Equality

The idea that public life ought to be organized on the basis of this presumption of a formal equivalence and its ensuing entitlements emerged relatively recently. It is a distinguishing characteristic of modern liberalism, modes of thought and practices that emerged in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Western Europe. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) are among the most important early liberal theorists. Their writings reflect and refine the new bourgeoisie's claims of equality arising in the political struggles in early modern Europe against older feudal hierarchal orders. These new movements rejected the ideas of a natural basis for authority or the relevance of certain ascribed characteristics, such as one's family of origin, to the legitimacy of claims to rule or to the distribution of public power.

In the apparent rejection of the significance of at least some ascribed characteristics to the distribution of power, discourses of equality would appear to have the potential to dissolve the basis of many asymmetrical relationships. Indeed, one can argue that modern feminisms emerged simultaneously with and within theories and practices of liberal equality. However, while perhaps siblings, feminisms and their related liberal discourses are not identical. From the first, feminisms exposed the contradictions and limits of liberal equality. Feminist movements fought (and in some countries, continue to fight) sustained and difficult battles to attain suffrage and equal rights to education, reproductive freedom, employment, and protection under the law. Such rights are called formal equality. As more countries extend formal equality to previously excluded groups and declare their commitment to gender neutrality, however, the contradictions and limits of formal equality become more evident. Consequently the meanings of and relationships between equality and gender are increasingly complex and contested.