Are feminism and multiculturalism fundamentally incompatible theories? To the question Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?

posed in her essay of that title, Okin very much answers in the affirmative, concluding that female members of a minority culture: might be better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct [] or, preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women1 This essay posed yet one more challenge to multiculturalism, which has been one of the most widely debated political theories of recent years, and provoked an array of responses from political theorists. Okin opposes liberal universalist norms against the cultural relativism she sees as inherent in multiculturalism, and her essay might be seen to fit into the wider debate between those who consider liberal principles and norms to be absolute and universalizable and those who favour some accommodation with minority cultures within liberal societies with the aim of preserving their distinct cultures and perspective. Okin, in arguing her case on the basis of fundamental liberal principles, obviously belongs to the former category. Her liberal feminist theory is by no means unchallenged amongst feminists however, and thus this debate is also symptomatic of a larger debate within feminism; that between western liberal feminists and other feminist theorists including black American, Islamic and postmodern feminists who challenge the hegemony of the former, arguing that it does not adequately respond to the very different situations of different women across the world. I look first at Okins arguments with regard to the incompatibility of feminism and multiculturalism. I then look at the various critical responses to her essay and particularly to her handling of the concept of culture. I continue on to some of the critiques of Western liberal feminism coming from other strands of feminism and I conclude by placing this argument about womens rights in the context of the larger debate about multiculturalism in political theory. Okins critique of multiculturalism is based on a reading of multiculturalism in line with Kymlickas liberal theory of multiculturalism, which allows room for what
1

Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? in J. Cohen, M. Howard & M. Nussbaum (eds.), Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Susan Moller Okin with respondents (Priceton, NJ, 1999), pp. 22-3.

he terms group rights.2 Multiculturalism then is:

the claim, made in the basic context of basically liberal democracies, that minority cultures or ways of life are not sufficiently protected by the practice of ensuring the individual rights of their members, and as a consequence these should also be protected through special group rights.3

In her eyes such claims are incompatible with feminism which she defines as the belief that women should not be disadvantaged by their sex, that they should be recognised as having human dignity equal to that of men, and that they should have the opportunity to live as fulfilling and as freely chosen lives as men can.4 She claims that even apparently liberal groups are almost always discriminatory towards women and that we must pay attention, not just to the differences between groups, but also to those within groups, particularly those relating to gender. Furthermore she asks that more attention be paid to the private sphere, thus returning to one of the major themes in feminist political theory and a theme that she has dealt extensively with in her work.5 She argues that there are two major connections between culture and gender. Firstly, culture has a much stronger hold over girls who are affected by personal law - marriage, divorce, child care and property rights - to a degree unknown to most men. Secondly, the major aim of any culture is to put in place systems by which men can control women and points to the major monotheist religions as evidence.6 She underlines practices in minority cultures that are particularly harmful to women such as clitorectomy, polygamy, child marriage, and looks at a variety of court cases where culture was used as a defence for violence against women and even murder.7 Okin thus concludes that Kymlicka has not considered seriously enough the degree to which almost all cultures are sexist.8 This suggestion in itself reveals one of the biggest flaws in Okins arguments; that it is not only minorities that have culture and that Western liberal cultures are also inherently sexist, a fact that Okin acknowledges elsewhere and indeed has dedicated much of her career to.9
2 3 4 5

Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford, 1995), passim. Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women, pp. 10-11. Ibid., p. 10.

Ibid., pp. 11-12, Okin, Political Liberalism, Justice, and Gender, Ethics, Vol. 105, No. 1 (Oct., 1994), pp. 2343. 6 Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women, pp. 12-14.
7 8 9

Ibid., pp. 14-19. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., pp. 2-13, 33-40.

