A New Dawn for the Second Sex: Women's Freedom Practices in World Perspective

One of the most contentious issues in contemporary global politics is the relationship between women’s rights and multiculturalism. The debate is highly polarized, with one side seeing feminism—which demands an equality that many non-Western traditions deny—as an agent of Western imperialism, while the other argues that it is the West’s duty to export the enlightened, egalitarian values its society espouses.

This book proposes a new way to escape this dilemma, elaborating an alternative approach to contemporary feminism. Rather than a hierarchy, which all too often positions Western feminism as better than the non-Western tradition, Karen Vintges argues for a horizontal relationship between the two, one that would foster a crosscultural cooperation that is missing from debates on gender and multiculturalism today.