If this is so-if, when writing about women, privileged women are really talking only about themselves and their own situations, there is little chance that feminists like myself will have anything of note to say about the situations of poor women in poor countries with cultures that may differ considerably from our own. They ‘substitute the experience of white middle and upper class women (mainly professional women) for that of all women’ (Putnam, this volume, p. Those who are often referred to as essentialists, and whom Ruth Anna Putman, adopting the term from Benhabib ( 1987) but adapting it to her own purpose, calls ‘substitutionalist’ feminists, allegedly commit the mistake of subsuming all women under the category to which they themselves belong. ‘Gender’, therefore, is a problematic category, unless qualified by race, class, ethnicity, religion, and so on (see Childers and hooks, 1990 Harris, 1990 Minow and Spelman, 1990 Spelman, 1988). 1 White, middle‐ and upper‐class feminists, it is alleged, have been insensitive not only to the problems of women of other races, cultures, and religions, but even to those of women of other classes than their own. It is ‘essentialist’, some say, to talk about women, the problems of women, and especially the problems of women ‘as such’. But they were also brought about by the current prevalence among feminists of charges of ‘essentialism’ or, as Ruth Anna Putnam names it in this volume, ‘substitutionalism’. The difficulties I faced in writing this paper stemmed partly from an initially inadequate knowledge, which I have done, and am continuing to do, what I can to rectify. It is a daunting task for a feminist theorist accustomed to writing about justice between the sexes in the context of Western industrialized societies to venture into the subject area of women in different cultural contexts in far poorer countries. But how can all the different voices express themselves, and be heard, and still yield a coherent and workable theory of justice? This question is one to which I shall (eventually) return. There can no longer be any doubt that many voices were not heard, while most theories of justice were being shaped. Is it possible, by taking this route, to come up with any principles at all? Is it a reliable route, given the possibility of ‘false consciousness’? Doesn't stressing differences, especially cultural differences, lead to a slide towards relativism? The problem that is being grappled with is an important one. Yet, while to some extent acknowledging this neglect, some of us discern problems with going in the direction of formulating a theory of justice entirely by listening to every individual's or group's concrete point of view and expression of its needs. And some feminists have then gone on to point out that many feminist theories, while taking account of sexist bias or omission, have neglected racist, heterosexist, class, religious, and other biases. How can they be universal, principled, founded on good reasons that all can accept, and yet take account of the many differences among persons and social groups? Feminists have been in the forefront of pointing out that large numbers of persons have typically been excluded from consideration in purportedly universalist theories. Theories of justice, confronted with the challenges of feminism, post‐modernism, and multiculturalism, are undergoing something of a crisis.
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