Liberal feminism

Liberal feminism seeks gender equality through individual rights, equal legal treatment, education, and reform of existing political and economic institutions.

Mary Wollstonecraft: An eighteenth-century writer who argued for women's education and equal rational standing. Her 1792 defense of women's education became a foundational argument for later rights-based feminism.
Equal protection: A legal principle requiring governments to treat people equally under the law. Liberal feminist claims often ask courts and lawmakers to apply this principle without sex-based exclusions.
Radical feminism: A feminist tradition that analyzes patriarchy as a fundamental structure organizing social relations and power. It challenges the liberal emphasis on reforming institutions rather than transforming underlying power relations.
Pay equity: The principle and policies aimed at fair compensation across jobs and groups, including women and men. It applies equal-treatment claims to persistent differences in pay and occupational reward.
Second-wave feminism: A feminist movement from the 1960s through the 1980s addressing legal equality, work, sexuality, and family life. Liberal feminist campaigns helped shape its legislative agenda, alongside broader critiques of social norms.
John Stuart Mill: A nineteenth-century philosopher and politician who advocated individual liberty and women's legal equality. His arguments against women's subordination helped bring equality into liberal political debate.
Anti-discrimination law: Law that prohibits unequal treatment based on protected characteristics such as sex. It provides a direct legal tool for challenging barriers to employment, education, and public participation.
Marxist feminism: A feminist approach that examines women's oppression through capitalism, class relations, and labor. It foregrounds economic structures that liberal rights reforms may leave intact.
Comparable worth: A pay-equity approach comparing the value of different jobs to address wage disparities between occupational groups. It extends formal equality beyond equal pay for identical work.
Equal Pay Act of 1963: A United States federal law requiring equal pay for men and women performing substantially equal work. It illustrates a concrete statutory result of campaigns against sex-based economic discrimination.

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