Feminist Scholar Says Justice, Family Linked

Providing inexpensive, first-class day care, and linking practical wages and hours with parental leave are important first steps in establishing the just society, a noted feminist scholar in political thought told an audience of 50 people at Boylston Hall last night.

In a lecture entitled "Justice and the Family," Susan Moller Okin, associate professor of politics at Brandeis University, said that justice must originate in the family.

"It is necessary for the family to meet standards for justice," said Okin, who attended graduate school at Harvard. "Women will not find equality in any other sphere until we find equality in the family."

Okin added that she wondered "how children can learn to behave justly without growing up under a just family."

Okin challenged University of Chicago Philosophy Professor Allan Bloom, who argues in his best-selling book, "The Closing of the American Mind," that "the unjust family is natural."

"The fact that this book topped the New York Times bestsellers list all summer is the best evidence of the closing of the American mind," Okin said.

"The world of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaids Tale" [which depicts the subjugation of women in a fundamentalist-governed United States] might well be the logical conclusion of Bloom's world," Okin said.

Okin said that Bloom's attitudes also provide philosophical justification for the gender-separated family, where women must provide the majority of domestic work. Such an arrangement, Okin said, "makes women vulnerable."

Okin, the author of "Women and Western Political Thought," said that she favors "a system of family where either men and women agree to share work and responsibilities equally, or to a division of labor where partners are equally compensated for work outside and inside the home."

"It is in the breakdown of marriage that the social inequality of wives is most visible," Okin said.

Okin is currently writing a book entitled "Justice Versus Family," which she calls "a feminist critique of some major contemporary theories of justice and an outline of a fully humanist theory of justice."