Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Friday, June 24, 2022

The Politics of Reproduction: A Canadian Feminist Perspective

Historically, men have used freedom, the highest human value, to institutionalize the inequalities which have hitherto been the condition of freedom.  It is not claimed that inequality or freedom are derived exclusively from reproductive relations …. To lump liberty, equality and fraternity together is to make a categorical error.  Fraternity is the ideologically formulated condition of an actual liberty, the brotherhood of fathers who are forced to be free.  It is universal only in male terms, and absolutely precludes a truly universal freedom and equality, for its condition is the suppression of women.[1]

Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (1981)



[1] Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 158.  Mary O’Brien was a nurse, philosopher and founding member of the Feminist Party of Canada. 

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