The entry in W. H. Auden's Commonplace Book for “Justice” cautions: “Whoever suffers from the malady of being unable to endure any injustice, must never look out of the window, but stay in his room with the door shut. He would also do well, perhaps, to throw away his mirror.” Susan Moller Okin suffered this malady but rejected the poet's advice. She opened the window and looked in the mirror; her writings reflect sensitivity to injustice and acute awareness that her position of privilege and her good fortune made the work she did a moral imperative. The temper of her work was set by her political sensibility to the consequences of strength and weakness and by unflagging attention to the events of our world.

Okin was a liberal—or as she sometimes put it a “humanist”—feminist. Her work was based on liberal theory's concern for individual freedom and wellbeing and its political framework of rights and constitutional protections against the abuse of power. In a paper presented at the Boston area Workshop on Gender and Philosophy in 2004, she insisted that “liberalism properly understood, with its radical refusal to accept hierarchy and its focus on the freedom and equality of individuals, is crucial to feminism.” When we do not take the individual seriously enough, women within families and women within minority communities experience injustice.

In her first book, Women in Western Political Thought (1979), Okin used the works of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Mill to ask “whether the existing traditions of political philosophy can sustain the inclusion of women in its subject matter.” Her answer was that it could not, because most philosophers assumed a sharp division between the realm of public action and that of family life. Their views of women and the family often put authors in tension with themselves. Even Mill, who like Plato objected to the attribution of socially prescribed roles to so-called women's nature, failed to recognize the tension in advocating opening all occupations to women while assuming that most women will marry and be homemakers by choice.

The tour de force of Justice, Gender and the Family (1989) was to take four major political theorists and philosophers of the time—MacIntyre, Nozick, Rawls, and Walzer—and show that taking account of women would devastate or radically change central points of each of their arguments. The argument in this vein for which Okin is best known is her challenge to Rawls's Theory of Justice. In the “original position” under the “veil of ignorance,” the thought experiment that identifies principles of justice for a constitutional democracy, Rawls failed to include knowledge of one's sex among the characteristics of which a person would be ignorant in agreeing to enter a hypothetical society. If you might end up a woman, Okin pointed out, you would want more political and social reforms than those that Rawls suggested; in particular, you would want to insure justice within the family. This was a devastating criticism, made necessary by contemporary philosophers' disappointing continuation of a pattern of neglect of women and gender in the history of political thought. One of her last pieces, “‘Forty Acres and a Mule’ for Women: Rawls and Feminism” (forthcoming in Politics, Philosophy and Economics), was a grim assessment of the very limited alterations Rawls made in response to this criticism. Rawls conceded that the family was part of the basic structure, with a powerful effect on the distribution of fundamental rights and duties, but he did not apply principles of justice to the internal life of the family.

A common, simplistic view has it that any challenge to the public/private divide is a challenge to liberalism. Okin showed what is wrong with this commonplace. The interaction between public and private life produces gender hierarchy in both. Parents and teachers of girls raised on the assumption that girls' destiny is to become housekeepers and mothers will not invest attention and money in their education for other tasks. Options for young women to earn a good living at satisfying work outside the home are therefore limited. A woman is better off joining with a man, who is more likely to be able to command a living wage or salary. The relatively low wage that women obtain in the paid employment market reinforces the allocation of domestic work to women, and makes many women dependent on male earnings for the hope of a middle-income life. Inequality in the domestic division of labor fosters a gendered work environment that contributes to an unequal playing field.

In what became known as the cycle of vulnerability, Okin explains how this dynamic renders women vulnerable both within marriage and outside it.

The structured gender division of labor in the family thus conditions the lives of single women, especially single women with children, as well as women in relationships with men. Marriage and the family are “the pivot of a societal system of gender that renders women vulnerable to dependency, exploitation, and abuse.”

Okin's liberalism emerged as a ferocious fighting creed in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (1999). Her position was classically liberal: skeptical of authority and vigilant against the unchecked abuse of power, including the often self-styled authorities of religious or cultural groups and the power they exercised over the vulnerable. Okin showed great courage in this work, provoking opprobrium from both the right and left. She argued against acceptance of gender inequalities rooted in cultural and religious communities and she pointed out that the liberal disposition to grant exemptions from constitutional guarantees for indigenous peoples and illiberal cultural minorities sometimes put the women in those groups in jeopardy. A liberal feminist, she did not share the view of some other liberals that tolerance of injustice within nonliberal communities was an appropriate apology for colonialism. A liberal feminist, she was confident that a just liberal democracy should promote freedom and equality for all, including women from culturally and religiously conservative minority communities. Okin's liberal convictions, her unembarrassed assertion that women are “full human beings to whom a theory of justice must apply,” and her insistence that the “anti-essentialists” turned a blind eye to the constraints and vulnerabilities faced by women in general—these things distinguished her theory, the moral and political prescriptions she drew from it, and the stream of criticism her work provoked.

The questions of injustice that worried Okin were not limited to those experienced by women. She was deeply disturbed by global inequality and the ways in which hierarchies function within global and national legal, economic, and social life. This concern lay behind not only her criticisms of her political theory colleagues when she thought they backed off from the imperatives of justice, but also her early criticism of the U.S. Catholic bishops and her more recent criticism of international financial and other global institutions.

In “Taking the Bishops Seriously” (1984) Okin analyzed the U.S. Catholic bishops' 1983 Pastoral Letter on War and Peace to argue vehemently for justice and peace in international affairs. The Pastoral Letter was hailed by liberals at the time as an important anti-war statement in the face of the Reagan military buildup and debate over the deployment of the MX missile which, it was argued, would severely compromise the stability of the nuclear arms race. The bishops were harshly criticized by leading conservatives both within and outside the government. For her part, Okin took the bishops to task for the inconsistencies in their argument and for their conditional support of deterrence based on a counterforce strategy. Using the very terms of the just war theory the bishops invoked, Okin insisted that the bishops had not gone far enough in their condemnation of nuclear weapons and war as an instrument of international politics. She argued particularly that the bishops' claim that American Catholics might serve in the military and in defense industries without violating Catholic moral teaching contradicted the bishops' own principles.

In “Poverty, Well-Being, and Gender: What Counts, Who's Heard?” (2003) Okin argued that the conditions of global inequality, global poverty, and inequality within nations constituted a moral and political crisis. In this essay in Philosophy and Public Affairs and in other work that was unpublished at her death, Okin turned her attention to issues of material deprivation and vulnerability around the world.

For Okin, justice and gender were not just of philosophical import, but something she cared about with practical passion. She supported the organization and agency of some of the world's poorest women in her work with the Global Fund for Women. In the tradition of great liberals, Susan Okin gave us political theory as advocacy, liberalism as radical political thought. Unfortunately, our conversation with her about what liberal political thought has to offer in dealing with the most pressing problems of global poverty and inequality was cut short by her premature death.

Susan Okin inspires us in the pursuit of justice not only by the force of her keen intellect, but also by the way in which she lived and worked: watching over her students and egging them on; helping friends and colleagues sort out and develop their ideas; refusing to waffle or shilly-shally; delighting in cooking, swimming, and being with friends; and manifesting unceasing attentiveness to and pride in her children. We honor her best when we emulate her dedication to clear thinking, her honesty and courage, her commitment to others, and her passion for justice.