Justice Begins at Home

Susan Moller Okin, in Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989), noticed that theories of justice took the family as given. Who did the washing went unasked. Okin argued that a family divided by gender is itself a question of justice. It is also justice’s first school: children learn fairness, or its absence, at home.

The slogan “the personal is political,” from the women’s movement of the 1960s, makes the same move. Problems that look private, who cooks, who is believed, who is safe, are shaped by shared rules and can be changed by them.

Iris Marion Young widened what injustice means, naming five faces of oppression. Exploitation is being used; marginalization is being left out; powerlessness is taking orders without giving any. Cultural imperialism is having another group’s ways count as normal, and violence is living under its threat. A group can suffer one without the others.

The promotion

Dana and her husband Ilan both work. When their daughter is ill, Dana stays home, because her job is the smaller one. Her job is smaller because she stayed home last time. Her manager, Mrs. Castellanos, passes her over for promotion as less committed.

Nothing here breaks a rule. Okin’s point is that the rules on leave, pay and promotion made the arrangement, and a different set would have made a different one. The private choice was built in public.

Try this today Look at how one household you know divides unpaid work, and ask whether a fair society could be built from children raised in it.