Equality

Tensions between equality and gender exist partially as the result of each term's traditional construction. While equality is understood as equivalence and entails stipulating a common quality or uniform measure, gender has been constituted through difference, specifically "sexual difference." Until recent feminist discourses, gender and sexual difference have been interchangeable and identical terms. As traditionally conceived, gender is constituted in and through "naturally occurring" sexual (anatomical) differences. Male and female are dichotomous natural kinds; gender categories simply reflect a biologically determined order. All humans are one and only one of gender's constituent binary pair: man/woman. Conventionally, gender is not only a binary, but an asymmetrical, hierarchical one. The male is the norm and superior, the female deviant and lacking.

Given this ranking, when theorists began to evaluate the significance of equality discourses to women's situations, certain questions inevitably arose. These included whether sexual difference was a kind of difference relevant to theories and practices of equality and, if so, if women's difference was mis-conceived. In other words, despite women's difference, were they in the relevant sense equal to men? The relevant sense would be that they sufficiently partake of the common quality the possession of which warrants claims to equality. Thus eighteenth-century writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) argue that reason is the common quality that renders humans equal. Women are as capable of reasoning as men; hence, they deserve equal enjoyment of all public rights. Later John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) argues that given the existing subordination of women, it is impossible to know what their true nature might be. Therefore, one ought to assume that they are as able and desiring as men to exercise the innate capacities of self-development and reason that define humanness.