Equality: Still Illusive after All These Years

Abstract:     
This essay will be a chapter in Social Citizenship and Gender, edited by Joanna Grossman and Linda McClain (Cambridge University Press 2009). It addresses the anomaly that after four decades of using the ideal of equality to confront gender-skewed distributions of power we, still we find a politics of gender subordination and domination embedded in society and its ideological and structural institutions, including law. Why is it that the realization of gender equality - even after all these years of theorizing, arguing, and strategizing - remains strangely illusive? Part of the answer is found in the fact that in our ongoing struggle for gender equality we have been constrained by philosophical and jurisprudential concepts shaped and handed down to us by our forefathers. This chapter proposes that one way to render equality less illusive is to move beyond gender and build a more comprehensive framework on the concept of universal human vulnerability. This new theoretical investigation will focus on privilege, as well as discrimination, and reflects on the benefits allocated through the organization of society and its institutional structures. Such an approach could move us closer to securing substantive equality and social rights in the United States.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 30

Keywords: equality, gender, feminist theory, family, dependency, vulnerablity, critical theory

Accepted Paper Series