 First I want to ask you How do you think of yourself and how do other people think of you? Are you Irish a? Democrat a member of the ACLU a member of the Chamber of Commerce a member of a union a member of the PTA a member of an alumni association a feminist Jewish a member of the Neighborhood Block Association black Russian a Bowler a bridge player a woman an Immigrant a member of a food purchasing cooperative a Boy Scout a Libertarian a Smoker a rock musician Well, you get the idea We Libertarians champion the individual but the fact is that each individual belongs to many groups Some of these were born into and cannot avoid most of them are voluntary. I Want to talk about the importance of groups and associations in human society? Human beings are by nature a gregarious species a human being does not develop in isolated splendor from an egg glued to a branch a Human being has a long development into maturity in the company of others during which the care of others is essential We are beings who think alone, but who find our actions magnified and effectiveness by our interaction with others Many people particularly individualists seem to resent anyone noticing the groups. They're born into they may even claim never to think of Themselves or anyone else as belonging to a particular nationality or gender or race or cultural background But even if they manage not to others do There are pluses and minuses in being a member of such involuntary groups other group members can reflect back to us our Experiences and those values that we have found in the group We all have been profoundly influenced by experiences both positive and negative that perhaps only those who have also Experienced them can fully understand But on the other hand we all hate to be stereotyped and we are No matter how many times a person may say I'm not a woman. I'm a person or I never had any of those racial ethnic experiences or I'm not Jewish. I'm a rational individualist We're still seen by others in terms of whatever group identity is important to the viewer Society has these stereotyped pigeonholes for group members that help it to function Women are not milk welcome in men's locker rooms doormen don't let obviously intoxicated persons into a restaurant as Walter Williams points out knowledge is not free Sometimes it will cost us too much not to act on the basis of incomplete knowledge in the state against blacks He challenged readers to decide whether they would put a complicated Mathematical question to young blacks or young Chinese on a college campus if they were offered $50 for every right answer But fine for every wrong one that they received So we're all individuals, but we're also all members of groups some chosen some unchosen This is a fact, but how it's viewed is very subjective I may be thinking of myself as a member of one group while the person I'm dealing with is thinking of me in an entirely different context While I'm thinking of myself as an engineer the person I'm dealing with may be seeing me as a woman or a southerner or the graduate of a second-rate school And he may not want to work with members of any of those groups. I Can give you two examples of this sort of contradictory identification one contemporary and one that really was Responsible for the beginnings of American feminism The contemporary example concerns a friend of mine a musician who was starting a rock group and decided to do something different He wanted to use some untraditional instruments and heard of a woman who played rock on the French horn Having a woman in an otherwise male band He decided it might be an extra plus and it couldn't be easy for a woman playing such an unusual Instrument to find work in a male-dominated profession So he invited her to audition and she was brilliant But when she was asked to join the band she turned them down Indignantly because one member of the band was white. I thought this was a black band. She protested. I don't want to play with no hunkies The other anecdote is about two 19th century women Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton Who were pioneers in the abolitionist movement in the United States in the 1830s in 1840 They were among the elected delegates to a world anti-slavery convention held in London They were obviously thinking of themselves as members of the white race who were privileged and free Imagine their surprise When they found that their London hosts thought of them differently and did not allow them to sit in the meeting with male delegates They were required to listen to the proceedings from behind a curtain William Lord Garrison was horrified at this ruling too and sat behind the curtain with them This experience was a catalyst that made modern Stanton resolved to hold a women's rights convention when they returned to the United States and Eight years later. They did so at Seneca Falls, New York There they issued a woman's declaration of independence signed not only by women But by such leading male avid listeners as Garrison and Frederick Douglass in style It was modified on Jefferson's declaration But the tyrant who was addressed was not King George, but generic man The facts that women submitted to a candid world in 1848 included the fact that a married woman had no rights apart from her husband No property rights. No rights over her children. No right to use the courts civilly dead the declaration put it She could even commit crimes without being punished if those crimes were committed in the presence of her husband The declaration also demanded the franchise for women, which was considered very far out Let's go back a bit of history in England Edmund Burke had supported the American Revolution, but he both ridiculed belief in the rights of man and Assumed the inferiority of woman in his later reflections on the revolution in France written in 1798 Burke said a woman