Political Theorist Homes In on Justice Within the Family

Maybe it’s because it seems so obvious that no one before Susan Moller Okin actually thought to say it: Justice begins at home.

More likely, however, in the view of Brandeis University political theorist Okin, the family simply has been overlooked as an institution where justice bears any relevance. “It’s usually just assumed that families are just,” she said, “so ‘we don’t have to think about that.’

“Frequently,” she said, “the family is not only regarded as a private kind of institution, but one that doesn’t even need to be looked at as being related to other kinds of moral realms.”

But Okin, an expert on gender in politics, contends that the facts are otherwise. Rigidly defined traditional sex roles militate against justice within the family, she argues, perpetuating what she calls “a kind of caste system” rife with inequality. And by overlooking the family as a forum for social justice, she maintains, social theorists have vastly undervalued the contributions of women.

“Many assumptions about gender structure--about women doing the child-rearing and taking care of the psychological nurturing of men and children--are just looked on as unquestioned assumptions not to be talked about,” Okin said.

The result, she suggests, is a population of citizens who are not only incapable of thinking about justice in an all-encompassing way, but who are unable to implement a fully just society.

“How can you grow up in an institution that is pervaded by injustice in very many ways, and become somebody who thinks about justice and goes out there in the world to try to institutionalize it?” Okin said. “I think the socialization of people in traditional families, in gender-structured families, is extremely detrimental to their thinking about these issues in any kind of reasonable way.”

Or, she said, summarizing a major theme of her forthcoming book, “Justice vs. Gender”: “There can be no justice in society until there is justice in the family.”

Urging a “gender-free” theory of justice, she wrote in her proposal for that book, “Even recent theories of justice have not confronted the issue of gender distinction in society, and . . . they must if they are to be socially relevant (and) respond to recent changes in gender roles and in the status of women.”

Political Theorists

An associate professor of politics, Okin is the author also of “Women in Western Political Thought” (Princeton University Press), a widely acclaimed examination of assumptions about gender in the works of such political theorists as Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau and John Stuart Mill. Her current research is supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation’s program on “Long-Term Implications of Changing Gender Roles.”

“One of the things I am arguing,” she said, “is that theories of justice, although they claim to be talking about the human good and human needs and human desserts and all these kinds of things as being essential to their theories of justice--by ignoring the family, and to a large extent by ignoring relations between the sexes, and by ignoring all the things that have traditionally been women’s work and women’s sphere, they are in fact leaving huge things out of the human good, human needs, human desserts.”

The “human good,” Okin said, “very often turns out to have to do with material resources and things like intellectual development. That leaves out the whole issue of the good of human intimate relationships, of psychological good, of having a capacity to relate to other people in various ways, including the most intimate way.

A Capacity for Relating

“Now when we start to think about it, it seems fairly clear that you can’t have a very good human life if you don’t have that capacity to relate to others in intimate and less intimate ways. But mostly that just gets left out.”

Taken out of the theoretical sphere and into the arena of real-life human dynamics, “this kind of notion,” Okin said, “strongly affects the way in which we value and don’t value things.” Consider, she submits, “the incredible pay differential between someone who is a day-care teacher and someone who’s an administrator in a corporation. We pay someone who administers something in a corporation 10 or 20 times as much as we pay someone who is extremely good at taking care of very small children--a job that is first of all colossally important, and also not a talent that’s widely shared.”

That kind of discrepancy, Okin said, traces directly to inequalities--to imbalances of justice--established within the traditional family structure.

“The inequality within the family,” she said, “is absolutely central to the way that people have been able to construct these theories without thinking about the things that women do.”

Where the Family Lives

Only recently, Okin points out, have divorce courts begun to assess the unpaid labor of women in determining property division. By contrast, however, she cites “the notion that the man chooses the residence of the family,” as in the case of “an extremely elderly couple, I think their ages were 88 and 92. The man wanted them both to live with, I think, his daughter, and the woman didn’t want to live with her, and refused. But the court determined that the man had the right to determine their residence.”

To support her theories about injustice within the family, Okin notes that “the court said things such as the man had to determine the family’s place of residence because he was the family breadwinner. Now the man was 92, so it was a little difficult to see what he was doing that she wasn’t doing to win the family’s bread.”

A scholar with degrees from Oxford and Harvard universities, Okin, 40, said she can scarcely remember a time when she wasn’t assessing issues from a feminist perspective.

“Well, I think a lot of people my age were having those kinds of thoughts as they were growing up,” she said, “maybe some of us in reaction or in response to the fact that our mothers were living very traditional lives based on their sex--and not necessarily wanting to; being ambivalent about it, not really having a choice. I think that was what sort of set some of us off.”

Strong, Intelligent Women Growing up in such a family in New Zealand, Okin nonetheless found herself harking back to “a tradition of strong and intelligent women in the family. I think that really made me question very early the kinds of ideas of about women I was exposed to as I went through my studies of history.” Studying political theory in college and graduate school, she said, “I was increasingly intrigued by what was underneath all these ideas, and why people thought the way they did.”

In particular, her studies made her “very interested to find out what had made different political theorists think differently about women and the family.” For the most part, she found, “they didn’t think about it, and when they did, they thought about it in entirely different ways, some of them completely inconsistent with the ways they thought about other things.”

Married to a psychiatrist, Okin has a daughter, 9, and a son, 5. If “in the beginning, I really did shoulder an awful lot” of the domestic responsibilities, she said that in her own family now, they have come to hammer out a fairly equitable situation.

“He is a reasonable, fair-minded man,” Okin said of her husband. “But I also did a lot of pushing.”

In large part, that is what she advocates for other women as well. “I think women have got to make men do it,” she said. But also, she said, change must occur on the level of public policy, providing, for example, “the kind of employment structure and benefits program that allow people to share parenting and to share household responsibilities.”

Even those changes must be considered in the light of social justice, she cautions. “I think it is a mistake to look at those public policy changes as being benefits for women, because I don’t think they’re merely benefits for women, I think they’re benefits for all of us.”

For the short term, Okin said she is “definitely pessimistic” about the chances for eliminating social injustices based on gender. But in the long term, she’s more sanguine.

“I think it will take a generation or two,” she said, “but I do think the changes will come.”