Introduction

In this chapter, I provide final support for conceiving women's rights as multicultural claims by engaging with the issues examined previously – namely, rights to mediation and autonomy and the presumption for educational accommodation. My analysis will also articulate the farthest-reaching implications of adhering to Young's notion of seriality in the debate about gender and culture in political philosophy. Specifically, I contend that the idea of civic reciprocity helps to demonstrate why the educational accommodation of some apparently non-liberal practices would support the framework of rights defended in this book. While liberals should not sanction gender inequality in education, accommodating certain minority gendered practices could sometimes lead to women's greater participation in the public sphere, and would thereby occasion a politically responsible dialogue between diverse women that responds to the complex and subtle social constraints that should concern feminists across the permeable boundaries of their cultural and religious differences. While these issues may not amount to the extreme pressures involved in, say, forced marriage, and might not warrant direct legal prohibition, they nonetheless deserve feminist attention. Therefore, this chapter establishes the final sense in which attention to cultural particularity serves to reconfigure universal judgements about gender justice in an interest theory of rights.

To clarify the role played by the notion of ‘civic reciprocity’ in supporting this argument, consider the standard liberal appeal to the special relationship that obtains between citizens of a political state (Dagger 1997: 46; Callan 1997: 99–102).