The strand of feminist political thought arguing for the legal, political and economic equality of the sexes within liberal democratic institutions, on the ground that the principles liberalism already proclaims commit it to that conclusion whether or not its proponents intended them to.
Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) set the argument's form: written against Rousseau's account of female education, it held that women appear irrational because they are trained to be, and that a doctrine of natural rights that stops at the sexes has refuted itself. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill extended it in The Subjection of Women (1869), comparing marriage as then constituted to legal slavery and arguing that no one could know women's capacities while their circumstances remained coercive.
The tradition drove first-wave suffragism and the long campaign for property, custody, divorce and contract rights, then re-emerged in the mid-twentieth century with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) and the organizational push for anti-discrimination law. Susan Moller Okin later turned liberal principles on the family itself, arguing in Justice, Gender and the Family (1989) that a theory of justice which treats the household as outside its scope cannot deliver what it promises.
Liberal feminism is contested from within feminism more than from outside it. Radical and socialist feminists argue that formal equal rights leave the structures producing inequality untouched, and that access to existing institutions is not the same as changing them. Intersectional critics, following Crenshaw's 1989 analysis, argue that a movement organized around the disadvantages of otherwise privileged women will systematically miss how disadvantages compound. The tradition's reply is largely a record: most of the concrete legal gains women hold were won on its arguments.