Abstract

This book deals with the relationship between feminism and liberalism in theory and practice. The author argues that rather than seeing liberalism as exclusionary of women's specificity, as many contemporary feminists do, we should look at variations in liberalism, and in particular at its democratization in the nineteenth century and how feminists have used liberalism as a resource. Liberalism is analyzed using a post-structuralist theory of hegemony: texts of liberal political philosophy are deconstructed to show how the term "women" is used as an "undecidable" in the Derridean sense to produce the opposition between feminine private and masculine public spheres; these texts are then linked to liberal-democratic social and political practices, including feminism as a social movement.