The New York Times Sunday Review section carried a commentary by Jessica Valenti titled “The Myth of Conservative Feminism.” Anyone who has written an opinion piece for an American newspaper knows that someone else writes the headline. So the headline does not always reflect the exact views of the author. But if Valenti actually intends to say that conservative feminism is a myth, it is a troubling claim.
Valenti writes in reaction to those seeing hypocrisy in the refusal of self-proclaimed liberal feminists to celebrate the successes of women like newly confirmed CIA Director Gina Haspel and newly appointed Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott.
While she alleges specific anti-feminist offenses by Haspel and Scott, she sees no room for conservatives (or Republicans) in the feminist movement. Her objective is to protect the “movement against conservative appropriation.” She says conservatives have an “abysmal record on women’s rights” and Republicans have done “next to nothing to prioritize women’s representation.”
So no conservative or Republican women can claim to be feminists? Even if it is fair to say, as Valenti does, that the Trump administration is anti-women’s rights because of “an immigration policy of taking children away from undocumented immigrant mothers” and because of its “mandate that would withhold funding from any health care center that helps patients find abortion services,” does that mean all conservatives and Republicans who claim to believe in equal rights for women are illegitimate appropriators of the feminist label? Are conservative and Republican women guilty of anti-feminism because of their association with a president who only recently discovered that he is a Republican?
If feminism is “a movement for social, economic and political justice,” as Valenti asserts, there are countless conservative and Republican women (and men) who support those ends and have valuable ideas about how to achieve them. Many conservative women support charter schools that provide opportunities to poor and minority girls previously condemned to failed urban school systems. There are conservative and Republican women who support the elimination of unnecessary licensing regimes and excessive regulations that prevent entrepreneurial women from creating new businesses and employing other women. And there are conservative and Republican women who support freedom of choice in health care providers, and the right to live on one’s property even if the government prefers other private owners (remember Suzette Kelo’s little pink house).
A Republican friend in Oregon who heads a family timber company, and happens to be a woman, supports expanded access to public timber lands, which would allow her innovative company to provide more jobs for women in depressed rural communities and supply more affordable housing to women and men alike.
Another Republican friend, who also happens to be a woman, heads a law firm that specializes in seeking justice for children who have been victims of sex abuse. Are not all of these — education, entrepreneurship, employment, health care, housing and personal safety — at the heart of social, economic and political justice?
But all of these conservative and Republican women, it seems, are feminist pretenders. Not because they don’t support social, economic and political justice, but because they advocate policies not approved by liberal feminists. They disagree about methods, not ends. They are guilty of anti-feminism because of who they associate with and the unapproved policies they advocate, not because of what they actually do and believe.
If Valenti were truly committed to achieving social, economic and political justice, she would welcome conservative and Republican women to the sisterhood of feminism. She would want a big feminist tent in which competing ideas about how to achieve justice are debated and tested.
As millennia of injustices for women and men alike make clear, the pursuit of social, economic and political justice is a daunting challenge. Conservative and Republican women might just have some ideas that will advance the cause.
