Susan Moller Okin has died. Stanford has now released its obituary.
UPDATE: I’ll write more here as I’m able. For now I’ll note that the tributes to Okin are likely to (rightly) emphasize her best-known and most influential work, Justice, Gender, and the Family. But Okin’s subsequent fame as a normative liberal feminist shouldn’t obscure her ealr contribution to feminist history of political thought, Women in Western Political Thought. Predating Carole Pateman’s better-known The Sexual Contract by a decade and even my colleague Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Public Man, Private Woman by a few years, WWPT demonstrated the centrality of questions of gender and women’s status to a full understanding of the canon of political theory; and showed some of the ways in which that canon distorted our thought about gender. This was not the sort of casual dismissal of Dead White Men that would become so easy a decade or more later; it was an early grappling with important works and important arguments that implicitly or explicitly said a great deal about gender, but that hadn’t been analyzed through that lens by feminists before. In my view it is Okin’s finest work; it is certainly the one that has had the greatest effect on my research and teaching.
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