At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex, and Equality. By Drucilla Cornell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. 254p. $14.95 paper.

Extract

Drucilla Cornell has two goals: Pinpoint equal freedom as the core of sexual equality and make the case for the equal rights of gays and lesbians. Interwoven within these themes is a case for sexual freedom itself, for men and women. With erudite references to a wide multidisciplinary swath of literature, she succeeds in hammering home these concerns and in demanding that the sociolegal order reform its policies affecting sexuality, reproduction, and definitions of family. In these respects, this is a valuable study of how the United States specifically and other societies referentially fall short of what Christine Littleton calls making sex “cost free.” Cornell's book, which in the subjects and issues it analyzes covers very familiar territory, is intriguing for a very different reason. It is one of a very few works in radical feminist thought that is fundamentally about employing the tenets of classical liberalism, if not libertarianism, in the service of progressive social change. In contrast with the paradigms of modal feminism, which address social structures and connectedness, and which are concerned predominantly with equality, this work unabashedly focuses on the individual and stresses the freedom of each as a sexual being.