Liberal feminism: equal rights through law and reason

What this chapter is for

Liberal feminism is the oldest school of feminist thought and the one that has changed the most laws, in the West and in Pakistan. This chapter teaches what it says, where it came from, how it works, what its critics say and how Pakistan’s own laws for women carry it. By the end you should be able to explain the school in your own words, tell its two kinds apart, and judge how far it can raise women’s status in Pakistan.

The chapter has four parts. The first teaches the idea and its founders, Wollstonecraft, Mill and the American campaigners. The second shows how it works and how it split, with Okin and Nussbaum. The third reads Pakistan’s laws, from the Constitution to the child marriage laws of 2025 and 2026. The last weighs the critics and applies everything to the paper.

No Part-II question from CE-2016 to CE-2026 names liberal feminism alone, but three questions need it directly, and Part-I has asked about Friedan, Seneca Falls and the harassment law.¹

Before you start

The words

Liberalism. A family of political ideas that puts the freedom of the individual person first, and holds that a just state protects that freedom.

Liberal feminism. The school of feminism that applies liberalism to women. Women are rational individuals, so they deserve the same rights and chances as men, won through law and reform.

Rational. Able to think, reason and judge for yourself.

Suffrage. The right to vote in public elections.

Formal equality. Equality in what the law says. Every person has the same written rights.

Substantive equality. Equality in real life. People can actually use their rights and reach comparable outcomes.

Classical-liberal feminism. The kind of liberal feminism that sees freedom as freedom from force, and asks mainly that the law stop treating women differently from men.

Egalitarian-liberal feminism. The kind of liberal feminism that sees freedom as the real ability to run your own life, and asks the state to act, through anti-discrimination law, support for care and other measures.

Capabilities approach. Martha Nussbaum’s view that justice means making sure each person is truly able to do and to be certain basic things.

Temporary special measure. A step that treats women differently for a time in order to make them equal in fact, such as reserved seats. CEDAW says such steps are not discrimination.

The places

Seneca Falls. A small town in New York State, in the United States, where the first women’s rights convention met in July 1848.

Westminster. The seat of the British Parliament in London, and the constituency John Stuart Mill represented from 1865.

Islamabad Capital Territory. The federal capital and the area around it, where laws passed by Parliament for the capital apply, such as the child marriage law of 2025 and the domestic violence law of 2026.

Punjab. Pakistan’s most populous province, which passed its own child marriage law in 2026.

The story in plain words

1. For centuries the law in most countries treated women as less than full citizens.
2. In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft argued that women can reason as men can, so they deserve the same education.
3. In 1848 a meeting at Seneca Falls in America demanded equal rights for women, including the vote.
4. In 1869 John Stuart Mill argued for “perfect equality” between the sexes in law.
5. Over the next century women won the vote, property rights and entry to universities and professions.
6. In 1963 Betty Friedan showed that equal laws had not freed many women from narrow lives at home.
7. Later thinkers asked the state to do more, even to make family life fair.
8. Critics said equal rights alone cannot end women’s subordination.
9. Pakistan has many equal laws for women, and is still passing new ones, but women’s lives have not yet caught up with them.

1. What liberal feminism says

Imagine two students in Multan who finish school with the same marks. The boy goes to university. The girl is told that university is not for girls, and that she will marry soon. A liberal feminist looks at this and asks one question. Is she less able to reason, to learn and to judge than her brother? If not, then nothing justifies giving him a chance that is denied to her. That question, and the answer that follows, is the whole school in small.

Liberal feminism holds that women are rational human beings, equal to men in their capacity to think and choose, and so entitled to the same rights, freedoms and chances. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it in two sentences. “Liberalism is a family of doctrines that emphasize the value of freedom and hold that the just state ensures freedom for individuals. Liberal feminists embrace this value and this role for the state and insist on freedom for women.”² The individual comes first, freedom is the value, and the state’s job is to secure that freedom equally for women and men.

Every school of feminism names a cause of women’s subordination and a remedy. For liberal feminism the cause lies in unequal laws, unequal education and prejudice. For most of history women were shut out of the vote, the universities, the professions and the ownership of property. They were then judged unfit for public life because they had never been allowed into it. The remedy follows from the cause. Remove the legal barriers, open education and work to women, and let them compete on equal terms.

