Scholars debate gender, justice at conference honoring late feminist thinker
From left, Elizabeth Beaumont of the Carnegie Foundation chaired a session on globalization and gender with Robert Keohane of Princeton University and Stanford political science Professor Judith Goldstein.
BY BARBARA PALMER
Discussion among scholars who gathered here last week at a conference organized to honor the late feminist political philosopher Susan Moller Okin were wide-ranging, critical and deeply engaged—which was characteristic of Okin and her work, said Debra Satz, associate professor of philosophy and director of the Ethics in Society Program, which organized the conference.
Okin, who joined the Stanford faculty in 1990 and served as the director of the Ethics in Society Program from 1993 to 1996, died unexpectedly on March 3, 2004, at the age of 57. Okin, author of Women in Western Political Thought (1979), Justice, Gender and the Family (1989) and Is Multi-Culturalism Bad for Women? (1999) revolutionized political philosophy by "gendering" the concept of justice in both the public and private sphere, Satz wrote as co-author of a memorial resolution honoring Okin.
Papers presented during the two-and-a-half-day conference—on topics including the history of women and political thought, gender and religion, theories of justice and the family, and gender in the developing world—reflected the breadth of Okin's scholarship and influence.
"I think the conference highlighted the diversity of contributions that feminist scholarship—and Susan's feminist scholarship in particular—has made to political theory," Satz said. "Susan Okin's work placed feminist concerns at the center of her work—in particular, ending the social subordination of women—and showed how these concerns matter for other questions."
On Friday afternoon, Robert Keohane, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and professor of international affairs at Princeton University, noted that in the last years of her life, Okin had shifted her attention from gender inequality in rich countries to the even greater injustices inflicted on women as result of gender inequalities in poor countries. In a paper, "Reinventing Globalization to Reduce Gender Inequality," Keohane used the AIDS epidemic, which he characterized as a "gendered catastrophe" to illustrate the significance of gender inequality as a crucial barrier to development. "If anyone ever doubted how central gender inequalities are to development, they would only need to look at AIDS," he said.
While men are largely responsible for the spread of AIDS in Africa, 58 percent of the HIV/AIDS sufferers in Africa are women, who are infected an average of 6 to 8 years earlier in their lives than men, he said. In sub-Saharan Africa, three-quarters of the people aged 15 to 24 who are infected with HIV/AIDS are women, yet only one-third of young women in that age group were educated about basic HIV-prevention methods, he said.
Quoting Okin, Keohane concurred that informal practices—including unequal access to food, health care and education within the home—are at the core of the problem of gender inequality. The AIDS crisis dramatically supports Okin's contention that indigenous feminist movements, which are able to point out inequities of traditional practice in terms understandable to a society, are necessary to reduce gender inequality, he said.
Even so, Keohane argued, powerful multilateral organizations like the World Bank, while tied closely to the capitalist political economies where gender inequities are entrenched, were sufficiently aware of issues of gender and development to be a progressive force. Non-governmental development organizations, which are hundreds and sometimes thousands of times smaller and weaker, should use the World Bank as a "principal point of access" to affect the policies of governments in less developed countries by pressing for gender equality in World Bank programs.
Judith Goldstein, professor of political science and a fellow at the Stanford Institute for International Studies, said she agreed with many of the arguments Keohane made, but questioned whether focusing on gender equity would be the best venue for reaching development goals. "What does it mean to put gender equality at the head of other things?" she asked. "What else is not being done?
"The key issues we face today are economic," she said. "Poverty breeds ignorance and social inequality." Goldstein suggested that, to be most effective, development programs should worry less about gender equality and more about economic and political development, in the hopes that as income increases so will a country's interests.
"The basic problem isn't economic," Keohane countered. "The basic problem is political power—and who has it and who doesn't have it."
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