Liberalism, Feminism and the Reagan State

Abstract

Today, liberalism is in crisis. Neoconservatives believe that the crisis stems from excessive demands for egalitarianism which have created a no-win situation for a liberal democratic society, a society which is supposed to be organised around freedom rather than equality. According to most left liberals and leftists, liberalism is in crisis because capitalism is itself in crisis. Markets are not expanding as they once were; Third World countries are challenging the hegemony of American world power; structural changes in the economy have expanded the service sector at the expense of production. Few of these critics, however, define the crisis as reflecting a challenge to traditional patriarchal institutions that underpin the relations of capital. New Right groups come the closest to this analysis in their concern with reconstructing the patriarchal white nuclear heterosexual family and the traditional male role as head of household. But even the New Right, which brought family issues and questions of sexuality to the mainstream of American politics in the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections, has not articulated in a systematic fashion why women's emplacement in the labour force challenges the system of liberal democracy and the discourse of liberalism so fundamentally, why the notion of equality is as subversive as it is when applied to women, or how feminism's rejection of the publiclprivate split and its recognition that the 'personal is political' is central to the crisis of liberalism.