Reclaiming Feminism

Welcome to Family Policy Matters, an engaging and informative weekly radio show and podcast produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, this is John Rustin, president of NC Family, and we're grateful to have you with us for this week's program.

It's our prayer that you will be informed, encouraged, and inspired by what you hear on Family Policy Matters, and that you will feel better about your work. You are equipped to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. And now, here is our host of Family Policy Matters, Tracey Devitt-Griggs.

Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. Few people would argue against equal treatment under the law for women, but our guest today argues that today's form of feminism needs some drastic revision. Erica Bakayaki is a legal scholar specializing in equal protection, jurisprudence, and feminist legal theory. A 2018 visiting scholar at Harvard Law School, she's also a senior fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute, where she founded and directs the Wollstonecraft Project. Her newest book, The Rights of Women Reclaiming a Lost Vision, was named a finalist for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's 2022 Conservative Book of the Year. Erica Bakayaki, welcome to Family Policy Matters.

Thank you so much for having me. I dare say that in some circles, the word feminism might be interpreted in a bad way. Do you understand why that is?

And should we have that sense of that word? Yeah, you know, there's actually been really good polls recently that have showed that most women do not understand themselves to be feminists. They don't call themselves feminists. Yet at the same poll, the vast majority of people, both men and women, just as you said in your introduction, would say that women and men should have equal rights. So there's a way in which feminism is a word that people don't want to associate with. And I think there's good reason for that in the sense that modern feminism, I think, is really a cause of a lot of our ills in society today and the way that it's really taken a pretty false understanding of both equality and freedom, which are really the things I look at, but also with regard to rights as well. And so I think without reclaiming an older understanding of both equality, freedom and rights, then we're going to see a lot of reaction against even women's rights, potentially.

So we've got to really re-ground those things. The earliest feminist movement you suggest was quite different from today. So tell us how that was different.

That was a sort of a late stage in that work in America. But in the Philosophical Foundations, what you understand is that equality is certainly not the kind of sameness that we see today. They very much took sexual difference for granted. And they wanted to put equality on a different basis. And that is just the sense that we're equal. Men and women are equal as the kinds of human beings we are. For Wollsercraft, that meant rational creatures. And she saw us as order to excellence.

Well, what does that mean? That we basically have the ability or the capacity to develop intellectually and morally into excellent beings. And that moral development was really important also to our freedom. Because for freedom, it wasn't as we understand today, which is just sort of free to do whatever I want, you know, whatever sort of my lower passions dictate at the moment. For them, freedom, and therefore rights as well, was necessary so that they could carry out their responsibilities to God, to themselves, to their families. And that's why they wanted things like equal education, so that they could develop morally and intellectually to be the kinds of people who could do good for the wider society, for their own families, and all of that.

And so it's an entirely sort of different basis. Rights too are understood as necessary to carry out responsibilities. So responsibilities is totally interconnected to rights in a way that we do not see at all today. Okay. So we're going to dig more deeply into a lot of what you just said, but it sounds like you're suggesting a very basic misunderstanding of how we even define ourselves as independent human beings.

Yeah, that's right. We've had a deep sort of error in our philosophy of what it is to be human. And so we've conceived ourselves by following, you know, people who are really important in our founding, like John Locke. But for different reasons, his understanding of the person as really deeply independent just doesn't really strike us, I think, as true to our experience. We're deeply interdependent from the time we're very small, of course, first in our mother's wombs, but then even as infants, and as children.

And then of course, if we live long enough into old age, but of course, all the way through every part of our day. So that interdependence was very much understood by Wollstonecraft and these early women's rights advocates, sort of all of their advocacy was really based on like, how do we respond to being different men and women as different, but also deeply interdependent with one another, and really able to collaborate in the home and potentially in other spheres as well. So yeah, it's an entirely different basis than the sort of radical autonomy we have today, where everyone is sort of this self-determining, self-creating person, which is really just kind of an illusion, if you think about it. When you're talking about this radical autonomy, and being opposite to those relationships that are so important, I think most of us would agree are so important in our lives. Talk a little more about why that's an important part of true feminism. Yeah, because you have to get, you know, who we are, as men and women, right, in terms of our experience of living in the world.

If you start building upon an illusion of who we are, then you're just not going to come up with the right responses to things. So I mean, abortion is a really good example of this. So the early American feminists understood themselves to be mothers, not just when the child was born, but also when the child was developing in their womb. And so they understood themselves to have duties, just as they did after the child was born, duties when the child was developing. And so they were adamantly against abortion. And so that all changes first with Margaret Sanger, but then later with the second wave of feminism has toward abortion, right, in this idea that we can sort of be autonomous from the child who's growing in the womb, sort of like an imitation of a man who can walk away from an unexpected pregnancy, as though women to be equal to men have to be able to do the same sort of thing to be equally autonomous, they have to walk away from that pregnancy.

Well, what the early women's rights advocates would have said is like, that's a failure. You basically said to be equal, you have to be like a man instead of saying to be equal, why can't we just be exactly as we are as women and have societies, institutions, politics, economics, the workplace, and all sorts of things, education, the oriented self around what actually is the way women actually are, instead of telling us that we have to change who we are change our bodies to sort of fit the norms that men have laid out. Our bodies are an important part of this conversation, right?

That female's body is different from a male's body really does matter. That's a really, really important part is that, you know, in the quest for autonomy, we've had to obscure from or abstract from or sort of forget about the fact that we're embodied and we're embodied, as we now say, sexually dimorphic, right, we're two different bodies, human beings come as two different bodies. And so what a true sort of understanding of sexual equality and freedom and all of that has to do is really hold intention, what we are as human beings, because we have this great nobility and this great complexity, right, we're all human beings, and we share in that human nature that makes us capable of thinking through things freely choosing and all of that. But we also come in these two bodies, and we're also each individual.