Okins essay was greatly criticized for assuming the universality of the priciples of Western liberalism, for its narrow reading of culture and religion and for ultimately espousing a certain cultural imperialism. Okin thus falls into the same trap that Rawls was often accused of falling into in Theory of Justice. She assumes that the priciples of liberalism are self-evident and thus does not even enter into the discussion of why minority cultures ought to accept her arguments. Parekh, amongst others, points out that Western liberalism is by no means so universal and that to assume so is selfdefeating and patronising. Western liberalism too is the product of a specific cultural heritage.10 Okin seems to suggest that minorities have strong unchanging patriarchal cultures, while liberal democracies have somehow escaped the chains of culture and developed universal principles that allow equal respect and concern for everyone.11 She lumps minority cultures together in a manner that Bhabha suggests is: in danger of producing the monolithic discourse of the cultural stereotype.12 Although Okin acknowledges that this is not always the case and that in practice sexism also occurs in western liberal societies, she seems to consider these deviations from the norm, as opposed to the cultural nature of these acts of violence or abuse when commited by minority or non-western cultures. Several of her critics suggest that violence against women is no less cultural in western liberal democracies where violence, rape and sexual abuse are still widespread and unresolved.13 Okins arguments are thus considered neo-colonialist and unreasoned:
With a zealousness not unlike the colonial civilizing mission, the liberal agenda is articulated without a shadow of self-doubt, except perhaps an acknowledgement of its contingent failings in the practice of everyday life [] Such a campaigning stance obscures indigenous traditions of reform and resistance, ignores local leavenings of liberty, flies in the face of feminist campaigns within nationalist and anticolonial struggles14

It is thus not by allowing minority cultures to simply die out that feminism will achieve its aims, but through a more inclusive and dialogical approach to culture that certainly attacks practices that harm women in minority cultures, but also attacks
10 11

Bhikhu Parekh, A Varied Moral World, in Cohen et al., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, pp. 73-5.

Leti Volpp, Feminism Versus Multiculturalism, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 101, No. 5 (Jun., 2001), pp. 1186-9, Homi K. Bhabha, Liberalisms Sacred Cow in Cohen et al., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, pp. 81-2. 12 Bhabha, Liberalisms Sacred Cow, p. 81
13 14

Volpp, Feminism Versus Multiculturalism, pp. 1187, 1189, Bhabha, Liberalisms Sacred Cow, p. 80. Bhabha, Liberalisms Sacred Cow, p. 83.

violence and domination in western liberal society as a whole.15 Indeed, oppression and discrimination are not experienced only by women, and in many cases, the oppression of men in minority cultures may be as, or often more severe than that of women in the dominant culture:
Rather than rejecting group rights as such, the analytic and political focus may well have to negotiate intracultural gender inequalities at the centre of Okins concerns and intercultural oppression that frequently lies at the origins of the experienced need for group rights.16

To attack multiculturalism as Okin does, then, would seem to be reductionist, ignoring the complexities of culture and the many forms of oppression within western liberal society, as well as prioritising the oppression of women to the detriment of all other groups within society. There have been multiple critiques of western liberal feminism from within the feminist movement as being a culturally specific movement and thus not adequately addressing the needs of women at large, including minority and non-Western women: There is a convergence between the way gender emerged as a primary category of analysis and the social, demographic, and class composition of those who actually theorized gender in the U.S. academy.17 Bell hooks points out that Betty Friedans The Feminine Mystique addressed the problems of only a subsection of American women: white, college educated, middle and upper class housewives, bored with their lot. Hooks does not negate the importance of this work, but points out that it was meaningless for the majority of American women, who did not share the social background of those who came to dominate the feminist movement.18 Thus the feminist project, summed up as the quest to achieve social equality with men, was not a project that was universally shared by all American women and was highly problematic in that it isolated the problem of sexism from other forms of oppression:
Since men are not equals in white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal class structures, which men do women want to be equal to? Do women share a common vision of what equality means? Implicit in this simplistic definition of womens liberation is a dismissal of race and class as factors that, in conjunction with sexism, determine the extent to
15 16 17

Parekh, A Varied Moral World, pp. 74-5 Saskia Sassen, Culture beyond Gender, in Cohen et al., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, p. 78.

Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Genealogies, Legacies, and Move ments," in Kum-Kum Bhavnani (ed.), Feminism and "Race," (Oxford, 2001), p. 495. 18 bell hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (Boston, MA, 1984), p. 2.

which as individual will be discriminated against, exploited or oppressed.19

It ignored the domination that was at the heart of womens lower social status, as addressing domination would mean looking at the bigger picture and realising that domination was also very much present in white womens interactions with black women and even black men. For the women Friedan addressed, sexism was the only form of oppression that interfered with their freedom, but this was not the case for women from less advantaged backgrounds or groups within society.20 Coming from another perspective, Islamic feminists similarly criticize Western liberal feminism for being reductive and ultimately seeking to impose a patriarchal cultural imperialism. They acknowledge that many practices common in Muslim countries are harmful to women and certainly undesirable. However, they highlight that Islam is a religion rather than a culture and thus its adherents come from a variety of different cultures, many of which promote such practices, but which must not be confused with the Muslim religion itself.21 Furthermore, Islam itself is not as inherently sexist as many Western observers suggest. For example, the Quran does not blame Eve for the fall of man but places the blame equally on the shoulders of Adam and Eve. Thus the founding myths of Islam are in fact not nearly as patriarchal as those of Christianity. Al-Hibri thus advocates a form of feminism that respects religious and cultural sentiments in Muslim communities, but that critically examines Islamic jurisprudence and provided modern interpretations that take into account the needs of all Muslims including women.22 Both of these critiques from outside the mainstream of western liberal feminism suggest that feminism as a theory would be more universal if it did not assume its own universalizability, but rather respected divergent voices. These debates fits into a larger theoretical debate between those who claim the absolute universalizability of liberalism and those who claim that human life is meaningless without cultural context. Barrys attack on multiculturalism and group rights is perhaps the most complete defence of the universalism of liberalism and of
19 20 21

Ibid., p. 18. hooks, Feminist Theory, p. 14.

Jasmin Zine, Creating a Critical Faith-Centered Space for Antiracist Feminism: Reflections of a Muslim Scholar-Activist, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall, 2004), pp. 168-171, Azizah Y. AlHibri, Is Western Patriarchal Feminism for Third World/Minority Women? in Cohen et al., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, p. 43. 22 Al-Hibri, Is Western Patriarchal Feminism?, pp. 43-44.

its basic principles and thus brings Okins arguments to their logical conclusion. Barry equates multiculturalism with division, anti-egalitarianism and ultimately with a sort of neo-fascism.23 His warnings against nationalism and ethnic self-asertion, that seem to foresee a return to interwar Europe, are rather hyperbolic at a time when Europe is more united than ever before.24 Other liberal theorists have been more accomodating to the needs of minority cultures, accepting what Rawls calls a plurality of reasonable yet incompatible comprehensive doctrines and acknowledging the importance of culture in an individuals conception of the self.25 Parekh meanwhile comes from outside liberalism to posit a much greater challenge to the universalism that Barry espouses, criticizing what he sees as the moral monism of liberalism:
The thought of Locke and Mill [] displays a strange blend of moral egalitarianism and political and cultural inegalitarianism: equality of human beings but inequality of cultures, respect for persons but not their ways of life, rejection of racism but advocacy of cultural domination, equal concern for all as individuals but not as self-determining collective subjects Human beings are considered to be equal because they share a common nature, and the latter implies that the good life is the same for all.26

Parekh argues that human beings are culturally embedded and thus could not make sense of the world around them without the meaning and significance that culture lends to human life.27 This critique of liberalism is close to earlier Communitarian critiques that similarly argued that we can only make sense of our lives within the context of our communities.28 This does not necessarily mean giving oneself up to a completely subjective cultural relativism and abandoning individual rights altogether however. Universals cannot be imposed by one culture on another however, but should and can be arrived at through intercultural discourse and exchange.29 Yet, certain limits must be placed on this argument. As Okin points out it should not be only more conservative older men within the community who are given the opportunity to speak for their cultures; younger women in particular should be encouraged to speak for themselves.30 This is similar to what Al-Hibri advocates when
23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Brian Barry, Culture and Equality, An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (Oxford, 2000), pp. 3-12 Ibid., p. 3. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, 1993), p. xvi, Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, passim. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (London, 2000), p. 47. Ibid., pp. 142-5. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New York, 1982), pp. 64-65, 168-73. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, pp. 338-341. Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women, p. 24.

