Susan Moller Okin [1946–2004], a renowned political philosopher, was found dead at her home in Lincoln, Mass., on March 3. She was 57...

Okin, the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society, joined the Stanford faculty in 1990. At the time of her death, she held the Marta S. Horner Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a one-year fellowship at Harvard University....

...Okin's work focused on the exclusion of women from most Western political thought, past and present. She argued that gender issues belong at the core, not the margins, of political philosophy. Her book Women in Western Political Thought (1979) is considered a cornerstone of research on women in politics. She also authored two other books, Justice, Gender and the Family (1989) and Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (1999)....

...In recent years, Okin had turned her attention to the plight of women in the least developed countries....In that capacity, Okin became a staunch supporter of the Global Fund for Women, a San Francisco-based grantmaking foundation supporting women's human rights....

...At the Radcliffe institute, Okin was expanding on her recent work on gender, economic development and women's rights in the late 20th century. She also planned to collect her work on multiculturalism and feminism, and to begin looking at the subject of evolutionary biology from a feminist point of view....

...Okin was born in 1946 in Auckland, New Zealand. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Auckland in 1967, a master of philosophy degree from Oxford in 1970 and a doctorate from Harvard in 1975. She taught at the University of Auckland, Vassar, Brandeis and Harvard before joining Stanford's faculty....

...Okin received numerous awards during her career, including the American Political Science Association's Victoria Schuck Prize for the best book on women and politics in 1989 for Justice, Gender and the Family..." (from the obituary in the online Stanford Report on the Stanford University website, March 9, 2004)

"...Professor Okin was a pioneer who changed traditional conceptions of political philosophy and political theory by focusing on the exclusion of women from most Western political thought. Insisting that women contribute significantly to politics and public life through their work in the home where a sense of ethics and justice are formed, she brought concerns about women into the mainstream of political theory. Gender issues belong at the core, and not the margins, of our theories of justice, she wrote, because as long as women bear most responsibility for the care of the family, social justice can never be fully achieved...." (from the Memorial Resolution in the online Stanford Report on the Stanford University website, March 9, 2004)