This remedy is reform, not revolution. Liberal feminism works inside the existing state and economy and tries to make their rules fair. It argues in the language of rights, citizenship and fairness that the law and the public already accept, and asks the state to live up to its own principles. If all citizens are equal, women citizens must be equal too. That method explains both its great success and its limits, and the rest of this chapter follows both.

Behind the remedy sits a claim about human nature. Liberal feminists hold that much of what is called women’s nature is the product of upbringing and law. John Stuart Mill wrote in 1869 that “What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing”, the result “of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others”.⁶ That is the idea the chapters on the social construction of gender teach, stated a century before the word “gender” took its modern sense.

2. Liberalism, the parent idea

Liberal feminism grew out of liberalism, the political idea of the European Enlightenment, so the parent comes first. Liberalism put two things at the centre of politics. The first is the individual person, who matters in their own right and not only as a member of a family, a tribe or a class. The second is freedom, each person’s right to choose how to live. A liberal state exists to protect that freedom equally for all, and its power over people needs a justification they could accept.

The early liberals spoke of the rights of man, and many meant it literally. The law of England treated a married woman as absorbed into her husband. The American campaigners of 1848 complained that the law made a woman, “if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead”.¹⁰ Liberal feminism’s first move was simply to point out the contradiction. If rights belong to every rational individual, and women are rational individuals, then the rights belong to women as well.

Liberals have always disagreed about what freedom means, and the disagreement split liberal feminism in two. The encyclopedia explains that “Some liberals understand freedom as freedom from coercive interference”, while “Other liberals understand freedom as personal autonomy—living a life of one’s own choosing—and political autonomy—being co-author of the conditions under which one lives”.² The first view is older and is called classical liberalism. The second is called egalitarian liberalism. Section 6 shows how each produces its own feminism, and why the difference matters for Pakistan.

3. Wollstonecraft: reason and education

Mary Wollstonecraft is the founder of liberal feminism. In 1792, three years after the French Revolution had proclaimed the rights of man, she published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.³ Her argument rests on reason. Women, she held, have the same power of reason as men, and she tied that power to God. “The nature of reason must be the same in all,” she wrote, “if it be an emanation of divinity, the tie that connects the creature with the Creator”.⁵ If reason is God’s gift to every soul, then denying women its use denies something sacred.

Her main target was the education girls received. Girls of her class were trained to please men, to be pretty, gentle and obedient, and then blamed for being weak. Wollstonecraft refused to flatter them in the usual way. “My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their FASCINATING graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.”⁵ She mocked the advice books that taught women to be only “gentle, domestic brutes”.⁵

Her reply to the French philosopher Rousseau shows the liberal aim exactly. Rousseau had argued that girls must be educated differently from boys, and Wollstonecraft quotes him. “Educate women like men,” says Rousseau, “and the more they resemble our sex the less power will they have over us.” Her answer is one of the most famous lines in feminist writing. “This is the very point I aim at. I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.”⁵ The goal was not to turn the hierarchy upside down. It was self-government, the power of each woman over her own life.

Her proposals follow from that aim. Boys and girls “ought, not only in private families, but in public schools, to be educated together”.⁵ Women “might certainly study the art of healing, and be physicians as well as nurses”, and she hinted that women “ought to have representatives” in government.⁵ A woman who could support herself would marry by choice, not from need. Wollstonecraft did not reject marriage or motherhood. She argued that an educated woman would be a better wife and mother, a companion rather than a servant. Some modern readers find that too modest, but it is the seed of everything that followed. Once women are accepted as rational, the case for shutting them out of schools, professions and votes collapses.

4. Mill: perfect equality

John Stuart Mill turned Wollstonecraft’s moral case into a full argument from liberal principles. He was elected to Parliament for Westminster in July 1865, and in 1869 he published The Subjection of Women.⁷⁶ Its opening states the thesis. The legal subordination of one sex to the other “is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement”, and “it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other”.⁶ The book makes three arguments, and each is still used.

