Introduction to Chapter 1

This chapter traces the feminist origins of Vulnerability Theory, considering how some early feminist legal critiques by focusing on the social institution of the family also laid the groundwork for a more comprehensive understanding of equality and social justice. The family is a fundamental social institution, which performs a range of socially essential tasks. Those tasks historically have been allocated based on the construction of gender differences. This chapter suggests that, in bringing the gendered family within a gender-equality (or neutrality) paradigm, reformers erred in focusing too much on gender discrimination or disadvantage and not enough on the need to reallocate the necessary dependency work that must be done to replicate society across a wider range of social institutions.

By framing the issue primarily as one of individual rights and gender equality, reformers left unexamined the structural inequities that persisted in the allocation of caregiving duties. The failure to challenge the underlying assumption that the family is the primary and ‘natural’ institution responsible for managing dependency left intact a system that continues to rely heavily on unpaid or underpaid caregiving labour.

This chapter contends that the feminist legal reformers’ pursuit of gender equality, while a necessary step in the quest for social justice, was incomplete. Vulnerability Theory advances the social justice project by offering a more comprehensive framework that recognizes the universality of human dependency and calls for a redistribution of the burdens of care across all of society.