law thinkers, he believed that we can
accomplish this devising with sufficient certitude to warrant the strongly imperatival
languages of law and justice, obligation and duty, right and rights.
Religion was not a matter of vital moment in Hobbes's experience. He attributed less
moral weight to it than Machiavelli. The desire for freedom of conscience, like the desire
for political freedom, seems to have figured in his mind merely as an evidence of
intellectual confusion. At the same time ecclesiastical questions, which constitute nearly
half of Leviathan, still bulked very large in his political outlook.
In his individualism, there are individuals who desire to live and to enjoy protection for
the means of life. The advantages of a government are substantial and they must be
gathered in individuals in the form of peace, and comfort and security of person and
property. This is the only ground upon which government can be justified or even exist.
A general or public good, like a public will is an idol of the imagination.
This individualism is the definitely modern element in Hobbes and for the two centuries
after him, self-interest seemed to most thinkers an obvious motive. The absolute power
of the sovereign, a theory with which Hobbes's name is more generally associated, was
really the necessary complement of his individualism. These tendencies, like the increase
of legal power and the recognition of self-interest as the dominant motive in life, have
been among the most pervasive in modern times.
English Thought must have moved rapidly between 1650 and the end of the century.
When Locke wrote forty years later, he could assume far more actual separation of
political and religious questions than Hobbes ever imagined.
John Locke as a young man had hoped for a policy of comprehension in the English
church itself, and when his hope was defeated, he turned to a theory of almost universal
toleration and of practical separation between church and state. The whole intellectual
mood of Locke was secular to a degree that would have been impossible during the time
of Hobbes. He met the theological dispute with a deadliest weapon, indifference. He was
profoundly reasonable and anti-dogmatic.
Although Locke was not directly criticizing Hobbes, he attached some ideas such as the
theory that the state of nature is a war of all against all. Locke held that the state of
nature is peace, good will, mutual assistance and preservation.
He held that moral rights and duties are intrinsic and prior to law and governments are
obligated to give effect by their law to what is naturally and morally right. For him,
property is a right which each individual brings to society in his own person, just as he
brings the physical energy of his body.
Locke drew a different picture of the state of nature. The war
of all against all seemed to his common sense to be overdrawn, but like Hobbes he said
that society exists to protect property and other private rights which society does not
create. As a result, his theory of mind was fundamentally
egoistic in its explanation of human behavior. It seems strange to notice an undesigned
cooperation both men stuck on social theory, the presumption that individual self-
interest is clear and impressive.
Locke's political philosophy was an effort to combine past and present and also to find a
nucleus of agreement for reasonable men. Since he combined many elements from the
past, in the century following him, diverse theories emerged from his political philosophy.
His sincerity, his profound moral conviction, his genuine belief in liberty, in human rights
and in the dignity of human nature, united with his moderation and good sense, made him
the ideal spokesman of a middle-class revolution.
In France, the criticism of Louis XIV government which began at the end of the
seventeenth century was not at first the product of any political philosophy but merely
the reaction of conscientious men to the shocking effects of a bad government. Criticism
of the absolute monarchy urgently needed a philosophy. In the seventeenth century
French philosophy had been relatively self-contained but in the eighteenth, it was
deliberately supplanted by the philosophy of Locke. A political philosophy like
Rousseau's began by the denial of rational self-interest which was not a reputable motive.
Rousseau supposed that the moral virtues exist in the greatest purity among the common
people. Rousseau's general will represented a unique fact about a community, which is a
collective good which is not the same thing as the private interests of its members. The
rights of individuals, such as liberty, equality and property which natural law attributed
to men as such, are really the rights of citizens. Men become equal, as Rousseau says, 'by
convention and legal rights', not as Hobbes had said, because their physical power is
substantially equal.
Timothy Luke argues in Social Theory and Modernity that Rousseau is a systematic,
dialectical and antibourgeois social critic. Many of the social problems and cultural crises
that Rousseau assailed in his political and social theory continue to plague society today.
Moreover, Rousseau's arguments can be of great value in
understanding the powerlessness and inequalities characteristic of modern life.
For Rousseau, the blessed state of nature was the state before all law and before all
knowledge of good or evil. The man of nature was happy and good because he was
ignorant of any morality and followed only his brute instincts. In the Social Contract, he
says only the passage from the state of nature to the civil state transformed man from a
dim-witted beast, subject exclusively to his appetites, into a being capable of reason and
of distinguishing between the just and the unjust. What constitutes Rousseau's
'modernity', what separates him radically from any tradition of the moralists, is that he
sees the origin of evil not in the soul of man but in society, namely, in others. His
fundamental thesis could be formulated as follows: Man would be good, ignorant, and
happy if he were permitted to be alone, and far from his fellows. Man is good by nature,
but the society of men does not permit him to be good.
As Herber stresses, the slogans of modern concern appear for the first time in
recognizable terms in Rousseau's work, from alienation to depersonalization, and from
the uprootedness of socialized man to the formerly fashionable antithesis between soul
and intellect, between the organic and the ready-made, between culture and civilization,
between people and mass.
Classical liberalism was founded on the doctrine of individual freedom. Defence of the
basic freedoms necessarily required clear limits on their restrictions by the state.
Individual freedoms are translated into individual rights which the state is bound to
administrate and uphold. The most fundamental right is the right to privacy and the
public becomes necessary to secure the private. The classic distinction between public
and private is the one between the public world of politics and the private world of
economic and familial relationships.
Within this broad evaluation of modernity, where was the women situated?
Unfortunately, it was not in a prospectively promising place. In fact, she was located
persistently out of the public sphere. Barbara Marshall underlines the negative influence
of the writers of modernity on women by arguing that 'there is no question that the
individual of liberalism was male; women were excluded from the public in both its
political and economic senses, being subsumed under the authority of their husband and
fathers'. Women could neither own property nor sign contracts
in their own right, and neither was the bulk of their labour undertaken in terms of a labour
contract. The marriage contract provided their only articulation as individuals to the
public realm. In classical liberal theory, the positioning of the individual as prior to and
partially outside of society is the reason for the exclusion of women from society.
Joan Landes stresses the dramatic exclusion of women from the full rights of citizenship,
which arrested the movement toward gender equality during the French Revolution. She
also adds that the paradox of the gendered determination of modern democratic
sovereignty and republican freedom is nowhere more dramatically played out during the
eighteenth century than in the popular revolution in France.