The first argument is about nature. Defenders of the old order said women were unfit by nature for public life. Mill replied that nobody could know women’s nature while women lived under men’s control. What people called female nature was “an eminently artificial thing”, produced by “forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others”.⁶ Claims about what women are by nature were really claims about what subordination had made of them.

The second argument is about competition, and it is liberal through and through. If women truly cannot do something, Mill said, there is no need to forbid it. “What women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing.” If they can do it, but less well than men, then “competition suffices to exclude them”.⁶ Either way the law has no business deciding in advance. This is the idea of a fair race. Remove the rules that favour one runner, and let ability decide the result.

The third argument is about marriage. In the England of his day a wife without a protective settlement lost everything on marriage, and Mill wrote that “the absorption of all rights, all property, as well as all freedom of action, is complete”.⁶ A home built on command, he argued, teaches children command and obedience rather than justice, because “the only school of genuine moral sentiment is society between equals”.⁶ Susan Okin would build on this idea more than a century later, as section 7 shows.

Mill also acted on his views. On 7 June 1866 he presented to Parliament the first mass petition for women’s suffrage, signed by around 1,500 women. On 20 May 1867 he moved to replace the word “man” with “person” in the Reform Bill, which would have given some women the vote. His amendment “was defeated by 196 votes to 75 (including tellers)”.⁷ It failed, but it put women’s votes before Parliament as a serious question for the first time.

5. Seneca Falls, Friedan and the National Organization for Women

In America the argument became a movement, and it began with a snub. In 1840 the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London refused to seat its elected women delegates “because of their sex”. Two of the women there, the Quaker reformer Lucretia Mott and the young Elizabeth Cady Stanton, met in the women’s section and “vowed to hold a convention” on the wrongs done to women once they were home.⁹ In July 1848 Stanton and four friends, Mott among them, called it. On 19 and 20 July about three hundred women and men met at Seneca Falls in New York State, including Mott and the former slave Frederick Douglass. At the end, 68 women and 32 men signed a Declaration of Sentiments drafted by Stanton and the M’Clintock family.⁸ It copied the American Declaration of Independence and changed a single phrase. “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal”.¹⁰

The Declaration then listed the wrongs done to women, and nearly every one names a law. “He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.” “He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.” “He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.”¹⁰ That is the liberal diagnosis in its plainest form. Women are wronged because the law denies them what it gives men. The vote took decades to win. American women gained it through the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, the year usually taken as the end of the first wave of feminism.⁴

A century after Seneca Falls, Betty Friedan found a wrong the law did not explain. American women could vote, own property and go to college, yet many educated women felt trapped at home. In 1963 her book The Feminine Mystique named this “the problem that has no name”. Her publisher describes the book’s subject as “the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women’s confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home”, and notes that the average woman then “first married in her teens” and that “60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry”.¹¹ Friedan’s point was still liberal. Women were being steered away from choosing their own lives.

The National Organization for Women, NOW, turned this into a programme. Its Statement of Purpose, adopted on 29 October 1966, promised “to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now”, in “truly equal partnership with men”.¹² It complained that women working full time earned “on the average only 60% of what men earn”. It rejected “the token appointment of a few women to high-level positions” and “the traditional assumption that a woman has to choose between marriage and motherhood, on the one hand, and serious participation in industry or the professions on the other”.¹²

That last demand reaches past the law into how work and family are organised. Liberal feminism was moving from equality on paper towards equality in life, and the move split it in two. The timeline below follows the school from Wollstonecraft to Pakistan’s newest laws.

6. How it works, from a right on paper to a right in life

Go back to the girl in Multan. Suppose a law is passed tomorrow that says girls and boys have an equal right to university places. Is she now free to go? A liberal feminist of the classical kind would say yes, or nearly. Nobody may force her out, so her freedom is secure. A liberal feminist of the egalitarian kind would say not yet. If her family will not pay, if no college is near, if she fears harassment on the bus, her right is real on paper and closed in practice. This difference is the working heart of liberal feminism, and it turns on what freedom means.

