The Sceptical Feminist: A Philosophical Enquiry (Penguin Women's Studies) [Paperback]

Feminism has a strong fundamental case, by which Janet Radcliffe Richards means that there are excellent reasons for thinking that "women suffer from systematic social injustice because of their sex". Throughout this brilliant book, which fully deserves its status as a classic, she takes this proposition as constituting the essence of feminism, and she counts anyone who accepts it as a feminist. As a philosopher she dismantles the traditionalist position, examining its arguments and revealing them for what they are: deficient in reasoning, inventive with the facts, threadbare in logic. She combines clarity and rigour with sharp wit and good humour but, most importantly, never loses sight of the central issue: feminism is first and foremost "concerned with sexual justice".

To anyone who's grown up using mobile phones, it can seem incredible there was a time - twenty years ago! - when such things were monstrous curiosities or simply didn't exist. Similarly, an increasing number of people have never known a time when women could be legally discriminated against because they were women and for no other reason. Go back a little further and women were systematically excluded from large chunks of male territory: "from most education, from the professions, from most respectable or remunerative employment, and from participation in the making of the law". Not only was a woman's property - everything she owned and earned - her husband's, she herself was often treated as one more piece of his property. "If you consider the past there is no doubt at all that the whole structure of society was designed to keep women entirely in the power of men."

The past is a different country, indeed, but we should not think of its inhabitants as entirely foreign, since we are in fact their direct descendants. Our biology hasn't changed, and we haven't suddenly become experts in logic and respecters of evidence. This was all too apparent in the foaming response to a certain celebrity's recent comments that women, in his opinion, were not as interested in sex as men. The fear felt by right-thinking folk was that if women did not have exactly the same appetites as men, this would betray the feminist ideal. According to the rather more considered opinion of Radcliffe Richards, however, the absurdity is to think that feminism has anything to do with this kind of equality. It may be true that women are satisfied by the same things as men, but that's an empirical question and nothing to do with principles of social justice. If we look at our ancestral environment, for example, the reproductively successful males "must have been the ones who succeeded in impregnating most females, while the impulse to mate must have been relatively unimportant in the female (since she would in general produce the same number of offspring whether she mated every day or twice a year), and the most successful females would have been the ones who selected the best mates and cared most conscientiously for their offspring. This would presumably lead to a strong sexual drive in males, and a strong desire to care for their offspring in females."

Radcliffe Richards takes these evolutionary arguments seriously (and has written about them in her highly recommended Human Nature After Darwin: A Philosophical Introduction). More broadly and perhaps more controversially, she thinks that feminists "can get nowhere without logic and science" and should "be committed to an unending, unprejudiced investigation of the nature of the world as it actually is". This does not mean that feminism depends on beliefs about matters of fact, just that facts are important in any argument, feminist or otherwise.

This paramount concern with reason is reflected in the opening chapter, which lays out "The Fruits of Unreason" for our inspection. It may seem disloyal of Radcliffe Richards to point out "that feminism has some tendency to get stuck in the quagmire of unreason from time to time" and that some feminists "are so committed to their beliefs that they are unwilling even to look at evidence which might tend to dislodge them". The "new breed of anti-rational feminist" will surely think so, but Radcliffe Richards is sticking with reason. "If feminists defend irrationality they are in no position to complain if men resist all evidence and go on believing until the end of time that women are inherently weak, unreasonable and given to fits of the vapours."

Radcliffe Richards demonstrates the power of reason by taking down the likes of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and John Ruskin. Along with most men for most of recorded history, they thought women inferior and they expected women "to swallow arguments in defence of tradition" which are logically invalid, empirically implausible and morally repugnant. What these great thinkers would have made of a specimen of womankind setting them straight on matters of logic and reasoning can only be imagined, but when Radcliffe Richards reassures us that "some men are quite as capable of useful logical thinking and scientific investigation as women" we suspect she is being a little too kind.

There are many more issues - birth control, beauty, conditioning, etc. - that I haven't got space to mention but which are all dealt with in the same thoughtful way. One of the strengths of the book is the broader framework that explores more general questions of reason, nature, freedom and justice. These are essential for an understanding of feminism but also "relevant to all political and moral discussion" (I was struck, for example, by the parallels with contemporary secular humanism, which has its own extremes and can be seen as an unattractive option: "I'm not a feminist, but..." becomes "I'm not an atheist, but...").

It is a sign of progress that many discriminatory laws have been repealed and much anti-discrimination legislation enacted, and that those who openly mourn the passing of such injustices are fewer in number. Work still needs to be done, of course, here and elsewhere in the world and to that end there is no doubt that sceptical feminism will continue to make an important contribution.