Feminist Critiques on Individualism

Sheldon Wolin describes liberalism as 'a philosophy of sobriety, born with fear,
nourished by disenchantment, and prone to believe that the human condition was likely
to remain one of pain and anxiety'. Benjamin Barber sums up the liberal psychology as one in
which 'we are born into the world solitary strangers, live our lives as wary aliens, and die in
fearful isolation'. It may be possible to claim that the individuals of the classic tradition
were in desperate need of protection due to their private needs and interests and the
threatening image of the others. Thomas Hobbes saw only one possible solution which was a
regime of absolute power.
The emphasis on the individual has usually been one of the points of departure for those
who criticize the liberal tradition. According to Zillah Eisenstein, the dilemma rests on
the abstractions of the individual. The male has been the reference point in all the
phallocratic discourses, with the supposedly gender-free language of individuals.
1
AsCarole Pateman argues, 'the individual is a man, in a man's body'.
The discussions of sexual equality have always silently privileged this male body. When
men and women are treated the same, it means women are treated as if they were men.
When men and women are treated differently, the man is the norm, against which woman
is peculiar, lacking and different. Feminism has been endlessly locked into this
equality/difference dichotomy.
The alternative offered by Zillah Eisenstein is to 'pluralize the meaning of difference and
reinvent the category of equality'. Instead of the difference between
male and female, she suggests the recognition of the many differences between women,
between men, as well as between the two sexes. She argues that what we need is a
'radical sex/gender pluralism that will reconstitute the meaning of equality.
Nancy Fraser examines the needs of women and underlines the prominent role of needs
talk. She discussed the difference between needs and rights and she aligns herself with
those who favor translating justified needs claims into social rights. She stresses that
feminists will have to operate on a terrain where needs talk is the discursive coin of the
realm.
The genealogy of Carole Pateman centers on Hobbes, the social contractarian.
According to Christine Sylvester, Pateman suggests that Hobbes's route of escape from a
mythical state of nature, which was anarchical and warlike, in part required the
subordination of women in collective units, captained by men, that occasionally warred
against other similar units. Women in the state of nature were as strong and ingenious as men,
but the mother rights to children that Hobbes granted to women weighed them down during
periods of war. Having to defend children and themselves, women tended to be
conquered by men. The conquering man, his confederates and conquered women made
a family which consisted of a man, and his children, and servants together. The father or
master is the sovereign of the family.
Only free-standing, unconquered men negotiated the social contract for other free-
standing men. Since women did not stand free, they were partly left behind in the state of
nature. Women were also partly brought under men's formal control by civic contract of
marriage, which was made possible by the contracting logic of the social contract.
Women consented to become wives under the domain of their husbands. This sexual
contract based on male-female relations in the state of nature and which was the only
logical option for non-free-standing women, made for a troubled relationship of women
to citizenship.
The citizen's regard for himself follows from his participation in sovereignty. The identity
of men becomes fused with the identity of the conquering, or naturally entitled, authority
of the state. This fusion has an interpretation in Hobbes' implicit imaginary of women
and children. The citizen and state are free that can defend itself and gain the recognition
of others and shore up an acknowledged identity as the sovereign state.

CONCLUSION

Feminism has been seen as adding decisive weight to the charges against liberal
democracy and has viewed this tradition as peculiarly resistant to gender concerns.
Among the issues emerging in feminist theory, the most provocative focuses on
universality. As Carole Pateman, Zillah Eisenstein, Iris Marion Young and others have
argued, there is no gender-neutral individual, and they claim that when liberals try to deal
with feminists only in their capacity as abstract citizens, liberals are wishing away not
only differences of class but even differences of sex. Liberal democracy wants to ignore
all local identities and differences. Liberal democrats, in particular, believed they had
extended all necessary rights and freedoms to women when they allowed them to vote
on the same terms as men. This is quite inadequate as the indicators such as the number
of women in politics will show.
Liberals have a good record on issues of discrimination. Feminists desire a future which
is androgynous because they look forward to a time when they are treated as people, no
longer as women and men. The economic and political structures of contemporary
societies exhibit a high degree of sexual and racial segregation. There are definable
groups and group interests in such societies. To start with the most obvious ones which
are based on biological foundation, feminists argue that there is not a legitimate link
between people's sex and race with their suitability for the political stage. If women are
not elected in much the same proportions as men, and Africans or Asians in the USA not
elected in broad proportion to their numbers in the electorate as a whole, then it seems
something wrong is going on.