Classical-liberal feminists understand freedom as “freedom from coercive interference”. They hold, in the encyclopedia’s words, “that feminism’s political task is limited to opposing laws that treat women differently from men, a task which they hold has been largely accomplished in societies like the United States”.² They are wary of state power and oppose most further state action. One group among them, the equity feminists, holds that in such societies the only serious source of women’s oppression is the state itself, so feminism’s political role is “to bring an end to laws that limit women’s freedom in particular, but also to laws that grant special privileges to women”.² They see themselves as the true heirs of Wollstonecraft and the Mills.²

Egalitarian-liberal feminists understand freedom as autonomy, the real ability to live a life of one’s own choosing and to help set the rules one lives under. A woman whom no law restricts may still not be free, because poverty, violence, stereotypes and the burden of unpaid care can close her options as surely as a law. They trace these limits to what Susan Okin called the “gender system”, that is, “inherited patriarchal traditions and institutions”.² So they “see the state as a potential ally” and “endorse measures like anti-discrimination law, affirmative action, and welfare state programs”.² They also back policies such as “parental leave, state subsidized, high quality day care, and flexible work schedules”, so that caring for children does not shut a woman out of paid work.²

Think of the difference as a set of steps. On the first step the law is written and treats women and men the same. On the second it is enforced, by courts, police, ombudspersons and registrars. On the third a woman is actually able to use it, because she can read, has an income, is safe outside her home and has time beyond unpaid care. Classical-liberal feminism climbs the first step and largely stops. Egalitarian-liberal feminism insists on all three.

The two kinds also part over laws that claim to protect women. Egalitarian liberals want women free of “patriarchal paternalistic and moralistic laws”, laws that limit women’s choices “on the grounds that such limits are in women’s interest”.² A rule that a woman may not travel or work without a male relative’s permission is the clearest example. The state that should be an ally becomes an obstacle when it decides for adult women what is good for them.

Most of the laws a Pakistani student will meet are egalitarian in shape. Reserved seats, harassment committees in every office and protection orders against domestic violence all ask the state to act on private power, not merely to stop discriminating itself. When you write about a law, say which kind of liberal feminism it belongs to. That one sentence shows the examiner you understand the school rather than its name.

7. Okin: justice in the family

Susan Moller Okin carried egalitarian-liberal feminism into the one place liberals had left alone, the family. She built on John Rawls, whose work, the encyclopedia notes, “has played a very large role” in liberal philosophy for fifty years.² Rawls asked what principles of justice people would choose behind a “veil of ignorance”, not knowing their own place in society, “for example their socio-economic status, religion, and sex”.² Such people, he argued, would choose equal basic liberties for all and fair equality of opportunity.

Okin, in Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989), took the veil seriously. Suppose you did not know whether you would be born a woman or a man. Would you accept a family in which one sex does the unpaid work, gives up its earnings and depends on the other? She held that the family and the gender system are basic institutions of society and must be judged by the same principles as the state and the market.² By assigning work by sex, the gender system denies people a “free choice of occupation”.² In a just society, gender could no longer form “part of the social structure, whether inside or outside the family”.²

Her second argument concerns children, and it takes up Mill’s school of moral sentiment. Children first learn justice at home. A family marked by “dependence and domination”, Okin argued, cannot teach a sense of justice, and children raised in one may grow up believing that women are not owed equal citizenship.² An unjust family therefore threatens the whole just society.

Her remedies were practical. She proposed state-subsidised day care, a legal right to parental leave and flexible hours, and public education that builds children’s independence. She also proposed protecting women who choose a traditional role “by making them legally entitled to half of their spouse’s paycheck”.² Other liberals answered that the state should not favour one model of family life over the others “free people might want to organize their lives” around.² That dispute is still open.

8. Nussbaum: what a woman can actually do and be

Martha Nussbaum asked what justice requires for women in poor countries. Her book Women and Human Development (2000) proposes “a kind of feminism that is genuinely international”, taking as “her point of departure the predicament of poor women in India”.¹³ Its core is the capabilities approach. Justice is not only a matter of rights on paper or income in a pocket. It is a matter of what each person is actually able to do and to be.

