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BOOK SUMMARY
FREEDOM, FEMINISM, AND THE STATE
Revised Edition
Edited by WENDY McELROY
Foreword by LEWIS PERRY
HIGHLIGHTS:
1. The dominant goal of what is called feminism today may be social and
economic equality at the expense of individual freedom. The
nineteenth-century founders of the women's movement, however, were
individualists to the core and wanted instead to achieve legal equality for
women, i.e., equal rights to life, liberty, and property.
2. The American women's movement emerged from of the crusade against slavery.
"We have good cause to be grateful to the slave," proclaimed Abbie Kelley, an
early feminist. "In trying to strike his irons off, we found most surely that
we were manacled ourselves."
3. After the Civil War, while mainstream feminists devoted all their efforts
to gaining the vote, individualist feminists were being jailed for defying
laws that restricted the dissemination of birth control information or
required marriages to conform to government regulations. Sixteen-year old
Lillian Harman, for instance, was jailed for six months for a non-church
marriage. "I consider uniformity in mode of sexual relations as undesirable
and impractical as enforced uniformity in anything else," she proclaimed.
4. No economic system has done more for the advancement of women than the
unregulated free market. It is only capitalist societies that have freed
women from the drudgery and degradation of their traditional status. Nothing
opened more economic opportunity for women than the general prosperity and
abundance generated by the Industrial Revolution.
5. Individualist feminists oppose special protective legislation, which
regulate the hours and conditions under which women work. Such class
legislation has done more harm than good to the cause of women's rights.
Interfering with a woman's freedom of contract, these laws helped confine to
men highly skilled or supervisory jobs in manufacturing.
6. Medical licensing laws have effectively restricted women from becoming
physicians. No industrialized country has a lower percentage of woman doctors
than the United States, with only 7 percent. In 1910, before such laws became
extensive, about 50 percent of all babies in this country were delivered by
non-licensed female mid-wives.
7. Some individualist feminists carried their opposition to the State so far
that they even opposed women's suffrage. Viewing politics as merely the effort
to use government to exploit others, Voltairine de Cleyre, for instance,
wrote: "A body of voters cannot give into your charge any rights but their
own. By no possible jugglery of logic can they delegate the exercise of any
function which they themselves do not control."
SYNOPSIS:
Mainstream feminism is nowadays intimately associated with demands for State
intervention, as attested by campaigns for government-funded abortion, for
laws mandating equal pay and outlawing sexual discrimination, for
taxpayer-financed day care, and for legal and economic privileges for
pregnant women. But feminism's roots are radically individualistic,
anti-political, and anti-State. Arising out of the pre-Civil War anti-slavery
movement, the early women's movement recognized clearly that government was
the real obstacle preventing women from achieving freedom and equal rights.
And despite the recent positions of many prominent feminists, today an
increasing number of individualist feminists have become consistent foes of
the State.
The Independent Institute's latest book, Freedom, Feminism, and the State: An
Overview of Individualist Feminism, unearths and revitalizes this forgotten
heritage, providing a basis for its modern resurgence. The volume is edited
by Wendy McElroy, Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and a
prominent individualist-feminist author and speaker. Noted historian Lewis
Perry of Indiana University provides the book's foreword.
McElroy brings together twenty-two selections from the individualist feminist
tradition, integrating them with a fine historical introduction. These
striking essays span the history of the women's movement. Some are
nineteenth-century classics from such early giants of individualist feminism
as Angelina and Sarah Grimk� and Voltairine de Cleyre; others are penned by
well known figures of the early twentieth century, such as Suzanne LaFollete
and Emma Goldman; and still others are more modern writings from the likes of
Joan Kennedy Taylor, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Deirdre English. Overall they
offer the individualist perspective on nearly every feminist issue, from
birth control to war, from the family to the marketplace, and everything in
between.
No one will fully agree with every essay in this volume. The individualist
feminists are too diverse, too unique, too independent--too individualistic.
But as Lewis Perry points out in his foreword, Freedom, Feminism, and the
State helps to recover a lost historical consciousness with pressing
relevance today. "For feminists, the disastrous strategies of the ERA
campaign and floundering leadership ought to provoke a reexamination of goals
and principles." Perhaps this vibrant collection will inspire such a
reexamination and revitalize the principle that individual liberty is the
imperative for all women, as well as all men.
Women versus the State
"The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better
understanding of my own." These words commence the first selection in
Freedom, Feminism, and the State, a letter written by Angelina Grimk� in
1837. Grimk� was the daughter of a slaveholder who became one of the foremost
crusaders against slavery and also the first woman in America to lecture
before mixed audiences of men and women.
Hers is a particularly appropriate opening selection, because as McElroy
points out in the book's introduction, "As an organized force, feminism dates
from abolitionism in the early 1830s." Steeped and practiced in the defense
of the individual rights of the slave, the early feminists applied the same
principles to women. Their conception of women's rights, therefore, was in
keeping with the libertarian thrust of the Declaration of Independence and
the American Revolution. They conceived of rights as providing a moral
jurisdiction within which the individual ought to be free from all outside
interference.
Feminists recognized that government must always be one of the primary
transgressors of women's rights--a point forcefully emphasized in the other
four essays of the book's first section. These essays also demonstrate the
historical continuity and timelessness of individualist feminist concerns.
