Feminism and Basic Income

Abstract

The task we face in this chapter and the next is slightly different from that of the previous three. There is no such thing as a feminist BI, although we shall see in section 8.5 that Participation Income fulfils some of the objectives of a feminist social policy. Instead, the task is to relate BI to other pro-feminist and pro-ecologist reform proposals in order to gauge its significance to these two sets of political ideas. We begin with feminism, the definition of which is our first problem: to what extent does it interact with other ideologies across the political spectrum? At the risk of oversimplification I am going to proceed on the following assumption: that feminism should be treated partly as a distinct set of ideas and partly as something which interfaces most productively with left-wing political ideas, including some aspects of welfare collectivism. I appreciate that this risks upsetting conservatives and those on the radical right who insist that the free market and/or the traditional family is the best means of promoting women’s interests. Space does not allow us to consider here the many varieties of feminisms, e.g. black; disabled; lesbian.