Her account of the good life has, in her own words, “at its heart, a profoundly liberal idea … the idea of the citizen as a free and dignified human being, a maker of choices”.² She lists the major human functionings that make a good life, among them “bodily health and integrity, affiliation, and political participation”. One must be able to function in each of these ways, and “Social arrangements are to be criticized if they render their participants unable to function in the valued ways regardless of their preferences”.² An earlier essay of hers argued that “the best way to tackle the issue of women’s equality in developing countries is to begin with a conception of the human being and human functioning”.¹⁴

The approach deals with a hard problem that the encyclopedia calls “deformed preferences”. When choices are narrow or arrangements unfair, people can come to want less than their fair share.² A woman told all her life that she does not need schooling may say, honestly, that she does not want it. For Nussbaum her answer does not make the lack of schooling just. The question is whether she was ever truly able to choose.

Nussbaum expected the charge that a single list imposes one culture’s values on others, and defended “her particular brand of universalism” against it.¹⁴ Her approach suits Pakistan well. It does not stop at asking whether a girl in Tharparkar has a legal right to school. It asks whether there is a school she can reach, a teacher in it and a family able to spare her, which is the third step of the figure in section 6.

9. Pakistan’s laws for women, read as a liberal record

Few of Pakistan’s laws for women call themselves feminist, but their shape is liberal. They give women equal rights as individuals, forbid discrimination and set up bodies to enforce both. Many go further, into the egalitarian kind. Reading them this way gives you a ready structure for any question on the law and women’s status.

The base is the Constitution of 1973. Article 25 says that “All citizens are equal before law and are entitled to equal protection of law”, that “There shall be no discrimination on the basis of sex”, and that “Nothing in this Article shall prevent the State from making any special provision for the protection of women and children”.¹⁵ The first two clauses are classical liberal, equal treatment and no discrimination. The third is egalitarian. It lets the state treat women differently in order to make them equal in fact. Article 34 adds that “Steps shall be taken to ensure full participation of women in all spheres of national life”.¹⁵

A one-word change in 2010 shows the liberal logic at work. Article 25(2) once forbade discrimination on the basis of sex “alone”, and the Eighteenth Amendment of 2010 omitted that word.¹⁵ With “alone” in place, a rule that disadvantaged women on sex together with some other ground could slip past the ban. Without it, the ban reaches further.

The Constitution also reserves seats. Article 51 gives the National Assembly 336 seats, 60 of them reserved for women and filled from party lists in proportion to the general seats each party wins. Article 59 has each Provincial Assembly elect four women to the Senate and the Federal Capital elect one.¹⁵ Reserved seats are what CEDAW calls a temporary special measure. Its Article 4 says that “temporary special measures aimed at accelerating de facto equality between men and women shall not be considered discrimination”.¹⁶ Pakistan acceded to CEDAW on 12 March 1996, declaring that its accession was “subject to the provisions of the Constitution”.¹⁷

Parliament has built on that base with statutes. The Protection against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act received the President’s assent on 9 March 2010.¹⁸ It requires every organisation to set up an inquiry committee of three members, “of whom at least one member shall be a woman”, and as amended it counts “discrimination on basis of gender, which may or may not be sexual in nature” as harassment.¹⁸ An ombudsperson hears complaints. This is the egalitarian programme in practice. It meets private power in the office with public law.

Section 206 of the Elections Act 2017 requires each party to give women at least five per cent of its tickets for general seats.¹⁹ The Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act 2026 received the President’s assent on 26 January 2026. It extends to the Islamabad Capital Territory and protects “any woman, man, transgender person, child, vulnerable person” against violence in the home, with the family court empowered to grant protection orders.²⁰ The provinces have their own laws on violence in the home, which a later chapter teaches.

The age of marriage shows the liberal method most clearly, because it is being fought over now. Sindh set eighteen for both sexes in 2013. In May 2025 the President signed the Islamabad Capital Territory Child Marriage Restraint Act, setting eighteen in the federal capital.²¹²² In April 2026 the Punjab Assembly passed the Punjab Child Marriage Restraint Bill 2026, which replaces the law of 1929, bans marriage under eighteen for both boys and girls, and in its own words removes “gender-based age distinction and discrimination”.²² Other provinces have largely kept the old rule of sixteen for girls.²²

Each of these laws treats a girl as an individual whose schooling, health and choices the state must protect, which is the liberal claim. Each has also been contested in the language of Islam, which section 12 sets out. The pattern is the one this chapter keeps returning to. Pakistan writes the right first, then argues about whether and how to enforce it.

