Susan moller okin biography

Okin was born in 1946 in Auckland, New Zealand, and attended Remuera Primary School, Remuera Intermediate and Epsom Girls' Grammar School, where she was Dux in 1963.

She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Auckland in 1966, a master of philosophy degree from Oxford in 1970 and a doctorate from Harvard in 1975.

She taught at the University of Auckland, Vassar, Brandeis and Harvard before joining Stanford's faculty.

Okin became the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society at Stanford University in 1990.

Okin held a visiting professorship at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at the time of her death in 2004.

Okin was found dead in her home in Lincoln, Massachusetts on March 3, 2004.

Research in evolutionary psychology and quantitative genetics demonstrates persistent female advantages in direct nurturing care, with mothers exhibiting higher investment in offspring proximity and responsiveness due to genetic and hormonal factors shaped by ancestral selection pressures.^[56][57] Mandating identical roles, as Okin proposes to achieve justice, risks disrupting these evolved complementarities—such as paternal provisioning and maternal bonding—that empirical models link to optimal child development, prioritizing ideological uniformity over causal evidence of role divergence's benefits.^[58]Empirical data on child outcomes reinforces these concerns, revealing that intact, biologically intact traditional families—often featuring differentiated gender roles—correlate with superior physical, emotional, and academic well-being compared to restructured egalitarian alternatives prone to dissolution or conflict.

For Justice, Gender, and the Family, she was corecipient of the Victoria Schuck Award for the best book on women in politics published in 1989. The cause of death is still unknown, but authorities do not believe there was any foul play.

In 1979 she published Women in Western Political Thought, in which she details the history of the perceptions of women in western political philosophy.

Her 1989 book Justice, Gender, and the Family is a critique of modern theories of justice.

She intends also to collect her work on multiculturalism and feminism in a volume. This stance provoked criticism from multiculturalists who viewed it as insufficiently sensitive to historical oppression, yet it highlighted tensions between relativism and universalist standards of justice grounded in empirical patterns of gender-based disadvantage.^[2] Throughout her career, Okin's approach privileged reasoned extension of first-order justice principles over deference to cultural traditions, influencing discussions on how private dependencies causally sustain public inequalities.^[4]

Early Life and Education

Origins in New Zealand

Susan Moller Okin was born on July 19, 1946, in Auckland, New Zealand, as the youngest of three daughters in a family shaped by European immigrant heritage.^[5][6] Her father, born in Denmark, immigrated to New Zealand and worked as an accountant for Holeproof, a hosiery manufacturing company, while her mother, a New Zealander, transitioned to full-time homemaking after marriage, conforming to prevailing social expectations.^[7] The family resided in a state house in the suburb of Remuera, reflecting modest middle-class circumstances amid New Zealand's post-war housing initiatives.^[8]Post-World War II New Zealand society emphasized traditional gender divisions, with women predominantly cast in domestic roles and facing structural barriers to professional advancement outside limited fields.^[9] Married women were often expected to prioritize homemaking over paid employment, as evidenced by the norm of maternal withdrawal from the workforce upon family formation, which Okin's mother exemplified.^[7][10] Although wartime labor demands had temporarily expanded women's opportunities in industry and agriculture, these gains largely reverted after 1945, reinforcing male breadwinner models and restricting women's access to higher education or careers in male-dominated sectors like STEM.^[11][12] Okin's upbringing in this environment, surrounded by "strong and intelligent women" in her family, occurred against a backdrop where such qualities were channeled primarily into private spheres rather than public or professional ones.^[1]