she writes that in Islam, each individual has the right to interpret the religious texts him or herself and therefore Muslim women should develop their own interpretations and thus develop real freedom of conscience.31 Hence, multiculturalism must be challenged by feminist critiques and others to provoke it to justify its principles, in the same way that multiculturalism demands that liberalism should justify itself. Okins arguments then seem too black and white in so starkly opposing multiculturalism and feminism. Her views of minority cultures are reductionist and have not unfairly been compared with cultural imperialism. She mixes up religion and culture, seems to see violence and sexism as inherent only in minority cultures and thus ignores the widespread instances of both in western cultures. Her arguments fit in with the mainstream of liberal feminism, which has been criticized by other feminist theorists for being too specific to a particular cultural context while claiming universality and for focusing only on gender domination, thus ignoring racism and classism. This debate mirrors the wider debate between certain liberals, who claim the universal application of their principles, and multiculturalists, who stress the importance of cultural context. Multiculturalists have raised interesting points about the limits of liberal universalism, but group rights should not allow for a complete dismissal of individual rights. Indeed, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples shows a willingness to accept: the right of all peoples to be different, to consider themselves different, and to be respected as such.32 This does not mean ignoring the individual rights inherent in the Universal Declaration and the protections extended to women in particular in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Ultimately, Parekh is right to suggest that it is the variety of different ideologies in western societies that have enriched and stabilised these societies and that only when ideologies are in constant contestation will they justify themselves sufficiently.33

31 32

Al-Hibri, Is Western Patriarchal Feminism?, p. 43.

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Adopted by General Assembly Resolution 61/295 on 13 September 2007. 33 Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, p. 339.

Bibliography Alexander, M. Jacqui & Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, "Genealogies, Legacies, Movements," in Kum-Kum Bhavnani (ed.), Feminism and "Race," (Oxford, 2001), pp. 492-515. Al-Hibri, Azizah Y., Is Western Patriarchal Feminism for Third World/Minority Women? in J. Cohen, M. Howard & M. Nussbaum (eds.), Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Susan Moller Okin with respondents (Priceton, NJ, 1999), pp. 41-6. Barry, Brian, Culture and Equality, An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (Oxford, 2000). Bhabha, Homi K., Liberalisms Sacred Cow in J. Cohen, M. Howard & M. Nussbaum (eds.), Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Susan Moller Okin with respondents (Priceton, NJ, 1999), pp. 79-84. hooks, bell, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (Boston, MA, 1984). Kymlicka, Will, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford, 1995). Okin, Susan Moller o Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? in J. Cohen, M. Howard & M. Nussbaum (eds.), Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Susan Moller Okin with respondents (Priceton, NJ, 1999), pp. 9-24. o Political Liberalism, Justice, and Gender, Ethics, Vol. 105, No. 1 (Oct., 1994), pp. 23-43. o Justice, Gender and the Family (New York, 1989) Parekh, Bhikhu o A Varied Moral World, in J. Cohen, M. Howard & M. Nussbaum (eds.), Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Susan Moller Okin with respondents (Priceton, NJ, 1999), pp. 69-75. o Rethinking Multiculturalism, Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (London, 2000). Rawls, John Political Liberalism (New York, 1993). Sandel, Michael, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New York, 1982).

 Sassen, Saskia, Culture beyond Gender, in J. Cohen, M. Howard & M. Nussbaum (eds.), Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Susan Moller Okin with respondents (Priceton, NJ, 1999), p. 76-8. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Adopted by General Assembly Resolution 61/295 on 13 September 2007. Volpp, Leti, Feminism Versus Multiculturalism, Columbia Law Review, Vol. 101, No. 5 (Jun., 2001), pp. 1181-1218. Zine, Jasmin, Creating a Critical Faith-Centered Space for Antiracist Feminism: Reflections of a Muslim Scholar-Activist, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall, 2004), pp. 167-187.