The book examines contemporary structural social injustices from a distinctly feminist perspective. It asks: what makes social group based oppression, discrimination, and domination wrongful? And what grounds the wrongfulness of patriarchal damage done to women? In thinking about these normative issues, the book puts forward two related views. First, it argues for a paradigm shift in focus away from feminist philosophy that is organized around the gender concept woman and toward feminist philosophy that is humanist. This is against the following theoretical backdrop: Politically effective femi ... More

The book examines contemporary structural social injustices from a distinctly feminist perspective. It asks: what makes social group based oppression, discrimination, and domination wrongful? And what grounds the wrongfulness of patriarchal damage done to women? In thinking about these normative issues, the book puts forward two related views. First, it argues for a paradigm shift in focus away from feminist philosophy that is organized around the gender concept woman and toward feminist philosophy that is humanist. This is against the following theoretical backdrop: Politically effective feminism requires ways to elucidate how and why patriarchy damages women and to defend feminism’s critical claims. Many have subsequently presumed that for emancipatory purposes feminist philosophers should articulate a thick conception of the gender concept woman around which feminism is organized. Part I of the book argues that feminists should resist this move and reframe their analyses of injustice in humanist terms. Second, the book spells out a humanist alternative to the more prevalent gender focus with a notion of dehumanization developed in Part II—a notion that explicates the wrongness-making feature of social injustices, both in general and of those due to patriarchy. Part II spells out that dehumanization is not another form of injustice, but that which makes forms of social injustice unjust. This part further provides a regimentation of social injustice from a feminist perspective in order to illustrate the proposed humanist feminism and to demonstrate how it improves some nonfeminist analyses of injustice too.