- Susan Moller Okin
Susan Moller Okin (
July 19 ,1946 -March 3 ,2004 ) was afeminist political philosopher and author.In 1979 she published "Women in Western Political Thought", in which she details the history of the perceptions of women in western political philosophy.
Her 1989 book "Justice, Gender, and the Family" is a critique of modern theories of justice ranging from the
liberalism ofJohn Rawls andRobert Nozick to thecommunitarianism ofAlasdair MacIntyre andMichael Walzer . According to Okin, these theorists write from a male perspective that wrongly assumes that the institution of the family is just. She believes that the family perpetuates gender inequalities throughout all of society, particularly because children acquire their values and ideas in the family's sexist setting, then grow up to enact these ideas as adults. If a theory of justice is to be complete, Okin asserts that it must include women and it must address the gender inequalities she believes are prevalent in modern-day families.Okin was born in 1946 in
Auckland , New Zealand. She earned a bachelor's degree from theUniversity of Auckland in 1967, a master of philosophy degree from Oxford in 1970 and a doctorate from Harvard in 1975. She taught at the University of Auckland, Vassar,Brandeis and Harvard before joining Stanford's faculty.Okin became the
Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society atStanford University in 1990.She died of natural causes at her home in
Lincoln, Massachusetts .External links
* [http://www.bostonreview.net/BR22.5/okin.html Essay: "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?"]
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