University Studies and Influences

Okin earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the University of Auckland in 1966.^[2][7] Her undergraduate coursework provided an initial grounding in the historical contexts of political institutions and ideas, fostering an appreciation for the evolution of governance and social structures that would later inform her analytical approach to gender inequities.^[2]Following her bachelor's, Okin attended Somerville College at Oxford University, where she pursued advanced studies in philosophy and obtained a Master of Philosophy degree in 1970.^[13][14] At Oxford, she immersed herself in liberal political theory, engaging with foundational texts that emphasized individual rights and justice, while encountering the prevailing analytic methods of philosophical inquiry prevalent in British academia during the late 1960s.^[2]It was during her time at Oxford that Okin first recognized the systematic omission of women's perspectives and experiences from the canonical works of Western political philosophy, a realization prompted by close examination of thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Rousseau.^[2] This observation aligned with the contemporaneous emergence of second-wave feminism, which highlighted structural gender inequalities and inspired her to explore how traditional theories perpetuated familial and societal biases against women, setting the stage for her subsequent doctoral research.^[2][14]

Academic Career

Early Appointments and Move to the United States

Following her PhD from Harvard University in 1975, Okin returned briefly to New Zealand, where she taught at the University of Auckland.^[15][13] During this period in the 1970s, she began publishing early scholarly articles on political theory, contributing to her emerging reputation in the field.^[6]In the late 1970s, Okin immigrated to the United States, securing an appointment as assistant professor of political theory at Brandeis University in 1976.^[6][2] She held this position for approximately 15 years, advancing through the ranks in a discipline where women philosophers encountered systemic obstacles, including limited tenure-track opportunities and underrepresentation in elite departments dominated by male faculty.^[2] Okin also taught at Vassar College and Harvard University during this phase, balancing academic demands with raising three children, a challenge compounded by the era's lack of institutional support for work-life integration in academia.^[15][13]These early U.S.

appointments marked Okin's transition to a prominent role in American political philosophy, where she navigated gender-related professional hurdles while establishing her research agenda on justice and equality.^[2] By the early 1980s, her work at Harvard further solidified her trajectory, though full details of the exact start date there remain tied to her broader pre-1990 engagements across institutions.^[16]

Tenure at Harvard and Stanford

Okin taught at Harvard University following positions at Brandeis University before joining the Stanford University faculty in 1990 as the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society and professor of political science.^[13][14] This appointment emphasized interdisciplinary approaches to ethics, politics, and gender, aligning with Stanford's program structures.^[4] At Stanford, she directed the Program in Ethics in Society from 1993 to 1996, fostering collaborative research across philosophy, political science, and related fields.^[17][15]During her tenure at Stanford, Okin sustained a rigorous research agenda, producing scholarly articles and engaging in debates on political theory while mentoring graduate students in ethics and justice-related topics.^[2] Her institutional roles supported an environment for advancing empirical and theoretical inquiries into social structures, though her output drew scrutiny for challenging prevailing academic norms on gender neutrality.^[4]Okin died on March 3, 2004, at her home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, at age 57 while on a one-year fellowship as the Marta S.

Horner Distinguished Visiting Research Professor at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute.^[15][1] Local authorities determined the cause as natural, with no indication of foul play.^[13][15] Her abrupt passing elicited prompt commendations from colleagues, highlighting her role in reshaping feminist political philosophy.^[2]

Core Philosophical Contributions

Feminist Critiques of Classical Political Theory

In Women in Western Political Thought (1979), Susan Moller Okin conducted a detailed examination of canonical texts from Plato through John Stuart Mill, arguing that these philosophers systematically excluded women from their conceptions of justice or accommodated gender-based subordination despite professed commitments to equality and rationality.^[18] For instance, Plato's advocacy for female participation in guardianship in The Republic ultimately subordinated women to male oversight and preserved sexual dimorphism in roles, while John Locke's emphasis on consent in political society coexisted with acceptance of paternal authority in the family, treating wives as under coverture.^[19]John Stuart Mill, in The Subjection of Women (1869), critiqued marital inequality but retained assumptions of women's economic dependence, limiting the radicalism of his utilitarian framework.^[20] Okin's analysis revealed that such oversights were not incidental but structural, as these thinkers applied principles of impartiality selectively, exempting the domestic realm from egalitarian scrutiny.^[21]Okin's methodological approach centered on empirical close reading of primary texts, tracing how gender hierarchies were naturalized or ignored amid broader egalitarian ideals.^[22] She demonstrated that the entrenched public/private dichotomy—wherein the state and civil society were deemed sites of justice while the household was consigned to natural or pre-political status—enabled the privatization of familial power imbalances, shielding practices like wifely obedience and unequal labor division from philosophical critique.^[23] This divide, Okin contended, perpetuated women's systemic disadvantage by rendering domestic injustices invisible to theories focused on public institutions alone.^[24] Her work thus exposed inconsistencies: for example, Aristotle's explicit endorsement of male rule in the Politics as natural, or Rousseau's educational prescriptions in Emile that confined women to ornamental roles supportive of male citizenship.^[18]By insisting that justice principles must extend uniformly across all spheres of human association, including the family, Okin challenged the compartmentalization of political theory, positing that genuine universality requires interrogating spheres where gender operates as a barrier to equal moral agency.^[25] This perspective underscored the need for historical reconstruction to align political philosophy with comprehensive equality, without which abstract ideals remain hollow.^[26] Okin's critique thereby laid groundwork for feminist rereadings of the tradition, emphasizing textual evidence over anachronistic projections.^[27]

