 The title of my talk is really a sort of pastiche title. You know, they say you're coming to this conference, what will you speak on? And my subject will be a little bit different from the place of women in the free society, but we'll see where it will go. But I want to start by calling your attention to the fact that every country in the world has a history of male domination. And this has often been explained and excused as being only natural. For instance, our own Murray Rothbard in the title essay of a book called Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature suggested the fact that historically cultures have been male dominated may simply indicate that males are superior to females. Such a view, of course, overlooks the fact that the domination has been enforced by law. And it still is. Divorce laws, property laws, the franchise, legal restriction on occupations are traditionally skewed in favor of men. And this fact has caused a reaction which is generally called feminism. That is, a desire to change and eradicate this legally enforced domination. And the present women's movement in the United States was formed out of several strands in the 1960s. The New Left, the New Deal Left, that is, people who believed that big government could solve all kinds of problems, which they learned from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Roosevelt's followers, and the classical liberal strand. People of all these persuasions became aware that there were a number of legal and social assumptions about women that needed to be questioned. And today, there is still feminism, but there is a backlash to it. And there are women who are both for the women's movement and who are against the women's movement. And now, feminism themselves are arriving at a position where they are divided. There are feminists on the one hand wanting to censor pornography and to remove sexism from school books. And there are feminist organizations that support the First Amendment to the American Constitution, which says that Congress shall make no law restricting freedom of speech. There are feminists on both sides of a challenge to a new California law that requires employers to grant maternity leave to their employees. Some feminists say, yes, this is very good, but women, other feminists say, no, it's not good for women to be treated specially and separately. And feminist historians testified both for and against Sears Roebuck when that company was charged by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with discriminating against women in commissioned sales jobs. So we find that a great deal has changed since the women's movement first surfaced in the 1960s. In the 1960s, for instance, when this movement began, the so-called nuclear family consisting of a working husband and a wife staying at home with the children and dependent on him for her support was the norm. And today, half of all marriages in the United States end in divorce. And only 7% of American families fit this nuclear pattern. Where once most American women were dependent on men for their support, now most women are expected to support themselves and can do so. In the 1960s, women began to realize that they were virtually excluded by law or custom from a number of occupations. And few women held political office. Today, although women still dominate the so-called feminine occupations like nursing and secretarial work, they also form a significant part of the professions of law, medicine, banking and engineering. And they own 25% of all the small businesses in the United States. And more than 15,000 women now hold elective office. Whether or not the American women's movement is solely responsible for these changes, as a result of them, the American women's movement is no longer viewed with the same urgency on the part of feminists. Now this experience that American women have had is not completely duplicated in other countries. European women, for instance, are not faced with such rapid fragmentation of the family as we are faced with in America. According to one source, the divorce rate in the United States is now double that in Sweden, that in Britain, that in Germany, triple that in France and 20 times as high as in Italy. But everywhere, all over the world, even in Muslim countries who have perhaps the strongest logical resistance to the modernization of the role of women, there is a move afoot for women to combine their age-old role of nurturing the family with access to education and productive work. As the productive work is relevant to an industrial society. If society is changing on its own, so to speak, is there a need for feminism in today's world? Is there a meaningful way in which feminism can define what woman's place should be in that world? What is woman's place in society? I hope that an audience of libertarians recognizes that this is a strange question. You may not even notice how strange a question it is until you reverse it. What is man's place in society? Man's place? Society is made up of human beings. How can human beings have a place in it? Indeed. But woman is not man. Women do not by themselves constitute human beings or people. Dorothy Sayers, who was one of the first women to earn a degree from Oxford, wrote an article in the thirties called The Human Not Quite Human, which calls attention to this discrepancy. She wrote, probably no man has ever troubled to imagine how strange his life would appear to himself if it were to be assessed in the terms of his maleness. If everything he wore, said, or did had to be justified by reference to female approval. If he were compelled to regard himself day in, day out, not as a member of society, but merely as a virile member of society. If the center of his dress consciousness were the cod piece, his education directed to making him a spirited lover and meek pat of familiar. His interests held to be natural only so far as they were sexual. If from school and lecture room press and pulpit, he heard the persistent outpouring of a shrill and scolding voice bidding him remember his biological function. His newspaper would assist him with a men's corner, telling him how he could attract the girls and retain his wife's affection. People would write books called History of the Mail Psychology of the Mail or Mails of the Bible and he would be regaled daily with headlines such as Gentlemen Doctor's Discovery and Men Artists in the Academy. If he gave an interview to a reporter, he would find it recorded in such terms as these. Professor Bracht, although a distinguished botanist, is not in any way an unmanly man. He has in fact a wife and several children. When I swilled beer with him in his laboratory, he bawled his conclusions at me in a strong rough voice that implemented the promise of his swaggering moustache. Let's go back a bit in history. Edmund Burke supported the American Revolution but both ridiculed belief in the rights of men and assumed the inferiority of women in his later statement Reflections on the Revolution in France, written in 1790. Burke said, a woman is but an animal and an animal not of the highest order. An answer appeared to Burke before the end of 1790 entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Men. It was written by an anonymous author who also took on Burke's views about women and this anonymous author was herself a woman. Her name was Mary Wollstonecraft. In this book, her general definition of rights was as follows. The birthright of man is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact and the continued existence of that compact. