I have trouble accepting the idea of a right-wing feminist.
Partly that’s because most of the examples I’ve come across – the IWF, Christina Hoff Sommers and ifeminism.com, for example – are so discouraging. It seems to me that to be a feminist, one ought be in favor of feminism. Therefore, it’s difficult for me to accept that these “right-wing feminists” – none of whom ever take the feminist side in current controversies, and all of whom make their livings doing nothing but slamming feminism – are feminists.
But examples aside (after all, that’s just anecdotal evidence), as a matter of theory I think right-wing politics and feminism are fundamentally in conflict.
As I understand it (and speaking in sweeping generalizations), there are two dominant brands of right-wingers in the US today: social conservatives and libertarians. Social conservatism is pretty obviously incompatible with feminism: social conservatives are anti-abortion, anti-lesbian, anti-women-in-the-workplace. Basically, they’re anti-feminist.
Libertarianism is on the surface more compatible with feminism. Libertarians disapprove of sexist discrimination, believe in equal legal rights for lesbians (and gay men), and usually don’t think it’s the government’s proper role to enforce childbirth on unwilling women.
But there’s more to feminism than disapproving of sexism and keeping abortion legal. There’s a huge variety of feminisms out there, but there are a couple of things virtually all feminists believe. One is that feminists can, by taking collective action, change society in ways that improves the status of women-as-a-whole. Towards this end, feminists have worked collectively for battered women’s shelters (and have sometimes lobbied for government funding), rape crisis lines (ditto), anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action, pay equity, state-funded day care, the family leave act, a higher minimum wage, government-funded research on violence against women, and so on.
But libertarianism opposes most collective action: for libertarians, everything is about the individual. Strict libertarianism opposes laws against discrimination; if an individual business owner wants to discriminate, he should have that freedom, because after all it’s his business and his money. Similarly, pay equity, affirmative action, minimum wage and family leave are bad, because government shouldn’t tell business owners what to do. Rape crisis lines and battered women’s shelters should be provided by private charity and markets, not by tax dollars “taken at gunpoint.” And so on, and so on.
Of course, I’m not saying that no feminist can disagree with welfare, or affirmative action, or family leave, or whatever. Feminists disagree on things like this all the time. But can someone be against virtually every policy that might help women and still be a feminist? After all, it’s not just that libertarians want to prevent new laws to help women: libertarians also want to repeal most of the current laws that help women.
Getting rid of Social Security would hurt women more than men; getting rid of the minimum wage would hurt women more than men (because more women are minimum-wage workers); getting rid of anti-discrimination laws would hurt women more; I could go on with examples like these all day. All these policies would hurt women’s interests, and all of them are favored by libertarians. If virtually all the policies a person favors would hurt women’s interests, doesn’t that make it a contradiction to call that person a feminist?
So that’s why I think libertarianism is contrary to feminism. Does that mean that I think libertarians can’t be feminists? No, not really. I think there’s a bad contradiction there, but people deal with contradictions in their lives all the time, after all. But I’m skeptical that such a feminist will ever create any meaningful change for gender justice.
There’s one other reason I think it’s unlikely that any coherent philosophy could be both right-wing and feminist. Feminism’s mandate is justice, and especially justice for women. But fighting for “justice” for women isn’t meaningful if it only applies to some women. Consider the feminist principle that “all women must have the freedom to choose abortion.” If we’re serious about that principle, it’s not enough that abortion remain legal; it also has to be meaningfully available to all women. That means feminism has to concern itself at least partly with class justice – if poor women can’t afford abortions, then poor women lack the freedom to choose abortion.
Similar arguments could be made about why feminism has to not only consider gender justice, but also the places where gender justice “intersects” with racial justice, economic justice, justice for lesbians, and so on. Certainly, there are many individual right-wingers who are personally anti-racist, concerned with the plight of the poor, and so on. But on the whole, it is the left which is fighting for social justice on all these fronts; and insofar as feminism has to be concerned with social justice for all women (and not just white middle-class first-world ablebodied heterosexual women), it’s more natural for feminism to ally with the left than with the right.
