This is an important and insightful book that tackles an incredibly challenging problem, namely, how to balance the commitment of gender equality with the commitment of multiculturalism. Drawing on a wide range of resources, including feminist literature, anthropology, and political and legal theory, the answer by Anne Phillips partially turns on how we understand culture. Phillips wants multiculturalism to dispense with essentialist understandings or “strong” notions of cultures and to place human agency at its center. Instead of understanding cultures as depriving minority women entirely of their agency, we need to recognize the diverse ways that minority women can embrace, struggle with, and reject their cultural practices, norms, and values. A defensible multiculturalism should, according to the author, be grounded on individual rights, not group rights. She does not wish to deny that people are cultural beings. Rather, her claim is that a defensible multiculturalism treats cultures more akin to current treatments of class and gender.
Phillips illustrates this point by discussing Price v. Civil Service Commission (1978). This case found that an age limit of 28 for applicants to an executive grade of the Civil Service did discriminate against women inasmuch as many women bring up children in their twenties and, therefore, start their careers later. This case demonstrates that the British courts can acknowledge constraints on women without denying their autonomy. Public authorities ought to recognize the relevance of culture without assuming that culture dictates all actions. The trick, according to Phillips, is for generalizations about gender and class to be based on specific evidence about a particular individual.
Unfortunately, Phillips never discusses whether there are any relevant differences in the ways that gender and culture enable and constrain individual choices. Nor does she provide any clues as to how public authorities should address these differences. For instance, she ignores how the United Nations Draft Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Groups recognizes collective rights, for example, the right to self-determination. Typically, no such rights are claimed on behalf of women. Do such differences matter? If so, how? Her book does not provide any answer. Moreover, Phillips's recommendation that we should treat culture in a way akin to gender ignores the legal complexities and double binds that can arise from current legal understandings of gender. For instance, in the United States, black women are required to identify sex or race as the primary form of discrimination because racial discrimination requires a stricter level of scrutiny than gender discrimination does. By failing to specify how public and legal authorities should properly adjudicate different kinds of gendered claims, Phillips's recommendation to treat culture like gender is not as instructive as it could be. Although she goes out of her way to recognize the diversity among women in minority cultures, she does not provide any clues about whose interpretations of a cultural practice should be given weight for determining the influence of culture on an individual.
Despite these omissions, Multiculturalism Without Culture holds many instructive and invaluable lessons for feminists and political scientists concerning how they should view and criticize minority cultures. For instance, Phillips contends that public authorities should not assume that the coercion of some members of a minority culture means that all members of minority cultures are coerced. Western governments should not use the bad behavior of a few members of a minority culture to justify a ban on the entire group. For example, Phillips rejects the notion that the forced marriages of some women from minority cultures should be used to justify the practice of setting an age limit on all foreign marriages. She recommends that our public policies acknowledge both the coercive elements of culture, as well as the agency of individuals.
Phillips uses an impressive range of interesting and educational examples to illuminate her argument for a multiculturalism without culture. Sometimes, she criticizes public authorities for overestimating the power and control of cultures, thereby denying female members of minority cultures any agency. For instance, she denounces prohibitions against wearing the hijab, or headscarf covering the head and shoulders, for an identity photograph. Fears that some women are being coerced into wearing a headscarf should not blind us to the fact that some women choose what their religion recommends as modest dress. At other times, Phillips considers cases in which the coercive dimensions of cultural commitments are underestimated. For example, she criticizes those who endorse exit rights as sufficient for guaranteeing individual autonomy. According to the author, they make exit seem easier than it is. Instead of treating exit as a test of agency, we need to recognize the agency of, and support, those who choose to stay under, and negotiate, oppressive conditions. The right to stay must be “complemented” by the right to exit.
This is an impressive and timely book. Not only does Phillips wants to overcome feminist anxieties about cultural imperialism—the imposition of one's own cultural values and norms on another culture—that make it difficult to represent any belief or practice as oppressive to women, but she is also suspicious of feminists' arguments for gender equality that can be co-opted by xenophobic groups as a way to demonize minority cultures. Such appropriations of feminist arguments are particularly worrisome, given the current retreat from multiculturalism. Her alternative approach to multiculturalism is designed to address both of these concerns. Multiculturalism Without Cultures should appeal to those who study gender oppression, as well as those who wish to engage sensitively in cultural criticism. Phillips's treatment of this complex and important topic exemplifies the very best of feminist critical thinking.