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Man is not well known today. It has been overshadowed by the book she then wrote in 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Women. In it, she carefully analyzed and refuted the assumptions of her day about the nature and place of woman. She took particular pains to refute the argument reflecting the subjection in which the sex has ever been held. That's Marie Rothbard's argument. As she put it, pointing out that men too have submitted to tyranny. And she said, Tillard has proved that the courtier who severely resigns the birthright of a man is not a moral agent. It cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man who has always been subjugated. And not only did Wollstonecraft argue that woman should be considered the philosophical equals of man, she was probably the first person to point out that the laws respecting woman make an absurd unit of a man and his wife. And then by the easy transition of only considering him as responsible, she is reduced to a mere cipher. But to render her really virtuous and useful continued Wollstonecraft. She must not, if she discharged multiple duties, want individually the protection of civil laws. She must not be dependent on her husband's bounty for her subsistence during his life or support after his death. For how can a being be generous who has nothing of its own or virtuous who is not free? She called for a proper education for women so that they might be fitted for various businesses instead of only being taught to please men. Saying eloquently, how many women thus waste life away the prey of discontent who might have practiced as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop and stood erect, supported by their own industry. Would men but generously snap our chains and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers, in a word, better citizens. This was all said remember in 1792. The concern of the Enlightenment for the rights of man led inexorably to a concern for the rights of women on the part of some. In the United States the concern for the rights of slaves led to a similar concern for the rights of women as the states of the union had generally adopted the same British common law that Mary Wollstonecraft pointed out made of husband and wife an absurd unit. In 1848 a group of abolitionists met in Seneca Falls, New York and issued a declaration of women's rights based stylistically on Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. But where the tyrant that Jefferson referred to was the British King, the Tyrant the Seneca Falls declaration referred to was that generic man that had created the laws and rules of society. Listen to some of the points. The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward women having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her to prove this let facts be submitted to a candid world. He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws in the formation of which she had no voice. He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men both natives and foreigners. Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen the elective franchise thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation he has oppressed her on all sides. He has made her if married in the eyes of the law civilly dead. He has taken from her all right to property even to the wages she earns. He has made her morally an irresponsible being as she can commit many crimes with impunity provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage she has compelled her to promise obedience to her husband. He becoming to all intents and purposes her master. The law giving him power to deprive her of liberty and to administer chastisement. By the way you sure that you've all heard the English phrase the rule of thumb many of you may not know what that refers to. The rule of thumb is that a man may not beat his wife with a stick larger than his thumb. That's part of the common law of Great Britain and which was adopted by the United States. And still exists in some states in the United States today although legislation has superseded it in most places. He has so framed the laws of divorce we're now back at the Seneca Falls declaration as to what shall be the proper causes and in case of separation to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women. The law is going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man and giving all power into his hands. After depriving her of all rights as a married woman if single and the owner of property he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it. Clearly the founding of the United States upon what were to be called liberal principles hadn't done much for women. The abolitionist movement years before the Civil War enlisted many women and both they and their male colleagues became sympathetic to the burgeoning feminist movement. How could one believe that slaves should have civil rights and still believe in denying those rights to the women who are championing their cause. Surely these supposedly free women were no less intelligent, no less worthy, no less human than these unfortunate members of another race enslaved on our shores. Yet like the slaves American married women could not own property, could not sign contracts could not vote, could not control their own earnings, could be physically beaten and could be returned to their homes by force if they ran away. After the Civil War women abolitionists expected their male colleagues to help them gain the rights that now would be granted to freed male slaves by the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution but it was not to be. A petition to specify that the 14th amendment applied to women was introduced in the Senate and voted down. And to make sure that there was no