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of some presumed difference could not be justified unless it could be shown
that the difference was relevant to the distinction being made. Whatever dif–
ferences might exist between the sexes, none, based on this view,justified
legal inequality and denial of the rights and privileges ofcitizenship.
Few early feminists pushed liberal universalism to its most radical con–
clusion by arguing that there were
no
justifiable bases for exclusion of adult
human beings from legal equality and citizenship. Proponents of women's
suffrage were also heirs to a tradition that stressed the need for social order
and shared values, emphasized civic education, and pressed the importance of
having a propertied stake in society. Demands for the inclusion ofwomen did
not often extend to
all
women. Some women, and men, would be excluded
by criteria of literacy, property-ownership, disability, or, in the United States,
race.
At times, feminist discourse turned liberal egalitarianism on its head by
arguing/or women's civic equality on grounds that served historically to
guarantee women's exclusion from politics. One finds the case for greater
female political participation argued in terms ofwomen's moral supremacy or
characteristic forms of virtue. These appeals, strategic though they have
been, were never
merely
strategic. They spoke to and from women's social
identity. At various times, radical, liberal, democratic and socialist feminists
have paid homage to women as exemplars of particular forms of social
virtue.
From the vantage point of rights-based feminism, the emphasis on civic–
based motherhood was a trap. But the historic discourse that evoked images
of maternal virtue was one feminist response to a complex, rapidly changing
political culture. That political culture, in the Western democracies, was com–
mitted to liberalism but included as well civic republican themes of social soli–
darity and national identity. Women made their case within a male-dominated
political order from
their
own sphere, a world of female-structured sensibility
and imperatives that signified doubly their exclusion from political life and
their cultural strength and importance. Less able than men to embrace the
identity of a wholly autonomous social atom, often rejecting explicitly the in–
dividualist ideal, many feminists endorsed expanded familial values, stripped
of patriarchal privilege, as the basis for a new social world.
Feminists also turned variously to socialism, in its utopian and 'scientific'
aspects, and to romanticism. Finding in notions ofclass oppression an analogue
to women's social position vis-a.-vis men, socialist feminists promoted notions
of sex-class struggle and revolt. Feminists indebted to romanticism embraced
a robust notion of a passionate, feeling self breaking the encrustations of social
custom. Pressing a notion that women suffered as much from
repression,
or
internalized notions of their own incapacities, as from
oppression,
or system–
atically imposed rules and customs that guaranteed sex inequality, feminist
romantics stressed women's 'especial genius' (in the worlds of the American