Extension of Justice Principles to the Family

In Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989), Susan Moller Okin posited that the family constitutes the foundational site—or "linchpin"—of gender injustice, necessitating the application of liberal principles of justice, such as those in John Rawls' theory of justice as fairness, to its internal dynamics to rectify broader societal inequalities.^[28] She contended that traditional family structures, characterized by gendered divisions of paid and unpaid labor, systematically disadvantage women by limiting their access to education, employment, and political participation, thereby undermining the egalitarian premises of public justice.^[29]Okin adapted Rawls' original position and veil of ignorance to argue that rational contractors, unaware of their future gender or family roles, would design families without inherent gender hierarchies, as any acceptance of unequal domestic burdens would risk personal disadvantage.^[30] This extension critiques Rawls' own exemption of the family from strict justice scrutiny, asserting instead that familial practices shape moral development and resource distribution from infancy, making them integral to the basic structure of society.^[31] Unequal child-rearing, she emphasized, socializes children into gender-stereotyped expectations—girls toward dependency and care, boys toward autonomy—perpetuating cycles of inequality through distorted opportunity sets.^[32]Causally, Okin linked familial inequities to women's economic vulnerabilities, drawing on evidence that primary caregiving responsibilities interrupt women's careers and reduce lifetime earnings; U.S.

data from the 1980s indicated women earned about 65% of men's median wages, with much of the gap attributable to family-related absences rather than productivity differences.^[33] This division imposes opportunity costs on women, fostering dependency in marriage and vulnerability post-divorce, as unequal asset accumulation and pension entitlements favor breadwinning spouses.^[19]To enforce justice, Okin advocated state interventions beyond mere formal equality, including mandatory parental leave policies shared equally between parents, employer-provided on-site childcare, and educational reforms to promote egalitarian family models from childhood.^[18] These measures, she argued, would incentivize symmetric domestic participation, enabling families to approximate a "genderless" structure where justice principles govern resource allocation and decision-making internally, thus aligning private spheres with public fairness.^[34] Empirical precedents from Nordic countries, with subsidized childcare correlating to higher female labor participation rates (around 70-80% in the late 1980s), supported her view that such policies could mitigate injustice without eroding family functions.^[33]