ambiguity about this, the word male was introduced into the American Constitution for the first time. What this means in American law is that no matter what the wording of equal protection of the law may seem to imply, it is clear that the framers of this amendment did not mean it to apply to women and so it doesn't. When the territory of Wyoming which gave women the vote in 1869 became a state in 1889, it was even argued in Congress that the 14th amendment made it unconstitutional for women to vote. So that Wyoming women should be deprived of their suffrage before Wyoming could be admitted to the union as a state. Fortunately this argument did not prevail. But it's one reason why a branch of American feminists agitated for a number of years for an equal rights amendment to be added to our Constitution. But I'm getting ahead of the story. I think I've said enough to show that feminism began as a classical liberal movement based on the assumption that the rights of man included the rights of woman. That woman is not by nature man's property whose primary purpose is to bring other generations of men into the world but is equally a human being with all the variations that that implies. The 19th century feminists didn't want special treatment by the law. They wanted less restriction. But society changed. Industrialism preceded a pace. Socialism developed as did a trade union movement into which women began to be admitted in the late 1860s. By 1880 women workers were 15% of the labor force. In 1903 the National Women's Trade Union League was formed and lobbied Congress to investigate the working conditions of women and children. So as one strain of feminism fought to dismantle the laws that treated women differently a new network of laws concerning women was passed. Called protective labor legislation. The Supreme Court which had held general protective legislation to be an unconstitutional violation of the right to contract, appell protective laws that only applied to women in 1908 on the ground that it is in the interest of people to take special care of the health of women as if she were a farm animal because the physical well-being of women becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the health and vigor of the race. In 1901 the Socialist Party was formed in America, the first political party to allow women to participate. And it was an avowed supporter of votes for women. And in 1904 the first socialist women's organization was formed. The National Socialist Union the coincidence of language is just that. The larger progressive party made women's suffrage part of its program in 1912. When the campaign to allow women to vote finally was won in 1920 it was with the help of socialists and progressives who did not entirely share the original classical liberal vision of dismantling restrictive laws. And the first laws that women lobbied for after they got the vote had expanded state power. Two among other things, inspect meat and outlaw child labor. The cutting edge of social reform was socialist in the 20s and 30s and only one small women's group kept the classical liberal flame alive. A tiny organization called the National Women's Party that kept introducing the Equal Rights Amendment into every session of Congress despite the opposition of such formidable foes as the women's bureau of the labor, Eleanor Roosevelt, the AFL-CIO, the League of Women Voters, President John F. Kennedy's commission on the status of women, all of whom pointed out that the Equal Rights Amendment would invalidate the protective labor legislation regulating women's pay, hours and working conditions. But the new wave of feminists began to realize that this legislation actually restricted the economic options open to women and they began to insist that protective legislation should be struck down. At first their vehicle was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but then they began to see that the Equal Rights Amendment would save them from having to bring individual suits against specific laws by making the entire category of protective laws unconstitutional. So a group of now activists now as the National Organization for Women disrupted a session of a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee demanding immediate hearings on the ERA and they got it in 1970. It's interesting in light of the later successful campaign against this Equal Rights Amendment that none of the conservative legal experts that testified against it between 1970 and 1972 when hearings were being held complained that it would expand government power. On the contrary, they said it would invalidate too many laws. That it would disable the government from passing legislation and that the government already had all the power it needed to pass any positive legislation for women that it wished to. Let me give you as an example one objection a testimony objecting to the Equal Rights Amendment that was given by a former director of the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor. She said, this amendment wouldn't put a single law on our books. It wouldn't require equality of pay in states now lacking women interested toward this end. It would not require Yale or Harvard, Princeton or Notre Dame to add a few women full professors to their staffs. Nor would it change policy with respect to women seeking admission to law or medical schools or any other private institutions of higher learning. It wouldn't put more women in top jobs nor supply a single daycare center to enlarge the opportunity of a welfare mother to obtain a job. The inequality of women does not arise as a constitutional defect but rather out of economic, social, political and legislative default. So this was the kind of argument that was mounted against the Equal Rights Amendment. A very heartening thing happened in the United States in the early 1970s and that is that conservatives primarily Sam Irwin of the Watergate thing tried to pull a variation of the Washington Monument Gambit and their bluff was called the Washington Monument Gambit as it has been identified by the Public Choice School of Economics is when the bureaucracy says these budget cuts can only be achieved if we close the most popular tourist attraction in Washington, the Washington Monument on the busiest holiday of the year which is the 4th of July. What Sam Irwin did was to say to American feminists this Equal Rights Amendment will only function to invalidate all the wonderful laws that we have passed for divorced women. Not only protective labor legislation but exemption from jury due, the exemption from armed forces conscription and compulsory alimony for divorced women and to his surprise, instead of saying we can't