As a lifelong homemaker and mother of nine children, I should be an easy audience for a talk making “The Case Against Feminism.” Yet Graduate School of Government Assistant Professor David Azerrad’s recent talk left me disappointed and even concerned.
Conservative women do not need to be persuaded that modern feminism — the denial of sex differences, the elevation of career over family, the denigration of motherhood, the celebration of the sexual revolution, the attack on masculinity — is a scourge. That evidence is all around us and has been a frequent subject of conservative writers. They want to know how to properly live out the truth of human equality and sex difference.
Exploring this would require honestly exploring the origins of feminism, including the challenges caused by the industrial revolution, the legal injustices of coverture marriage and barring women from political participation, the lack of opportunities for women in education and professions, and more. It would show why the first feminists were pro-marriage and pro-family. And it would help the young women in his audience understand they are the beneficiaries of an education that Hillsdale College helped pioneer in 1844 when this path was closed to the vast majority of women.
Young conservative women also want to know what an anthropologically sound and socially constructive pro-family women’s movement might look like. Sex is not like race. Parsing how the two halves of the human race are equal and different, each with respect to what involves asking hard questions with profound social and political implications. On these questions, Azerrad shed more heat than light.
What should sex difference mean, socially and politically? Azerrad rightly advocated separate spaces for men and women, but which separate spaces are legally or socially warranted, and which are unjust sex discrimination? Other than easy shots at the incoherence and tyranny of the left’s transgender identity politics and blithe assertions that he was “not here to take away anyone’s rights,” Azerrad didn’t say. He described women’s sports as the “most masculinizing activity that women do,” implying perhaps this is not activity suitable for women. What message did he send to the young women in the audience about the WHIP program which he was ostensibly advocating? Do internships that could lead to wage work in Washington make Hillsdale’s female students unfit for home and motherhood? If not, why?
Fortunately, although Azerrad never mentioned them, there are good scholars doing this work today: Helen Alvare, Mona Charen, Suzanne Venker (Phyllis Schlafly’s niece), Christina Hoff Sommers, Mary Harrington, Helen Roy, Abigail Favale, Rachel Lu, Margaret Harper McCarthy, and legal scholar Erika Bachiochi.
In the end, Azerrad had few positive suggestions other than urging conservatives to make more movies about the joys of motherhood. Yes, respect for motherhood and homemaking need to be restored, but don’t we need to restore marriage first? This also means forming more marriageable, virtuous men, who by definition will be manly gentlemen. In his recent book “Get Married,” social scientist Brad Wilcox shows the modern career-over-family mentality affects both sexes. Due to sexual asymmetry and the needs of young children, which were neither referenced nor explained in the talk, there are real costs when mothers put career over family. But what does putting family first look like for prudent mothers, and what about convincing fathers to abandon their own career-over-family attitudes?
Especially for the conservative young women attending Hillsdale College, Azerrad’s “anti-feminism” is not enough. It might even be counterproductive.