is but an animal and an animal not of the highest order an Answer to Burke appeared before the end of 1790. Did I say 1890? I'm sorry 1790 Entitled a vindication of the rights of man It was written by an anonymous author who also challenged Burke's views on women and this anonymous author was herself a woman a woman named 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 isn't united in a social compact and the Continued existence of that compact Mary Wollstonecraft's vindications of the rights of man is not well known today It has been overshadowed by the book. She then wrote in 1792 of vindication of the rights of women In it she carefully analyzed and refuted the assumptions of her day about the nature and place of women She took particularly pains to refute the argument reflecting the subjugation in which the sex has ever been held as she put it That's the argument that if women stay in a subordinate position that indicates an inferior nature Pointing out that men too have submitted to tyranny and she said Till it is proved that the court here whose Servally resigns the birthright of a man is not a moral agent It cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjugated Not only did Wollstonecraft argue that women should be considered the equals of men on this philosophical level 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 youthful She must not if she discharged her civil duties want individually the protection of civil laws She must not be dependent on our husband's bounty for her subsistence during his life or support after his death But 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 being only 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 But although in the United States the concern for the rights of slaves led to a similar concern for the rights of women Conditions in 1848 when the Seneca Falls Declaration was signed was substantially the same as in England in 1792 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 How could one believe that slaves should have civil rights and still believe in denying those rights to the women who were 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 the same 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 included 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 has meant 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 However, 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 proceeded 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 percent of the labor force In 1903 the national woman's trade union lead 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 protective labor legislation The supreme court which had held general protective legislation to be unconstitutional violation of the right To contract upheld 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 woman As if she were a farm animal because the physical well-being of woman 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 the first political party to allow women as participants And an avowed supporter of votes for women in 1904 the first socialist women's organization was formed the woman's national socialist union 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 share the original classical liberal vision of dismantling restrictive laws And the first laws that women lobbied for after they got the vote Were laws that expanded state power to 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 over the years of such Formidable foes as the woman's bureau of the department of labor Eleanor Roosevelt the a f of l cio The legal women voters and 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 in the late 1960s 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 But then they began to see that the equal rights amendment could save them from having to bring Individual suits against specific laws by making the entire category of protective laws for women unconstitutional So a group of now national organization for women activists Disrupted a session of a subcommittee of the senate judiciary committee demanding immediate hearings on the e r a and they got it in 1970 You know it's interesting in light of the later successful campaign against the equal rights amendment That none of the conservative legal experts that testified against it between 1970 and 1972 When hearings were being held in congress 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 that necessary legislation And that the government already had all the power it needed to pass any positive legislation for women that it would wish to Let me give you just an example Testimony objecting to the equal rights amendment that was given by a former director of the woman's bureau of the department of labor Mary dublin kaiser she said This amendment wouldn't put a single law on the books It wouldn't require equality of pay in states now lacking statutes 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 day care center to enlarge the opportunity of a welfare mother to obtain a job The inequality of women does not arise out of constitutional defect But rather out of economic social political and legislative default This was typical of the arguments mounted against the equal rights amendment when congress was considering it A very heartening thing happened in the united states in the early 1970s And that is the conservatives primarily sam urvin of watergate fame Tried to pull a variation of the washington monument gambit and their bluff was called much to their surprise 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 amongst popular tourist attraction in washington the washington monument On the busiest holiday of the year the fourth of july What sam urvin did was to say to american feminists This equal rights amendment will only function to invalidate all the wonderful laws we have passed to help women Not only protective labor legislation But exemption