Libertarian Feminism

I recently came across a new sub-species of libertarian that I did not know about before:  libertarian feminists.  Now, obviously I have known that there are libertarian females (although, not that many, unfortunately) but libertarian feminists?  From my, admittedly meager, knowledge of the subject, the term "libertarian feminism" seemed almost oxymoronic, at least in connotation if not in practice.

But despite the vaguely socialist reputation of feminism these days, the early history of feminism was apparently dominated by, mostly little known, "libertarian" feminists (at the time called "liberal" feminists, "liberal" being used in the classical sense).  Born out of the anti-slavery movement, many of the libertarian types, like William Lloyd Garrison, who had worked to bring equal rights to blacks felt that women should have equal rights as well.

A broad definition of feminism would be the idea that women should be treated the same as men.  Libertarianism holds that all individuals own themselves, and should be treated equally under the law.   From these, perhaps imprecise, definitions it would seem that the term "libertarian feminist" is not oxymoronic at all.  Quite the opposite, it seems redundant.  In fact, libertarians would oppose, on principle, all of the laws that originally sparked the feminist movement:  the problems with marriage law, divorce law, suffrage, etc.  A wife who left her husband, for example, could be forcibly returned, not unlike a runaway slave.  A man who assaulted or raped his wife wasn’t considered a criminal.  There were lots of restrictions on property ownership for women.  These kinds of laws are not compatible with the libertarian principle of self-ownership, or the non-aggression axiom.

Now, at this point in history, my impression is that practically all of those objectionable laws are gone.  There are probably still a few remnants, and I'm sure any libertarian worth his salt would oppose them if he was made aware of them, but it seems to me that they're a pretty rare find and certainly not currently the most egregious fault of the state.  What libertarian feminists deal with at this point are laws that are not explicitly anti-female, but implicitly anti-female.*  Veronique de Rugy wrote an article for April's edition of Reason magazine listing many of the most important examples of these kinds of laws.  Included are things like tax law, which punishes lower earning spouses by taxing them at their spouses' rate.  Since most women earn less than their husbands (this is rapidly changing, but still technically true for the moment at least), women end up paying a higher tax rate, in practice, than men.  The myriad laws that restrict workplace mobility also have a disproportionate effect on women, who leave and re-enter the workforce much more frequently than men because of childbirth.  Restrictive immigration laws prevent low-wage labor from entering the country that could be used in child care, and end up forcing working mothers to pay more for daycare.

But today's non-libertarian feminists don't really focus on ending laws, hence the socialist reputation.  Instead they seem to rally around passing laws to turn women into a protected class.  That strategy is doomed to backfire, as it has for other protected classes.  Just take one law intended to benefit women:  mandatory paid maternity leave.  As de Rugy explains, this law actually hurts women more than it helps by leaving all women, whether they choose to have a child or not, with a lower wage:

Government mandates that force employers to approve lengthy maternity leaves make hiring women of childbearing age less appealing. As a result, women are more likely to be unemployed or to see their compensation reduced, whether they want to have children or not. Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber has shown that real wages for women in the 1990s in states that require comprehensive maternity expenses fell, compared to states that don’t.

And, on his radio show, Peter Schiff has frequently pointed out that provisions such as free birth control and the liability that comes with hiring a woman (the risk of a lawsuit from a woman who finds the workplace offensive or sexist) reduce wages and job opportunities for women in a similar way, while purporting to help them.

Another frequent refrain of the socialist feminists, as I guess I've dubbed them, is "equal pay for equal work."  Libertarianism doesn't really have much to say about this, except to say that there shouldn't be laws against paying people unequally since it's a voluntary transaction.  But economics does have something to say about "equal pay for equal work": as long as there is unequal pay for equal work, employers who hire workers from the less equal class will benefit and employers that discriminate will be hurt.  This doesn't mean that racist or sexist businesses will go out of business, necessarily, but they will end up paying a price for their racism or sexism in the form of higher than average wages.  So why do women only get paid 70 cents on the dollar (or whatever the current bogus figure is), compared to a man?  They actually don't.  The discrepancy is an artifact of how you slice up the numbers.  If you look at similarly qualified men and women, none of whom have ever married (apples to apples, in other words), you find that women actually earn a few cents more per hour than a man for the same job.  This makes intuitive sense to me, since all I hear my male friends complain about is how there are too few women at their workplace and how they wish there were more.  I have never heard of a guy who complains about having too many women around (I'm sure he exists, but I have no sympathy for him).

The one area where some libertarians may have a principled objection to libertarian feminism would be on the issue of abortion.  So far as I can tell, in order to be a libertarian feminist you have to be radically pro-choice.  Most libertarians don't have a problem with this, but 30-40% of libertarians are pro-life on the principle of self ownership.  There's really a divide in libertarianism on this issue and it has to do with what you define as a person, when a person obtains rights, etc.  It's a complex issue, and one that probably deserves it's own post, so I'll leave the nuts and bolts of it for another day.  Suffice to say, I think preventing the murder of ~650,000 female fetuses each year would be pro-woman, but I can understand how libertarians who do not think a fetus is entitled to rights would think of anti-abortion laws as anti-woman.  In general I think pro-life libertarians seem to have a great amount of respect for the pro-choice position of other libertarians, and vice versa.  Progressives and conservatives, for the most part, just end up talking past each other on the issue. 

Anyway.  In conclusion, libertarian feminism is way more awesome than socialist feminism.



*Many would argue that today's laws, and even culture, are more anti-male than anti-female. I don't really have too much of an opinion one way or the other when it comes to that, except to say that bad laws will always benefit certain groups at the expense of others, and there is no shortage of bad laws.