This book insists that “universals” are both real and necessary. Human dependency—that “every mortal is indebted to the others that supply the conditions of life”—is a “real universal,” according to Mary C. Rawlinson (p. 147). This universal is more than a fact; it carries normative weight, she contends, because it gives rise to “ethical imperatives” that should guide the reorganization of social life. Just Life identifies two specific expressions of such dependency: that “everyone is born of a woman” and that “every human being must eat other living things, plants or animals, to survive” (p. xx), truths which Rawlinson links to “women’s experiences” of generativity, “marginalized under Man’s hegemony” (p. xiv). Thus, the case for universalism advanced here is simultaneously a case for the “irreducibility of sexual difference.” The universals at the center of the book, tasked with promoting an “ethics of life” capable of standing up to present-day “catastrophe,” are those which affirm the “different capacities and destinies of the two sexes” (pp. 2, xiv).

The book addresses an eclectic combination of materials and examples over three sections. Part I, “Critique of Rights,” lays out the text’s main targets of critique. Chapter 1 exposes the exclusionary forms of community theorized by the social contract tradition, specifically by Hobbes and Rousseau. Rawlinson argues that the installation of “Man” as the “figure of the human” in these foundational texts not only signals the patriarchy of philosophy but is also emblematic of women’s enduring confinement to “the body, to domesticity, and to sexuality” even today, where they remain “dramatically underrepresented in political institutions around the globe” (pp. 32, xi). Chapter 2 shifts to Foucauldian concepts to diagnose contemporary practices of biopower, which, Rawlinson says, target “female bodies as a population”: the spatial confinement of women in Saudi Arabia, gendered dress codes in U.S. schools, and the surrogacy market in India (p. 63). These practices wrongly “reduce a human life to a unit in a calculus of . . . probabilities,” she says, and then responds by beginning to delineate an “ethics of life” that takes its bearings from the “distinctive generativity of female humans” (p. 70).

Chapters 3 and 4 comprise Part II, “Refiguring Ethics,” in which Rawlinson expands upon that ethical project by turning to two classical Greek pairs. Chapter 3 challenges feminist readings of Antigone as heroic by redeeming the maligned figure of her sister, Ismene. While Antigone “serves the fraternal economy and abandons the living sister,” Ismene should be praised for her courageous “attachment to life” (p. 102). The story of Demeter and Persephone, at the center of Chapter 4, is thematized by Rawlinson along two lines: Demeter embodies “maternal fidelity” and Persephone “the immanence of death in life” (pp. 122, 121). They should be embraced as “ethical figures,” the chapter concludes, because they jointly stand for an “intergenerational generativity” that shelters living and dying on earth (pp. 125–27).

Part III, “Livable Futures,” addresses the topics of eating and working, respectively. Chapter 5 opens with the observation that just as Demeter and Persephone were “keepers of the seed,” so too women in general are connected to the provision of physical nourishment, because of “the productivity of the female body” and because “food belongs to the invisible domain of women’s labor” (pp. 135, 146). The majority of the chapter, however, catalogs the ecological and human-health consequences of agribusiness while maintaining that eating is “at the heart of ethics.” The odd couple of Plato and Franklin D. Roosevelt star in Chapter 6, which argues for the importance of “meaningful” work for all citizens in a just state. Rawlinson says that policy today must prioritize the conditions of women’s labor and create “adequate infrastructures for integrating . . . the public world of work and the private world of the family” (p. 181).

The final section, a single chapter, underlines the virtues of universalism with which the book began. “The male has had his turn as the paradigm,” Rawlinson writes, and she urges us to “remember . . . that each and every one has been born of a woman,” a thought intended to illuminate the disavowed universal that humans are “always already interdependent with other living things” (pp. 187–88).

This puzzling book evades its stated aim, to explicate the political and ethical significance of two provocative universals: that everyone is born from a woman and that everyone needs to eat. Instead, the reader is presented with meandering, even disjointed reflections on everything from a simplistically rendered Hobbesian state of nature to the pleasures of shopping for cheese in France. The specific “real universals” with which Rawlinson opens and closes the book are never adequately theorized. As a result, what appears quite tantalizing in the introduction leads mostly to frustration by the end.

