Preface to a feminist theory of poverty

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The study of justice has been what John Scharr calls a "sunrise indust ry" in academia for the last decade.~ But while production has been remarkable on the "supply side" with almost every graduate student and doctor of political philosophy contributing views on the issue, the "demand side" continues to lag. What has all this discussion of justice come to? Are we any closer to finding or establishing a basic distributive principle which applies everywhere and always, or even provisionally within a given historical and cultural sphere? This is an important question for policy makers and activists as well as for scholars from many fields. In this paper I propose to discuss an approach which has not generally been explored by political theorists interested in the question of justice--namely, a feminist approach which critiques the way gender inequality structures economic systems and informs the process of theorizing itself. The literature of social theory, in its classic as well as contemporary versions, has given us a starting point, a perspective, from which we can begin to assess the quality of justice in any society. Marx argued that one must consider the justice of any system of distribution from the point of view of the lowest and most wretched in that society. Rawls' "difference principle" similarly argues that no advantage in a society can be justified unless it is in the interest of the least advantaged g r o u p . 2 T h e fact that women are the least advantaged group in all societies is taken to be accidental. That is, from a theoretical, formal point of view, gender is not funda-