(By the way, I’d make a similar argument that to be consistent, all non-feminist social justice groups must be concerned with gender justice; i.e., just as feminism without concern for economic justice is incomplete, socialism without concern for gender justice is incomplete.)
MRAs? You don’t mean Men’s Rights Activists, right? You’re not conflating those with feminists, right?
“? or you both work and get a care-giving dog to raise your child…”?
That’s hilarious. But hey – no doubt genetically-enhanced nurse-dogs will be the $5000 stroller of the 2020s –
Yes, I do mean Mens’ Rights Activists as I’ve lurked on many of there blogs and seen how they describe mothers who wish to stay at home to raise their children as leeches, parasites, etc.,…
What’s the difference if MRAs discourage women not to have kids by calling mothers who wish to be home with their children parasites or if feminists tell women raising kids is the ‘shit work’ of society…
As few women will have kids listening to this…
AND yes, I too am waiting to see when dogs become the new $5,000 strollers/caregivers of children…I was actually looking at Booknotes this morning and hearing an author talk about his new book “A Dog’s History of America” and I, myself, never realized how much dogs did in the past…they even helped with cooking by turning spits and with marketing, farming, etc.,…simply unbelievable…
At least I know where I’ll be able to get a pretty decent and reasonably priced cook when I’m too old to do it myself…now if they could only learn to properly clean…
here’s a suggestion for a form of social engineering that would benefit society immensely: have mandatory history lessons each year, for all adults past their school years, because clearly what gets taught in schools is not sufficient to prevent people from making ignorant attempts at historical revisionism, genocide minimisation or use of historical tragedies for scoring points in an internet debate.
I’m talking to you, Robert and NYMOM. Others have responded already to that particular “nazism was left wing” straw men, but I hope you don’t mind if I add my own remarks to that particular digression.
Genocide aside (oh just little detail, that), Hitler’s nazism, like Mussolini’s fascism, did incorporate a collectivist, populist, for-the-masses element; it attacked capitalists and financiers (identified with the Jewish cabal; who were also identified with communists and liberals; all the while profiting from deals with national and foreign capital, though); it organised labourers in its own state-mandated groups and associations; it strongly believed in moulding society, down to the personal habits of people in their private life; it used heavy taxation for obvious reasons (supporting the regime and its programmes, supporting wars, etc.)
If any of that, or the ‘socialist’ origin (Mussolini was actively a socialist too, before founding his own fascist movement) is enough to qualify a dictatorship as leftist, then all dictatorships are.
If aversion to a heavy presence of the state in the economy and aversion to taxation is the one fundamental trait of the right wing (I thought it was of libertarians? since when did libertarians become equated with conservatives?), then no dictatorship by definition can be right wing.
(Nevermind that the right wing is not averse to government manipulation of economy at all, it only does it in a way that benefits its own cliques).
Thing is, you speak of dictatorship by pretending the dictatorship element is not the defining one. Any dictatorship can and will incorporate all sorts of political ideas and rhetorics, borrowing much of it from pre-existing currents of thought, left wing, right wing, nationalist, corporativist, etc., remoulding them to their own agenda, and basically doing anything it can to achieve and maintain authoritarian power. Authoritarian power being the keyword, not left or right. Some dictatorship used mostly left wing ideas to achieve and maintain authoritarian power; some mostly right wing; most both. The only constant is: authoritarian power.
If you equate the right wing with libertarianism, then obviously no dictatorship will ever fit into the right wing label. Dictatorhips are state power and control multiplied to the nth degree. To call that leftist, you have to truly believe the ridiculous proposition that the left wing is all about making the state even more powerful and controlling of people’s lives, and the right all about happy clappy personal freedom. But then you’d have countless historical and present realities to deal with.
How about, when talking of current political factions and ideas within a democracy, referring to their actual, current form, not their abnormal deviations into authoritarian power, especially if those deviations happened in other countries?
