1. The work of Nancy Hartsock and Catherine MacKinnon are exceptions to this. Both define a standpoint for a feminist politics, Hartsock using the exploitation of women's labor in the household and MacKinnon using the exploitation of women's sexuality. Hartsock, Nancy, Money, Sex and Power (Boston: Northeastern 1983)Google Scholar; MacKinnon, Catherine, “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory,” Signs vol. 7, no. 3.Google Scholar

2. For an exceptionally thoughtful consideration of this question in an article that is also a thorough bibliography of contemporary feminist thought, see Scott, Joan, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. This question is most eloquently raised by black feminists. See Hooks, Bell, Ain't I A Woman (Boston: South End Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Lorde, Audre, Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984).Google Scholar

4. In an article that treats the conflicts among feminist theories of knowledge, Mary E. Hawkesworth proposes that feminists move beyond the problems inherent in trying to define a “woman's perspective” with a “critical feminist epistemology” (538). By her definition, such an epistemology would recognize that all knowledge is mediated by theory and would direct the energy of feminist theorists of knowledge toward examining “the specific processes by which knowledge has been constituted within determinate traditions and explor[ing] the effects of the exclusion of women from participation in those traditions” (551). Hawkesworth's conception of feminist critical theory is not incompatible with that discussed in this article, but it differs slightly in that she is primarily concerned with the production of knowledge and these authors are primarily concerned with institutional practices that are directly connected to social policy. See, “Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth,” Signs vol. 14, no. 3 (1989).

5. There are implicit connections to feminist theory in Barber's, Benjamin Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).Google Scholar This relationship, premised on an Arendtian conception of democracy, is explicit in the work of Mary G. Dietz who brings feminist and democratic theory together in a mutually critical relationship. See, “Citizenship with a Feminist Face: The Problem with Maternal Thinking,” Political Theory, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Feb. 1985); “Context is All: Feminism and Theories of Citizenship,” Daedalus (Fall 1987); “Hannah Arendt and Feminist Politics,” in Feminist Theory and Interpretations, ed. Shanley, Mary Lyndon and Pateman, Carole (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991).Google Scholar

6. Rosaldo, M. Z., “The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding,” Signs vol 5, no. 3 (1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. See for example, Chodorow, Nancy, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. See for example, Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a consideration of this style of argument, see Pateman, Carole, “Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy,” in The Disorder of Women (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

9. See Rosaldo, and Lamphere, , eds., Woman, Culture, and Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974).Google Scholar

10. Joan Scott carries Rosaldo's argument into a critique of more recent feminist scholarship. She suggests a critical appropriation of deconstruction as a way to “theorize [feminist] practice and to develop gender as an analytic category” (“Gender…,” p. 41).

11. Linda Alcoff finds a definition of gender that has affinities with feminist critical theory in the work of Teresa de Lauretis whom she argues sees gender as “not a point to start from in the sense of being a given thing but … a position or construct, formalizable in a nonarbitrary way through a matrix of habits, practices, and discourses.” See, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” Signs vol. 13, no. 3, (p. 431).

12. Of the works I will discuss, two authors—Iris Marion Young and Nancy Fraser—claim explicitly to be engaged in critical social theory. Though Susan Moller Okin and Martha Minow do not claim the label, they converse with Young and Fraser both explicitly (by means of citations), and implicitly by the method and focus of their inquiries.

13. I borrow this term from conversations with Mary Dietz and Sara Evans.

14. Moishe Postone notes the critical theoretic possibilities in contemporary feminist thought and activism by its attempt to “get beyond the antinomy of a form of universalism that is abstract and homogeneous, and a form of particularism that excludes universality.” See Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), p. 210. In an essay informed by the work of Martha Minow, Joan Scott argues that the “problem” of reconciling equality with difference is a consequence of an underlying theoretical construction that pairs sameness with equality. See, “The Sears Case,” in Gender and the Politics of History.

15. Minow, Martha, Making all the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

16. The difference dilemma appears in debates like the Sears Case, which questioned whether employment and earning patterns at Sears should be attributed to women's choices or to discrimination at Sears and in society. See Joan Scott, “The Sears Case.” A more recent example of a debate that was distorted by a difference dilemma is Felice Schwartz's article “Management Women and the New Facts of Life” which argues that the categories “career-primary” and “career-and-family” identify choices that women have to make. See, Harvard Business Review, vol. 89, no. 1 (1989), pp. 65–76.

17. Young, Iris Marion, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

18. A noteworthy aspect of both Minow and Young's works is the attempt to move beyond oppositional modes of thinking about rights and relationships. Young puts it succinctly, “[R]ights are relationships, not things; they are institutionally defined rules specifying what people can do in relation to one another” (25). One early and important work to consider this dichotomy is Gilligan, Carol, In A Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1982).Google Scholar For a discussion of the political and ethical possibilities of Gilligan's book, see Tronto, Joan, “Beyond Gender Difference to a Theory of Care,” Signs, vol. 12, no. 4 (1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Okin, Susan Moller, Justice, Gender and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989).Google Scholar

20. Fraser, Nancy, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).Google Scholar

21. Okin's recent book follows from the insights of her fine study, Women in Western Political Thought, where she argued that the rights-bearing individual of liberal political theory is the male head of household, and that his unfettered exercise of his rights depends on a gendered division of labor between the household and the formal public realm.

22. Terry Winant narrates an interesting storyline moving from Hannah Arendt to Nancy Hartsock to Nancy Fraser, that also sees a feminist critical theory emerging in the work of contemporary feminist political thinkers. See, “The Feminist Standpoint: A Matter of Language,” Hypatia vol. 2, no. 1 (Winter, 1987).

23. For development of this argument, Scott, , “Gender …,” p. 39 Google Scholar; Alcoff; and Bordo, Susan, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender-Skepticism,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Nicholson, Linda J. (New York: Routledge, 1989).Google Scholar