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Liberal Feminism Essay
Margaret Rawlings
Women’s Gender Studies 3220
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte
27 January 2020
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Can freedom and equality fully coexist in a society, or does one undermine the other? I
think that freedom and equality cannot coexist unless there is significant social change in the
world. Although the citizens of the United States pledge to liberty for all, the factors of class,
race, and gender provide constraints on people’s ability to be free and equal. Liberal feminism
focuses on gender equality for women in the public sphere, such as equal pay, better working
conditions, equal access to education, and ending job sex segregation. Liberal feminists argue
that women deserve to be included in all aspects of society, which can be accomplished by
eliminating any limitations that prevent women from participating in the same spheres as men.
In this essay, I will evaluate the work of three liberal feminist theorists who all argued for
equal access for women: Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan B. Anthony and Betty Friedan. All of these
feminists were women’s rights activists who advocated for women’s inclusion in education,
voting, and employment. Although these women helped pave the path for the equal access that
most women experience in society today, some critics later condemned that equality for some
did not mean freedom for others. This theory is flawed because it focuses on an individualistic
idea about the lives of white, privileged, Western women who were presumed to be heterosexual.
Thus, this theory does not speak to and for all women, but rather to a small portion.
Liberal feminists believe that oppression exists because of the way men and women are
socialized by society, which supports patriarchy and demonstrates men in powerful positions.
The inclusion of women in education is strongly advocated by these feminists. This group
believes that women have the same mental capacity as males and should, therefore, have equal
educational rights. Since the enactment of Title IX in 1872, federal law has guaranteed the right
to an education free from sex discrimination in the United States. However, this was not the case
in earlier centuries. Women had limited opportunities to contribute to society. Because women
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did not receive the education and social opportunities that could make them independent, they
needed to marry a successful man to ensure their economic security.
A founding feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, was an English writer and passionate
advocate of educational and social equality for women. Wollstonecraft believed that the many
supposed differences between men and women were either fabricated or exaggerated and that
these differences were not sufficient enough for having separate rights and roles. “[Women] are
treated as a kind of subordinate species when improvable reason is allowed to be the dignified
distinction which raises men above the brute creation and puts a natural specter in a feeble hand”
(Wollstonecraft, 1793). Wollstonecraft argued that imposing different educational expectations
of the sexes was not only unjust but that it was disadvantaging because it resulted in less
productive females.
Both sexes, Wollstonecraft argued, have the ability to reason; hence both should be
educated to strengthen their rationality, which she defined as the ability to act as fully
responsible moral agents. The realization of this ability would provide self-fulfillment for the
moral agent and benefit society. When women were not given equal rights to pursue
opportunities outside of the home, this stunted their moral development and denied them self-
fulfillment that results in the freedoms of the “good life” (Bromley, 2012). In Vindication of the
Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft made a comparison between a flower planted in too rich soil
and the women of that time. She described the women in an unhealthy state because of their
sacrifice of strength and usefulness for the beauty that was beneficial in marriage. Wollstonecraft
argued that if women were given the right to education, then it would create stronger marriages.
She believed that a stable marriage was one in which the husband and wife have a partnership.
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For a partnership to be maintained, she argued, women needed to have an equal set of
knowledgable skills as their husbands.
During the eighteenth century, it was the women who were responsible for the education
of the young. One way Wollstonecraft advocated for women’s education was around this very
idea, that women should be educated if they are to educate their own children. “Only that
education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind, which teaches young
people how to begin to think” (Wollstonecraft, 1793). The stable marriage that Wollstonecraft
advocated for would provide the grounds for the proper education of the couple’s children. Thus,
women would be able to provide society with prospering children for future generations of
workers.
A second goal that liberal feminists strived for was to gain individual liberty. By gaining
