Death of a feminist legend

In March, on the twentieth anniversary of the death of a brilliant feminist thinker from Auckland who became a superstar in US academia, Justin Okin wrote a moving tribute to his mother, Susan Moller Okin, on International Women’s Day. “She was arguably the most influential feminist political philosopher of her time,” he wrote. “She spent her entire life fighting for women’s rights and she accomplished tremendous amount. I find comfort in the fact that she also missed Trump and the fall of Roe v. Wade.”

Her life was cut tragically short during the spring semester of her visiting professorship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. She was 57. But it’s only now that her family have broken their silence and spoken of the toll it took on her when she wrote a controversial essay on feminism and multiculturalism, and was accused of being a “colonial oppressor”.

Susan Moller, the youngest of three daughters, was born in 1946 and grew up in a state house in Remuera. Her Danish father worked as an accountant at Holeproof Woollen Mills. Susan attended Remuera Primary and Remuera Intermediate, and was at Epsom Girls Grammar with Helen Clark. She was awarded a John Williamson Scholarship to Auckland University and received another scholarship in 1966, to Somerville College in Oxford University. She earned her doctorate at Harvard University in 1975. She taught at Brandeis University, Massachusetts for 15 years.

Doe-eyed, with long, ironing-board straight hair, she married Boston psychiatrist, Robert Okin. The couple became parents to a girl and a boy. Her career trajectory in the US as a high-flying feminist political theorist took off. Her first book, Women in Western Political Thought (1979), analysed the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Mills concerning family and gender roles within political society. Its main intellectual claim was that gender issues should be central, rather than peripheral, to political theory. It received high praise from Vivian Gornick in the Washington Post: “Excellent. . . . Given the generations of scholars who have ignored the obvious, Okin’s contribution is tantamount to the child declaring the emperor to be without clothes. Her language is calm, clear, simple, and strong.”

And in Ethics, Nannerl Keohane wrote, “Okin’s impressive book makes clear that whatever we may have been taught, we cannot read the great political theorists as though ‘mankind’ means all of us.”

Her second book Justice, Gender and the Family (1989) was a critique of how mainstream political theory supports the traditional family institution and its reinforcement of sexist values through children’s socialisation. Review, Boston Globe: “A tough brilliant book…It doesn’t let anybody get away with sexism.” It earned Susan the American Political Science Association’s Victoria Schuck Award for the best book on women in politics.

In 1990, Susan moved to California to take up a position as Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. Everything was going well – until she addressed the uneasy mix between feminism and multiculturalism.

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Susan wrote in the Boston Review, “I think we – especially those of us who consider ourselves politically progressive and opposed to all forms of oppression – have been too quick to assume that feminism and multiculturalism are both good things which are easily reconciled.” She queried whether the conflicts between the feminist commitment to gender equality could be reconciled with cultural practices such as female genital mutilation, polygamy, and forced marriage. She insisted that women’s rights should be upheld universally, notwithstanding concerns about cultural diversity.

She further argued against liberals who support certain oppressive gendered practicesas intrinsic to a particular minority group’s cultural traditions, and wrote that they fail to recognise minority cultural groups “are themselves gendered, with substantial differences of power and advantage between men and women”.

Her essay drew immediate criticism. Joseph Raz accused her of  “striving to eliminate other cultures” and Bonnie Honig argued that she was actively “extinguishing cultures”.

Susan agreed to Princeton University Press publishing an anthology of responses to her book. It featured the contributions of 15 leading thinkers. Susan accepted her publisher’s advice to name the book Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, the title of her original essay. She later regretted agreeing to this sensationalist title for what were, in fact, a nuanced set of arguments.

Katha Pollitt, feminist columnist for The Nation, supported Susan’s dismissal of the notion that it’s up to particular cultures to determine their own specific gendered practices. According to Pollitt, the very essence of feminism is its questioning of tradition: “In its demand for equality for women, feminism sets itself in opposition to virtually every culture on earth. You could say that multiculturalism demands respect for all cultural traditions, while feminism interrogates and challenges all cultural traditions … Fundamentally, the ethical claims of feminism run counter to the cultural relativism of group-rights multiculturalism.”

But other commentators saw her argument as arrogant, even “militantly insensitive” to liberalism’s own inherent Western biases. In an essay posthumously published in 2005, Susan wrote that she had become “the person who stepped into something of a political minefield…and  threw a verbal grenade into a simmering discussion.”

She also revealed that she fought against the title of her essay and book. “After something of a struggle, I finally agreed with the editors of the Boston Review to call my essay ‘Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?’…I had already chosen the far more neutral title of Feminism and Multiculturalism: Some Tensions.” Looking back, she regretted that she had not “vetoed the more provocative title”.

Susan looked to New Zealand as a place of respite from the controversy, as well as from the stress of her marriage ending, and the demands surrounding her career. She was in Auckland for Xmas 2001 and some of the following summer. A former Epsom Girls Grammar schoolfriend, after talking to Susan about how she would like employment in New Zealand for part of each year, wrote to Helen Clark, then Prime Minister, along the lines of, “Do you remember the attractive prefect who played the piano at assemblies when you were in the 3rd form at EGGS?” and asked if there might be something Susan could do for her. “She would have remembered Susan I am sure. I got a reply that my letter had been passed on but heard no more.”