(and just so it’s clear I’m not saying this in the sense that America is immune from authoritarian tendencies; they are a danger in any democracy, more so a military superpower; but as someone whose family did live under nazi occupation, I hope you’ll forgive me if I feel my blood curl and my dead ancestors turn in their graves when I hear people who compare any political trend in the US, however despicable I or anyone else may think it is, to real nazism, not even metaphorical or in the by now trivialised sense of the word, but real historical nazism. It is an historical offence, a form of intellectual dishonesty and a moral crime. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ll get off the soapbox…)
NYMOM, I understand you’re passionate in your concerns about how children may be affected by parental custody laws in the US (of which I don’t know much about), but you are painting a caricature picture of feminism, and again, please, could you leave the nazi comparisons to ignorant bullies and resourceless politicians?
I do think it’s important to give proper value to motherhood, and in fact, I always thought it was part of feminism, maybe that’s because I live in one of those European countries where maternity leaves are so generous and child care so easily available. Without feminism, we wouldn’t have had that. I suspect even without maternity leaves, even in the US some improvements have been brought by feminist demands, no?
On that, I honestly do not understand the libertarian position. I also get that “tough shit” message, and all that talk of gender neutrality when there’s no real neutrality in the workplace sounds a little hypocrite. Also things like what redneck quoted (that “don’t you want to SMACK a woman who…”, er, no I wouldn’t want to smack anyone, much less women, not metaphorically, not literally!) sound downright unpleasant to me. I appreciate how redneck feminist explained her views and I understand where it’s coming from, but to me, the assumption that women who are locked in a destructive relationship must be blamed for being masochists else we’re treating them like helpless idiots is too extreme and nasty already. I appreciate the point about personal responsibility, but really, there’s no need to throw out basic human compassion *and* most of all the notion of a social responsibility to help each other and make society work for as many people as possible, to keep believing in the importance of individual responsibility. Why can’t we have both, really – promote individual awareness and responsibility by helping people achieve it? What are societies for, otherwise? We all are individuals, but we also live in communities. We can’t pretend we don’t.
“What’s the difference if MRAs discourage women not to have kids by calling mothers who wish to be home with their children parasites or if feminists tell women raising kids is the ‘shit work’ of society…”
Because feminism doesn’t tell women that raising kids is the “shit work” of society. Please stop beating that strawwoman!
You might be interested in reading Amanda’s series on the Men’s Rights Movement over at Pandagon.
If you actually live in NY (well, in NYC), don’t forget that the public library system has books on feminism and Nazism.
Without domestic animals, history would have been very different. Much slower, for starters . . .
“Anyway – I would say social engineering is trying to change society. That is what most of the historical examples you cited were about, even as they were inextricably – and tragically – entwined with dogmatic notions about human nature. That’s why most of the actual leftist butchery &etc. you listed occured in places with lots of peasants.”
No…in Russia and China that was the case because they were still mainly agricultural societies, but Germany wasn’t…these things could happen in industrialized and urban societies as well…
I guess I consider ‘essential’ anything that could be considered intrinsically a part of our human nature…such as mother/child bond, aggression or lack thereof in men versus women, ownership of property (as I do consider males to be territorial by nature), natural hierarchies such as exist everywhere even in small villages and towns, etc., Attempts to wipe out or change these sorts of traits is what I would describe as social engineering…as all of these sorts of behaviors could have some genetic component in human nature that we have not even identified yet…
I mean we are trying to change human nature and we are not even sure of what it consists of as yet…
My main concern, of course, is mothers and children (I have a blog http://womenasmothers.blogspot.com/ that writes about this)…I figure men will take care of their own essential issues, they usually manage to anyway…but it just puzzles me some of the thinking lately regarding mothers and children…
I mean if there is nothing essential about the mother/child, for instance, it doesn’t exist, just another social construct. If we accept the feminists/MRA thinking that children are just like chickens and just bond/imprint on the first person they spent anytime with, then what is the incentive for women to continue having children. I mean we have to use some common sense here, for who the heck is going to go through all the inconvenience, pain, sheer bloody mess of the whole childbirth thing if that is the case…In the old days before we had reliable birth control, clearly it wasn’t an issue, but today it’s a major one…
Whenever I ask this question, however, someone invariably responds with, well women will want to have children anyway due to the maternal instinct…Well WTF, if the mother child/bond is total bullshit then what do you think the maternal instinct is??? Why would we assume one w/o the other, as I don’t think we can have it both ways…
So that’s what I’m talking about when I say essential….
