ABSTRACT
In the 1980s, as women’s studies was gaining a foothold in the US academy, feminist theorists commonly made a distinction between “equality” and “difference” approaches to the project of unseating patriarchy. 1 Generally speaking, the first pursues equal access to traditionally male institutions and prerogatives, while the second recognizes the specificity of women’s lives and redeems qualities traditionally denigrated as “feminine.” In these terms, looking back at 19th-century issues, we can recognize suffrage as an equality campaign; by contrast, laws protecting women from hazardous working conditions may be seen as reflecting a difference strategy. We find a similar split in feminist emphases today between, for example, “leaning in” (equality) and providing for nursing mothers (difference). Positions falling into one of these two camps recur and occasionally rival one another throughout the history of Western feminist thinking. When Mary Wollstonecraft argued the cause of women’s education in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she took an equality tack. When Virginia Woolf touted books about women’s feelings as no less important than books about war in A Room of One’s Own (1929), she was elaborating a difference argument. As theoretical and tactical approaches, “equality” and “difference” have each made huge contributions, yet each also has attendant risks. “Equality” may urge uncritical assimilation to male-dominated hierarchies (corporate, military, etc.), upholding their authority; “difference,” even when clearly framed in social rather than biological terms, may reinforce notions of women as essentially distinct from men (more nurturing, emotional, etc.). Further, by pivoting on the sole binary of gender, both approaches risk inattention to other structures of inequality. Responding to this limitation, feminist scholars in the 1990s would proceed to theorize identity and injustice in newly complex and fluid ways – as constituted by the intersecting axes of race, class, sexuality, and nation as well as gender. 2
