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The literature on feminism and multiculturalism has identified potential conflicts between the recognition of cultural diversity and securing women's equality. Three broad approaches to this dilemma have emerged in the practices of contemporary states: regulation, working with the communities, and exit. Each of these is apparent in current initiatives regarding forced marriage, but the overwhelming emphasis in the UK has been on enabling individuals to exit from the threat or reality of a forced marriage. In assessing these initiatives, this paper highlights the limitations of exit and the danger of moving towards immigration regulation as the preferred solution.

In contemporary renderings of modernity, it is patented to the West and assumed to include gender equality; a commitment to gender equality then risks becoming overlaid with hierarchies of country and culture. One way of contesting this, associated with alternative modernities, takes issue with the presumed Western origins of modernity. Another, associated with feminism, subjects the claim the modern societies deliver gender equality to more critical scrutiny. But the first is vulnerable to the charge of describing different routes to the same ideals, and the second to the response that evidence of shortcomings only shows that modernity has not yet fully arrived. The contribution of the West to the birth of modernity is not, in my argument, the important issue. The problem, rather, is the mistaken attribution of a "logic" to modernity, as if it contains nested within it egalitarian principles that will eventually unfold. Something did indeed happen at a particular moment in history that provided new ways of imagining equality, but the conditions of its birth were associated from the start with the spread of colonial despotisms and the naturalisation of both gender and racial difference. There was no logic driving this towards more radical versions. It is in the politics of equality that new social imaginaries are forged, not in the unfolding of an inherently "modern" ideal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluates the arguments concerning the relationship between feminism and liberalism contained in the article "Sex and Social Justice," by Martha Nussbaum. Reasons behind the statement that the relationship between feminism and liberalism has always been an uneasy one; Indications from the birth of liberalism in the seventeenth century; Reemergence of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s in a period when liberalism was shorthand for everything.

Focuses on the relationship between feminism and republicanism. Points of contact and contention with feminist thinking; Conflict of interest between feminist and republicans; Role of women in altering democratic politics; Campaign on political equality by the feminist movement.

The author reflects on the legal status of women and provides a comment on civil society with emphasis on feminism. She says that feminism should be attracted to politics associated with civil society because feminist perspective is radically pluralist, and some of the associations in civil society have a loose characteristic that will surely catch the attention of women. However, she adds that there is a problem with civil society due to some organizations that prohibit women socialization.

Focuses on the problems of feminism in Great Britain. Details on the binary opposition between male and female towards a theory of multiple differences; Link between conflict of interests and the organizational basis of political mobilization; Connection between philosophy and politics.

The article presents a reprint of the article "Sexual Equality and Socialism," by Anne Phillips, which appeared in the "Equality" journal. It discusses the relationship between socialism and sexual equality in the context of feminism and traces the socialist and liberal traditions in viewing the role of women in the community during the 19th century. Moreover, it discusses the emergence of socialist women's movement during the 1970s that permeated a wider political context for feminism.