It’s too bad that blog readership plummets in the summertime, because there are such good conversations going on right now.
A few weeks ago, the feminist blogosphere was in a tither about whether or not feminism has put the interests of middle-class women on hold, while they pursue the interests of poor and working class women. The controversy was sparked by an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Linda Hirshman, who said that feminist goals had become too broad. Feminists should let others deal with social justice issues, while they focus on getting women up the corporate ladder. Less talk about welfare, more talk about glass ceilings. (links when I get the time.)
Last week, some said that feminism was too narrow and had neglected the needs of disabled women.
Today, Megan writes that feminism should include libertarian women, who are lukewarm on abortion issues and aren’t supportive of large governmental programs.
What do you think?
Apt. 11d 
All the libertarian women I know (and men, too, but for some reason it irks more when it’s women) complain about how people don’t take responsibility for themselves. I mean, this seems to be their primary concern. So they’d lukewarm on abortion mainly because they hate how women don’t take responsibility for themselves.
I think feminism could make great strides here by encouraging more discussion of birth control availability and education.
I also think that more could be done to emphasize job training and vocational education programs. I think child care subsidies is also a great idea because it would enable more parents to work instead of being supported by government programs. It would give the illusion of less leeching off the government and more taking responsibility for oneself.
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I don’t get why libertarian women would be lukewarm on abortion. They fear big government programs, but support the government telling women what they can do with their bodies?
“Recognizing that abortion is a sensitive issue and that libertarians can hold good-faith views on both sides, we believe the government should be kept out of the question. We condemn state-funded abortions. It is particularly harsh to force someone who believes that abortion is murder to pay for another’s abortion. It is the right of the woman, not the state, to decide the desirability of prenatal testing, Caesarean births, fetal surgery, and/or home births.”
(from the Libertarian party platform).
I guess they oppose the government paying for abortions, but they probably also oppose the government paying for vaccines.
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Feminism is about enabling all women, sure, to make choices of what they want to do with their lives from the widest available range (and to ensure that the old bugbear, patriarchy, isn’t used to cut off some of these avenues). Does that mean I have a responsibility to do everything for every other woman out there? I hope not, because that’s impossible!
That said, I think it’s interesting to see Wendy’s take on libertarian views on abortion as being lukewarm. That’d never occurred to me: I figured that libertarians would be annoyed at the attempts to legislate and control women’s reproductive rights.
I’d expect that childcare subsidies wouldn’t fly with that crowd because it would be more government interferences, one way or the other.
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I’m not that worried about welfare anymore. On the bus home today, I saw a guy with a t-shirt that said “Poverty Ends 2025.” So, I assume that will take care of welfare. I’m not sure why poverty is going to end in 2025 (I only saw the back of the shirt), but the guy wearing it got off at Carnegie Mellon, so he must know what he is doing.
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I think the term “feminism” has little meaning anymore. It’s been outgrown by society at large, and is now little more than a flag for smaller causes to wrap themselves in.
A true rebirth of feminism will probably come in 20 years, when one of our daughters rediscovers it, and applies it to contemporary problems. In those days, it might apply to allowing women to choose to grow their children in artificial wombs, rather than inside their bodies.
I don’t consider libertarianism a coherent political philosophy. “You can’t make me!” isn’t a sentiment upon which one can build large groups, and politics depend upon large groups of people. It’s the equivalent of answering “none of the above” to any survey questions.
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The reason that there’s no specifically libertarian position on abortion is that libertarians are extreme anti-instrumentalists. The question of whether pregnancy makes it harder to have social equality is simply irrelevant; the only relevant question is the rights of the two entities involved. If you think the fetus is a person, then vivisecting it and removing it from your body is no more a question of “your right to control your body” than it it when you use your body to fire a howitzer at me. If it isn’t a person, then the government has no right to interfere. There’s an intermediate argument that probably only libertarians have about whether it is nonetheless legitimate to murder a fetus you believe is a person because it can’t survive without making use of your body, but this dives deep into the weeds over whether sex should constitute implied consent to such usage. Then there are further Nozickian debates over whether a fetus can have interests even if not full personhood.
The point being that there’s no simple libertarian answer to the questions: are fetuses persons? If they are persons, do they have the right to subsist off your body? If they are not, do they nonetheless have justiciable interests, in the same way that we outlaw animal cruelty? There’s a tendency on both sides of the debate to talk to each other as if their answer to the fundemantal questions of personhood and conflicting rights were obvious, and that the other side is rejecting the principle you have decided is more important–pro-choicers hate babies, pro-lifers don’t believe a woman has a right to control her body. In fact, it is possible to care about both things, and if the answers to these questions were in fact as obvious as most people like to pretend, there wouldn’t be a social debate about them–we don’t argue about whether 45 year old men in their prime are persons with rights not to have their lives terminated at random. I myself am pro-choice, for complicated and perhaps somewhat squishy reasons. But I don’t believe that the value judgements made by other side are facially unreasonable.
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Or am I a feminist? I write a hellava lot on this blog questioning the priorities of work and the virtues of family life. I could easily be voted off feminist island.
Actually, I do think that Hirshman is right about this. If feminism has too many goals, then nothing happens. I’m not sure if the goals should be towards getting more elite women up the corporate ladder or helping more poor women get an education or pushing for more breast feeding rooms in the workplace. However, I do think that if feminists really wants to make a political difference, they should stop going on anti-feminist witch hunts and actually pick a couple of policies to pursue.
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Is that necessarily an either-or choice Laura? Plus it looks to me (at some remove and with little sustained attention, admittedly) like there is serious competition for who most generally controls the end of the sentence that begins “Feminism is…”
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Actually, I do think that Hirshman is right about this. If feminism has too many goals, then nothing happens.
And if Feminism has only one goal, then at most one good thing can happen. Hirshman is frustrated that “her” feminism is now only one of many feminisms, and she wants more attention paid to it. She is free to lobby, but I don’t see why “her” feminism has any more claim to being the “real” feminism than any other definition.
If a woman living in El Paso sees that undocumented female migrants are being treated worse than undocumented male migrants by border guards, then she may reasonable conclude that “immigration is a feminist issue.”
If you (or Hirshman) tells her than working on immigration policy is not a “feminist issue” anymore, and she has to work to get more women into boardrooms, her response will not be, “Ok! I’ll get back to immigration issues later after corporate boards have reached equality!” It will be “If what I am doing to help a particular group of women is no longer considered feminism, then I no longer consider myself a feminist.”
Hirshman has certainly identified the type of feminism that is least “interdisciplinary,” but I don’t see how its logical purity gives it any more claim on feminists’ attention.
On a practical level, also, I don’t see how you get consensus and assistance on problems that effect more than one group if you have defined your group so narrowly as to explicitly exclude their concerns. The next restriction on abortion may disproportionately impact immigrant women, but can you get your former immigration-feminist ally to help, or will she say, “Hey, I only work on ‘pure immigration’ issues now.”
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A big part of Hirshman’s problem is that she is a narcissistic jerk, who thinks it’s all about her. She has quite suddenly burst onto the national scene after her retirement, and her scene-bursting strategy has been to make loud and extreme statements to get attention. That’s not a way to recruit anyone to care about your issue. Ragtime’s view is quite correct, too, that if she narrows the thing too much, anyone who is not plausibly in the corporate-chieftain track will think, what is in this for me?
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