do without these benefits as any self-respecting interest group should be able to be counted to do liberal feminists said we don't want your benefits we just want equality before the law and they quoted the 19th century abolitionist Angelina Grimke I ask no favors for my sex all I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright it didn't last Over the years the supporters of the ERA forgot that they had originally agreed that the amendment would have no impact on private discrimination or private employment but would only affect governments and started predicting that it would lessen the pay gap between men and women and would wipe out any and all existing inequalities between men and women because no one in the feminist movement did the intellectual homework to distinguish between equality before the law, meaning the law treats all people equally and equality in fact meaning the law treats people in different positions differently in order to make them equal what we might call the classical liberal and socialist strains in the women's movement continued to maintain an uneasy coexistence using the same word equality in contradictory ways and forming coalitions to invalidate laws or to expand them with equal abandon this lack of identification of political principles has led to the present confused picture with feminists on both sides of many issues including censorship how to deal with existing pay and job differentials between men and women and maternity leave two books that came out this year in the United States tell the good news and the bad news of American thinking about the woman question one, gender justice is a piece of establishment scholarship written by two men and a woman that meticulously makes the case that justice depends on freedom of choice it was published by the University of Chicago Press widely reviewed in major media and hailed by the New York Times reviewer as literate, jargon free and even entertaining it criticizes both those on the right who want to change the present state of things because women are not fulfilling their natural function which is to stay home and those on the left who want to change the present state of things because women are acting in accordance with their conditioning instead of creating an ideal society saying that both schools are equally opposed to freedom of individual choice this book is a welcome addition to the literature of liberty that is increasingly being produced by American academia the book that tells the bad news of American thinking is one that is also gaining attention from the mainstream media the author was a guest for instance on the prestigious television show Face the Nation on Mother's Day it is called a lesser life the myth of women's liberation in America and it is written by Sylvia Ann Hewlett a former economics professor who is now vice president for economic studies at the United Nations Association her book criticizes the emphasis in the American women's movement on consciousness raising expanding opportunities in the equal rights amendment as too individualistic and suggests that women should become like any other special interest group and band together to get the legislation that European social feminists she says take for granted legislation provided for paid maternity leaves child allowances subsidized day care and free health services she advises women to ally themselves with labor unions in order to achieve these goals saying that the market can never adequately solve the problems of working mothers the danger of this approach is that it seems so reasonable that it's being hailed by American conservatives as a breath of fresh air about feminism after all the book is written by a mother of four whose vowed aim is to make life easier for mothers and therefore help preserve the family Dr. Hewlett explicitly supports Phyllis Schlafly's opposition to the ERA pointing out that Schlafly like Eleanor Roosevelt realized the protective labor legislation was more in women's interest than equality before the law here both conservatives and old line democratic feminists like Betty Friedan agree is an approach that may solve the American women's dilemma by offering her concrete non-ideological help already maternity leave is the new rallying cry at the United Nations World Conference in Nairobi last summer according to Betty Friedan American women delegates led by Maureen Reagan president Reagan's daughter were working for a consensus on parental leave childcare and even equal pay for work of comparable value in other words American feminism is borrowing a leaf from the European alliance between women as a special interest group and trade unions representative Patricia Schroeder a democrat from the state of Colorado has been supporting a parental and medical leave bill this summer which would require employers to give both birth and adoptive parents 18 weeks of unpaid parental leave it would also authorize a commission to study the feasibility of requiring this parental leave be paid by the employer and the grand of American feminism Betty Friedan is fighting feminists in now in the American civil liberties union who are challenging the California law that singles out pregnant women for special legal benefits namely maternity leave Friedan an earlier supporter of equal rights before the law has now decided that the fact that women are different from men justifies as time describes it not only benefits like those routinely offered to working mothers in other industrialized countries there's a strong push for feminists and labor to join in support of status measures not just daycare and child allowances but comparable worth and affirmative action these are being presented as I said before as non-ideological issues that can unite everyone feminism as a political philosophy has been fragmented infiltrated as was liberalism by the idea that not only is the state the enemy of freedom if it is not restrained but the powerful private interests must also be restrained the result for both ideas is a contradictory mixture of individualism and collectivism in the last analysis only expediency tells us when to call on the individual to restrain the state and when to call on the state to restrain the individual in trying to rescue the word feminism in my opinion there is just as there is a value in referring to the classical liberal tradition the history of freedom should not be abandoned in our present struggle and particularly today when the pendulum of political action is swinging again towards special treatment for or we would point out against women libertarian feminism may have important points to contribute to the dialogue at least we have to try thank you