We are grateful for Kara Ellerby’s generous and incisive review of our book. As she points out, we aim to bring greater precision to debates about the politics and logics of women’s rights by explaining why and how different issues follow different logics of reform. For example, whereas change on status issues involves autonomous feminist movements leveraging international norms to contest women’s subordination, doctrinal issues trigger conflicts between religious groups and the state and unsettle old bargains over state–religion relations. Class issues, by contrast, expand the state’s role in redistribution to shift the division of labor between family, market, and the state for social provision.
To explain these patterns, our book presents a typology that disaggregates women’s rights policy issues along two dimensions: whether the issue involves women as a class or a status group, and whether the issue confronts religious doctrine or sacred traditions. In her review, however, Ellerby portrays the first dimension as a distinction between gender AND class, when in fact, we refer to both class and status as dimensions of the gender system. We see the gender system patterning women as both a class group, defined by their position in the sexual division of labor and in relation to markets (e.g., for land, labor, and capital), and as a status group, constituted by institutionalized patterns of value and violence. The distinction we pose distinguishes among gender issues, not between gender and class.
Ellerby takes issue with the way we treat the concepts of women’s rights, gender equality, and gender justice. She writes that we conflate these terms and thus run the risk of limiting the agenda of gender justice to focusing merely on women. We explain in the introduction that we consider women’s rights to be a subset of gender equality, a far larger concept that includes the politics of sexuality, queer and transgender identities, heteronormativity, and more. We go on to explain in a footnote that, even though one concept is a subset of the other, we sometimes use the terms interchangeably in the book.
We agree with Ellerby that gender is a broad and complex concept that includes, but is not limited to, the system that defines women’s identities and shapes their social position. However, recognizing the breadth of gender and the range of issues affected by the gender system should not deter us from analysis and advocacy of women’s rights, nor should we refrain from characterizing women’s rights as part of gender justice.
Laws and policies in much of the world continue to discriminate against women, deny women recognition and dignity as human beings, subject them to violence and abuse, and limit their opportunities to get educated, work, and support themselves and their families. We do not endorse an approach to gender justice that prevents us from naming and criticizing these laws that define and denigrate women as a group. A broader concept of gender justice ought to incorporate, even as it goes beyond, women’s rights. Eschewing talk of “women” in favor of a gender-neutral approach runs the risk of being blind to the myriad injustices perpetrated on account of gender.
