Engaging with these activist concerns, feminists drew on late twentieth century scholarship in feminist moral and social theory that utilizes sex, gender, and other marginalizing characteristics as categories of analysis that are bound up with power relations across public and private life. (Alison Jaggar’s 2001 Encyclopedia of Ethics entry on “Feminist Ethics” provides an excellent summary of many of the key features of second wave feminism that influenced feminist bioethics.) This research called attention to the need for theoretical grounding to provide a framework for practical strategies to curtail oppressive practices in medicine and healthcare.  It is within this context of attention to practical issues combined with the drive to provide a conceptual underpinning for analysis and, ultimately, reform, that the emergence of feminist bioethics should be understood. Feminists working in bioethics today speak in many different voices, reflecting their disparate social positioning and academic backgrounds, and the new global reach of the field.  Nonetheless, they share significant commonalities, both in their criticisms of dominant structures and in their efforts to build a more adequate framework that is responsive to the diversity of the circumstances of women and other groups. In doing so they call attention to neglected voices that are seldom represented within mainstream bioethics. Notably, feminist discourse highlights the way in which hierarchical rankings that categorize people by sex, race, ethnicity, age, disability, or susceptibility to genetic disease, can perpetuate unjust practices in health and social care, research, and public health. Some feminists integrate cross-disciplinary analysis of structural and social frameworks that divide and marginalize people with insights from the women’s health movement, others concentrate their analysis on a specific axis of oppressive practice, but all recognize interrelationships among such practices.