Women's Rights have a Purpose. So does Liberalism.

At the beginning of the year I spent at Cambridge, I met a man who would go on to be a good friend while I was there. He was an aesthetically-oriented conservative who studied Anglo-Saxon literature and wrote poetry inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins. We disagreed on a lot of things.

He floated, early on, the idea that women would be just as happy in the home as in the workplace; perhaps even more so. “I can’t speak for everyone,” I told him in response. “Perhaps some women might. But I recoil with horror at the idea of being a Dorothea Brooke or an Isobel Archer, forced to attempt to satisfy my ambitions with marriage!”

He blinked, and then said, in the confused tone of a British person encountering an unexpected display of emotion, “You’re very passionate about this.”

What gets me about his reaction, still, is that he honestly seemed surprised. I will never understand why. Did he believe, somehow, in the existence of a woman who would travel halfway around the world to study mathematics, just on a lark? Would this hypothetical woman have walked into the Trinity College library, signed her name in the big red book, alongside that book’s scuffed red predecessor opened at the signature of Newton, and shrugged? Would her extraordinarily difficult studies be undertaken out of some listless sense of duty to succeed, in the absence of anything better to do?

He got the message, I made sure of that. After a while, he and the other conservative-leaning student of our acquaintance developed a habit of tacking “… but of course, Gemma will be allowed to study mathematics” onto any suggested rearrangement of the world that could threaten my ability to do so. I didn’t believe them for a minute, of course. I knew I’d be just as out of luck as anyone else, if any of their late-night pub discussion ideas came to fruition. But I appreciated it, for all that. I wanted them to at least know they were threatening something I cared deeply for.

Alas, such ideas no longer just belong to late-night pub discussions among graduate students. Helen Andrews made a splash last year with an article in Compact, making the simultaneously-implausible pair of claims that, firstly, the influx of women into professions such as law and academia poses “a threat to civilization” and, secondly, that this threat can be fixed merely by “restoring fair rules” in a meritocratic system. Her argument is tailor-made to be defended in bad faith: nobody is going to take away women’s rights, and anyway it would be good if they did.

Accelerating this trend, The Atlantic reported last December that the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative US think tank, has hired one Scott Yenor, formerly of the far-right Claremont Institute. Yenor’s views on women’s rights are not subtle or hard to find. “[W]e need a new gender ideology, one that restores a workable patriarchy,” he explains in a 2021 article for First Things. Among other things, he laments that “Educational institutions, often abetted by overeager parents, cheerlead for female professional success. This needs to stop.”

To truly reverse the feminist gains of the 20th century would be an uphill battle; many such advances are both legally and societally entrenched. Still, attention to the philosophical grounding beneath women’s full participation in society remains important. It matters that people understand why we do this. It matters that, throughout society, we treat women as human beings who are worthy of—nay, called to—a well-rounded kind of development as people.

I actually don’t know if I’d have ended up at Cambridge had it not been for a lecturer at my undergraduate institution in New Zealand who had studied there, himself. He encouraged me to apply, and after I was accepted he gave me advice on how to navigate the place. You have to list your top three desired colleges in order of preference. There are lots of reasons to pick one college over another: history, student population, prestige, vibes. Some colleges are choosier than others about the students they take. Trinity, my lecturer noted, is very choosy, because the place has a lot of money and resources.

I mentioned at least one other college to him first, and then, in an appropriately diffident Kiwi manner, noted that Trinity might be nice.

“Well, don’t bother putting them as your second choice,” he told me. “I did, and I shouldn’t have. They already have plenty of applicants putting them first.”

“Oh,” I said. “So perhaps I shouldn’t list them at all? I mean, they might not take me anyway.”

Being a Kiwi himself, he understood exactly where this was coming from, and he didn’t give me any guff about “putting myself forward,” like an American would. He simply looked me in the eye and said, in a level tone, “You are their type. You are smart and mathematical. If you list them first, there is a decent chance they will accept you. But don’t put them second.”

I did not put them second.

When people refer to civil rights as “individual rights,” they have failed to notice the meaning of the word “civil.” Participation in society is not an individual act. Civil rights are facilitated by society and are employed in order to contribute to society. And although civil rights provide a baseline level of support for everybody’s civic participation, they could never be enough on their own. We are all reliant on the generosity of others—on our fellow citizens’ liberality in helping us find our way. Nobody can force that, not really. We can only point out why it’s good.

Writing at The Argument, Matthew Yglesias recently invoked the threat to women’s rights as a way of arguing for individualist liberalism. “This is a terrible idea,” he says, of driving women out of the workplace, “but it’s hard to explain why it’s a terrible idea without recourse to old-fashioned ideas like judging people on their own merits rather than as manifestations of groups.”

If he’s right, then the prospect for women is grim. For this would mean that there is no positive good that we can point to, in women’s full participation in society, that might lead us to support it. Women’s rights, Yglesias implies, are only defensible as a side effect of individualist liberal procedures. Yet who would bother to defend a mere procedural outcome with nothing substantive to recommend it?