from jury duty 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 groups should be counted on to say 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 who said 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 should 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 continue 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 self identified 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 Feminism the political philosophy has been fragmented and infiltrated as was liberalism By the idea that not only is the state the enemy of freedom if it is not restrained But 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 So why be a libertarian feminist? This question really has two aspects Is there still a need for feminism now that society has changed so much And so much of the legal domination of males has been dismantled And even if there is is there a value for libertarians in trying to rescue the word feminism Considering the first part of the question male domination has been cultural as well as legal It's a truism that behavior that is admired in a man is also considered pushy aggressive or bitchy in a woman Many more women than men leave corporations to start their own businesses because they still find there is a glass ceiling on their promotions Clients of large professional firms often assume that they have been slighted if a woman is assigned to handle their work For years anthropologist lewis leaky was credited with discoveries that were actually made by his wife mary leaky Other wives who have been partners in their husband's work have similarly not been given credit or demanded it Which brings us back to involuntary groups It grew up I grew up among girls who accepted a certain definition of woman's place in society And my conclusion was for many years girls are stupid. I want to be one of the boys But it wasn't entirely true Because I was born into that group and I share a lot of experiences and emotions with it And then a funny thing happened As feminism revived in the early 1970s I began to see that not only my childhood companions, but I myself my rational wonderful self Were in part products of cultural assumptions and self-fulfilling prophecies Feminist consciousness raising speeded up that process for me Let me say here parenthetically that although sexism is still a cultural issue I think it's counterproductive to see it as an outside cause of every difficulty a woman might face Just as attributing every social problem faced by blacks to racism is counterproductive as journalist william raspberry pointed out It makes it harder to try So I consider myself a feminist and saw the issues of reproductive choice and laws discriminating against women Like protective labor legislation domicile laws which make a husband's domicile automatically his wife's So that if he moves out of state and she doesn't she can no longer vote or run for office Laws giving husbands control of joint property. I saw these as important political issues This led me to an interest in libertarian political action Actually, I was a feminist before I was a libertarian although in politics Although I had uh been familiar with objectivism so that the ideas were all familiar to me I'm not saying that every woman should be a feminist But I think that the current confusion over what the word means keeps a lot of women from identifying themselves as feminists Who might otherwise do so Take iron rand for instance Iron rand said she wasn't a feminist. She attacked feminists Yet look at her view of ronald reagan First of all she didn't believe in the viability of third parties. So she would only consider candidates from the two major parties Reagan had the most sweeping free market rhetoric. We have seen from a major politician in modern times He was one of the strongest anti-communist in american politics an issue of overriding importance to rand He was the conservative who because he had been a member of the hollywood community was most likely to understand Deviant personal lifestyles and the issue of personal freedom Really What was the single issue of such importance that it made her feel that reagan must not be supported? abortion was she a feminist Uh With other linguistic conventions. She might have been But are these problems still with us? Well in the 1970s I discovered by accident that the house that I bought entirely with my own money for my husband and myself Had on the advice of my lawyer been put in a legal form the old common law joint tendency in the entirety That gave my husband the right to sell it without my consent as long as he divided the sale price with me In the number of states a husband still has total immunity from rape prosecution by his wife even if they're separated It was not until the end of 1984 That in new york an appeals court struck down part of a rape statute that after defining rape as sexual intercourse with a female By forcible compulsion went on to say that the victim of a rape committed by her husband Is not legally considered a female in the meaning of the statute When is a female not a female? When she's a wife And even more recently the governor of new hampshire vetoed a law that the conservative legislature had passed which replaced Laws still on the books making abortion a criminal offense in new hampshire with a statement that the state should neither force nor prevent abortions The conservative live free or die new hampshire legislature was willing to say that the state should stay out of it But the governor was not Clearly there are political issues still that uniquely affect women And there are remaining social issues affecting them the group action can ameliorate Those of us who don't want to see social problems solved by state action will have to try to find solutions ourselves In both cases there's a place in the world for some sort of feminist sensibility