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In her new book, Perfectionism and Contemporary Feminists Values (Indiana University Press, 2003), Kimberly A. Yuracko, assistant professor of law at Northwestern University, examines the reasons contemporary feminists give for criticizing certain choices women make.

Although formal barriers to women’s social and political participation have crumbled, Yuracko says, society remains, to a significant degree, gendered in the roles that women and men play.

“Women’s and men’s choices regarding work and family are largely responsible for maintain and reinforcing the differences,” she writes.

Yuracko believes that often feminists recognize the need to criticize women’s choices, but they focus on the conditions under which choices are made rather than the choices themselves.

In her book, she argues, instead, that encouraging women to choose in accordance with grounded and well-defined conception of perfectionism, a philosophy concerned with human flourishing, is the most effective way to redress the gender inequality that stubbornly persists in our society. To this end, Yuracko seeks not only to expose the perfectionism underlying current choice critiques, but to articulate a concrete set of feminist perfectionist principles that would improve the quality of individual women’s lives and improve the social standing of women as a whole.

Yuracko received her JD and PhD in Political Science from Stanford University. She has written several articles on feminist political theory, anti-discrimination law, and gender equality in college athletics.

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