Two are from the past, but two are recent, arguing that government today is
still as much an enemy of women as ever, if not more so. Consider, for
instance, Jean Bethke Elshtain, warning to the feminist movement from the
April 1982 issue of Democracy. "For feminists to discover in the state the
new `Mr. Right,' and to wed themselves thereby, for better or for worse, to a
public identity inseparable from the exigencies of state power and policy
would be a mistake."
A subsequent section of Freedom, Feminism, and the State, on women and the
family, makes very clear why early feminists had no trouble identifying
government as their main problem. Feminism arose at a time when women, in
addition to being unable to vote, hold public office, or serve on juries,
were considered wards of their nearest male relative or chattels of their
husbands, who legally controlled all their property, their earnings, and
their children. In most states, women could not hold or dispose of property,
sue in court, make contracts, or keep the wages from their labor. Sarah
Grimk�, Angelina's older sister, complained in 1837: "there are few things
which present greater obstacles to the improvement and elevation of woman to
her appropriate sphere of usefulness and duty, than the laws which have been
enacted to destroy her independence, and crush her individuality; laws
which... rob her of some of her essential rights....The various laws leave
women very little more liberty, or power, in some respects, than the slave."
Even as late 1886, after emancipation of the slaves, sixteen-year old Lillian
Harman was thrown into the Oskaloosa County jail in Kansas for a non-State,
non-church marriage that evaded such conventional arrangements. It is thus
appropriate that Freedom, Feminism, and the State also include her inspiring
call for social and economic freedom.
Individualist versus Socialist Feminism
McElroy emphasizes that the Civil War dealt a "stunning blow" to individual
liberty. Mainstream feminism began to concentrate--nearly to the point of
obsession--upon securing the vote for women, to the exclusion of all other
issues. Indeed, many suffragists compromised on subsidiary questions and even
embraced such government interventions as prohibition and social purity
legislation. No longer grounding their arguments in the principle of natural,
individual rights, mainstream feminists increasingly relied on pragmatic
appeals. Some went so far as to attempt to show how women voting would
accelerate the cause of government intervention because of women's moral
superiority. This stood in marked contrast to the years prior to the war,
when the women's movement showed almost scant interest in suffrage, other
grievances taking precedence.
Individualist feminists, in contrast, still continued a lonely crusade for
the reform of birth control and marriage laws, often at great personal risk.
Moses Harman, Lillian Harman's father, for example, endured a chilling,
ongoing confrontation with government police power over the publication and
mailing of birth control information. Repeatedly imprisoned for violating the
Comstock Laws, Harman served his last sentence, a year at hard labor, when he
was 75.
Lillian Harman, Moses Harman, and other individualist feminists all went to
jail for exercising fundamental freedoms that we take for granted today. Yet
their names have been relegated to obscurity by mainstream feminism, whose
own pragmatic record during this period shows far less political and personal
courage. Fortunately, McElroy resurrects these episodes both in her
introduction and in a 1906 article from Harman's own publication. McElroy's
own discussion of the heated question of abortion is an incisive defense of
the right to choice unencumbered with pleas for government funding and fully
grounded in the traditional individualist premise of self-ownership.
But what of suffrage? Did individualist feminists actually oppose extending
the vote to women? Some in fact did, as a logical extension of their
opposition to all political power. Yet on this issue individualist feminists
were divided, and so Freedom, Feminism, and the State reprints arguments of
both sides. In opposition we have a timeless, hard-hitting essay from
Lysander Spooner: "Women are human beings, and consequently have all the
natural rights that any human beings can have. They have just as good a right
to make laws as men have, and not better; and that is just no right at all.
No human being, nor any number of human beings, have any right to make laws,
and compel other human beings to obey them." Taking a more conventional view
in favor of suffrage is a selection from Ezra Heywood's Uncivil Liberty.
The book's concluding essay, by Emma Goldman, tackles the subject of women
and war. Although an anti-statist, Goldman was not a full individualist
feminist. Yet as McElroy points out, "Goldman's adamant opposition to state
interference in the life of the individual made her a valuable fellow
traveler on many issues." The reprinted essay, a ringing indictment of the
State's tendency toward war, arose out of Goldman's anti-draft activities
during World War I.
Women and the Market
No question better clarifies what distinguishes socialist and individualist
feminists than their attitudes toward the market. In contrast to the open
hostility of the many feminists, modern individualist feminists embrace the
market's freedom and opportunity. Rosalie Nichols in a contemporary article
asserts that "feminism and a regulated economy are mutually exclusive and
antagonistic.... Only a free society can be feminist. And the economic system
of a free society is Laissez-Faire Capitalism." Sharing Nichols view is
Suzanne LaFollette, a protege of Albert Jay Nock. In an excerpt from her 1926
book, Concerning Women, she pointed out "It is the industrial revolution more
than anything else, perhaps, that women owe such freedom as they now enjoy."
Joan Kennedy Taylor contributes a feminist denunciation of such government
interference with the market as protective labor legislation.
Milton Friedman and other free market advocates have long opposed medical
licensing laws as unnecessary and harmful interventions that artificially
raise the cost of medical care. But the McElroy collection, by giving us an
insightful history and feminist analysis of these laws by Barbara Ehrenreich
and Deirdre English, shows how they closed off legitimate medical
alternatives and created a male dominated medical hierarchy in the process.
Order Freedom, Feminism and the State
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