Tensions Between Feminism and Multiculturalism

Susan Moller Okin argued that multiculturalism, by emphasizing group rights for minority cultures, frequently undermines feminist goals of gender equality, as these rights often entrench patriarchal structures that disadvantage women and girls.^[35] She posited that practices such as polygamy, female genital mutilation (FGM), and forced marriages—common in certain minority groups—perpetuate sex-based subordination, directly conflicting with the principle of universal justice requiring equal dignity and freedom regardless of gender.^[35][36]In liberal democracies, Okin highlighted empirical instances where multicultural accommodations exacerbate these issues, such as the estimated 200,000 polygamous families among Malian immigrants in Paris as of the late 1990s, where men hold multiple wives under cultural exemptions, limiting women's autonomy and economic independence.^[35] Similarly, she critiqued tolerance of FGM in immigrant communities from regions like Côte d'Ivoire, Togo, and Egypt, and forced or child marriages prevalent among groups from Iraq and parts of Latin America, arguing that such policies prioritize collective cultural preservation over individual protections.^[35] In the United States, cultural defenses in criminal cases have reduced penalties for gender-based violence, further illustrating how group rights can shield harmful practices against women.^[35]Okin's reasoning emphasized that liberalism, to remain consistent, must favor the rights of vulnerable individuals—particularly women and girls within patriarchal minority cultures—over exemptions for group self-governance, as the latter often amplifies male authority and restricts female agency.^[35][37] She advocated applying host societies' gender equality norms to all residents, necessitating assimilation or reform of cultural practices that violate these standards, rather than granting differential treatment that perpetuates inequality.^[37] This approach aligns with causal mechanisms where unchecked group autonomy causally reinforces intra-group power imbalances, hindering women's exit options and broader societal integration.^[35]

Major Works and Arguments

Women in Western Political Thought

Susan Moller Okin's 1979 book Women in Western Political Thought provides a systematic analysis of the treatment of women in the canonical texts of Western political philosophy, spanning from Plato to John Stuart Mill.^[3] The work structures its inquiry chronologically, dedicating chapters to key figures including Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Mill, while revealing patterns of gender-based exclusions embedded in their theories of justice, citizenship, and the state.^[38][39] Okin argues that these philosophers presuppose women's subordination within the private sphere of the family, which in turn reinforces public exclusions from political equality.^[40]At the core of Okin's thesis is the contention that the Western political tradition's claims to universality falter due to its foundational assumption of natural sexual inequality, rendering theories of justice incomplete without accounting for women's full inclusion as moral equals.^[3][41] She posits that integrating women requires challenging entrenched views on sex roles, the family unit, and its separation from political institutions, as these elements perpetuate systemic gender hierarchies.^[40] This approach marked an early effort to reread the canon through a feminist lens, exposing how gender blindness undermined the purported impartiality of classical political thought.^[42]The book received acclaim for its rigorous textual scholarship and intellectual depth, with reviewers noting its essential value for understanding the historical oversight of gender in political theory.^[43] However, it faced criticism for occasionally imposing contemporary egalitarian standards on pre-modern thinkers, potentially leading to anachronistic evaluations of their contexts and intentions.^[44] Despite such reservations, Okin's analysis pioneered subsequent feminist engagements with the philosophical canon by demonstrating the necessity of gender-inclusive reinterpretations for assessing the tradition's enduring validity.^[21]

Justice, Gender, and the Family

In Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989), Susan Moller Okin applies John Rawls's framework of the original position to argue that the family must be governed by the same principles of justice as public institutions, contending that gender-structured families inherently violate fairness by assigning unequal roles based on sex from the outset.^[45] She modifies Rawls's veil of ignorance to include ignorance of one's gender, asserting that rational agents designing family institutions under this condition would reject divisions of labor, authority, and opportunity predicated on biological sex, opting instead for egalitarian structures that treat family members as free and equal persons regardless of gender.^[31] This methodological adaptation implies that Rawlsian justice, properly extended, demands the elimination of gender hierarchy within the family as a prerequisite for broader societal equality, exposing an oversight in Rawls's original theory where the family was implicitly exempted from distributive principles.^[46]Okin supports her critique with evidence of how gendered family practices causally sustain wider injustices, particularly through women's disproportionate burden of unpaid domestic labor and childcare, which limits their market participation and career advancement.^[18] She highlights post-divorce outcomes, where women's economic dependence—stemming from interrupted work histories and lower earning potential—exacerbates poverty risks for women and children, as custodial mothers often receive inadequate child support and face barriers to self-sufficiency.^[18] These patterns, Okin argues, are not incidental but structurally linked to family-level inequities that Rawlsian principles, if gender-blind, would prohibit, thereby revealing the family's role as the primary site where justice deficits originate and propagate.^[47]To realize gender-blind family principles, Okin proposes policies that empirically challenge traditional roles, such as mandatory paid parental leave available equally to both parents to encourage shared childcare, flexible work arrangements for caregivers, and legal presumptions favoring joint custody in divorce proceedings to mitigate women's post-separation vulnerabilities.^[46] These recommendations aim to redistribute family labor equitably from conception through child-rearing, fostering conditions where children's opportunities are not skewed by parental gender roles and where adults' life prospects remain uncompromised by sex-based assumptions.^[48] By integrating such reforms, Okin maintains, Rawlsian theory gains coherence, ensuring that the difference principle—prioritizing the least advantaged—accounts for intra-family dynamics that otherwise undermine equal liberty and fair equality of opportunity.^[49]

Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?

Susan Moller Okin's 1999 essay "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?" contends that multiculturalism's emphasis on group rights for minority cultures frequently conflicts with gender equality, as many such cultures embody patriarchal norms that disadvantage women internally.^[35] Okin asserts that exemptions from liberal state laws—intended to accommodate cultural diversity—often reinforce women's subordination by permitting practices like religious arbitration in family matters, where male-dominated tribunals apply discriminatory rules on marriage, divorce, and property.^[50] She argues that cultural "group rights" prioritize collective preservation over individual rights, particularly for female members whose interests are sidelined by traditions enforcing unequal power dynamics.^[50]Okin illustrates her thesis with cases of sought-after legal exemptions, such as British Muslim groups' proposals in the 1970s and 1980s for Sharia-based personal laws governing inheritance, where daughters receive half the share allotted to sons, and divorce, which is far more accessible to men than women.^[50] Similar demands arose in Canada during 1990s debates over Islamic tribunals, potentially allowing polygyny and custody biases favoring fathers, practices that empirical observations in diaspora communities link to heightened female vulnerability.^[50] She also critiques cultural defenses in violence cases, including leniency for acts like honor killings—where women face lethal retribution for defying familial norms—a phenomenon reported in minority ethnic enclaves in Europe and North America, often tied to imported patriarchal controls over female sexuality and mobility.^[51]The essay grounds its critique in observable patterns within immigrant groups, such as enforced veiling and seclusion to uphold "modesty" codes that restrict women's public participation while imposing no equivalent burdens on men, contributing to broader gender disparities in education and employment.^[50] These accommodations, Okin warns, dilute the liberal commitment to universal justice by entrenching inequalities under the banner of tolerance.^[35]Publication in the Boston Review prompted a forum soliciting responses from diverse scholars, including Katha Pollitt's endorsement of Okin's emphasis on women's agency over cultural claims, and critiques from figures like Joseph Raz advocating internal cultural reform rather than outright rejection.^[35] This exchange exposed fault lines in progressive thought, where multiculturalism's appeal to left-leaning academics often downplayed empirical harms to women in favor of anti-assimilation stances, fueling interdisciplinary scrutiny of policy exemptions.^[35]

Criticisms and Debates

Challenges from Multiculturalists and Cultural Relativists

Multiculturalists and cultural relativists, often aligned with left-leaning academic perspectives, contested Susan Moller Okin's advocacy for subjecting cultural group rights to scrutiny under universal principles of gender justice, arguing that her framework eroded cultural autonomy and overlooked contextual nuances in minority practices.^[35]Bhikhu Parekh, in his 1999 response to Okin's essay "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?", criticized her approach as transforming liberal principles into an inflexible ideology that stifles moralpluralism, asserting that no single set of values constitutes absolute "fundamentals" capable of overriding diverse cultural norms without dialogical negotiation.^[52]Parekh further charged Okin's universalism with ethnocentrism, portraying it as a patronizing imposition of Western feminist standards that dismisses the agency of women within minority cultures, such as those who voluntarily adopt veiling or arranged marriages as forms of self-expression or strategic adaptation amid power imbalances, rather than inherent oppression.^[52] He contended that prioritizing gender equality to the extent of denying group rights to sexist cultures ignores colonial-era power dynamics, where external judgments historically justified assimilation, and fails to recognize how cultures provide essential frameworks for identity and belonging that enhance, rather than hinder, individual autonomy.^[52]Will Kymlicka echoed elements of this critique by emphasizing that Okin's strict application of individual rights risks conflating multicultural accommodations with endorsement of internal illiberalism, potentially reinforcing majority cultural hegemony and undermining the shared progressive aims of feminism and minority self-determination, as cultural membership itself underpins the autonomy liberals value.^[53] Contextualist arguments from these scholars highlight empirical patterns where minority groups, including some South Asian and Muslim communities in Western societies, have incrementally reformed gender practices—such as increased female education and workforce participation—through endogenous advocacy and generational shifts, without state-mandated interventions that could provoke backlash or cultural dissolution.^[52]Parekh warned that Okin's conditional rights model is not only impractical but counterproductive, as it could entrench resistance by framing reforms as capitulation to external pressures rather than organic evolution.^[52]

