At a time when so many different religious fundamentalisms are coming to the fore and demanding legal recognition, I want to vindicate something I have come to call feminist fundamentalism, by which I mean an uncompromising commitment to the equality of the sexes as intense and at least as worthy of respect as, for example, a religiously or culturally based commitment to female subordination or fixed sex roles. As I shall argue, both individuals and nation-states can have feminist fundamentalist commitments.

Fundamentalism and Perfectionism Defined

I define myself as a feminist fundamentalist. I am deeply and profoundly committed to the equality of the sexes and, in particular, to its instantiation in the repudiation of “fixed notions concerning the roles and abilities of males and females.” These commitments are at my fundament, my root, my base. My commitment to them is such that I would find it very difficult to act in ways contrary to or inconsistent with them, much like a believer who, even when the alternative is martyrdom, would refuse to deny the faith and sacrifice to what she believes are false idols, or, less dramatically, like a believer who would rather go hungry than eat forbidden food. A few examples may make this clear: first, recall that the Southern Baptists fairly recently declared that it was a wife's duty to “submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.