I have trouble accepting the idea of a right-wing feminist.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 <\/em>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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> a person favors would hurt women’s interests, doesn’t that make it a contradiction to call that person a feminist?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n (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.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading