Women’s Rights and Liberty
March is Women’s History Month, and today (March 8th) is International Women’s Day. What better time to remember the role women played in launching the libertarian movement, as well as the role women with libertarian values have played in advancing women’s rights?
It’s no accident that feminism (and abolitionism) emerged out of the Industrial Revolution and the American and French revolutions. The equality and individualism that underlay the emergence of capitalism and republican government in the 18th century naturally led people to start thinking about the individual rights of women and slaves.
Many women involved in the American abolitionist movement took up the feminist banner, grounding their arguments in both cases in the idea of self-ownership, the fundamental right of property in one’s own person.
That classically liberal, individualist strain of feminist thought continued into the 20th century, as feminists fought not just for the vote but for sexual freedom, access to birth control, and the right to own property and enter into contracts.
Though, unfortunately, many contemporary feminists are far from being libertarians, a libertarian must necessarily be a feminist, in the sense of being an advocate of equality under the law for all men and women.