That feeling is exacerbated by the peculiar absence of relevant secondary literature throughout. For example, Rawlinson never addresses maternal feminism, despite her persistent focus on mothering as an invaluable ethico-political resource. This inattention could be overlooked if it were only a matter of flouting academic norms. But the author’s apparent disinterest in the pertinent work of contemporaries exacts theoretical costs. In the long first chapter on Hobbes and Rousseau, there is no consideration of any of the massive secondary scholarship on these canonical thinkers. Most crucially, no mention is made of Carole Pateman or Charles Mills, whose groundbreaking works examine the constitutive exclusions of the social contract device, precisely Rawlinson’s concern. Here and elsewhere, the lack of serious engagement with relevant scholarship leads in two unfortunate directions: prose that remains too mired in synopsis, on the one hand, or that presents rather well-worn observations as though they were original insights, on the other.

Perhaps most vexing is how imprecisely the central concept of “sexual difference” is rendered. Rawlinson continuously invokes the term, but its meaning remains obscure: “Women,” she writes, are “distinguished from men, and yet bound to one another, by their generativity. All women are comprised of the possibility of pregnancy, whether the possibility is thwarted by infertility or spectacular, as in the case of transwomen who, appearing as women, might very well appear as someone’s mother” (p. 70). On the one hand, Rawlinson maintains that “all women” share a common “biology of the female sex” (p. 70)—a flat declaration left undefended—while on the other hand, she seems to tacitly recognize the impossibility of such a monolithic reduction with the peculiar formulation that posits transwomen as sites of “spectacular” pregnancy.

In the end, it is difficult to know why Rawlinson remains attached to this ambiguous notion of sexual difference, especially when the book’s other theoretical commitments do not require it, and may even strain against it. Judith Butler’s work of the last decade-plus, centered on the ethics and politics of “precarious life,” can help problematize the place of “sexual difference” in Just Life. Rawlinson and Butler in many ways share an idiom and a set of motivating concerns. Both thinkers seek to rescue the category of “life” from the Right and use the term to address what each presents as an indisputable universal: humans’ “fundamental dependency” on other human and nonhuman animals (Judith Butler, Precarious Life, 2004, and Frames of War, 2009). Likewise, both imbue this truth with prescriptive power, urging their audiences to consider the “ethical obligations” (Butler) and “ethical imperatives” (Rawlinson) that emerge from the acknowledgment of deep interdependency. Each emphasizes that honoring these ethical demands is never simply a matter of individual choice or conduct, but requires efforts to reshape collective existence, to provide what Butler calls the “sustaining social conditions of life” and what Rawlinson refers to as “a culture of possibilities” that affirms our indebtedness to one another and seeks to more equitably nourish human and nonhuman life.

Despite these affinities, Butler’s project is dedicated to disrupting the binary schema of sexual difference that Rawlinson’s work reinforces. Butler’s critique of gender norms (and of the erroneous assumption of a “natural dimorphism” that props up the dominant sex/gender system) is driven by the “question of what maximizes the possibilities for a livable life and minimizes the possibility of unbearable life” (Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, 2004, 8). How, she presses, can our “schemes of intelligibility” be transformed so that placement into a dichotomous gender category is no longer a precondition for “legible humanity”? (ibid., p. 11). Rawlinson’s “ethics of life,” on the other hand, involves repeated claims about “all women,” “women’s experience,” and “the material universal of a woman’s body.” Do such statements resist or assist what Butler calls the “unwanted legislation of identity”? (ibid., 7).

Most significantly, by repeatedly reinscribing women-as-bodies and women-as-mothers, Rawlinson seems to foreclose a more radically open and pluralistic vision of the future that the book also, in its best moments, dares to imagine: “a life together that would no longer require that we divide ourselves by the differences of gender,” one in which “surprising, novel, unheard-of identities can be expected” (pp. 105, 196). If this is the world Rawlinson hopes to inhabit, why does the “future of sexual difference” elaborated here so often resemble that of the past?