dence for the need to reorder legal, social, and political policy in a way that redistributes the benefits of membership in civil society so as to provide women as a group with access to such benefits. Feminist ideology in its most general sense sets about exposing the lineaments of culture hostile to women's interpretation of its content and comfortable in its status as the authoritative repository and transmitter of wisdom and norms. Thus in the background of gender-based social theory is an agenda of social and political change enabling women's increased access to social goods, a social voice, and social power.
The feminist agenda of social change has been used as a weapon against gender-based critique, which is said simply to "privilege" the female perspective of social analysis (Hekman, 1997). Those who identify with so-called feminist standpoint theory (e.g., Harding, 1997) specifically and programmatically reject that characterization. Feminist truth is not the objective of identification in standpoint theory, Harding says, but i
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