I date my feminism to the Enlightenment — to Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote, at the end of the 18th century, ‘‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.’’ Her essay was squarely aligned with other Enlightenment thinkers’ appeals to reason, to the rights of man, and to the notion of equality of dignity among all people. This Enlightenment vision is so powerful, and so right, that it has spread around the world, from the ‘‘one person, one vote’’ advocates in Sierra Leone, to the Tahrir Square protesters in Egypt, to the furious parents in Sichuan Province in China, who fought the regional Communist Party’s refusal to release information about how their children died in a poorly-built school during an earthquake. Underlying all of these movements is the democratic ideal from the 1790s that asserts: No one person has the natural right to suppress, silence or dominate any other person, simply because of where both are situated in society.

But what that set of beliefs isn’t is as important as what it is. Feminism, in my view, should always have kept that original precept in sight as it pursued its aims from one generation to the next. It doesn’t prescribe lifestyle choices. It doesn’t dictate sexual decisions. It doesn’t define itself in terms of cultural battles. True feminism empowers anyone to be free and to have equal opportunity and access to equal legal rights and the rule of law. But it doesn’t dictate what that free person should be doing with her or his freedom.

Unfortunately, Western feminism is too often bogged down in cultural battles, in asserting a checklist of political policies. For two decades, I have been insisting that there can certainly be a right-wing, a libertarian, and a left- wing feminist agenda — because what makes a ‘'feminist'’ is not the policy outcome. Democracy is a concatenation of voices arising out of many individual free lives.

I think we need to reassert our Enlightenment heritage in the fight for gender justice in the West. The feminists of Africa, Asia and the Middle East have now outstripped Western feminists as pioneers for gender justice — partly because they do not see women’s fight for justice as pitting them against men, against family life or even against faith. They draw on the Wollstonecraftian heritage of democracy and human rights, which is very hard to mock or dismiss.