10. Liberal reform in the language of faith

A liberal-feminist law in Pakistan does not have to borrow a secular language to defend itself. Wollstonecraft herself grounded women’s reason in God, and the Quran addresses believing women beside believing men. Surah al-Ahzab promises reward to “Muslim men and Muslim women, believing men and believing women”, and to every pair of good men and good women it lists, “for them, Allah has prepared forgiveness and a great reward”.²⁷

Mufti Muhammad Shafi’s Ma’arif al-Qur’an explains the verse. Women had felt that the Quran addressed men, and here special mention is made of their deeds “to mollify the hearts of women”. The verse makes clear, he writes, “that the touchstone of acceptance and appreciation with Allah Ta’ala is the righteousness of deeds and the spirit of obedience to Him. In this, there is no discrimination between man and woman.”²⁸ Another verse gives each sex its own earnings. “For men there is a share of what they earned, and for women, a share of what they earned.”²⁹

This does not make liberal feminism an Islamic doctrine, and you should not claim that it does. The ulema disagree among themselves about many of the laws in section 9, and some reject them. What the verses give a Pakistani liberal feminist is common ground. Equal moral worth before God, and a woman’s own right to what she earns, are premises most Pakistanis already hold. An argument that starts there can reach readers a purely secular argument cannot, which is why Pakistani reformers so often make it.

11. What the critics say, and the replies

Liberal feminism has more critics than any other school, partly because it is the oldest and most influential. Each criticism points to something that equal rights for individuals may miss, and a strong answer gives each with its reply.

The first criticism is that liberal feminism cannot see power or groups. Some critics hold that a focus on individuals and on sharing out goods cannot grasp injustice done to women as a group. Iris Marion Young argued that the distributive approach “neglects relations of power”.² Catharine MacKinnon argued that the root of the gender system is men’s sexual domination of women, which rights-based reform leaves untouched.² These are radical-feminist objections, taught in the chapter on radical feminism. Liberal feminists reply that political liberalism can treat group injustice as domination, and some now draw directly on radical insight into violence and hierarchy.²

The second criticism is that it leaves the economy alone. Socialist feminists object that liberal feminism accepts capitalism. Nancy Fraser has argued that “feminism has entered a dangerous liaison with neoliberalism”, meaning a politics of largely unfettered markets, and with others calls for a “feminism for the 99%”.² A feminism that helps a few women reach the boardroom, on this view, does little for the women who clean it. The encyclopedia concedes that poverty “has not been a major focus” of much egalitarian-liberal feminist work.² Some egalitarian liberals answer by accepting “liberal socialism”.²

The third criticism is that it reasons from an ideal world that does not exist. Charles Mills argued that justice must start from a society “with a history of injustice”, not from a perfectly just one.² Serene Khader argued that an ideal of independence and self-sufficiency ignores the relationships many women rely on, and that such a feminism “may harm many of the very women it aims to benefit”.² Care ethicists add that every human life begins in dependence on others. Liberal feminists have answered by treating autonomy as relational, built through relationships rather than against them.²

The last criticisms come from opposite directions. Conservative critics warn that reformers can do more harm than good by weakening institutions and customs that many people rely on.² In Pakistan this criticism usually comes in religious terms, as the next section shows. Classical liberals make the opposite complaint from inside liberalism, that the arguments which justified the reforms of the nineteenth century now count against further state action.² The school has proved good at absorbing its critics. That flexibility is a strength, though it also blurs the line between liberal feminism and its rivals.

