Susan okin biography

Susan Moller Okin was born in New Zealand, where she attended the University of Auckland and received a B.A. in History.
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Life.

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Toward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin

The late Susan Moller Okin was a leading political theorist whose scholarship integrated political philosophy and issues of gender, the family, and culture. Okin argued that liberalism, properly understood as a theory opposed to social hierarchies and supportive of individual freedom and equality, provided the tools for criticizing the substantial and systematic inequalities between men and women. Her thought was deeply informed by a feminist view that theories of justice must apply equally to women as men, and she was deeply engaged in showing how many past and present political theories failed to do this. She sought to rehabilitate political theories--particularly that of liberal egalitarianism, in such a way as to accommodate the equality of the sexes, and with an eye toward improving the condition of women and families in a world of massive gender inequalities. In her lifetime Okin was widely respected as a scholar whose engagement went well beyond the world of theory, and her premature death in 2004 was

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Okin, Susan Moller 1946-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born July 19, 1946, in Auckland, New Zealand; died March 3, 2004, in Lincoln, MA. Philosopher, educator, and author. Okin was a Stanford University professor well known as a feminist political philosopher. Her childhood life growing up among strong-willed women led her to question her professor's stance on women's issues while at the University of Auckland. Graduating there in 1967, she earned her B.Phil. in 1970 from Somerville College, Oxford, and her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1975. After a few visiting professor stints, she became an assistant professor of political theory at Brandeis University in 1976. Her first book, Women in Western Political Thought (1979), was based on her Ph.D. dissertation. After being promoted to full professor in 1989 at Brandeis, Okin accepted a position as Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society at Stanford in 1990, where she was also director of the ethics in society program. Throughout her career, she argued for more equity for women in society, politics, and bus

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Susan Okin

International Development and the Importance of Gender

Susan Moller Okin was born in New Zealand, where she attended the University of Auckland and received a B.A. in History. She then studied at Oxford, where she earned an M. Phil. in Politics, and at Harvard, where she earned a Ph.D. in Government. She has taught at Vassar College, Brandeis University and Harvard University and is now Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. Okin has authored three books, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, 1979), Justice, Gender, and the Family, (Basic Books, 1989) and, co-authored with others, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, (Princeton, 1999). She has published many articles on subjects ranging from Hobbes’s changing ideas about Parliament to the ethics of nuclear deterrence. She is currently working on issues having to do with gender and economic development.