“Equality in difference”

“Equality in difference” is presented as a familiar formula for reconciling women’s emancipation with the persistence of sexual difference. The book challenges the formula’s use as a defense of hierarchy: differences between women and men need not disappear, but they cannot justify keeping women in an inferior position. Its alternative is a future in which distinct experiences coexist with reciprocal freedom.

Difference, Reciprocity, and the “Other”

The book asks why relations between the sexes have not achieved the reciprocity found in other encounters between groups. A traveler can discover that people regarded as local at home are foreigners elsewhere; relations among villages, nations, and classes likewise unsettle any group’s claim to absolute status. Yet men have been established as the essential term, while women are treated as the inessential Other. Women’s subordination is especially difficult to undo because it appears to rest on an unchanging natural condition rather than on a datable historical event.

This account also distinguishes women’s situation from those of other subordinated groups. Women are as numerous as men, but they have not generally formed a unified group capable of acting in their own name. They are dispersed among men through family, work, and economic ties, and divisions of class and race can align some women more closely with men of their own group than with other women. The couple itself binds the two sexes together as necessary halves, making their opposition unlike a separation between independent groups.

Difference as a Justification for Inequality

The historical argument shows how claims of difference can convert an imposed condition into an alleged natural inferiority. As women entered paid work during the Industrial Revolution, their demands gained economic force, and resistance intensified. Employers benefited from women’s lower wages; male workers could perceive women workers as competitors rather than allies. The book argues that organizing women within unions made it possible to defend their interests without turning them into a weapon against the working class as a whole.

The comparison with racial subordination clarifies how this circular reasoning works while also marking limits to the analogy. The book notes that both women and Black people have been assigned a place by a dominant group and then judged by the conditions that group imposed. But the histories are not identical: women lack the separate communal space that has supported other groups’ solidarity, and racial and class divisions also divide women among themselves. “Equality in difference,” when it preserves a prescribed place for women, resembles the language of separate but equal status: the appearance of recognizing difference can serve to maintain discrimination.

The Phrase Reconsidered

The book does not argue that emancipation will make women and men identical. It allows that differences in erotic life, bodily experience, and relations to children will remain. Its objection is to treating these differences as a warrant for hierarchy or as evidence that women should remain dependent. The phrase is turned around: if equality is real, differences must be acknowledged within equality, rather than equality being made conditional on women accepting a subordinate role.

The proposed alternative is reciprocal recognition. Emancipation would not abolish relations between women and men; it would end the confinement of women to those relations and allow each person to exist as a subject. Desire, love, possession, adventure, and companionship could persist, but without one sex’s social subjection supplying the terms of the other’s experience. In this sense, “equality in difference” is not a settled slogan in the book but a problem to be tested against the institutions that shape difference and the freedoms that could give it a nonhierarchical meaning.