Julie Borowski, who bills herself as “TokenLibertarianGirl” in her Youtube videos, sparked a back and forth recently about why so few women identify as libertarian. In her breathless video, her thesis mostly boils down to the fact that libertarianism isn’t cool or part of mainstream pop culture, so women, who she thinks tend to be more susceptible to social pressure, don’t sign up. Some fellow libertarians responded by pointing out that the video also “slut shames women who engage in casual sex, off-handedly dismisses the possibility that a libertarian could be pro-choice, and spirals off into an unfocused critique of the luxury goods market,” thus replicating one of the reasons women may stay away from the philosophy: it’s often a He-Man Woman Haters Club. She has since responded to say that she just meant to say that women care more than men about fitting in and thus find calling themselves libertarian to be dangerous.
There’s some truth the idea that a reason women shy away from libertarianism is because they don’t feel welcomed into it. You don’t have to look far to find the mansplainers in the bunch. But women’s hesitance to join the Atlas Shrugged reading club likely goes much deeper than that. (I of course can’t speak for all women, and there are clearly women who do call themselves libertarian, including Borowski and some of her critics.) Libertarianism has a hard time reconciling most of women’s lived experiences with its core tenets.
If brought to its logical conclusions, libertarianism runs up hard against children and childrearing. Susan Moller Okin is the go-to source on hashing out this conundrum in her book Justice, Gender, and the Family. (Huge hat tip to Mike Konczal both for putting me on to the book and reminding me of it with this tweet.) She explains that for libertarian philosophers, “The rights of the individual to conduct his own life and to retain the fruits of his labor are sacrosanct.” To make this all work, people own both what they make from raw materials and their own bodies that do the making. As the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick puts it, “Whoever makes something, having bought or contracted for all other held resources used in the process…is entitled to it.”
The “his” in that quote is not accidental, because when applied to women something very strange happens. What does this mean for babies? As Okin writes, “Pregnancy and birth seem to constitute a paradigm” of the process that Nozick describes for people creating something they own. After all, a woman usually gets sperm legitimately, either through a man interested in having a baby with her or through a sperm bank. Once she has that raw material, “a fertile woman can make a baby with no other resources than her own body and its nourishment.” She legitimately gets the material she needs, puts her own labor into it, and viola, a product – the baby – is created.
But the labor of a creating a person, particularly one who is moral and capable of living a meaningful life as Nozick requires, goes further. It entails actually raising a kid. Mothers and fathers continue to put their labor into their offspring by giving them love and attention – what we call parenting. Okin notes that libertarians “take for granted that whole vast sphere of life in which persons (mostly women) take care of others, often at considerable cost to their own advancement as individuals.”
So does this mean a mother owns the children she births and raises? That idea should sound completely bizarre to anyone, libertarian or otherwise. Even if a woman who considers becoming a libertarian doesn’t do the deep analysis Okin does, the work that many of them will do to have kids just doesn’t get taken into consideration. That will turn a lot of us off.
But it also goes to illustrate why women in general, even those who never plan to have kids, are likely turned off by libertarianism. As Okin puts it, libertarians “ignore the fact that the things distributed are products of human labor, not manna from heaven.” The notion that you own what you make from raw materials ignores any particular privilege or advantage you might start out with. Ann Friedman wrote an essay during the election that gets at the heart of this issue:
In my experience, women are less likely than men to be in total denial about the fact that some Americans are born with more cultural and financial advantage than others and that government should have some programs that seek to lessen the disparity. It’s not because women are less logical or rational, two descriptors often applied to Ryan’s “small government” approach; it’s because women are more likely to hold minimum-wage jobs. We make less money. So we’re more likely to rely on programs like food stamps and Medicare. And, unsurprisingly, we’re more likely to support legislation that stems from a collective-good worldview, such as the Affordable Care Act.
Women and minorities know perhaps better than anyone that a lot of life is determined not by what you’re able to do, but where you start out. By assuming the mythical even playing field at the beginning, libertarianism ignores the disadvantages some have to climb out of or the advantages others enjoy to get those raw materials in the first place. Someone who’s born into poverty has a lot of cards stacked against her compared to someone born into more affluence. How do you account for those challenges in libertarianism if the government’s regulations are an intrusion on liberty?
It may be that some women don’t stamp themselves libertarian because they worry it’ll make them a social outcast or they don’t want to enter a political leaning that can resemble a frat house. But for many of us, the problems are philosophical to begin with. We just don’t agree.
