Susan Miller Okin's Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women

Susan Miller Okin’s “Is multiculturalism bad for women” attempts to address key reasons as to why she feels multiculturalism cannot coincide with feminism. She begins by defining the specific notions of feminism and multiculturalism that she is referring to in order to provide clarity to the reader. She refers to the liberal model of feminism, which is the belief that women should not be look down upon due to their gender, and should be widely recognized as equal, not unequal, to men. By multiculturalism, she refers to the Kymlicka model of the preservation of group-differentiated rights. Kymlicka’s model of multiculturalism promotes group-differentiated rights, arguing that rights cannot always be attached to individuals; rather we must see what these rights do for
Therefore if most cultures at its core are patriarchal and established for the continued empowerment of males, then there is no way that this will coincide with the core doctrine of feminism. She provides the example of certain cultural defenses such as polygamy, as I have referred to previously, or child marriage as evidence of this argument. She states “Those who practice some of the most controversial such customs…the marriage of children or marriages that are otherwise coerced, or polygamy—sometimes explicitly defend them as necessary for controlling women, and openly acknowledge that the customs persist at men's insistence”(14). So as we can see, that although the propagation of different cultures is good for most male members of society, it doesn’t change such customs that promote the degradation of women in society. As such, Okin argues that due to this, instead of being part of the solution, multiculturalism may very well make it worse for females because the propagation of inherently male dominated cultures could make it much harder for females to achieve the core goal of equality that the feminist doctrine strives