I’m not sure if that ‘essential’ would include wearing eyeglasses to correct your vision or restricting/regulating certain forms of birth control…I mean I’m open to people having access to whatever medical care they need to be healthy…I do support abortion and ALL other forms of birth control, but to be honest I could ALSO live in a world without abortion, if ALL other forms of birth control were still available to women.
Frankly I just wish the issue would be settled, only because womens’ groups appear to spend much time and money haggling over it. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of mothers don’t seem to be aware that they could be dragged into court at anytime for any reason or no reason at all and face the loss of their living children…THAT doesn’t appear to bother NOW or any other womens’ group however…but they’ll spend millions on womens rights to contraceptive in some obscure corner of the world, but a mother here can’t get a dime from them to help her keep her own kids…
Fine, mythago. Mock my womanly sorrows. Everyone else does. :p
[deep breath, taps into the Well of Patience once again.]
NYMOM, you really need to stop these ham-fisted attempts to discredit and guilt-trip feminists who are loud and clear about our personal zero interest in motherhood. Equating us with MRAs in our own attitudes about kids doesn’t exactly cover you with glory. It smacks of “Us Vs. Them” nonsense that’s unhelpful and unwarranted. You can, of course, find people in any political stripe and any social circle who can’t stand mothers and/or children. Some of the haters are even –gasp !– mothers and kids themselves ! [Passes around smelling salts, just in case.] I find it incredibly rude and disrespectful of you to want to equate me with some jaggoff like Warren Farrell or my inadvertant namesake, the charming Mr. Sacks, knowing nothing more about me than that I have never wanted children and don’t intend on having any.
I have met women (and some men) who insist to me that I should just go ahead and spawn, because once the kid’s in the works, all the maternal feelings that I’ve been without my whole life will suddenly and magically appear and everything will be just dandy. I remain skeptical about this. It seems like a monumental gamble to take for no other reason than that people like you would suddenly find me more legitimate, lifestyle-wise.
Of course, a woman can competently raise a child she has no real emotional attachment to, just as she can haul her butt day after day into an office where she doesn’t like anything or anyone around her and yet be “a model employee.” Or just as she can be faithful in a loveless and unfulfilling marriage. People can be excellent actors when they know they have to be. However, duty is a poor substitute for genuine engagement, even if millions of us find ourselves more in possession of the former than the latter– for an infinite number of reasons.
“Sounds to me like you can’t relax if even one woman on the planet is not only content to neither bear nor raise children, but is genuinely happy about not doing so. ”
Not at all…
I fully support any womens’ right to NOT have children…what I don’t want is for them to set themselves up as a ‘standard’ by which other women are judged such as what Redneck Feminist said regarding ‘shit work’ being done by caring for home/children…and claiming women who raise children shouldn’t expect as much ‘status’ as women who make the opposite choice…
NOR do I want any of you to try to paint yourselves as speaking for mothers…
“The Taliban and the Shi’ite revolution were all about reactionary minorities enforcing dramatic changes on “the traditional ways of life of most of their people.”?
Those two groups might have been relatively new and minorities, but they had much popular support due to the fact that MOST of the peoples of those countries did NOT want western traditions imposed upon them…which is what the Soviet Union as well as the Shah of Iran tried to impose upon them…for their own good, maybe…I don’t know…
AND any group that takes over a country MUST have the assent of most of the people, as otherwise they couldn’t take over a country….thus, in spite of what some would like to believe, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and many many others including the Taliban and Iran’s mullahs HAD and STILL COULD HAVE popular support…
“…but I’m glad you slipped and said ‘shit work’ btw, because it expresses what a lot of other women on this site and others were implying about caring for children but never came right out and said [it]”?
No. It doesn’t. You seem to have missed the point. What Redneck Feminist actually said was “I saw my mom be nothing more than a slave and a servant to my abusive dad,”? which refers to something both different and more specific than “caring for children.”? It refer back to one of the main idea of feminism – that until recently women here had extremely limited options, and little economic or political power, with all that entails. Quick, kiddies – when did marital rape become a crime rather than a right?