Women’s rights should not arise from seeing women as isolated individuals, to be evaluated for “merit” and included or excluded from opportunities on that basis. Women’s rights should arise from seeing women as beneficiaries of and contributors to a society that honours the ability of its citizens to seek good lives for themselves and to help others to seek good lives in return.

We support the ability of women to seek professional success because a just society ought to be particularly solicitous toward its citizens’ ability to seek good things. This includes freedom of religion, of course, and also the freedom to reject religion in favour of other philosophies or indeed in favour of something you can’t define. It includes personal excellences, be they physical or intellectual. It includes interpersonal relationships, in the form of the ability to associate with other people. It includes family formation (and not just for traditional families). It includes the ability to contribute to society by working a job.

It was impossible, at Cambridge, not to remember that the intellectual arts were once religious arts. It was built into the very stones, our cross-shaped Great Hall, the chapels at all the older colleges, the constantly-visible history of the place. That friend I mentioned, at the start? He was deeply enamoured of it, musing about whether it might not be better to have lived back in the days when being a scholar meant being religiously celibate, dedicated to a calling.

I protested, of course, at the exclusion of women. He suggested nunneries, and I scoffed. Then I back-tracked, referencing Hildegard of Bingen, and he had the grace to look a little ashamed as he muttered “Actually, she was kind of an exception.”

He was an intellectually honest person. There were reasons why I liked him. It wasn’t until I went back and read my diaries after I left that I realised—on the basis of some indicators that were fairly blatant when I came to think about it—that he was almost certainly gay. There is a lot about him that appears rather different, in retrospect.

Notwithstanding the context, at no point in my time at Cambridge did I interpret my love of mathematics as being even potentially related to religion. There is a lot about me that appears rather different, in retrospect, too.

The good is a contested category, and sometimes we don’t know, ourselves, why we want a thing, even when we’re right to want it. Liberalism lets us go for it anyway. But if you want me to justify my love of mathematics now? I barely even need to invoke the questionable authority of my own mathematically-inflected spiritual experience. As a tool for learning to seek objective truth, goodness and beauty, mathematics is a classic. In fact, it is the classic, ever since Plato.

Yet this argument is too easy, and too small. I don’t just want a little carve-out that “of course Gemma will be allowed to study mathematics.” The freedom to seek the good is so much bigger than a single subject, or a single person. I would like to believe that the good is singular, but I’m pretty sure that different people find it in different ways. We should care about people’s ability to seek a wide variety of experiences.

Fundamental to my position here is that it can be genuinely difficult to say, for any given person, what they ought to be doing with their lives. Finding a good path is hard. A conservative might respond that this is why we need society to provide us with guidance. People sometimes do not know what is good for them, so can we really leave these things up to the individual to decide?

The problem with this response is not that we can be assumed to know what is good for ourselves—sometimes we do not—but rather that we are not always good at knowing what is good for other people, either. A liberal order provides us with some support, and some limitations, while leaving the highest (and hardest) questions about the good to open debates and freely-accepted quests.

Any movement that wants, instead, to have power over people’s ability to seek the good is going to have to justify itself against the harm it can do. Yet the overt misogyny seeping into movement conservatism does not appear to have a good grasp on anybody’s well-being. Consider Scott Yenor again, who in that First Things piece linked above complains of modern marriage that “all concerned must ‘share their feelings’ and ‘listen,’ and render other services that women naturally both desire and provide.” Without a trace of irony, he then goes on to complain of “the emotional damage divorce does to men,” given their comparative lack of social connections compared to women.

Yenor is certainly doing a good job of demonstrating that we as humans sometimes do not know what is good for us! Socially connecting with another person requires attention to that person. There is no substitute for this. By all means advocate patience across differences in communication style, but there’s no free lunch here. Forcing couples to stay together will not magically make it possible to get the benefits of social connection without the work of sincere interaction.

The idea that we should trust people like this to limit our freedoms in the name of “the good life” is absurd. Yenor wouldn’t know how to promote human flourishing if he tried. His worldview is based on a garbled mixture of sex stereotyping, disdain for women, and wishful thinking. Resistance to this kind of prejudice should not rely on liberal procedures without further justification! We can fight this easily, on the merits, if we bother to try.

It’s time to insist that liberal norms have a purpose; multiple purposes, actually. The obvious one is peace, as liberalism gives us systems and practices that encourage us to work out our differences by way of persuasion, and employs a system of protective rights so that people will be less likely to turn to violence in order to protect what matters to them. But another very important purpose of liberalism is to allow people to seek and advocate for their best vision of the good life.

A healthy liberal order arises not from procedure without disagreement but from good faith debate about the things that matter. It is best defended, not by clinging to recitations of “rights” and “individualist principles,” but by full-hearted advocacy for the power of civil liberties to allow people to lead better lives.