And so we have to kind of hold intention, all three of those aspects of us. And our bodies are really important. And if we sort of say, in order to be equal, and equal individuals, we have to completely forget that second level, then what ends up happening, and we see this all the time is that we sort of contemplate that individual as being basically like a man. And the fact is that half of us have very different bodies that are capable of doing the most incredible thing, and that is carrying and nurturing another human being inside of our bodies. And so why not take that really seriously and try to think about how society would be differently organized potentially, if we took that seriously, rather than saying equal rights means we have a right to end that life within rather than respect the woman who's carrying that life as well as the life too. Talk about how this might affect how women work, because I see that a lot with women wanting to be just like men in how they approach their work life as well. Yeah, that's right.

And this is a really difficult question. I think we actually haven't made nearly the progress we could have and thinking about workplace flexibility and thinking about me now we have way more remote work, especially after the pandemic, but I think because we've had this sort of reliance on this idea that women should just be like men and should abort if they need to, and all of that we haven't then become as flexible not only for women, but really for families that you know, a lot of times dads are the ones who want to be having a little bit more flexibility being able to take time here and there to either support their wives in the home or support their wives who are working or just take time off for a sick child or to care for other ailing relatives or whatever. And I think we structured our workplace very much along the lines of this autonomous individual. I think that's been harmful for everyone, but especially for women. One of the things that I really advocate for is just that a lot of women would prefer either part time work or also when their children are really young to remain at home with them and really prioritize caregiving. And I always wonder like why isn't it that when a woman decides to come back to look for work and she has that quote gap in her resume, why isn't it that she's asked by an employer, tell me about that work that you did and how the virtues and talents and gifts and all of that that you sort of acquired or nurtured during that time could be a benefit to the workplace for the job that you're applying. Because certainly everybody knows who's seen a mother in action or seen a primary caregiver in action is doing all sorts of things, studies show how important that is for managerial positions and other sorts of things. So I think we've taken this kind of shrunken idea of what kinds of things that parents can do in the workplace and I think that's especially true for women. There are certainly some jobs that are just much better for flexible kinds of work that most women who have children want. And I think it's good for women to self-select into those areas as much as they can, but also push other places to be more hospitable to those who are raising children, especially those who have young children in the home.

How about some suggestions on your part on ways that we either as individuals or policymakers can move toward this type of feminism that you're discussing? A lot of it is sort of reiterating that we need to be taking the responsibilities of those who care for children in the home really much more seriously than we do. I think as policymakers and just as people sort of thinking about the world, we often think is like, oh, there's the market, there's the state and there's the individual. And we forget that institution of the family that is doing all the important work that makes every other civic, political, economic, social good possible. You know, the work that's done in the family is really, really important work. And a lot of people are just don't have sort of the guidance to do that work well or are really economically having a hard time because, you know, they want to have probably the mother at home or at least home part time and they're not able to make that work. And so I'm trying to do my best to shape family policy, to think about the principles that we don't want those who are doing this important work to be disproportionately burdened economically.

I mean, they shouldn't be worse off economically than those who are single and able to do things a little bit easier in the world, right? These people are sacrificing a lot. And so we really need to think about the ways in which to shape policy better to support that work. When you look back at those 19th century women's rights advocates, and they weren't only advocating for women's rights in the way that I've described it, or even we think about it today in terms of equal opportunity in the workplace. They were also really advocating for mothers to be respected for the work they did as mothers.

And there were some single women and this, I think, is just really a page we could take out of this book is single women, you know, Jane Addams, who was a Nobel laureate who founded Hull House, Florence Kelly, who did incredible work, child labor laws and other types of things. These women, they didn't have children themselves, but they refer to themselves as public mothers because they understood the work of motherhood is so essential to the nurturance and care of the young children and everybody needs care, right? And so to really sort of understand once again, how important that work is, and to not only support it economically, but for people who have the capacity to use a bully pulpit to really honor that work and that sacrifice that women do. Sometimes you'll see stay at home dads, but generally it's stay at home moms, and not just think that everyone's supposed to be equal breadwinner in the workplace and that's where real equality is. I call that market equality, right?

Like that's rubbish, you know, it's great when people go out and a lot of people need to be in the workplace to support their family, but most people are in the workplace in order to support their family and the work of the family, the work that they're doing the family, they understand to be the most important work they do and that we really need to support that. We'll talk a little bit about how we can continue to follow your work and of course, get a copy of your book, The Rights of Women, Reclaiming a Lost Vision. Yes, please do that. You can find that at Amazon or the publisher, Notre-Dade Press, you can find all my writing at Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Institute there in Washington, D.C. and I would also just really ask listeners to go to a new online journal that I have helped to found out of the Wollstonecraft Project, which is called fairer disputations, like fairer sex, fairerdisputations.org is a place where women from the U.S. and the U.K. are coming together to launch a new feminism that's based in understanding that sex is real, that sex difference is real and that that embodiedness of men and women is really important to an understanding of feminism going forward. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Erika Bakayake, author of the new book, The Rights of Women, Reclaiming a Lost Vision. Thanks for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.

You've been listening to Family Policy Matters. We hope you enjoyed the program and plan to tune in again next week. To listen to this show online and to learn more about NC Families work to inform, encourage and inspire families across North Carolina, go to our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. Thanks again for listening and may God bless you and your family.