Feminism doesn’t say that your strenous and loving labor raising your children was “shit work”? –
See what Redneck Feminist said below:
“I also think the current mommy-madness is bad for feminism. We’ll have equality when men and women are equal partners in childrearing; not when we elevate motherhood over fatherhood, or when employers are forced to give breaks to moms that they don’t give to dads (except for physical differences like pregnancy, of course). How many women do you know who play the “mommy card”?? Too many for my taste.
If you put your career on hold for children, you shouldn’t expect to have the same status as others who have made the sacrifice for their jobs. It isn’t just men who make family sacrifices, but also careerist women. Not only that, but when women are given breaks to be a mommy, it’s just giving them an incentive to do all the shit work (i.e. the great “balancing act”?). It’s causing her to continue to be the one who takes care of the kids and the house. ”
So in fact, I was right…this is the standard feminist line regarding mothers being stay-at-home mothers and guess what, it’s the standard MRAs line as well…
Who knew????
Like I said feminists are the mothers of the whole MRA’s fathers rights movement…and the three are offshoots of the same twisted branch in my judgement…
“”raising children is… [snip] the most important job in the world…it really is…
shall we say it’s the most important job in the world, just like a lot of other jobs?”
N0…
NYMom, I think you’ve had a more-than-fair chance to state your views, and you’re beginning to dominate conversation to an unfair degree. From now on, you’re banned from posting in any of the “Alas” threads commenting on my posts. (What happens on Pseudo-Adrianne’s threads is up to her, of course).
“NOR do I want any of you to try to paint yourselves as speaking for mothers…..”
Why not? Why does your motherhood give you special status in speaking for mothers? I’m a mother, and I’m a feminist. I actually consider feminism essential (in the “necessary” sense) to my motherhood, because as an unmarried mother, prior to feminism I would have had no rights to my child. Prior to feminism, married women had no custodial rights to their children if the father wanted them; the children were considered to be the legal property of the father. Unmarried women also had no rights to their children; social-engineering do-gooders took the children away to orphanages or convents.
It is feminism that allowed me to get an education. It is feminism that grants me the right to vote. It is feminism that paved my way into my high-paying job. It is feminism that insists I have a right to be a single mother. It is feminism that insists on my right to my own bodily integrity. Feminism that allows me to keep the proceeds of my labor. Feminism that granted me the right to own my own home. Hell, because of feminism, I can wear comfortable clothes like blue jeans and t-shirts, rather than cramming my body into corsets and piling on another twenty of thirty pounds of clothes!
Feminism. Don’t leave home without it….literally!
Well said, La Lubu.
Yes, NYMOM may continue to post comments under my posts. Her commenting under the subject of feminism/women’s rights do create quite a bit of heated discourse which is what I want under my posts. Though they may seem more like “flame wars” I still want them.
[scratches head]
Belief in the rights of women –some of whom are mothers and children– to have more lifestyle options than just the Coventry Patmore model = “Speaking for all mothers.”
Uh-HUH.
Some days really are like the old joke about opening the freezer door and finding Fidel Castro in there in a parka and boots. One really is at a complete loss for words. At any rate, I’m off to change the name of my non-existent blog again: Now it’s going to be called “My Wacky Twisted Branches.” Cheers.
NYMOM, I stand by what I said. But I hardly speak the feminist platform. I think the whole point of this thread is whether or not people like me (a libertarian) can be feminists. A lot of people would say that my statements make me an anti-feminist.
You can hardly use me as an example of modern feminism, since I’m not a leftist or even the modern definition of ‘liberal’. Other feminists disagree with me all the time over things like affirmative action, men’s rights, and economic policy. (They do so in a respectful way, which I appreciate very much.)
In fact, I would go so far as to say that the mommy-madness craze is being driven by mainstream feminists. I found Mothers Ought to Have Equal Rights on a feminist blog… under the title “Feminist Links”.
So again, I stand by what I said. But just because I said it doesn’t mean all (or even most) feminists agree with it. You should just hate libertarian feminists, because those on the left fully support you.
WTF???!?!? This is a nonsense: not only are many of the women who post here actually mothers themselves, many of those who aren’t are very pro-mothers/children and all in favour of getting both more status and social support for mothers and children.
But hey, once again, if you choose not to acknowledge it, that means it doesn’t exist, right?