A new feminism?

Public Interest, Fall, 2002 by Kay S. Hymowitz

FEMINISM is a little like the local dowager who people say was a great beauty in her day, though to the young she seems only a cranky old lady. Only about a quarter of women are willing to call themselves feminists these days, and those who do often squirm uncomfortably under the label. Twenty and thirty-somethings who were nurtured by "girl power" soccer parents, swim coaches, and math teachers to become successful career women are more concerned with finding, time for the baby's pediatrician appointment than with listening to the old lady's history, which, to be honest, they find a little annoying in its self-regarding nostalgia.

Of course, the indifference of today's young women to the movement that did so much to shape their lives hardly means that the movement has lost its clout. Feminism continues to have friends in high places, especially in federal and local government bureaucracies. Just recently the National Women's Law Center released a study charging high school vocation and tech programs with "enduring sex discrimination." The fact that girls continue to study cosmetology and child care while boys learn plumbing and pipe-fitting, the report charges, is evidence of "biased counseling ... sexual harassment ... and other forms of discrimination." Can a Department of Education study, legal guidelines, state conferences, and perhaps even quotas for boy cosmetologists and girl plumbers be far behind?

Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, a volume of essays edited by Wendy McElroy and sponsored by the libertarian Independent Institute, attempts to steer the next generation away from this sort of tired meddling and toward a libertarian feminism more fitting for the new century. Certainly, the ideas espoused in Liberty for Women, which McElroy has dubbed "ifeminism" or individualist feminism, have a more buoyant, contemporary feel than the jargon-bound and turgid movement the book sets out to challenge. In fact, the ifeminist--tough, independent-minded, and determined to be as comfortable with a dirty joke or a sidearm as a Texas cowboy--has more of a beef with the sisterhood than with the patriarchy. Where the organization-feminist continues to scan the landscape warily for evidence of sexism that requires government attention--look no further than the National Women's Law Center study--the ifeminist rejects the idea that she is a helpless victim of traditional norms, seeing barriers to her liberation primarily in the very government programs her sisters persist in cooking up. Where orthodox feminists view men as the adversary in their ongoing struggle for full equality, libertarian feminists are as likely to link arms with men in protest against their counterparts' excesses. And where mainstream feminism has become a de facto PAC for the Democratic party--remember the embarrassed silence of the feminist establishment over the Clinton sex scandals--the authors in this volume are too proudly independent to be any kind of party animal.

DESPITE the credentials of groups like National Women's Law Center and NOW, McElroy clearly wants to claim that it is she and her fellow libertarians who are the authentic heirs of the movement's original principles. Her introductory essay describes the history of individualist feminism, which she locates in the early decades of the nineteenth century, when women, many of them Quaker and most from New England, began to organize in the struggle against slavery. These female abolitionists came to understand that their own legal status bore some similarities to that of the slaves they were working to free, since both were lacking in "self-ownership." Female abolitionists like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton also learned the skills of political organization and public speaking. These they put to good use, especially after the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments expanded the rights of black men but excluded women entirely. While black males were enfranchised, observed the understandably embittered Susan B . Anthony, women were "left outside with lunatics, idiots, and criminals."

McElroy shows how by the early twentieth century some feminists had expanded their vision of liberation into the personal realm, promoting birth control and sexual hygiene and defining forced sex within marriage as rape; others became anarchists and advocates of free love. She also finds examples of early feminists who embraced free-market principles and voluntary contract without government interference.

Yet in bringing to light this lesser known side of the early women's movement, McElroy understates the deep roots of the contemporary feminist establishment. She says nothing about the early feminists of the temperance movement, who believed that female compassion and moralism could bring about a more abstemious and virtuous society. These women are the ancestors of today's anti-date rape, sexual-harassment, and pornography activists. More significantly, she fails to grasp the influence of a democratic-socialist left on the second wave of feminists who took to the streets in the 1960s. As Daniel Horowitz has recently shown in his biography of Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique began her career as a union activist. Many other second-wave leaders went into the movement set on pursuing not just equal rights but also government-planned social and economic justice.