Conservative and Libertarian Critiques of Familial Interventionism

Libertarians have criticized Okin's extension of public justice principles to private family decisions as an unjustified expansion of state authority that violates individual rights and parental autonomy.

These theories include the liberalism of John Rawls, the libertarianism of Robert Nozick, and the communitarianism of Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Walzer. Finally, she hopes to approach the subject of evolutionary biology from a feminist point of view, primarily by looking at the ways in which research findings are presented to the nonscientific public.

Okin received her PhD from Harvard University in 1975.

(Princeton University Press, 1999), she analyzes and critiques theories from a feminist point of view.

Okin will spend part of her year as a Radcliffe fellow expanding on her recent writing about gender, economic-development theories and policies, and women’s human rights in the late twentieth century. She believes that the family perpetuates gender inequalities throughout all of society, particularly because children acquire their values and ideas in the family's sexist setting, then grow up to enact these ideas as adults.

In Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 1979), Justice, Gender, and the Family (Basic Books, 1989), and Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Her previous research and writing have been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and by Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Susan Moller Okin (July 19, 1946 – March 3, 2004) was a New Zealand-born political philosopher whose work centered on integrating feminist analysis into theories of justice, emphasizing the extension of egalitarian principles from public institutions to private family structures.^[1] Born in Auckland and educated at the University of Auckland (BA in history, 1966), Oxford University (MPhil in politics, 1970), and Harvard University (PhD in government, 1977), she taught at Harvard before joining Stanford University as the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society.^[2] Okin's scholarship demonstrated how gender hierarchies within households undermine broader societal justice, drawing on John Rawls's framework to argue that fair distribution of resources and opportunities requires dismantling traditional gender roles and divisions of labor in the family.^[2]Her influential books, including Women in Western Political Thought (1979), which examined the exclusion and subordination of women in canonical political theory from Plato to Rousseau, and Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989), which applied contractarian principles to advocate for gender-neutral family policies, established her as a pivotal figure in feminist political philosophy.^[3] Okin further contributed to debates on cultural pluralism through her co-edited volume Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (1999), where she contended that granting group rights to minority cultures often perpetuates harms against women, such as forced marriages or unequal inheritance, prioritizing individual rights over collective exemptions from gender-egalitarian norms.

If a theory of justice is to be complete, Okin asserts that it must include women and it must address the gender inequalities she believes are prevalent in modern-day families.

In 1993, with Jane Mansbridge, she summarized much of her own and others' work in the article on "Feminism," in Robert E. Goodin and Philip Petit, eds., A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, 269-290, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), and the next year, also with Mansbridge, published a two-volume collection of feminist writing, entitled Feminism (schools of thought in politics).[Aldershot, England and Brookfield, Vermont, USA: E.

Elgar. ISBN 9781852785659].

In her 1999 essay, later expanded into an anthology, "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?" Okin argues that a concern for the preservation of cultural diversity should not overshadow the discriminatory nature of gender roles in many traditional minority cultures, that, at the very least, "culture" should not be used as an excuse for rolling back the women's rights movement.

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Susan Moller Okin, the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society and a professor of political science at Stanford University, is a political theorist whose work has focused on the exclusion of women from most Western political thought, past and present.