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Susan switched her attention to the economic development of women in poor countries. In 2003 she was invited to Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study as the Matina S. Horner Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science and Ethics in Society to research “Gender, Economic Development, and Women’s Human Rights.”

In January 2004, only a few weeks before her death, she travelled to India with the Global Fund for Women. While there she visited the slums of Mumbai and Delhi. Almost as an antidote to her earlier work, she wrote lyrically about how she had expected to encounter only degradation and desperation among the women in India’s slums, but instead found vibrancy, community, and resilience. “My view of Mumbai’s and Delhi’s slums has been transformed from seeing them (from the outside) as totally destitute and sordid places, where no one could possibly lead a decent or hopeful life, to seeing them as poor, but vibrant, communities, where, with well-directed help from the outside, many people can improve their living conditions and hope for a better life for their children.”

Despite this tribute to the human spirit’s strength in adversity, Susan could not have failed to notice the bleak reality faced by many women in India. A few years later, in 2013, in an essay in the New York Review of Books, distinguished economist Amartya Sen painted a far less rosy picture of the situation of women in India, his country of birth, describing it as a “mixed truth,” with significant gender disparities, including those of “missing women and boy preference”.

Earlier this month I emailed Robert Okin, Susan’s former husband and an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry. He reflected on this period of Susan’s career: “I remember when she spoke to a conference at the World Bank about her view, first advanced in her essay ‘Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?’, that there are fundamental tensions between certain group rights and cultural norms on the one hand and individual human rights (e.g. of women) on the other.  Had she stopped there, her position would not have generated so much controversy.  It was her view that when group rights subjugate individual rights we should be less solicitous about the former and more protective of the latter.

“Certain women, particularly those from northern Africa, felt deeply offended by what they viewed as Susan’s criticism of their cultures.  They accused her of intellectual and cultural imperialism and viewed her critiques as yet another example of how white people in dominant cultures denigrate people in minority cultures. I remember how hurt Susan was being cast in the role of the oppressor, given that she had devoted her whole life to challenging that role when it was occupied by men. Shortly after the conference she became quite depressed, and there is no doubt that the controversy she generated at the World Bank added to the painful emotional struggles that bedevilled her throughout much of her adult life.

“The fact that she did not fully retreat from her position despite how painful these criticisms felt was a testimony to her bravery.” Besides, he concludes, Susan argued that all cultures be held to account for their inherent sexism, with her earlier books critical of the sexism inherent in Western culture.

I also emailed Laura Okin, Susan’s daughter and a Boston-based psychologist. She wrote,  “While the world knew my Mother for her brilliant mind, her prolific work, and her many awards, few people knew that she battled depression later in her life.

“I think she felt tremendous shame about it, something that made her reluctant to seek help in a consistent way. I don’t know whether her shame came from a family, generational, and or cultural ideology that one must simply march on, or whether she couldn’t reconcile the part of herself as a successful academic with the part of herself that was vulnerable and in pain ..so she chose to hide this. Unfortunately, this gave the world a very two dimensional view of her and likely led to an idealization of her. While there has been a gradual societal shift in the way that we view mental health in the Western world…academia remains a sphere in which people feel they must suffer in silence rather than seek out the help that they need.”

On March 8, 2004, Susan was due to give a public talk on her work for International Women’s Day at Radcliffe. Instead, colleagues and friends met to commemorate her life. She died at her home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, on March 3.

Susan’s sudden death was met with shock and sadness by her family, friends, and colleagues. Obituaries spoke of her courage, cleverness, and commitment to women’s development. Judith Squires’s obit in the Guardian opened, “For many people, Professor Susan Moller Okin, of Stanford University, invented the study of feminist political theory, and, during the last three decades, continued to define its debates.”

Influential political and academic blogsite Crooked Timber noted Susan’s passing: “She spoke out against injustices wherever she saw them, often saying publicly what other people were only thinking privately. Her scholarship reflected her sense that political theory must reach out to public concerns, both in the United States and abroad.”

In 2005, Stanford University hosted a memorial conference in honour of Susan. It resulted in the anthology Towards a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin, edited by Stanford University academics Debra Satz and Robert Reich (ex-secretary of labour to President Bill Clinton), in which several leading feminist and political philosophers assessed Susan’s significant contribution to political theory and how best to take her work forward.

At the time of her death, she was working on the implications of economic development policies for women’s rights, and evolutionary biology from a feminist perspective.

As for the controversy she aroused with her essay on multiculturalism, Robert Okin emailed, “I have always viewed this event and her reaction to it as the beginning of her painful emotional struggles. Despite her bravery, she couldn’t face these accusations without tremendous pain.”

Susan Moller Okin, July 19, 1946 – March 3, 2004.