SOURCE: Schaeffer, Denise. “Feminism and Liberalism Reconsidered: The Case of Catharine MacKinnon.” American Political Science Review 95, no. 3 (September 2001): 699-708.

In the following essay, Schaeffer argues that certain aspects of MacKinnon's feminist theory must be understood within a liberal framework.

Feminist theory has contributed a great deal to our understanding of the incompleteness of unreconstructed liberalism for addressing all aspects of human life. But the view that liberalism and feminism are incompatible has become widespread, especially among radical feminists who reject liberalism for offering women “a piece of the pie as currently and poisonously baked” (Morgan 1996, 5). When liberalism is understood as thoroughly patriarchal, feminism is understood as something separate from and beyond liberalism. The presentation of liberalism and feminism as disjunctive—indeed, as a contradiction¹—raises the question of whether we have become too eager to dissociate thoroughly feminism from liberalism. Once we acknowledge the gender bias in many...