An Investigation Into Personal Autonomy And Gender Inequality

Liberal feminism faces at least two difficult issues when coping gender inequality based on personal autonomy.First,female self-image was distorted by social construction and sequentially the distorted self-image prevents women from exercising their autonomy.Second,those adaptive preferences,which are made by our own choice but are influenced by social construction,will enhance the fact of gender inequality.Aiming to response to the above two hard cases,this thesis discusses and analyzes two versions of liberal feminism,advocated respectively by Martha Nussbaum and Clare Chambers.Martha Nussbaum argues that her capabilities approach helps women to build a self-image which contains human dignity,and the capabilities approach can exclude unreasonable adaptive preferences from women's autonomous choices.However,Clare Chambers is unsatisfied with Martha Nussbaum's political liberalism which underlies Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach.Clare Chambers claims that if we want to completely cope with status harm influenced by unjust social construction,then we have to ask for external state intervention in some justified conditions.After discussing Martha Nussbaum and Clare Chambers,this thesis attempts to reject and refute the feminist theory of Clare Chambers based on three arguments.Next,this thesis explicitly defends feminism theory of Martha Nussbaum,by drawing on the conception of relational autonomy,and using the idea of relational autonomy to re-conceptualize Martha Nussbaum's conception of autonomy.I argue that in so doing,we can help Martha Nussbaum reply to the criticisms of Clare Chambers.At the end,this thesis emphasizes that the new version of Martha Nussbaum's liberal feminism devotes to the gender equality which is not substantial equality,but the equality about every one's list of capabilities.In other words,it is the equality of‘what people are actually capable of doing or being'.