of differences that prevented women from being heads of households or taking part
in politics. The liberal ‘public/private’ divide was premised on the assumption that
women’s differences from men made them domestic creatures, suited to the private
sphere but not to the public one. Wollstonecraft and J.S. Mill took the universal
claims of liberalism that traditionally had only applied to men and argued that
women were individuals too – they were just as rational and logical as men – and
were therefore entitled to citizenship alongside men.
This notion was held by the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), an
organisation set up in Britain to monitor and encourage the pursuit of equal
opportunities (now replaced by the Equality and Human Rights Commission). As
far as women are concerned, the EOC sought a society that ‘enables women and
men to fulfil their potential, and have their contributions to work and home life
equally valued and respected, free from assumptions based on their sex’ (Hughes,
2002: 41). In other words, the differences between men and women tend to be
disregarded: the emphasis is upon what they have in common. They are equal, not
different.
Cultural and radical feminists, influential during what may be called second wave
feminism (a feminism that took root in the late 1960s), reversed the earlier
assumptions, valuing difference over equality. As Bohan has put it, ‘the customary
valuation of difference is turned on its head: women’s ways of doing are revered,
rather than demeaned’ (Hughes, 2002: 47). Mothering was seen as the embodiment
of virtue, and what was called maternal thinking should, it was argued, be extended
to all spheres of public life. This position has led to separatism – not only the physical
separation of women and men – but the cultural and intellectual separation as well.
The very notion of ‘objectivity’ is identified as a male value, so is rationality.
Adrienne Rich summed up the position succinctly: ‘objectivity is male subjectivity’
(quoted in Spender, 1980). As Barrett comments, ‘men have one reality, women
have another, and women’s culture can be developed as a separate activity’ (1987:
31). Experience is seen as something that differentiates men from women while
uniting women against men.
Third wave feminism – which is a feminism influenced by postmodernism – argues
for a notion of difference that extends from differences between women and men,
to differences among women themselves. Feminism, it is argued, must break from
the liberal view that if people are the same, then they cannot be different, and if
they are different, they cannot be the same. On this analysis, the second wavers
merely invert the first wavers. Instead of arguing that women should be equal to
men, they reject equality on the grounds that women are different from men. The
feminists who have drawn critically upon postmodernism argue that one should
cease to treat equality and difference as ‘binary [i.e. exclusive] opposites’. To argue,
as Brown does, that we should oppose the notion of gender equality on the grounds
that ‘equality presupposes sameness or equivalence’ (cited in Hoffman, 2001: 41)
is to accept uncritically the liberal view that we need to choose between equality
and difference, whereas it could be argued that one without the other turns into its
polarised opposite.
If we say that because white people are different from black people (as indeed
they are, in appearance at least), they are unequal, and to be equal, they must be
the same, then arguably we violate both equality and difference. Equality is seen as
something that suppresses difference – an unattainable goal since every individual474 Part 4 Contemporary ideas