...all from Megan McArdle.
(Several weeks ago Anna Quindlen wrote a Newsweek column that incensed me, basically asserting that any pro-female candidate would by definition have to support a bunch of hard-left economic politics that happened to pander to women as an interest group. I meant to kvetch about this here but never did. McArdle's context seems to be completely different but the basic points are the same.)
I differ from the feminist mainstream on many of the questions of how we should change [societal limits to and double standards against women]. I don't think that subsidized childcare should be a civil right, I think comparable worth is a very bad idea, and I don't view abortion rights as fundamentally a question of female equality, but rather as an incredibly complicated attempt to trade off two important and incommensurable values that has no overwhelmingly obvious answer. [...] But the basic thing, to me, is that I endorse the project of changing social values to increase the scope of human possibility.
But for many feminists, that's too basic. For many, to be a feminist, you have to want to make radical state-sponsored change to the economic system in order to promote equality. You have to grant rape accusers extraordinary presumption of truth-telling. You must endorse a hard line on abortion rights. If you do not agree with these propositions, you are a non-feminist, or an anti-feminist.
Then later in her blog, in a post that begins with a book about slavery and goes on to address many topics, a concept I wish some of my college peers had understood better (I didn't need them to agree with me, but I had hoped at least they'd realize that I wasn't a priori crazy or evil):
Most traditional feminists would say that being pro-life is an automatic disqualifier for calling yourself a feminist. I find this argument dramatically uncompelling. Fetal personhood is a quasi-empirical value judgement that should not be made for instrumental reasons--we can't decide [for example] that six year old children aren't persons simply because this would possibly make it easier to advance female equality.
What Fogel brings to mind is that the argument about the personhood of slaves was a similar sort of instrumental argument. Recognizing their personhood would in fact have destroyed a highly functioning economic system; therefore, many people advanced the argument that slaves couldn't be persons. This is rubbish.
To be sure, it's obvious to me that slaves are persons, while I find the personhood of fetuses deeply problematic. But I don't think it's facially ludicrous to declare that they are persons. To me that means that "Feminists for Life" cannot, as I've heard declared, be an oxymoron; it seems perfectly possible to embrace all the other tenets of whatever you want to define as feminism, and also regretfully believe that since fetuses are persons, we cannot embrace this particular means of women's liberation.
Posted by Matt Bruce at July 1, 2008 08:14 PM