and for feminist associations Solving problems somehow means someone solving them We can't just look at issues that today's feminists are agitating about like how do you care for the newborn infants of working mothers? And say the market will take care of it As tana's soul points out in knowledge and decisions the market is not an institution that is the alternative to government The market is simply the freedom to choose among many existing or still to be created possibilities To which i would add just as markets require specialization and division of labor So does the marketplace of ideas we sometimes seem to have an intellectual drive toward the most abstract the most theoretical The most comprehensive but in fact we need to drive in the opposite direction to apply our ideas to be more specialized more concrete Otherwise we run the danger of treating social problems as mary antoinette did let them eat cake Or as ian ran handled the issue of welfare if the poor die It's unfortunate, but we should have only voluntary charity for them end of discussion We need to be specific The fabian socialists saw the triumph of their ideas and built a welfare state in the home of laissez faire By immersing themselves in the details of local schools sewage facilities and municipal problems We need to find out how many corporations run daycare centers and what the effect is on absenteeism We need information on government regulations that close down existing private daycare daycare facilities Do welfare regulations allow sisters who are unmarried mothers to live together and pool resources and trade child care And still receive welfare if not, why not? Similar questions need to be asked about other issues of concern to the lives of women that are being preempted by government We need to Circulate the detailed objections to comparable worth legislation that have been amassed by economist jennifer roback and june oh neil to name but two So there's a place for an association that wants to promote non-state solutions to women's problems in our society Not everyone will want to join one of the great attractions of belonging to a voluntary ideological group is the personal value We experience in persuading others to agree with us Even if we never succeed in affecting the sought after social or political change We experience success in the new friends the new workers May I say the new converts that we make Libertarians have got to be aware of this But the umbrella of libertarianism is broad. Some people seem to assume that the only legitimate libertarian group is the libertarian party But since the marketplace of ideas needs specialists, we will always find new causes as the movement grows We will be libertarian republicans Christian libertarians libertarians for life Libertarian feminists and we will meet with each other Even more interested in teaching each other than we are in learning from each other But both will occur My particular group at least the one i'm focusing on today is libertarian feminism We considered changing our name last year, but decided that it helps us to be a gadfly to two groups that we think could learn from each other We have a feminist identity in libertarian circles and the libertarian identity in feminist circles We decided that there's a value in both words Just as there is a value in referring to the classical liberal tradition and refusing to repudiate the word liberal entirely today The history of freedom should not be abandoned But granted that we pay tribute to feminism's past, why should those who share classical liberal values call themselves feminist today? Precisely because this is a period in which choices are being made Like liberalism feminism is basically an attitude that questions the limits that society is automatically placed on individuals In this case the limits that it puts on women's ability and responsibility It became clear in the 60s and 70s even to those feminists who were socialists That the state is a patriarchal institution and that a satisfactory life requires self-reliance and some sense of personal achievement Not just security whether provided by a man or by a benevolent government This is an exciting time in which to live a time when a second classical liberal revolution is sweeping eastern europe literally An article by a solidarity leader in the new york times magazine said Sakharov taught us the human rights of the foundation of civilized world That the readiness to fight for those rights is the gauge of the human worth of each of us The great anti-totalitarian revolution which inscribed on its banner is the rights of man And engulfed like a fire the countries of my native europe began with andre sakharov If we take it this is a great opportunity for us to have our combination of idealism and practicality heard In the areas of feminism libertarians can't just take a negative stance No affirmative action no comparable worth no government daycare centers First we have to enlist the imagination of those who see that women as women do have problems that are worth solving that need solving Second those of us who agree that these problems exist have to do some studying and thinking about just what the problems are And third we have to separate out those few that require legal political action and map out strategies so that we can say This is where we stand now, and this is what we hope to do In the light of the new classical liberal revolution, let's get on the bandwagon It would be a shame if feminists weren't part of it After all we played a very honorable part in the first one For today american feminism is in danger of abandoning its individualist soul to gain a massive potage Rather than let the socialist feminists have the field We must reclaim the search for solutions to the problems that women share Solutions that are not dependent on government power Thank you