12. Where it stands now

Pakistan’s laws for women are strong on paper, and its outcomes for women are among the weakest in the world. In the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2026, Pakistan ranked 143rd of 145 economies with a score of 0.595, up from 148th of 148 in 2025, and still last in South Asia.²⁴²⁵ The report credited the rise mainly to “substantial gains in Educational Attainment”.²⁵

The detail shows where law has reached and where it has not. Pakistan closes 91.7 per cent of the gap between women and men in education and 95.9 per cent in health, but only 36.4 per cent in economic participation and 14.1 per cent in political empowerment. Women’s labour-force participation stands at 28.21 per cent against 81.46 per cent for men, women are 21.69 per cent of parliament and 3.45 per cent of ministers.²⁴ At home, the census of 2023 found 52.84 per cent of women literate against 68.00 per cent of men.²⁶

The party-ticket rule shows the gap between law and life on a small scale. Before the 2024 general election, 111 parties fielded 6,037 candidates for general seats, of whom 280, or 4.64 per cent, were women. Thirty parties met the five per cent rule. The rule binds in practice only parties with at least twenty candidates, and for the Punjab Assembly women were only 3.14 per cent of party candidates.¹⁹ The law existed. Many parties met its letter where they had to and no more.

The age of marriage shows the contest over liberal reform. The Council of Islamic Ideology rejected the Islamabad law of 2025, “declaring it contrary to the principles of Sharia”, and the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam said it would challenge the law “at every forum”. Supporters pointed to the Federal Shariat Court’s judgment of 2022 accepting the state’s right to set a marriage age.²¹ In 2026 the Punjab law was challenged in turn. By August the Federal Shariat Court had listed for hearing a petition which argues, in the Express Tribune’s account, that making marriage under eighteen a crime “is contrary to Shariah” and that “the state is not authorised to interfere in matters governed by Islamic law”.²³ The case was pending when this chapter was written.

So liberal feminism in Pakistan stands where the egalitarian kind said it would. The legal base is largely built and still growing. The open questions are enforcement, and whether other measures will reach the economy, the family and the culture. Classical liberal feminism has little to say about those questions. The egalitarian kind, with Nussbaum’s test of what a woman can actually do, is built for them.

13. What students mix up

Students often say liberal feminism wants women to become like men. It does not. Wollstonecraft wanted women to have power “over themselves”, and Mill wanted the law to stop deciding in advance what women could do.⁵⁶ The aim is equal freedom to choose, not one model of life.

Students often treat liberal feminism as one view. It has two kinds that disagree about the state. Classical-liberal feminism asks the state mainly to stop discriminating. Egalitarian-liberal feminism asks it to act against violence, discrimination and the burden of care.² Name both, and say which kind a given law belongs to.

Students often write that liberal feminism ignores the family. Early liberals did leave the family alone, but Okin put it at the centre of egalitarian-liberal justice in 1989.² The radical feminist slogan that the personal is political has a liberal answer.

Students often confuse formal and substantive equality with liberal and radical feminism. Formal against substantive is a difference inside liberal feminism, between its classical and egalitarian kinds. Radical feminism differs about the cause, patriarchy, not only about how far the state should go.

Students often say Pakistan has no laws for women. It has many, from Article 25 to the domestic violence law of 2026.¹⁵²⁰ The problem a good answer explains is the gap between those laws and women’s lives.

14. What the examiners have asked

No Part-II question from CE-2016 to CE-2026 names liberal feminism alone. Three need it directly.¹

• CE-2022, Q.3. “Describe any two Western Schools of thought about Feminism in detail.”
• CE-2018, Q.5. “What are the reasons responsible for ranking Pakistan as the second-worst country in the world for gender inequality despite Pakistan commitment to many international conventions and strong commitment to gender equality in 1973 constitution?”
• CE-2018, Q.7. “Believing in the statement that “women cover half the sky”, do you think we need equal number of women in all spheres of public domain, especially in politics?”

CE-2022 is answered best with liberal feminism as one of the two schools, with its founders, its two kinds and its critics. CE-2018 Q.5 is the gap between law and life, which sections 9 and 12 explain, and the three steps of section 6 give it a structure. CE-2018 Q.7 needs the liberal debate over reserved seats, CEDAW’s temporary special measures and the 2024 ticket data. The chapter on what feminism is teaches CE-2018 Q.4, which asks which feminism can raise women’s status in Pakistan.

Part-I has drawn on this school too. CE-2024 and CE-2025 both asked who wrote The Feminine Mystique. CE-2024 asked which women, shut out of an anti-slavery convention, resolved to hold Seneca Falls, and when the workplace harassment law was passed. CE-2025 asked who led Seneca Falls.¹

15. Facts to take into the examination hall

16. What loses marks on this subject

1. Defining liberal feminism without first saying what liberalism is.
2. Saying liberal feminism wants women to become like men.
3. Treating liberal feminism as one view, with no classical and egalitarian kinds.
4. Listing Wollstonecraft, Mill and Friedan with no argument from any of them.
5. Giving the criticisms without the replies.
6. Writing about the Western movement only, with no Pakistani law or figure.
7. Claiming Pakistan has no laws for women, or that its laws have worked.
8. Calling every reform “Western” without its constitutional and Islamic grounds.
9. Using the 2025 ranking of 148th as current. The 2026 report places Pakistan 143rd of 145.

17. A worked answer plan

The question is CE-2022, Q.3. “Describe any two Western Schools of thought about Feminism in detail.”¹

It asks for two schools “in detail”. Detail means, for each, the cause of women’s subordination it names, its leading thinkers, its remedies and its critics. Two contrasting schools make a stronger answer, and liberal and radical feminism suit, because each defines itself partly against the other. The chapter on radical feminism teaches the second school. The headings on your rough page might be these.

• Introduction, feminism defined and the two schools named with their causes
• Liberal feminism, its roots in liberalism, cause and remedy
• Wollstonecraft, Mill and Friedan, one argument each
• Classical and egalitarian liberal feminism, with Okin and Nussbaum
• Criticisms of liberal feminism, with replies
• Radical feminism, patriarchy as the root cause
• Its thinkers and remedies
• Criticisms of radical feminism
• The two compared on one Pakistani case, such as domestic violence
• Conclusion

A model introduction might run like this.

Feminism is the conviction that women suffer injustice as women, together with the organised effort to end it. Its Western schools differ chiefly in diagnosis. Liberal feminism attributes women’s subordination to unequal laws and unequal opportunity, and seeks equal rights through reform within the existing state; radical feminism attributes it to patriarchy, the systematic power of men over women, and seeks to transform society at its root, the home included. Liberal feminism has changed more laws; radical feminism has explained better why equal laws have not ended women’s subordination. Pakistan, with strong laws and weak outcomes, illustrates both claims.

Now plan the comparison paragraph yourself before you look. Take domestic violence in Pakistan. What would each school say causes it, and what would each propose?

What to remember from this chapter

• Liberalism puts the freedom of the individual first, and liberal feminism insists on that freedom for women.
• Its cause of women’s subordination is unequal law, education and prejudice. Its remedy is reform.
• Wollstonecraft (1792) argued from reason and wanted women to have power “over themselves”.
• Seneca Falls (1848) declared that “all men and women are created equal”.
• Mill (1869) asked for “perfect equality” and called women’s supposed nature “an eminently artificial thing”.
• Friedan (1963) named “the problem that has no name”, and NOW (1966) sought “truly equal partnership with men”.
• Classical-liberal feminism means freedom from force and stops at equal law. Egalitarian-liberal feminism means real autonomy and asks the state to act.
• Okin judged the family by Rawls’s justice. Nussbaum asks what a woman can actually do and be.
• Pakistan’s laws, from Article 25 to the laws of 2026, are liberal in shape. Its 2026 ranking of 143rd of 145 shows that law is necessary but not sufficient.

Check yourself

1. In your own words, what is the cause of women’s subordination and its remedy in liberal feminism?

2. What did Wollstonecraft mean when she wrote, “I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves”?

3. Explain the difference between classical and egalitarian liberal feminism, using one Pakistani law.

4. How did Okin use Rawls’s veil of ignorance?

5. What is a “deformed preference”, and why does it matter for a girl in rural Pakistan?

6. Give one criticism of liberal feminism from a socialist feminist and the liberal reply.

7. Why is Pakistan’s ranking in the Global Gender Gap Report evidence for this chapter’s judgment rather than against it?

8. From the chapter on what feminism is, what are the two kinds of claim every feminist argument makes, and where does Pakistan supply each?